The Dresden Files and other sagas

I don't remember if I mentioned before that I also love to read.

We both have kindles at home, and we both like to read whenever we can. I've always liked to read, and since we have kindles it's really easy to gather some books in the same device and just read one after the other.

I've been reading since I was very young, and I've managed to get certain...speed. Depending on how motivated I am and how much free time I have, right now a book 300 pages long may take me 3-5 days. If I'm very motivated to read, that may take just some hours and be done in less than a day, and if I'm not specially motivated it can be prolonged for a couple of weeks or so.

The problem with that is that books I find very interesting don't last me much time, and I always feel...I wouldn't say depressed, but demotivated to do anything else, after finishing a good story. I just want more of that story, and since I can't get more, I don't feel like reading anything else. Sometimes I feel like not doing anything else at all, in fact.

The solution to this is a good saga. A good series of books that you can read one after the other, sometimes without sharing a common plot but connected between them.

Discovering good sagas is an awesome feeling. It's not always the same case, but usually you start with some little book, that usually is good but maybe not spectacular. They usually have beginner's mistakes, and even when the story is compelling, they may have some boring parts, or some sections that do not make much sense.

Then you discover that there are more books, and since the first one was interesting, you start reading those. The author gets a better pace, the stories become more complex, there are less mistakes and things become more and more interconnected. The characters develop, and you start liking them more and more. You share their hobbies and passions, their fears, their lives. And you get into their world. You want to know more about their world, and you devour every little new piece of information, recreating everything in your mind and joining all the pieces into an awesome experience.

Of course, exiting this world is traumatic.

For this post, let's just focus on 2 sagas I want to comment about.

The first one is "Song of Ice and Fire" (stupidly known as "Game Of Thrones", because TV viewers are morons according to TV executives). It's a  famous one, and lots of people love it. I had re-read it again once the 5th book came out, in order to remember all the details and get back into that world.

The merit of this saga is to twist preconceptions and play with common fantasy tricks. The promised hero has a high chance of being killed two lines after appearing in these books. Not saying that this happens, I'm just using it as an example. The first two books can be summarized as "things go to hell, the bad guys get huge rewards for being bastards", so they're kind of depressing and slow, even if well-written. The third book is awesome, and I believe is the main reason this saga has so many fans. Things do not get better, but you see that, well, there is some remote hope at least...sure, the author likes to crush hopes, but there's always a little left, somewhere.

There's one thing that I don't like about these books, and is the fact that they were not planned very well (as the 7 year break can prove). The author is making things more complex and not offering any kind of resolution anywhere. He's not solving threads, he's creating more. I've seen this happening before, in other stories. The end result is usually not pretty, with years passing between updates and huge plans about the story that are never applied. I really hope to be able to see the end of it, but I'm not sure the author will be able to pull it off, even if he's a really good writer...since, by his own declarations, he has gotten stuck more than once in some parts that did not advance the story.

Maybe that's his ultimate preconception twist: All these threads left loose, with an ending where everybody dies and nothing gets resolved. Maybe the books are a huge staged suicide preparation by the author, where all the rabid fans will enter like a swarm to cut him into pieces after reading the end...With this author, who knows?

The other saga that I want to talk about is "The Dresden Files". And it's awesome. A friend, Joan Serrat, recommended it, and it's true, it's just awesome.

The books follow the stories of Harry Dresden, a wizard and private detective, in our modern world. Everything is narrated in first person, in the past, as if it's some kind of diary written by the protagonist. The thing is, in this world all the myths seem to be true. There are faeries, vampires, zombies, werewolves, ghosts, Norse gods, angels, fallen angels, paladins, demons, God, other Gods, Eldrich Abominations, Outsiders....and as usual, most people have no idea, since these beings are hiding in plain sight, living in our world and conspiring against each other.

These books can also be described with "Things getting worse all the time", but the experience is much different. First, things get worse, sure, but they tend to get a little better at the end of each book (although not in all of them). Second, the characters are usually pretty awesome. The books are filled with pokes, with action, with crazy ideas that work. They mix magic and practicality (why fight a dark wizard with magic? Just shoot them in the head when they're distracted, or get close to them and punch them to unconsciousness), and there's lots of comedy thrown in the mix (although there's also plenty of dramatic moments)

The first 2 books were a little bit...formulaic. However, I read that the author did that on purpose, to demonstrate that formulaic books do not work. And he was completely wrong, and they were very successful. Since then the other books had more work and care in them, and they got better and better. I got quite addicted to them. They also play with some preconceptions, although more like in the way the characters are thinly aware of being led as if in a story. For example, after several incidences, the main characters know better than to say out loud "things cannot get worse than this", since the universe is happy to prove them wrong...

There's lot's of pop culture references, geeky stuff, bad jokes, and plenty of irony and sarcasm, mixed together with apocalyptic fights, conspiracies, murder investigations, soap-opera plot twists, femme fatales taken straight from black novels and lots and lots of action, in an awesome way (I don't want to spoil some of the awesome things that happen in the story within this post, in case someone decides to read them).

In a way it reminds me a little of Firefly, with the right mixture of comedy, tragedy and action, and a special touch and care that makes it quite compelling. (By the way, there's a Firefly reference in the last book...which the main character does not get, which makes him grumpy for not knowing about it).

So far, there's 14 books plus one extra book that collects short stories the author wrote about this universe. In theory I believe the author plans to make around twice as many, probably ending up with close to 30 books, and ending the whole thing with an apocalyptic trilogy.

The bad thing is that the last book came out last November  I started to read these books at the end of October, and I finished them in January. The author seems to be able to write a new book after a year/year and a half, but that still means that a year or so will pass before we get a new book in this saga, and we're far from the end of it....when I finished that last book, I got the familiar feeling of a lack of will to do anything for the next few days....

I know I'm repeating myself, but this saga is just that awesome. Read it. I'm really tempted to re-read it myself, after I finish with my other current books....

Snowboarding in Russia

I'm not very good at sports in general. I have resistance and I'm not specially weak or anything, but I do not enjoy them as much as other people, and I do not have much skill on the first place. These things could be solved with training, but then again, as mentioned, I'm not fond enough of them to spend time practicing one. Right now at home we do some exercise with an elliptical bike, and the only reason we do so is because we can watch series while running, which makes it quite pleasant.

However, since we're next to the place where the winter Olympics are happening, we decided to try something snow-related: Snowboarding.We had never skied before, so we thought it may be fun to learn it, and we were told it was easier than skiing. Jordi Nadal (a coworker here in Adler) had never tried snowboarding, and wanted to take some classes here and try it. He convinced us to go with him, and we went all together with another friend, Misha.

We had to wake up early to take a bus to get us there. The mountains are close, but with the roads and traffic that they have here, it takes at least 1 hour to get there, and that's if you don't find many cars. It took us around one hour and a half, but Jordi told us it had been a fast trip this time.

We went to the ski resort called Gasprom-Laura. I believe it's where they're going to do Cross-Country and Biathlon competitions, but it also has normal tracks for alpine skiing and snowboard. The learning tracks are quite simple, so it was the ideal place to start. Arriving to the place takes a while, but the installations are brand-new (probably made thinking about olympics), and there was lots of space and facilities,

First thing was to rent equipment. We had clothes, but we were missing the snowboard itself and the boots. We asked for second-grade equipment, since it's cheaper and we're just learning. The process of selecting is kind of funny, since they make you stand still and push you to see which foot do you use to stop yourself (and consider that to be your dominant foot). It seems there are better ways, but oh well. According to my size, I got a table for a dominant right foot. The boots were rather nice, with a wheel that tensed a metal cable to adjust them(they're very thick and hard. even if softer than ski boots). It was a very easy-to-use thing, and I liked it. Not all of them had this system, though.

With the equipment ready, we paid the entrance fee valid until 16:30 and we went to the top of the mountain. The mountains around Sochi are quite high and they go up quite fast. In a small distance there are huge height differences. To go up, we took one of the cable cabins, and it was quite impressive. We climbed fast and there were really good views. Jordi told us that in other stations the views were even better, since they were higher.

The main starting place of the track was covered in snow, but the temperature was quite high, we believe it was between 3 and 6 degrees. That means that with our clothes we were actually rather warm. Once we had to start moving and falling, we'd probably sweat...but well, at least we checked and we really did not notice the humidity of the snow with these clothes.

We hired an instructor for 2 hours. This way we would get some introduction to snowboarding and we'd still have time to play around with the snowboard by ourselves. The instructor was a nice guy, that started with very basic things, like how to properly put on the snowboard, how to make sure it doesn't start sliding without us, what position to take when we had only one foot strapped so we can move around, how to fall properly, what posture to get when moving, etc...Of course, it was relatively easy to do all that while not moving, and even then I needed lots of corrections.

After a while of that , and a first try sliding in a flat place, we went to a blue track. For those of you that have never skied (like me), green tracks are for learning and beginning, blue tracks are faster and harder, red tracks are almost professional, and black tracks are really fast and hard, only for professionals or people who know what they're doing very well. Anyway, a blue track, for a beginner like me, is already quite steep.

In there, we were supposed to put the board horizontally, and slide frontally and backwards, by balancing ourselves with the snowboard edge. This way, if we didn't raise one side of the snowboard, we would start sliding quite fast. If we started raising one side, we would slow down, until stopping if we raised it too much. The idea was to achieve a controlled slide, with the instructor in front of us to stop us or grab us, if necessary.

There I remembered something that I already knew, but I had not think about it in a while: I have not much balance. Sure, I managed to slide down, and after 2-3 tries I improved, but I need much more practice with balance to really control it. Somehow, it was easier for me when I was balancing the board backwards, with my back to the ramp while looking towards the start of the track. I was told that most people have more trouble with this way of balancing than with the other way around, face towards the end of the track. Anyway, I was not doing very well in both cases, and the instructor thought that we wouldn't be able to do a whole green track with me around, so he tried to teach us some freestyle tricks instead.

That was just a little bit of fun, where we tried to jump around with the snowboard. We fell quite a lot, but we were in a flat surface and we were standing still, so it was not a problem. Eventually, to finish the training, we went to the start of a green track, the simplest one, accessible next to the starting point of all tracks. He taught us how we were supposed to turn left and right, to do so with one foot unstrapped from the board. Then he told us to go down the green track.

I had not done very well all this time, but when I started going down the little slope, I managed to not fall and move around for quite a long while (actually longer than the others). Then I had to actually turn around some obstacle, and I lost control and fell. Oh well. I managed to go down all the way, falling several times, but it was rather fun after all, and I did ok.

At the bottom of the green track we entered the queue to go up till the top again. The instructor, still with us at this moment, told us how to use the ski lift. With a snowboard you cannot "sit" on it, so you need to grab it from one side and let it pull you up. It's not easy at all compared to using it with skis (or so I've been told), and it was sometimes hard to keep the balance while the lift was pulling you. Right at the start was probably the most unstable part, with little bumps of snow moving you on unplanned directions all of a sudden.

Anyway, we went up, the instructor left and we had lunch to take a little break (by the way, if possible, bring your own food, they have overpriced bad-quality food, but well, it's normal in these places). We believe another hour of instructor could really help us, but that day we had enough, so after lunch we just went to the initial green track and went down several times.

After doing that, I discovered several things. First thing, I do not know how to brake with a snowboard. The instructor didn't clearly explain this section, I guess assuming that if we knew how to turn we'd be able to stop. Well, the others managed, but I didn't learn how to do it yet. So, most of the time I was going down at quite a high speed for a green track, maybe not turning enough times, and just launching myself to the floor when it was time to stop. It was not the best way, but I survived it and I was ok after the experience.However, I really need to learn this vital part before I can try other tracks than the green one. Falling in the green track when going fast is not that much of a problem. Trying the same in the blue track would probably break something....

Another thing I noticed is that the theory had been quite nice....but  I needed to get used to the feeling of sliding first. In the last 2 times I went down the green track, I finally started to notice things, how to incline myself to do this, how to change weight along the board, what happened if I did that, etc. Before that, my spinal cord was taking care of everything, and my brain had not much to say about it. With more practice, I'd be able to think about what I'm doing and change it if it's incorrect, but during these first tries, I was just going around with instinct mostly, and my instinct is rather incorrect when it comes to using the snowboard. Anyway, as I said, I had fun and managed to control things better after a few tries.

Third thing was that all the moving around, putting yourself in position (which was always bending everything a little), getting up after falling, putting the straps on and off...well, it adds up. It was a lot of exercise, and I sweated a lot. Besides, with the exercise and the falling, I ended up very tired. When we finally decided to leave, at around 16:00, we were all pretty dead.

It took us a while to reach the bus stop, between the cable car and finding the right spot. The bus also took some time to arrive, but the good part was that this station was at the beginning (or end) of the bus route, so we managed to get seats. It took us a long time to reach Adler again, and when we arrived home we were destroyed.

Next day everything hurt, but in a good way, like after going to the gym for the first time in 6 months. Since then I recovered. We had fun in there, and we'll probably go again soon. I was lazy to repeat it last couple of weekends, but we'll try to go again tomorrow, and we'll see how it goes. Lately there were several stations closed (since they're doing competitions to test them for the Olympics), and temperatures are stupidly high for winter, but we hope we'll be able to enjoy it a few other times before the season ends.

Maybe we'll like it so much that we'll get our own equipment in the end....

Christmas Games

The latest news from home are no surprise (some more corruption has been discovered, affecting the current government, president included), and lately I’ve made too many rants, so let’s talk about games.

 For Christmas, since we were going home, I ordered a large number of games. Here in Adler it’s harder to get games in English or delivered to your house. After coming back, since I didn’t want to do much, I managed to play for a while. This, plus some time playing before going home, has made me discover some really nice games:

 Xcom: 

I started playing this game before Christmas. I understand that this is a remake of an old game, where they tried to keep everything as close as the original as possible, while using the full graphic and sound capabilities that today’s computers can offer. The result is rather impressive, a very addictive game. The mechanic is quite simple: You control the resources of an organization that is trying to fight against an alien invasion. The main way to fight them by sending a small squad of soldiers against them (once they’re outside their UFOs), but you may need to shoot the UFO down sometimes with your own planes. While fighting them, you also need to capture different aliens to research them and improve your equipment. You also need to establish a network to protect countries and detect aliens, and you also manage your base, your constructions and workshops, and your research.

 This is done by having 2 main places where you play. Inside the base is one of them, where you can go to the different sections, order production of equipment or rooms, manage soldiers, manage interceptors, and all that. There is a global map, where you can make time pass. When time passes you complete constructions and research. Also, at random moments, aliens attack, or an UFO appears, or other things happen. That makes you move to the second part of the game, which is the combat. The combat is based on turns. Each turn your soldiers have a certain movement and available actions, and when you cannot do more actions, it’s the alien’s turn.

I’ve always liked strategy games, and turn-based strategy games are a very simple way to implement it, but with its own perks and good parts. In this game it’s very well done, I guess in a similar way as the original, but with 3D graphics and very detailed and personalized units (you can change faces, hair shape and color, armor design, equipment, weapons…). The trick is usually to move slowly, making sure all your units keep guarding each other. However, that’s not as interesting, so plenty of times I just charged ahead until crashing headfirst against groups of aliens. Well, it was not that bad, but always moving a little to keep the guard up slows the game down, so sometimes it was fun to just run to the middle of a mess.

The soldiers can have different specializations: Heavy (with a missile launcher and a heavy machine gun), assault (with skills to get close to the enemies and fight them there, ideally with a shotgun), sniper (to kill from far away), and assist (which is a generic soldier, good for making some damage while healing people around, or guarding places while people move). I really enjoyed playing with assault and sniper soldiers, and if you level them up these two can usually clean rooms in a matter of seconds and without getting damage. The assault in particular, with the ability to shoot people that just happen to walk next to it, it’s rather brutal. It can one-hit almost anything if they’re close enough. The sniper it’s also pretty cool sometimes, when you pull off shots from 5 rooms away, in which the animation following the bullet takes a looong while to reach the target, and it hits. In general, though, you’ll need all of them.

The plot itself is quite simple, as mentioned. You keep getting information about the aliens, while they increase the forces trying to invade it. The end feels rushed, but the point of the game is to slowly get there, and it's not really something that important to see how the plot develops.

I had not played for a while with turn-based strategy games, and it was quite addictive to try one that was so well done. The missions are certainly similar, but there’s always surprises, and new combinations, that you can try. Capturing aliens is quite tricky, but it’s vital for research, and it’s cool to keep gaining powers and skills.

It does get a little repetitive in the end, and while playing there were a couple of bad bugs that forced me to restart to the last saved game. Also, if you save-spam, the game can be quite easy. However, apart from that, I really like this game, and even without the plot, I enjoy doing missions quite a lot.
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Just Cause 2:

This game was game of the year some time ago according to Zero Punctuation. I gave it a try, without having played the first one.

The plot is one of the sorriest excuses I've ever seen: You're dumped (literally, from a helicopter) into an island-country, with the mission to find your mentor and maybe kill him depending on what he's doing. The islands are supposed to be a little third-world country, with a dictator ruling them, factions working against each other for power, and all the climates you can imagine, from snow in the highest mountains, to deserts, to jungle with rivers and lakes.

The way to find out what's going on and advance the plot consist in creating chaos, destroying militar installations and doing missions for the factions against the current government.

This sounds...well, boring. Every time I read the description I was wondering if the game was worth it, really.  I think that Yahtzee has great opinions regarding games, but one of the most important points of his videos is that, well, everybody has different tastes, and even if a game is good it doesn't mean it's good for everybody. So I believe that a game recommended by him it's going to be good, but maybe I personally will find it boring.

Anyway, this game isn't boring, at all. It's really really a lot of fun. Stupid fun. First, the country, made up of islands, it's huge. As in a  30km x 30km area, more or less (and if you walk, it would take around the same time to cross the map as a real person to walk that distance). There's thousands of locations, and you can spend hours just going from one place to another, depending on what you use for moving. That brings us to the second thing, which is that you can use any transport that you see moving around in the game, and you can do so from the start. You can choose to drive cars, motorbikes, tanks, different boats, helicopters and planes, from fighter jets to passenger planes. And apart from that, you can use a parachute any time you want and without any limitations, plus a grappling hook. The end result is that you can move quite fast, grapple yourself to a moving plane, pilot it against a mountain, and jump out of it with your parachute before it explodes, safely landing afterwards. And if you get tired of that, there's the black market chopper that can drop you (again, literally) into any location you have previously discovered.

Physics are frequently ignored, like when a good way to survive a 3km fall is to grapple the floor with your hook, safely landing after going even faster towards the floor. On the other hand, there's quite nice physical concepts, like the option to tie two things with the hook, or the way every transport moves around, quite different from one another.

So, most of the game you play around the island, jumping from place to place, shooting at things, falling from helicopters, tying people to planes and seeing them bounce around, and lots of other quite really funny things.

Actually, in the Zero Punctuation review it's mentioned that "Just Cause" basically can mean "Just because". After playing it, yeah, that's definitely the meaning they wanted it to have, since there's no just cause in the plot (the "just cause" is shoehorned at the end, but it's clear for everybody that it's just an excuse).

All in all, lots of stupid fun, with great graphics, awesome views and scenery, and fun stupid missions where you jump to the roof of moving cars or get grappled to a helicopter while you try to shoot down a rocket.

L.A. Noire:

Just to show, Yahtzee didn't like this game. I have only played a little bit, but I love it. It's basically a C.S.I, the game, set in the 50s. You're a police inspector, and you go to crime scenes, recover clues, and then interrogate people about them, trying to guess if they lie, if they're telling the truth or if they just didn't mention everything they knew. You need to guess these things by their facial expressions and ticks, and you need to prove they're lying by using the clues you've found.

The game has also a city you can patrol around, in GTA style, but I find this part secondary. I feel they put it there, same as with some chase scenes or shootings, to make publishers happy, because a pure "investigation" game would seem too "boring", specially if it's not based in any previous movie or T.V. franchise.

I haven't played much, but so far the different cases I've done were interesting, even if simple, and I really like the interrogation mechanics, were you need to find proofs, and where if you guess incorrectly you may miss whole investigation branches.

Halo 4:

Being a fan of the previous Halos, and after hearing this one was really good, I had to give it a try. I haven't played much yet, but so far it's really good. Well, the usual stuff, but good. I really like that in general, Halo is not trying too hard to be "realistic", and that it also does not use cover systems or anything. You move, and if you find objects were you can hide behind, that's the cover. You need to ration your bullets, and you need to manage your weapons so you don't get stuck into corners with nothing but a little powerless plasma pistol.

The plot is becoming interesting, with weird alien planets and ancient technology. It's true that the covenant are becoming a little repetitive, specially since you're supposed to have defeated them, or allied with the rest, and I was expecting new enemies and weapons (or at least, more new enemies and weapons from the start), but still has this epic feel while making you like the characters involved (unlike Gears of War. I liked the gameplay, but the characters were extremely boring and I didn't feel attached to them at all).

The forerunner areas that remind me of the first Halo endless corridors are a little boring, but so far they keep changing much faster than in the original, where after a while you kept having Deja vu's in each room.

Super Meat Boy: 

This is an indie game, and a very geeky one. It uses references from thousands of older games (the game starts with the Street Fighter 2 stupid intro, only changing the characters and the names used), and the mechanic is quite simple: You move inside a little scenario, avoiding traps, until you reach another character. Everything kills you, and if you die you just start again, without wasting any time in loading or anything.

The levels get harder and harder, and they're stupidly addictive. In the process you gain very fast reflexes, because the slightest mistake kills you and makes you repeat the whole level. There's special bonuses, portals, and if you finish a level fast enough you gain access to an even-harder version of that same level. Once you finish a level, you can see all your tries, simultaneously, including the successful one.

It's a very simple game mechanic, but the game is awesome, with different traps and puzzles. There's lots of details that are very well polished, and the gruesome ways in which you day makes it funny more than frustrating. To that end it also helps that you don;t lose time reloading or anything, and you just go right back to the start to try again, so eventually you learn. Sometimes you can day 6 times in less than 5 seconds, but that's the point. You just try again until you master the level and move on.

To point out why it's funny, your character is a square block of meat that bleeds any time you touch anything (well, it's a piece of meat after all), the character you need to rescue is a square made of bandages, and the evil character that kidnapped her is a foetus floating in a square glass tank with a suit, who likes to troll all other characters all the time, while beating them.

It's highly addictive and highly recommended. But it may take quite a lot of time from you, without you realizing about it....



And that's all for now. I still have plenty of games that we brought back during Christmas  plus some games we already had that I have not tried yet.

I have a big waiting list, and I'll try to slowly get through all of it (and comment about all these nice games in here).

We'll see which one's going to be next...