The Halo Games

These days I've finished Halo:Reach. This is the last Halo game made by Bungie, although not the last in the series (that would be Halo 4). Spoilers ahead if you haven't played any Halo games.

I left it for last because I understood that it was not as good as the previous ones. This is kind of true, but still is a pretty awesome game. The graphics are better than previous versions, and the world feels quite richer, with heavily populated areas, cities, bases, etc. I'd say its weak parts are the characters. I didn't manage to connect with them much.

As Yahtzee explained in his review, a team called "Noble Team" is clearly competing to see who is more selfless and caring, and performs a better sacrifice. The only two characters that had some slight development, in my opinion, were Jorge (the first guy to die) and the female researcher(don't remember her exact name) that acts as the usual crazy scientist (usual, but interesting). The rest were quite...bland.

It didn't help that there were moments where the IA of the other characters made them look while 2 huge hunters were playing tennis with my character's corpse....that cannot be helped I guess, otherwise you wouldn't have a challenge (since the other team members are kind of immortal unless killed by the plot), but when all characters are supposed to be super-soldiers, it doesn't quite fit....

Anyway, the game is still good and fun to play. However, I liked more the other Halo games, including 4 (and I'm not counting Halo Wars among them).

Halo games got me addicted some time ago after one friend from university, Alex Urbano, introduced me to them. They have something special. The main character, even if he's not talkative and it may appear rather bland as well, has a certain sense of humor, maybe like stereotypical action heroes, but that puts more personality than all the Gears of War characters combined. Together with the second main character, the AI Cortana, it makes the game much more fun. They interact like some kind of couple, and they kind of are a couple, in their weird way.

The main games always have a feeling of greatness, of something epic going on. I think the music has a great influence on that, I already commented in other posts that it's awesome, transmitting the action of the game together with the awe of discovering new planets and technology. By the 3rd game, it even adds a melancholic touch, and the feeling that it's the end of the world.  But it's not only the music...the graphics and the areas also give a special imprint. Instead of gritty realism, in these games everything is shiny, colorful, well illuminated (unless the are is supposed to be dark, of course). The different places are usually beautiful, in their modernity or their impossibility (a world in the shape of a ring, a huge structure with floating parts, an underground area that goes kilometers deep, etc.)

ODST, probably the weirdest game of the group, it's really great in making a simpler plot with new characters interesting. It centres more on the exploration of the city, and uses quite well the feeling of being completely alone, surrounded by enemies, trying to get help and get an idea of what has happened while you were unconscious.

It also has Malcolm Reynolds in it as the squad's leader, which is always a plus^^. 

The gameplay for all Halos  is quite simple,you need to explore different regions, gather useful weapons and kill everything to advance. In some exceptions, you can just try to run through enemy territories very fast. When you get hit, your shields take the damage. When you're out of shields, sometimes you have a life bar and sometimes health regeneration, but the effect is the same: Enough hits without shields, and you die. If you wait without getting hit again, shields recharge.

If you play in a difficulty harder than normal, the games are actually pretty hard. It's not easy to get out of places were you're heavily outnumbered and outflanked. Usually there will always be  a group of small enemies together with a couple of big ones. The small ones are not a big danger by themselves, but they interrupt you if you try to concentrate on the big ones, and their added attack can easily kill you if you don't find some cover.

In these harder difficulties, an important part of gameplay is actually something closer to survival-horror style games, where you scavenge for ammunition, and where it's important to not miss and waste resources. Lots of times you need to use the normal rifle instead of the big huge laser, since no matter how good you are with the laser, in the end it can only kill 6 enemies before you need another weapon.

In the end, you learn to use whatever is at hand, you learn to use as few shots as possible, you learn how to use grenades....you learn how to play better and better. And it's done nicely together with the advance of the plot.

I'd like to finish talking about Halo 4, the start of a new trilogy created by a Microsoft department dedicated to make more Halo games, while Bungie dedicates itself to other ideas and games.

When you heard such a thing, it sounds like the usual big company crap, where they beat the corpse of any franchise as long as it expels a little bit more of money for them. Probably the managers that decided to do this had that in mind. However, it seems they selected for the job actual Halo fans and ex-members of Bungie.

The result is really great. This game has more plot than any of the older games, and it manages to develop some very interesting secondary characters, apart from giving new dimensions to the usual ones. Sure, there are plenty of things that still don't make much sense, but the care and detail that has been dedicated to it is clear.

There is this example, further in the game, where you meet some old lady scientist, where without saying much, her expression in the game says thousands of things. You're forcing her to get rid of something she is researching. Without saying much, the face shows the regret of wasting hours to throw it away, the regret of not being able to know more, that she doesn't want to do it at all, but she knows that there is no other option to save the station where they are situated. By this simple trick, they develop her into a likeable character, with an inner world.

And then they kill her in a gruesome way. And they manage to motivate you to kill the bastard responsible for this.

This is good storytelling using video games  This is what they can offer. Sure, without good graphics they may have not been able to pull this off, but the idea of the whole scene, of all your efforts  of all her efforts  of the expression and tone of her voice, all that....that's storytelling when it approaches art.

Compare it with the stupid little kid in Mass Effect 3...I could not care less about him. He appeared once, he was a little bit annoying, maybe with reason, but with no nuances. We were supposed to feel bad because he was a kid. But the voice used, the face used, the situation, the dialogue....I could not care less. Specially because they force it on your character, who gets traumatized by it.

In Halo 4, they do nothing like that. They just show an interesting character, and kill it, and they do it in a way that you care...but even that is up to you to choose, in a way.

That shows that this game was made with care and respect, whatever the reason of its origin was. And that's why it's a great game.

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...

What's going on back home

Every day I try to keep track of the world news, and to do so I try to read some Spanish newspapers. Probably that’s not the best source of news, since most Spanish newspapers are highly biased and with strong opinions, but a mixture of several of them plus actually thinking about what is being said on the news is enough to get an idea.

The general picture right now is that Spain is going to shit. Which is evident, for a number of reasons.

For starters, the main Spanish parties are completely rotten with corruption. Every day there is a new article about a new corruption case being found and investigated, from small towns to the central government, and it usually involves the two main Spanish parties, PSOE and PP, plus some others, like CIU.

After this problem, there is the issue of unemployment.  6 million people in Spain are currently searching for a job, and we’re not including people who just gave up and are not searching any more.

Third problem would be the prices of apartments and houses. It’s still way too high, making lots and lots of empty residences that no one can buy.  The construction market is dead, but there’s people that are still trying to reanimate it, which would just restart the whole thing and we’d have the same problem later on.

Fourth problem is Catalunya’s government wish to consider independence as an option. All parties, in Catalunya and Spain, are fighting over this and the different options and reactions it should have.


In the case of the first problem, there’s no clear solution. The big parties involved control more than enough of the government and parliament to protect themselves.  Most politicians that have arrived to a position of important power in these parties are currently not fit to rule, they’re just very good at manipulating people and flattering the higher-ups. There’s lots of examples of politicians that do not have any studies, and they just climbed inside the party backstabbing people and centering on themselves. Once in a position of power, they started to work for themselves and their relatives and friends, hiring companies owned by themselves to do public work, evading taxes, hiding money, etc. And people still vote them. 

In Valencia, the corruption cases are embarrassing. The party with most cases, PP, has people that were declared guilty. However, since the crime was done 10 years ago, it didn't apply any more  even if they were guilty.  These people are still in power, and they won elections. One gets the feeling that the situation is similar in the rest of Spain. Basically, there’s a lot of people that follow this party blindly. There’s other people that follow other parties blindly, but in the case of PP, this number is really huge. I believe the cause of this is, in part, pure fanatism towards their ideas ,and in the other part, a strange feeling of proudness to the fact that they’re smart enough to steal money.

The other side of this problem is the people that, by ignorance, still believe PSOE is a leftist party(the people ruling the party and in Spanish parliament are definitely not leftists, even if lots of less important members may be it) and that they’re the solution against PP. Even if they fight each other, and they do try to screw each other lots of times, both are quite happy to alternate themselves as the ruling parties of Spain, and both just blame the other for everything, while doing almost the same when they’re in power.  PSOE voters are finally catching up to this fact, and the party is sinking quite fast. The leaders of the party are trying to find solutions, but the real solution would be if those leaders abandoned the party, and this is not going to happen, of course. Still, it will take a while for them to really sink. The leftist people are usually smarter and they will abandon them faster, but there’s still going to take a while. Maybe in this time PSOE will fix itself, but somehow I doubt it, since the people with most power are of the parasite type, not really problem solvers, as they have demonstrated themselves when they were ruling the country.

When PP and PSOE have controlled more than half the parliament, it is normal to hear that people that got condemned because of corruption got pardoned. While they can control the government and the parliament, corruption will run rampant. And of course, they will do whatever they can to keep the power, including laws like the one created recently, that makes it very hard to create a new political party if you don’t have people in the parliament already or a huge support beforehand.

If other parties took the power, we would have a chance of cleaning the big parties of corrupt people, but while this does not happen, things will be the same, and while there is no money for healthcare or education, there will be enough to hire a bad company owned by a friend, which will inflate the bills and do an inferior job.


The second Spanish problem is unemployment. The causes for this are several. The main one is that Spanish economy was based in constructing houses and other things. But instead of house prices decreasing, they increased. Eventually the situation became unsustainable, prices started to went down, nobody wanted to construct anything any more  and a huge lot of construction companies started to fire their people, since they didn't have work for them. Since banks were owners or close friends with lots of those construction companies, banks started to get loses, and they started to fire some people as well, plus they stopped giving money in the form of credits to other companies. These other companies didn't have money to pay their employees, so they started to fire them as well.

These unemployed people could not consume and buy things, so several companies that were trying to produce things also got loses, and so on. It was a huge chain reaction. The solution to this requires a big structural change. Spain is currently designed to get money by constructing. This is very idiotic, since the demand is not high enough or constant enough to be a perfect solution forever. We basically need to invest in research, to support new industries and services. However, the ruling parties have too many friends in construction, so because of the first problem, this second problem won't be solved. Instead, the ruling parties are making laws that make it easier to fire people, and to hire people for less money and with worse conditions.  People will get paid less or nothing, so there won't be consumers, so local industries won't be able to prosper. But somehow, big companies cannot grasp this concept, and their logic is something more like "I will lower salaries and fire people, so my company increases the benefits when selling things to people", without reaching to the next logic step, which is that if everybody does the same, people will not have enough money to buy anything in the first place. 

In general, the second problem is also caused by stupid rulers that didn't try to improve the situation, because their friends were getting lots of money in the process. 


The third problem is also related to the other two problems. Right now house prices are still very high compared to a normal salary. If renting an apartment, or buying a house, represented a small percentage of the total salary, people would have more options. This is not the case, but the prices are slowly getting down to more achievable values. The problem is that the majority of empty apartments are owned by constructors or banks. The same people who's friends with the government. If capitalism was really applied, since there is a huge offer and a very small demand, prices would sink to incredible levels. However, government and companies are modifying laws and playing with numbers, not trying to sell apartments, to keep the prices high. In their little minds they still think that they will be able to sell all these houses for a huge price, and get a profit. That's not going to happen, but meanwhile we have the absurd situation of people without houses, while there's millions of empty ones that are not for sale or rent. 

Again, while we have such levels of corruption and the same rulers, there's no solution to that. 


Finally, the fourth "problem", it's not as important as the rest, but it's showing how stupid is the current Spanish situation. 

First, the central government has started to propose a number of retarded laws that basically want to eliminate Catalan things. Starting with the language and it's presence in schools and government, followed by Catalan laws,  Catalan taxes and Catalan auto-government, Catalan culture, etc.

I'm not really against being Spanish, and I mentioned before that Spain was formed from Catalunya and other regions. However, lately we're being told we cannot be Catalan and Spanish. And they expect us to follow the logic of becoming only Spanish. Well, fuck that. 

Second, Catalunya's government after elections was indeed formed by CIU with the help of ERC. However, ERC didn't want to be part of it, since they're against some of CIU's actions. That's a good thing, since it allows ERC and other parties to force CIU to negotiate and not impose their ideas, which is basically to help their CEO friends. Anyway, CIU, ERC, ICV(left party) and CUP(left pro-independence party) have decided to sign some document saying they want to make people vote about catalunya's independence. 

The reaction of the other parties has been really really stupid. First, PP said that was antidemocratic, because it was not legal and not in the constitution, a constitution voted by all Spanish people. Let's start with the constitution argument: That was almost 35 years ago. I did not vote for it, and plenty of people that voted for it are dead, or they may have different opinions now. At the time, it was that or the threat of another dictatorship, so people went for that. The constitution was voted, yes, but it needs to follow the times, it needs reforms, and it needs to be voted again from time to time. The same way we vote each 4 years, instead of only voting once 35 years ago and keeping the same parliament since that moment. 

Second thing is the fact that a vote about Catalunya's independence is not legal with the current law. Well, yes. However, maybe the point of this is that we should change the laws. After all, it's more relevant if something is morally "good", or ethical. If lots of people want to become independent, or at least they want to vote for it to see what happens, that doesn't sound like a bad thing per se. Denying things because they're not legal is a dictatorship's tactic. A Dictator may declare that talking bad about him is not legal. So, if it's in the law, we should obey it blindly? Specially after considering that the current laws are managed by extremely corrupt people that think only about themselves and their friends, like a communal dictatorship? Yeah, no way. 

Third thing, is the most hilarious one: Since it's not legal and it's not on the constitution voted 35 years ago, it's not democratic. Excuse me? Voting is antidemocratic? Yeah, the level of stupidity in this reasoning is impressive.

Of course, PP is not alone in this stupidity, and Ciutadans, a weird party that has an unclear program (but tends to be from the right) is using more or less the same arguments. 

PSOE (or PSC, as the Catalan branch is named) is a funny case. In one side, they repeat PP's and Ciutadan's arguments, and voted against the idea of asking the people. However, in their program they said people should be asked about it. Besides that, they're defending to create a new Spanish model, with federations, as a solution. They say they defend this idea, but they never ever tried to put it in practice during 8 years of ruling Spain. Now those same rulers keep saying they want to propose this idea. Well, you had your time. Do you expect us to believe you now? However, inside PSC there were some voices saying PSC should vote together with CIU, ERC and the rest. And 5 people voted in favor of the document. According to the founding documents of the party, you cannot do that, and they got punished with a fine. 

And that's the last sign that Spain is not a democracy. The parties have a single view, and if you don't follow it, you get punished, or even expelled form the party. Well, then why do we need so many people in the parliament? We can easily reduce it to one person that has a certain share of the votes. If 30 people cannot say what they think, and they need to act without complaining, why do we need 30 people? One will be quite enough for that, and much safer for the party. 

Well, that was a long and slightly pointless rant. With all that, I wanted to say that I would like to live in Spain( or Catalunya, if Spain does not want to allow us to be Catalan and Spanish, I'd rather be Catalan). I really like living in Barcelona. However, if things do not improve and people start being slightly less stupid, Spain will keep being deep in shit.... 

Well see....the situation seems to be reaching a boiling point lately....

New Year Vacations

I have not written in a while...

The explanation to that can be found in the new year´s vacations. We went back to Barcelona for 12 days to celebrate New Year, and it was a great time. We managed to see friends and family, even if we missed people that we didn´t have time to meet in the end, and we had friends from Vilnius around most of the days.

All these things meant that for 12 days we were rather busy. We scheduled our days to the last minute, and we spend most of the time visiting people, meeting people or walking around the city. We did that for 12 days. And we loved seeing all the people that mattered to us.

However, Olia and I are not the most sociable people. So even if we enjoyed it, afterwards we were destroyed. As in completely tired and wanting to do nothing and not leave the house for several days. It hit me specially hard, and I didn´t want to do anything apart from reading, watching series and movies, or playing games.(things that do not require very high mental processes).

We have to say that we were "lucky", and we got a couple of extra days of isolation to rest and recover. When we were going back, our flight with Turkish airlines (a very good company, with big seats, a tv in front of you, and food during the flight) was going to pass through Istanbul, were we had to wait a couple of hours. It seems that during these dates, there was quite a big snow storm in there. We didn´t know, and in Barcelona´s airport they told us that, and that our plane had not left Istanbul yet. There was a 2 hour delay.

Of course, our first thought was that we were screwed, since the other flight was 2 hours after the first landing. However, they told us that the chaos was general, and that the other flight would be also delayed. With this reassurance, we went inside the airport and waited in front of the Gate. The plane arrived as expected, and we were ready to board....but we didn´t. Time passed and passed. Eventually, we boarded the plane, and had to wait a looong time before taking off. When we landed in Istanbul, we spent looots of time in the airport tracks, waiting for a place to stop the plane and get out.

Adding it all up, we were 4 hours late at least, and it was 1:45 am. Our plane to Sochi, even if delayed as well, had already left some minutes before that, and we were, in fact, screwed. Considering that, we went to claim new tickets, since the airline should help us in these situations.

After a big queue with all the people of all the flights that got delayed because of the snow, we were told that next possible flight was in 2 days, but that the airline was giving us a room in a hotel and had paid for our food and transfer. With  no other option, we went to enter the country.

To our surprise, Olia passed without incidents but I was told that I required a Visa, for being Spanish  We tried to go back, but they didn´t want to let Olia, since she was officially inside Turkey now, so they kept her passport. We went to an office 20 meters away, and were told that Visas were all for 90 days. We asked for the price, and it was just 15 euros. We paid, they stamped a little thing in my passport, which took 5 seconds, and the police control was happy to let us pass.  It was quite embarrassing, not a real Visa, just an entrance fee.

Next thing was to recover our luggage. We went to the office of lost luggage, and we were told that it could wait in the airport for 2 days. We needed it back for our stay in the hotel, so we asked them to bring it to us. They said it would take very long, like 2 hours, but we had no choice. It was rather stupid too, since they should have an easy way to keep track of baggage in transit, and in other circumstances they are able to transfer the baggage from plane to plane in less than 20 minutes...but well, airports are terrible disorganized messes everywhere it seems....

After 2 hours waiting, we were able to reach the desk of the airline in the airport that would transfer us to the hotel. They told us, again, that we would have to wait an hours or so until the shuttle arrived. So we waited some more, taking the chance to have some kind of breakfast (after all these queues and waiting  it was after 8 am already). We finally got the shuttle and the transfer to the hotel, we checked in (10 am), and we just went to sleep. We woke up to eat (it was paid by the airline), and continue sleeping, for the whole day and part of the next. We also read, and stayed in bed for a long time. It was quite awesome, actually.

On the second day, after lunch, we decided to actually go and visit something, and we found out that the hotel was right in the centre of the city. We were able to see the blue mosque, and to pick a cache in the process. It was quite nice, even if rather cold. We spent an hour or so walking around, and then went back to the hotel to rest some more and get ready to go to the airport.

We managed to give our suitcases, after having to transfer some weight from one to the other, since we were forced to put duty-free things inside and the total weight had increased. We went to the plane, and this time everything went fine, although the plane took a little longer than planned to take off.

We arrived to Adler, and spent lots of time trying to pass the border and get our suitcases. We didn´t have any problems, but it just took extremely long. Eventually we arrived home, dead, and we went to sleep at 6 am. I had to wake up 2 hours later and go to work, so I did. I had missed 2 extra days of work, but at least it meant that it was Friday. I survived the day, and with that weekend and several days of rest we got used again to live here in Russia.

Now that I have recovered, I´ll write sooner I hope. There´s lots of things that have happened in the world that I´d like to rant about, and I have lots of new computer games that I´d like to comment.

We´ll see....

Getting used to Adler

After some time in Russia, we can say we're starting to get used to it.

We've been here less than two months, but it feels ages, with all the things that have happened and we have done. Lots of people say that time perception depends on how many new things you do during the week (if everything is new, time feels longer), and moving to another country with a new different job definitely stretched our time quite a lot. Now, after almost 2 months, things are starting to get "normal"...and even then, there is new things happening every week, job-related or not...

First, we finally got a nice apartment in the centre of Adler, and did all the paperwork and payments necessary to rent it. It was not the original one that we wanted, but now we think this one is much better, since it came with almost everything (furniture, dishes, pots, etc.) and it's right next to the office and the main streets and markets. There were a few missing things, but we bought those.

We live in the same block as lots of other people from work, and it's nice to be able to visit them, or invite them, and do something at random, with no need to plan in advance, or spent time getting there first. Reminds me of some friends that all live in the same area of the city, and I understand them much better now, why they're always meeting without planning, it's quite natural if you're 2 minutes away from them...

The apartment is really big, it has several terraces, rooms and toilets, and we have adapted things to our liking and moved furniture a little. The main terrace, that has an extra kitchen apart from the main one, has sights to the sea, and receives a lot of sun. Even in a cold day, if it's clear enough, the place feels warm and nice.

We have received our things finally (the same day that we decided to buy and mount furniture for the TV that was coming....furniture that came with no instructions whatsoever about how to mount it, a thing that may require another post...), and we feel like at home now.

As I already said, Russian is a very curious place. There is a clear cultural shock. With people in the office we have not many problems, since these positions imply a certain level of education or experience that also guarantees a bigger mind, and a person who probably has travelled more or entered in contact with more different cultures.  However, that is not necessary the case with random people in the street, and this is kind of noticeable sometimes.

In general, Russian society reminds me at the moment of Spanish society, 20-30 years ago more or less...it's clearly not an undeveloped country, and the culture is similar to the occidental one, but there's still a long way to go to resemble other european, cosmopolitan places like the U.K., Sweden or Denmark (they have their faults, but in some aspects they have incredible advances). Spain is not there yet either by far, but in some aspects Russia seems to have a lot more room for social and cultural improvements, apart from things like infrastructures, public transports, etc.

For example, we already commented that traffic is awful. The principle behind it is that everybody is on its own, and to help other cars is to show weakness. A social improvement would be the change of this mentality to something where solidarity is more important....if drivers were nicer, everybody could probably move faster around intersections.

Other things that we've noticed is that everything is under construction right now. Our current building itself is half finish, even if our apartment is clearly done. It seems people are preparing for Olympics  and there's a rush to build more of everything. After all, Adler is very, very small, and Winter Olympics are supposed to happen in here...they need more roads, more hotels, more shops, etc. The current shops and restaurants also need to get bigger to compete with all these new ones. The end result is that we have the feeling sometimes of living in a construction site all the time. Even the office has this problem, the official desk were we are supposed to have a little place is in a building that only has the 6th floor finished, and the other 5 are a mess of unpainted concrete and dust. Our other workplace is not much better...it's more finished, but every day you find cables hanging from somewhere  a hole in a wall that opens to the street, and other such things.But well, these things just cause minor inconveniences...

Major inconveniences are caused by the fact that all these constructions are messing up some basic services (like Internet). It's normal that, when it rains or it's windy, cables break, things flood, and electricity wavers or stops for a while, water doesn't reach our floor, internet does not work...

So far every week I think we've had some interruptions in the electricity, even if just for a second...and other times we had electricity, but the company that provides internet did not.

In general the effect can be a little bit annoying, but oh well....

For the moment, we're quite happy living in our apartment in Russia^^

Elections

So, there were elections in Catalunya, and the results are....curious. They´r not good, but they could be worse.

There is a majority of votes towards the right or centre-right side of the political spectrum, which is always worrisome....but it´s true that, in general, the left parties got reinforced after elections, and won some territories. This was casued by a bigger participation mostly, but also by some changes in votes.

First of all, CIU. This is Catalunya´s main right party, and they have always played with catalanism to obtain things for themselves. In the past they did some good things, but also plenty of bad things, like helping private schools only, and big companies and such things. Lately, they did mostly bad things, like corruption  repression and huge social cuts.  Right now, they were governing without a majority, which means they had to pact to achieve things. They didn´t like that, and when it was clear that people were tired of some of the problems that come from being in Spain and wanted independence, they claimed that they were the most independent of them all, and organized this elections, with the message that independence would only be possible with them. They tried to hide all the bad things they had done, and present independence as the most important thing to vote for right now.

Luckily, things went very wrong for them. They have lost a big chunk of people in the parliament, and they have been weakened. They still have more than twice people in parliament than any other single party, but they cannot reach majority by far, and they need to pact.

ERC, catalunya´s main left catalanist party, got the next best result.ERC is truly in favor of independence, and for one people didn´t get tricked, and they got the majority of independentists votes instead of CIU . PSC followed them (spanish centre party, they are a little lost at the moment with no clear ideas), and then PP (spanish right party, same ideas as last 70 years). Then ICV (catalunya´s left party, got reinforced with some more people than before), C(catalunya´s right party in favour of Spain, won some votes against even asking about independence) and CUP (a new party from the left that wants independence while paying lots of attention to giving lots of social rights, and therefore got lots of new votes) took the rest of the people in the parliament. The result is that CIU has 50 people, ERC 21, PSC  20, PP 19, ICV 13, C 9 and CUP 3.

To have majority you need 68 people at least, so it´s easy to see that there are 4 main possible combinations: CIU+ERC, CIU+PSC, CIU+PP and PP+ERC+PSC+(ICS or C).

Some people, usually from the right political mindset, think that this is terrible. After all, it´s true that it´s really hard to do things if you have to make sure that some other party needs to agree on them with you. However, that´s something that really expresses democracy. If you can rule alone, you usually rule by yourself. You can claim that half of the people wanted you to rule (which is false, since with the laws around votes you can usually win elections with 20% of votes or less), and that means any decision you take is right. That ignores all the other parties that people also voted.  The result is that, if you don´t need to pact, you can be a dictator  until next elections, deciding everything on your own. And lots of people call that Democracy with a straight face. However, when you need to pact, it´s possible that the smaller parties force some changes down your throat. That is great, it makes you learn to dialogue, to compromise on things, to have to open your mind a little bit, or to just accept that you cannot do whatever you want responsibility-free until the next elections.

PP, being Franco´s heirs, and ERC (being part of Franco´s opponents heirs), will probably never agree in anything (they´re almost opposites) , so the last combination is not possible (or the probability needs to be calculated with a supercomputer, to fit all the decimal zeros it has before any other number).

This leaves the other 3 possible combinations.

CIU could pact with PP and they would probably agree on most things except independence. However, this is a very important point, CIU already has agreed on start the process of consulting with votes in a referendum about it (PP is completely against it), and in Catalunya if you ally yourself with PP in an open way you are committing political suicide. They could probably ally themselves with PSC. They do not have that many differences, and PSC is very lost at the moment and could probably adapt to CIU. However, either CIU would reject the idea of independence, which would be another suicide, or PSC accepts to make a referendum and policies from the right, which would give unclear results for them, but it´s probable that they would lose votes too.

CIU and ERC are the more probable initial pact. ERC has a problem, and that is that some of its members forget that "E" is from "Esquerra", which means left in catalan. ERC sometimes gives priority to give more independence to Catalunya than making social policies. This means that they could rule together for a while. CIU could pact with PP from time to time to approve their worst policies against social rights (no matter how publicly they fight and insult each other, CIU and PP are really close to each other and help each other again and again, even if they try to not advertise it), and if ERC doesn't get angry about it, things would continue like this. However, ERC has said that social policies will be a priority.

Will ERC be able to make CIU swallow a number of social reforms to, at least, get closer to the social situation we had before CIU ruled, with a better healthcare, education and other social objectives? Will it manage to stop the rampant corruption and repression, or will it join in the game?

We will see...but it might be interesting after all....

First week in Adler

After some time of instability, we're finally living in Russia. Right now we're still in the hotel, but this Monday we're supposed to sign the contract for our apartment.

The first impressions have been good, but Russia is indeed a curious country. The place where we will live, Adler, is quite small. It has 3-4 big streets, and the rest of the town is made of little passages and houses. There are a lot of little shops, and we have two shopping malls, that can be reached by a 10-minute walk.

Traffic is awful, there's way too many people using cars to move around, and they drive aggresively, plenty of times ignoring preferences, lights or lanes, and always competing for spaces with other cars. The result is that you can see daily deadlocks in the main street, created by cars trying to turn while other cars are in the way, with no one giving away any ground, and other similar situations.

Luckily, as mentioned, we do not need to use the car in here, we walk everywhere and it takes only a few minutes.

If we feel like going to a bigger place, Sochi's centre is 40 minutes or so (if there are no big traffic jams/deadlocks) away from here using the public buses. We've been there only once, but it's true that feels more like a city. However, if we analyse it, it's a similar situation than in London, where the centre was 40 minutes away, and around our house there was almost nothing, just some shops.

The apartments we can rent are pretty awesome and big, and the one we want to have will give us enough space for guests and parties (so we hope to have people around from time to time). We're meeting new nice people who already live here, and the feeling is similar to London, or to Sweden, where you usually keep meeting people in a similar situation, and since we do not know much of the place we band together. We've already gone to a couple of parties where we've met co-workers, Russians or from other parts of the world.

The hotel we're using right now is quite nice, but it has a major drawback: no internet in the room. This means that we need to go downstairs every time we want to connect, which means that we cannot check things as much as we usually want, or watch series and such things. Anyway, soon enough we'll be able to get internet in our apartment, and we're told it works well enough.

The weather, at the beginning of November, has been quite amazing, sunny and nice, while being temperate and not very hot. At night it's colder, since weather is drier than in Barcelona, but it's still very nice for the month. Before arriving here we had to stop one day in Moscow, and we were at around 3 degrees, it was raining like hell, and when it stopped raining it was to start snowing...

All in all, we believe we can live well in here, we'll see how it goes^^

Independence?(2)

I want to dedicate a second post, because I want to talk more about current situation...

What I didn't explain about Catalunya is that, for the past 20 years or so, there has been a strong campaign in the rest of Spain to promote hate against it.

After Franco died, as I mentioned, Catalunya got some independence back. This was respected, and while some people still claimed they wanted more, the vast majority of the population was happy with the state of things regarding Catalunya's management. There was a number of laws protecting the Catalan language and culture, to make sure Franco's effords to eliminate it were undone, and the degree of independence in government was enough to manage most things. 

However, Spain's right party, called PP, started a campaign defending the unity of Spain, where Catalunya was a target because of their use of Catalan and independence tendencies. PP promoted the idea that in Catalunya everybody hated Spain and Spanish people and culture, and that Catalan people were rude towards Spanish people and didn't try to communicate. 

This was used to show, then, that Spain's left party, called PSOE, collaborated too much with Catalunya, and Catalunya was not doing anything for Spain. The logic was that PP would put a stop to that, so you should vote it. Of course, the things they were saying were not true, but PP, as heirs of Franco, didn't care much about such things. 

PSOE didn't help, since part of it was also not happy with Catalunya's degree of independence, and there were regions were PSOE was also promoting this type of hate, by comments and declarations. 

This started mostly at the end of a big period where PSOE was ruling Spain, in 1996, and increased even more when PP ruled, between 1996 and 2004. 

All this bad comments, together with the fact that the amount of money that Catalunya was giving to the central government was much more than the money returned in inversions for Catalunya, made Catalan people mad. The growing feeling regarding money was that other Spanish regions, like Extremadura and Andalucia (that do not have a strong economy) , or even Madrid (who has) were getting most of it, and they didn't have to work as hard as Catalunya because they were getting money anyway. This may be a lie, but people from these regions have explained stories and it may not be completely false, even if it's not true for most of the population of these regions. This idea was also used by Catalunya's right party, CIU, to spread hate towards Spain as well, even if in lesser measure. Another nationalist party from the left, ERC, also shared some of these ideas and spread them.

There has been comments, and one thing that is true is that Catalunya gives more money than any other "rich" region present in other European countries, and the proportion of money that gets back is also much inferior.

Summing up, PP and sometimes PSOE were accusing Catalunya of being different and wanted it to become more "Spanish", they were ridiculising Catalunya's culture, and spreading hate against this region around Spain, while taking lots of money to spend in other regions. CIU and ERC took the chance to show that Spain wanted to eliminate Catalunya's culture while stealing money from it at the same time, even if their campaigns were not as brutal or hateful.

This resulted in more and more people getting angry at the central government, and starting to think that maybe Catalunya would do better if it was independent from Spain.

The people who live in Catalunya are very diverse. There's lots of immigrants, since Catalunya is one of the richest regions of Spain, so there are more job offers and opportunities  My father is from Andalucia and came here when he was young, searching for a better place to live. This happened from all around Spain, and right now Catalunya has lots and lots of people that were not born Catalans.

However, these people have felt they have found their home, and have made a place in Catalunya. Therefore,  they got angry too, because now it was also their culture, even if borrowed later in their lives, and their efforts and money. There a lots of immigrants, event from other Spanish regions, that became more radical than traditional Catalan families and supported the idea of just breaking up relations with Spain and declare independence. All these people, wherever their origins, started to realise that Spain seemed to hate them, so they wanted to separate from that.

People who supported independence were actually a minority for a very long time, they were just very noisy. But all these problems created more and more supporters. Every new stupid article done from central Spain by PP supporters explaining how terrible was the situation in Catalunya that you needed to learn another language to live there (something that clearly seemed to be a bad thing for them) created more independence supporters. Every new comment that Madrid was getting some extra highways free to use while in Catalunya people had to pay in order to use 20-year old ones increased the independentists' numbers.

Recently, Catalunya tried to make a new set of ruling laws for the region, and this set of laws was approved in a referendum by Catalan people (even if participation was low, which rests importance to the results), but PSOE gave problems to it, and PP directly went to the tribunals saying it was anticonstitutional, to try to modify it, which in the end is what happened.

Things have just been escalating since then. Right now, as I commented in the previous post, since there's no money and we keep hearing how it has been wasted all around Spain, the financial problem is one of the big ones. At the same time, PP and PSOE have continued to attack the culture, and have tried to take more control of Catalunya's government.

The end result? The demonstration of 11th of September. Between 1.500.000 and 2.000.000 people went to the streets asking independence. This has never happened before. Consider that Catalunya's total population is around 7.000.000 people, and that of course not everybody who might have wanted to go was there. That basically means that, probably, more than half of Catalunya's population wants to get rid of Spain, while the other half may be divided between indifferent people and people against separating.

CIU is using this to try to get more votes, when they have destroyed lots of public services, as if the only important thing right now is this. We should not fall for this trap, and even if it's true that they might support independence, which I doubt, they are the ones that have worsened a lot the situation in Catalunya, by giving money to their CEO friends. I repeat, we should get rid of them and not fall for their simplistic tactic of saying next elections are about Catalunya's independence only. However, given the chance to ask people if they want to be independent  we should take it, just to see what happens. That's democracy, even if PP insists, as a Lawful Evil character, that it's illegal. Well, it may be illegal, but that's only because the system is corrupt and not democratic enough.

And well, what can I say more? Spain's governments really worked hard for it during lots of years, we should honour them and leave....