Mansions of Madness

I don't remember if I've mention it before, but we really love tabletop games. We love making meetings where we can play them in group, and we have a nice selection of them that we have moved already a couple of times around the world, when changing houses.

I believe that around one year ago, for christmas, we got as a present this big game, Mansions of Madness. The game is set up in H.P.Lovecraft world, with cults, monsters from other dimensions, elder gods and stuff like that.

We already had one game from the same universe, Arkham Horror. We really like that game, its hard and compelling. It doesnt have any exploration component, but the feeling is similar to a Survival Horror, managing your resources and always having some shortage. There is lots of combinations in the game, and a certain randomness, but it adds to the excitement, and you get really involved while playing.

Mansions of Madness is different, but with a similar feeling. For starters, one of the players is the bad guy. The game is based on fixed scenarios, that allow several combinations, but they are more limited. Before the start, the bad guy needs to prepare everything according to that scenario.

The combat is much more random, based on cards, the attacked monster and the weapon used. In general, the game tries to set up everything as an ongoing story, even random events. All the cards have some little story, and after some turns special cards that advance the story are revealed.

The game has little figures representing the players and the monsters, and each player and monster has different stats and skills. The players need to explore the map, find clues towards their objective, and kill monsters. The "evil" player needs to command monsters and play nasty cards against the players, while trying to complete their "evil" objective.

The game sounds and looks awesome. However, it has problems. We've played it twice, and both times the same problems became apparent.

The first problem is that only one player explores. Most clues are protected by some key, and most keys are part of former clues. Therefore, the first player who gets the first key will be the only one finding all the clues (unless they drop one of the keys, which is a waste of time if done voluntarily). The other players are left with the task of killing monsters...which is not boring, but there may be moments with no monsters, and in general it feels as if you're not part of the important things in the game.

The second problem is that the "evil" player is overpowered. Its really easy to play game-breaking bad cards, which makes things less interesting. Cards, seems to me, should be more balanced.

The last problem, which seems to me the worst, is that there is no mistery, except in one scenario. You can find what you need to do by simply visiting all rooms, and just using the keys in the order they're found. The game advertises itself as a mistery, but most of the time you're just dragging the players from one side of the map to the other, with no possible thinking.

I believe that the game has a lot of potential. It has really great ideas, and the mechanics are really good and innovative, but the scenarios need to be improved. Mistery should be added, and there should be more posibilities and actions to take.

I believe that adjusting the rules and creating some scenario with more story parts and a bigger range of options can make this game a great one. However, i haven't made these changes yet, and the game as it is now feels like something is lacking...

Liberal Policies

There is a new video from Aleix Saló, Europesadilla. I'm sorry, this time I could not find English subtitles yet. The video, as always, explains the situation in Spain in a funny but direct way, while showing that we're totally and utterly screwed unless we kick some current leaders and their friends out of the power.

In the video, they explain two economic and politic ideas that are currently clashing in the democratic (or "democratic", like Spain) countries around the world. I thought I'd made a rant about these ideas, specially regarding the public services...

At heart, both ideas want to make life easier for everybody. The idea towards socialism defends that government has to control companies, offer services, give money support and redistribute wealth, so people have jobs and money and are not exploited. The liberal idea says that this control and redistribution makes it harder for companies to prosper, and without companies people will not have jobs and will not have wealth.With more freedom, companies thrive and hire more people, and share this wealth with their employees, redistributing it. It also defends that public services are inefficient, because they don't have as an objective to create wealth. All this money lost in the public services makes wealth to be lost for no reason. It also defends that we should be free to choose which service do we want, and by having a public service this freedom is denied, since we need to pay for the public one.

Lately, both sides are being considered as worthy options. However, I'm taking a side, and I consider the other one unethical, for several reasons. I'm talking about the liberal side, of course. I believe it can only make the situation much worse.

So, let's concentrate on the public services issue: The idea is that services will be more efficient being run by private companies, plus we will have the freedom to choose which service we do prefer to pay. If presented like this, it may sound reasonable, specially in a moment of crisis.

The problem is that private companies have a clear objective, to make more money. Please notice that the objective is not to make money, but to make more of it. A company that always wins the same amount of money is not considered successful, and may even be considered a failure. The point in the modern world is to always grow, forever (an impossibility), so when you're not growing, you're failing at your job as a company.

When these abstract services become things like healthcare or education, you can see the problem: These services are vital in making us, as a society, able to deal better with life and work. If your only concern when making these services is how much money they will gain, while keeping the service barely acceptable, you will cut costs in any way you can. It's good not to waste money, but in these services a cut in expenses may mean thousands of dead people that would have lived otherwise, or thousands of idiots who are unable to think higher thoughts when doing even the most basic tasks, which will result in poorer results in these tasks.

I'm not saying money should be ignored in the equation, but that the equation should prioritize first, the quality of the service. Then, it should try to equalize expenses so the balance gets closer to 0. If you have benefits, invest them in growing. In private companies, the directives and the stock owners get part of these benefits, so they will try to increase this amount. Some directives will even try to maximise short-time benefits, so they get a big chunk of them and then the company can crash, since they will be retired and enjoying the bonuses they got. Eliminating them from the equation guarantees that money will be dedicated only towards the improvement of the service. As per motivation (people say that public workers are unmotivated  with some truth to it), I kind of agree that, sometimes, public workers do not do as much as they can. However, I believe that this problem can easily be solved: Treat all public workers like private ones. Make it easier to fire people according to their productivity, and establish productivity evaluations. Offer also the possibility to ascend in ranks (and salary), if you choose to do so. If you make somebody unfirable, no matter if it's public or private, you have a problem if they turn out to be lazy, so make sure you can do something about it....

As per improvements, another argument is that without the motivation of money, the services will not try to become more efficient. About that, you can always make public evaluations of the services, auditories and plans for improvements. Since it's a public company, it's easier to implement. Private companies, unless demanded by law, will not have such checks, and I agree to the fact that the law should not interfere too much with private companies, apart from requiring some taxes and guaranteeing a certain level of well-being and security for the employees. Also, when a private company tries to make improvements, the underlying cause, as mentioned, is money. With the public one, these improvements can be triggered by other reasons, and problems that would be considered too expensive to fix can be resolved in the public ones, since the economic benefits are not as important.

Of course, I'm not saying all services should be like this. If you want to get rich, go ahead and create a private company that offers some non-vital service, and do whatever you legally can do to increase your money. However, there is a list of services that should always be available in a public way, that are too vital to be left only in the hands of private companies. Services like healthcare, education, security (firemen and police, and even the army, although I believe armies should not get a big part in modern, civilized countries with no problematic neighbours) or some basic transportation should be always available for everybody, in public form.

One of the arguments against that is that your freedom to choose a service is denied: Part of your money is taken to pay taxes for those services. This argument assumes that you're rich enough to pay for any service you want. One of the things that is usually said about freedom is that your freedom ends where the freedom of another person starts. Basically, you're free to do things as long as you're not decreasing the freedom of another person to do them. If we try to follow this, if you force people to choose such vital services (instead of having always the public option available), your're decreasing their freedom. Not everybody is going to have enough money to pay for these services in the first place, so if there is no public services, you are denying their freedom to use these services and to choose what to study, or even more basic, their freedom of getting better and live after falling ill.

Defenders of liberal theories will usually be rich, or people that believe they are rich enough to have freedom in paying the service. I believe that those critical services can be offered by private companies, as long as there is a public service offering the same, and if you have enough money to pay for the private one, please go ahead. However, eliminating the public one because you have the freedom to choose does not mean everybody shares this same freedom, so the public one should always be available. Denying it destroys the freedom of the people who do not have enough resources, and the only thing that does to the people who do have the resources is to charge them taxes, not killing them.

Anyway, just a rant about the latest decisions taken in Europe  where some bastards are trying to turn everything private, even when examples like USA and UK show proof of the big disaster that this will cause...(ask USA about their healthcare, or ask UK about their private train system and some of their hospitals....)

Some other day I'll rant some more about politics....

Doctor Who

We just finished watching the last chapter of Doctor Who, aired last Saturday, apparently. Other times I have mentioned this series, but I have never explained much about it...

Doctor Who is an English series, very VERY old one, that started as a way to teach some science things to kids, mixed with fiction. It evolved quite rapidly into a full science-fiction series with different plots, the teaching part mostly forgotten. The tone varied, and even if considered for kids most of the time, there were more adult themes thrown into the mix.

We're talking about lots of years and changes here, it started in 1963 and continued for a long time. In 1989, a big break in the series started, and it was not continued until 2005, with a movie in the middle of it, in 1996.

They got away with all this changes by the fact that the Doctor, the main character, is an alien with human form, that can regenerate when about to die. Using smart applications of that theory, they have changed the actor playing him all along these years. The Doctor is also accompanied by a "Companion", usually a girl, although later years there has been some more variety. To change companions, they just need to show that one of them got tired from travelling with him, and then the Doctor just finds another one (after some brooding). In some cases the companion has accidents and dies or is lost somewhere, but well, the end result is that they change.

The important thing, of course, is that the Doctor travels in a spaceship that is also a time machine (in the shape of a blue police box), so they can explore other planets and universes, the future, the past, even the present, and in some extreme cases, complete other dimensions.

Depending on the writer, things try to make more sense or less, from a scientific point of view, but it always tends to the "less sense", just for the fun of it.

We started watching it after the big break happened, and we have only watched the chapters emitted after 2005. Alba recommended them, and we really enjoyed them^^.

Anyway, the main writer for the first new seasons after 2005 had been Russel T. Davies. The plots had  been complex and interesting, plenty of times with some common theme present in most of the season's chapters.

The actors playing the Doctor in the first 4 new seasons were Christopher Ecclestone and David Tennant. Tennant in particular has done an incredible job, and is one of the best Doctors ever.

Of course, being the main writer does not mean you write all the chapters, there were other writers. One of these writers was Steven Moffat, a fan of the series since he was a kid, that has done work as the writer of other successful series. In the first 4 seasons, Moffat wrote one or two chapters in each of them. And they were awesome. Truly incredible chapters, scary, creepy, interesting, touching, funny chapters, all at the same time.

The chapters are The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, The Girl in the Fireplace, Blink and Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead
.
Watch them, even if you're not going to watch the rest of the series. Specially, watch Blink.

When Davies decided to end his period and leave it to someone else, that someone else was going to be Steven Moffat. The actor playing the Doctor would change and Tennant would leave too, but the fact that Moffat would take charge promised to be awesome.

The new Doctor ended up being Matt Smith, and even if not as good as Tennant, his doctor is quite interesting too, more goofy and in another world, less serious, but still giving a nice touch to it.

Moffat, however, was a disappointment.

His plots are usually much more simplistic than Davies, and make much less sense (when he starts getting into time travel, the amount of bullshit that doesn't make any sense with everything established beforehand is astounding). He made some awesome chapters before, but when he got free rule over it, lots of chapters resemble pure fan fiction, where he crams 6 different alien species (that appeared in the old series that he watched as a child), without making any sense of why they are here or why they're fighting with or against the Doctor.

Moffat is a fan of not explaining things too much, but you need to draw the line somewhere, and if you killed an entire dangerous alien species, and/or locked it inside some other dimension, when they appear again without further explanation it feels kind of...cheap. As I said, like cheap harry potter fan-fiction, where all of a sudden Hermione falls in love with Draco, logic be damned.

That's half of the chapters...the other half, the problem is another one. In the other half of the chapters, where things make sense, the world feels...empty. Davies was an specialist of showing probable real-life consequences of some alien attack over London (for example, people leaving London for Christmas because every previous one some dangerous thing was happening in there). It's little things that help to create a world that has internal workings and makes sense.

Terry Pratchett, I believe  has mentioned several times that the fictional city of Ankh-Morpork, that he created, makes sense because you can imagine it working even when the heroes are not around. It has a life of its own, it's not only a background scenario where plot happens.

Moffat missed precisely that for a very long time, and there were lots of chapters that felt as if there was no other world population than the 6 characters shown in screen....the feeling was that something was weird in that world, it was not really logic, it was half empty.

The last 2 seasons where Moffat has participated had these big problems, the plot was going all around the place, made little sense, introduced 5 minutes-characters as some kind of star guest and other similar bullshit.

There were good chapters (for example, I liked a lot The Doctor's Wife, done by Neil Gaiman, a writer of books that I really like), but the overall feeling was a disappointment.

However, even with problems, we could enjoy chapters, it's just that not as much as before...and the two-three companions of these 2 season managed to become interesting and nice. After a while, the companions had a life that made sense, and this added much-needed logic to the world.

Anyway, we've noticed that the chapters are getting better, and I really enjoyed this last chapter.

The current season, that stopped months ago and just now is being continued, has had already 2-3 chapters where the "world half-empty" feeling has disappeared. Maybe it's a little thing, but with these chapters, I finally got the feeling that we were in the same universe as the one done by Davies. There was a retarded chapter too (Moffat doesn't understand time travel at all sometimes, or contradicts everything we've seen, including things he has said), but overall things seem to have improved, and it's getting back to a very interesting place...

We'll see how the next chapter goes^^

Good Old Games and Indies

My birthday was on 6th of March, and I got lots of very nice presents.

One of these gifts was an electronic gift, by Denis: A game added to my account in some website, provided I create one in there. At first I thought it was spam from some website where I registered and put my real birth date  but after reading the personal comment I saw that it was for real. The game was System Shock 2, and after creating the account I was able to download it.

The website is called GOG (Good Old Games)

First, I will say that System Shock 2 seems really cool. I haven't finished the game (I haven't played very long, actually), but it's a hard game, with clearly lots of options and stuff. Graphics are old, of course, but the overall feeling is tense and scary, and I still don't know what's going on in there at all. I was told Bioshock is like a worse version of this game, and I can see that Bioshock, even with better graphics because of being released years later, has huge similarities with simplified gameplay. We'll see how it progresses.

Anyway, I'd like to talk about this website, and it's awesome. It has looots of old computer games that were absolutely awesome, and lets you buy them for a cheap price  usually, and modified so they (sort of) work with new computers. You basically just download the installer, and it installs the game with the necessary emulators, if any needed. Games do not have any DRM or anything like that, and anyway you have an account with the purchased games, so you can download them again if you need to. You also get some extras, like soundtracks or concept images, wallpapers and such things.

I like to pay for games, because of several reasons  First, it requires a lot of work from lots of people, so it's always good to support that work if you enjoy the game. Second, I don't have much free time, so if I only play games that I bought, I manage to keep their numbers under control. When I buy a game, I try to finish the game before getting 4 new ones (even if sometimes I do just that).

Of course, I like to pay when the prices are reasonable. This website is charging reasonable prices (6-10 dollars for an old game seems right), so I don't mind buying them.

The website also has indie games, which are also rather cheap. I don't know if you can get them from any other place that is cheaper, but it seems to me they're cheap enough. I'd like to comment about two more games I tried, Sanitarium and Hotline Miami.

Sanitarium is an old graphic adventure, one of the last ones made when they were still popular. In the game, you apparently have some kind of car accident and wake up with a bandaged face, in some kind of mental asylum. Things got weirder and creepier from there, where you explore places without knowing what's real and what's just in your mind.

This is an old game, so the graphics, voice and controls could be better...however, it's still pretty immersive, and really creepy. You explore really demented places, when trying to solve different types of puzzles, with a few action segments. It's hard to get really stuck, although sometimes you need to pixel hunt to find some hidden object...or you need to apply certain weird logic to solve some complex puzzle.

As you move through worlds, there's a number of repeating themes in them, that develop the story and give hints about what's going on...even if the plot itself has been used other times, so it's not that hard to guess. Still, it's quite a nice experience, and it gave me a very nice feeling, like playing old adventure games.

Hotline Miami is a new indie game. You can see Yhatzee's review here.  The game is new, but it's made in a a very retro style, with very simple graphics made by pixelated figures and scenarios (that still contain huge amounts of detail, usually quite gory). The music tries to emulate electronic music from the eighties, and it gives the whole thing a very special touch.

The game itself, when explained, seems to give arguments to those who say that videogames are just violent crap: You're some kind of professional killer, clearly demented, who gets messages in your answering machines with contracts. Once you have a contract, you go to the indicated place and kill everything that moves.

The gameplay is just that. You see everything from the top, so you see buildings as if they were maps of the floors, and you move around killing everything. You can punch people to stun them and then kill them on the floor, or you can steal their weapons and kill people with them. Everything kills in one hit or shot, and everybody, you included, dies after only one (well, there are some exceptions later in the game). If you die, you press R and restart right away, without loading times or anything. Firearms make noise, and when people hear it they rush towards that position, but they can kill from a big distance.

And that's about it. You need to plan your killing spree, and you usually need to react in milliseconds to new enemies coming towards you, or sudden changes in your plan. There's also the masks, which you gain when you complete missions, that give you different extra powers or advantages. It's incredibly addictive, really.

Between killing rampages the game even develops a complex and quite touching story, and without using any text, just by showing your house every time a mission start, and showing the changes that keep happening in it. It also shows that you, the main character, is clearly going insane as well.


I've heard that this game is the computer version of Drive. And in a weird way, it is....set in the 80s, with old music and style, you're some crazy psychopath that between jobs is trying to help some people...really, quite a deep and layered game for something that looks like this....

Highly recommended.

Adulthood

For those of you that do not know yet, my wife and I are going to have a child.

This is, of course, an important step, probably one of the most important things we'll ever do. There's still some time until birth, but we'll need to prepare, be ready for it, and it will change our daily lives.

Thinking about it, we're "young" for it, at least among the people we know. We're not the only ones who have children at this age, but most people I know that have studied something in University have kids and stable couples later. That does not happen in every culture, of course.

In Russia it seems most people are married and with kids way before reaching 30. In Spain it's otherwise, with people delaying these things until they become 30. I think in Lithuania it's something in the middle of this positions, while England is closer to the Spanish situation, but slightly younger.

Of course, an important factor is the security one feels in that culture or country. Spain right now has a terrible economy, and it's hard to afford some of the things that come with stable couples and kids. However, I think that in Spain it's also very important the cultural factor.

For example, for lots of people of my generation, we passed from the need to get married to the philosophy of not getting married, and seeing marriage as a terrible thing.

I hate stupid traditions. I believe that to do things just because "it has always been done like that" it's a really bad idea. For example, the idea that when you get married you need to do a wedding where you are the centre of attention and where you spend a huge amount of money to make it as impressive as you can. I'm not saying you cannot do it, or that it's very stupid to do it. I'm saying that you should think about it, to see if it's really what you want to do, and analyse the pros and cons it has in your personal opinion. To do it because it's proper, it's what everybody does, without thinking, is stupid.

And not to do it because everybody does it is equally stupid.

Anyway, right now I believe there's people that are not getting married or having kids because they don't feel ready. They also look around and see the same thing happening to other friends, so they believe this is normal, and by that it becomes normal.

I believe lots of people are not doing these things because of  a mixture of rebelling against the past traditions, the current lack of economic security, and that feeling of not being ready.

My current generation (people with similar age, similar level of studies, similar economy, etc.) has been the result of a number of coincidences that has made our lives quite easier than for other generations. We have lived in economic prosperity, with nice houses, with all this new "toys" at our reach, and I believe that we've all been...well, spoiled. Not in a bad way, but still, our lives have been relatively easy (even if some people have had it harder than others).

I believe that this kind of environment makes it easier to not have big responsibilities, or even if you have had them, to not easily think of yourself as an "adult". Well, I know I have trouble with this thought at least. It's not a matter of being immature or anything, it's just that, mentally, we all believe to be somehow in our last teenage years, or beginning of our twenties (and maybe that can be applied to everybody).

It's kind of the same reason why some hobbies are considered "childish". We put labels and categorize things, and we expect that things that we like as a child will latter seem silly, when the truth is that if we really like something, there's no reason to stop doing it, since we're the same person than before. Our tastes may change from time to time, but there are no childish hobbies, we just need to learn when can we indulge in them or not.

So, in this change from young to adult, since we're in the last teenage years, we're still having fun. We're not ready for some of those big steps that would clearly be something only an adult does.

What I mean is that sometimes we're somehow waiting for a change in our mind, that will switch into "adult" mode after that. And this is the problem. This does not happen. We're the same person at 15 that at 51. Sure, we'll have more experience at 51, and we may be wiser because of this experience (or not), but we're basically the same person. It's very well said in the movie American Beauty. The main character says that he could tell to his teenage daughter that the insecurities and problems and doubts she's having will pass away after adolescence,  but he does not want to lie to her.

Therefore, while we're waiting to be adults, we try to avoid marriage, or having kids, or buying a house, or any other thing that we believe only an adult, centered, stable person will do correctly. Because we do not feel specially centered or stable sometimes, and we've been told hundreds of times this is just a phase that teenagers pass after some time.

Is this a defense of traditional things? Of course not. As I mentioned, I hate to do things just because. I'm just saying that delaying things because we're not considering ourselves "adults" is something that we should try to fight back. We won't get a sudden revelation telling us this is the right moment. We won't know with stone-written certainty that we're ready. We will not avoid contradictory thoughts about these things.

And we should get used to that and get on with our lives. I'm pretty sure everybody has had the same thoughts, maybe just in different ages. The other people we know that are considered adults by us did these things in a way that seemed they had a different mind than our own, that they knew more than we do. And I believe that's not true at all.

Basically, we should not expect to have a huge different mentality some point in the future. People do not change much. So do not wait for some spontaneous change in your mind.

Just think about what you really want to do, something that makes you happy, plan for it (don't just randomly do or avoid doing things), and do it.

Second Snowboarding Trip

A few days ago, we finally repeated the excursion to the ski resort.

The first experience was fun, but later on we didn't find a moment to repeat it. Basically, I was lazy. It's fun, but it requires your whole day, so several times when we had moments to go, I preferred to stay and do different things instead.

Anyway, in the end we decided to go one Monday that, because of the weird pattern of shifts I have, we had vacations. We went with a co-worker,  Carlos Climent, to show him the way and how things were in the ski resort area. We knew that the station we were going to use was not the best one, but the idea was to show the way so later on he and the other people that has come from Spain to help us with shifts could know the way and go by themselves.

This time we didn't go very early, and instead we took the bus at around 10. We arrived without problems, and we got our equipment and pass quite fast, since we knew what to do now.

The start of the tracks had quite a good layer of snow, I believe it had snowed recently. It was more like powder, and the floor was harder than before, but smoother too. Carlos went on his way, since he had skied before. We asked for one more hour of training for later on, to practice my balance some more. Since I had one free hour before the training, I started to practice on the green track.

After a few tries, I managed to remember more or less the lessons of the last day. I still had lots of problems, but I practiced turning and stopping. I discovered that I was starting to easily turn to the left, but the right turn was hard for me, most of the times I tried that I ended on the floor. Still, I learned some more things, and I managed to stop at will, even if backwards instead of looking towards where I was moving.

Before the instruction we ate some little sandwiches we had with us, and  then I went to meet the guy who would teach me. This one spoke English, even if with some mistakes, so it was easier to communicate with him. After asking what had I done before, I explained that I had trouble with balancing, so we went straight to practicing that. To do so, we went straight to a blue/red track.

Basically, we started to travel that track with the snowboard across the track, so we were not going fast. Still, the first moments were kind of scary...

I discovered that my forward balance had improved a lot in just these 2 days,  and I managed to go down unassisted for a long period. Then he explain how to move from one side to the other, maintaining the position and just changing the weight distribution. It was possible to control it more or less, with some moments where I needed to adjust the weight because I was sliding too much or too little. After these exercises, we did the same but backwards.

This time it was harder for me to control the backwards movement, for some reason. I think it was just a muscle issue: This simple exercise requires you to use your leg muscles and put tension in them for long periods. I'm not in good shape, and muscles started to ache quite fast after a while of this. It was quite tiring.

Anyway, we managed to go down to the end of the track, but it took a long while, almost an hour. At the bottom, I finally used the ski pass, and we took one of the chairs to go up. This in theory is easier than the other type of lifts, but since it was my first time using it I though it was harder. Sure, you only needed to keep the balance a the beginning and at the end, but these were the most crucial parts.

After this hour, the instructor's time was over, so I went to practice some more on the green track. I had improved a little bit more, and even if I was not able to turn right correctly, the last time I went down I managed to stop at will and looking to the front. At least now I knew how to stop....

On our way back we had one last adventure. Everything was going fine, until we got close to Adler: There was a huge traffic jam. First, the bus driver asked if someone wanted to use a number of stops that were in the middle of the mess. Since nobody wanted to use them, he changed the route and used a different way. We managed to advance quite a lot more, but eventually we arrived to the traffic jam again.

After a while, and after receiving calls that were explaining to us that this was a massive traffic jam affecting everybody around the Adler area, we started to see people walking on the highway. Several passengers decided to imitate them, and went down the bus.

It was weird to walk in the highway, but it's true that no car was moving at all, and the people walking were covering ground faster than us. Besides, we noticed that the buildings where we live were visible. After checking the map, we calculated to be 2-3 km away from home.

Seeing that the traffic jam was not getting better, we decided to imitate other people and we went down in the middle of the highway to walk home.

It took us around 50 minutes, and there were lots of smoke and bad roads in the way, but we managed to get home, and clearly we managed to do so faster than the bus. It was still a weird experience, seeing how people just said "fuck it" and left the car or bus in the middle of the highway....but well, we're in Russia after all^^
 

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...