The wonders of space

After finishing most of the games I had for xbox, I decided to relive the Mass Effect saga, seeing as they were going to re-publish it in a special version. I tried to use the original games with my xbox one, and they work fine plus I have all the DLC I've bought over the years or that they made available for free after some time. 

Similar to RE, I'd like to talk about each game, starting with Mass Effect 1 (ME1). This is one of the first games I bought for Xbox 360, and when I saw the trailer I thought it was fake or misleading: It couldn't be that we had a long, well-developed sci--fi roleplaying game with such nice graphics and complex story. I thought I'd start it and it would be somehow reduced.

And well, while it had room for improvements, I have to say that no, ME was as spectacular as it seemed it could be. The game offers a lot of world-building, that is clearly inspired or derivative of other works of science-fiction, but that doesn't reduce its glory or its scope, which is massive. From the first seconds you get several choices and the game starts recording these and keeping them stored, to develop a story.

Mass effect defines a universe with aliens where humans have joined the intergalactic civilisation. You play as commander Shepard, a human, that is tasked as the first human member of an elite group of soldiers that can do pretty much whatever they want(Spectres), with the task to investigate what another "evil" guy from this group is doing and disrupt him. As you try to perform this task, you keep discovering that there's more at play, since the bad guy seems to be working helping the Reapers, giant artificial intelligences that kill all galactic civilisations advanced enough to space-travel every 50.000 years, which in this game are just some myth, a boogeyman, but that you believe are behind this. 

As you play, you discover that the bad guy's ship is actually one of those Reapers and has mind-controlled the "bad guy", something the Reapers can do, start controlling everyone in their proximity. If you have enough persuasion points you can make the bad guy see this and he kills himself, and end up defeating both of them (well, you and hundreds of other ships, the Reaper is big and tough) right before they can invite all the others to start the galactic extinction process.

So, this first game puts a very strong foundation. It creates a rich lore with different alien species, makes the scope epic enough while being just an introduction to the overall story arch and starts recording these key decisions that will influence the overall experience: did you save this or that character, did you help someone in there, did you kill these others? Depending on your choices, the experience will vary, and it's quite cool. 

Having said that, the game has numerous issues. 

The first one is that the non-story part is a bit lacking: Combat feels slightly static and repetitive: You go into cover, maybe use some powers, shot some enemies. Not having bullets and depending on the "heat" of your weapon is cool and I think it was innovative, but the combat was very basic cover-based stuff, not very exciting and a bit strange. Powers are also not very practical, most biotics make people float in some way but don't do proper damage and feels like it's not that spectacular then. Tech abilities are a bit better but not much. Then, when you're driving the Mako, a kind of tank, you just keep blasting at people and it's not that interesting, really. Combat is something you do to advance, but it's not something cool or very enjoyable, basically. 

Related to that, the exploring mechanics is cool in principle: You get to check all the planets in several galaxy sections, and you can land in some of them, some ships and some stations. However, the implementation of this results in a lot of very very similar terrains, where each planet that you can land has only a square of explorable terrain were you find some dead bodies and ruins and that's about it You spend most of the time trying to climb mountains with the Mako in order to get to some little point, no more than 5 per region, if that many. It makes you feel quite....alone, in what should be a vibrant populated galaxy. When you find structures that you can enter, all of them have the same look and distribution. You have the mine, the ship and the research bunker, multiplied by 10 or 20. You never find characters living there, only enemies with some exceptions where you can actually interact with some bad guy before they kill someone or before fighting, but that's it.  Side missions always include going to such places, and therefore a lot of this ends up being like a chore because you already have done 20 of the same, before.

So, you have a lot of time spend in the game, if you want 100% completion or close to that, just repeating the same tasks, which is not ideal. However the main story quests are good and diverse, so that compensates this issue a lot, and the main quests are really great and interesting, and the places you explore are amazing.

Another problematic point is that, in this game and the third one specially, you can feel the USA military industry has influenced it. I'm hundred per cent sure of it. You, in theory, are a spectre and respond only to the council, but you accept your former military chain of command without question, taking missions and orders from them, and there's lots of instances of "patriotic" moments and comments about how good it was to serve the military. I mean, I get it, shooters in general tend to be militaristic, and you need fights in theory to make the game challenging. But there's a....tone, in the game, that defends a lot the military, explains its glories and shows it as they say with modern ones, that they're the people defending your freedom and fighting for you. However you soon see that you're fighting for the humans, and the other races sometimes can go fuck themselves, which is totally not fair. I mean, you do try to help other races, but when there's a human-other species conflict, the game tends to heavily side with the human one, to the point that is shameful and bothersome. There's stuff that humanity's army does, that would be painted as evil if it wasn't because it's the human army. 

Related to that, there's a human bias in the game, as if humans are the best ones, more diverse, more daring, etc. This feels....very racist, sometimes. And the game gives you the option to explore this "racism" as a valid way to play the game, sometimes as "renegade" options, when maybe part of being "renegade" would be to say, "well, fuck humans, I'll help this other species now because I like them more". I kept finding this rather problematic. I mean, I understand in rpgs you are free to be an asshole, and it may be part of your choices....but there's "racist" options that are not painted as "bad" as they should be, in my opinion. Also, let's face it: humans are boring! You have a lot of other species to explore, and the game centres on  humanity, as if you'd be unable to relate to some other species. I guess there's male idiot players that think like this, and there's too many of them, and the developers pandered to these groups, but well, these incel-type with no empathy can go fuck themselves as far as I'm concerned and the game industry should not cater to them.  

In this first game, your supporting characters are also missing some definition. You start knowing them and you talk with them, but they don't say much. You can already do a type of "loyalty" missions for them, but they're very generic missions like the rest of side quests, and they only trigger a bit of conversations with them. However it's enough at least to start knowing them, and seeing glimpses of their personality, and they're already likeable, just not very developed yet, and they all adore you somehow without you having done much yet. 

Another issue that the game has is sexism. Sexism is rampant in videogames, but well, as you create new species, the typical thing of giving the females boobs is quite common in here, while at the same time hiding some females of certain species that look weird already as males and probably the developers thought would be too unappealing to the standard male gamer and didn't bother to design, at least in this first game, where you only see males apart from female humans and Asari. And related to that, special mention for the Asari, a race of hot blue girls that are all girls and pair with any other species, clearly a sex fantasy of someone. Although in the second game you do discover that the way you see them as beautiful human-like may be them mind-controlling you a bit, since every other species sees them as beautiful and similar to themselves, a nicer explanation that does not remove the fact that all of them are beautiful in-game and tend to have quite big breasts....

Finally, it's worth mention that the game is quite derivative. We're not doing anything revolutionary here, the game uses tropes and ideas from famous other science-fiction works and movies, from Ender's game to Alien, Star wars, etc. You could still take it as a homage more than pure plagiarism: The game tries to evoke a feeling most present during science-fiction works of the 80s, as the developers mentioned.

However, even after listing these issues, the game is quite awesome. The side quests are tedious but necessary to get nice perks in later games, and the main plot is great and amazing. The Citadel gives you a sense of wonder that is difficult to describe, but feels amazing. Ilos is incredibly creepy and epic. The music accompanies you in great ways, especially when it's not the military sections, but the sections where you're in awe. And the interactions you can have, the choices and the people you meet, all create an amazing experience, like having really a first contact with alien life.

Conspiranoia

I've made a small research and it seems this is a term used more in Spanish than in English, were people usually just refer to conspiracy theorist. Nevertheless I like the term. 

During this period, I've not seen a lot of cases in my social networks, but there's an occasional one sometimes. And I cannot help but get nervous about them, but it's not much I can do. 

Conspiranoia would refer to this tendency to believe that there's dark conspiracies involved in certain world events.  Conspiracy paranoia, basically. And current events are easy to cause strange irrational reactions that make us believe such things indeed. However, applying basic logic can help diffuse these strange feelings, even if not everyone applies it. 

For starters, let's clarify that there has been conspiracies in the world, and even now I totally believe there's some conspiracies being executed. The thing is, they're conspiracies that make sense. For example, if you review the history of C.I.A., you'll see that yeah, they're bastards that have conspire to overthrow legitimate progressive governments in order to put right-wing corrupt dictators in the past. So yes, I totally do not trust any "official" occidental comment about South-American politics where USA and Europe are supporting some party in there that is trying to gain power, because more often than not they're trying to overthrow a legitimate leftist government. Venezuela is a mess and I'm not sure what to think about it apart that every side is bad in there, but I'm sure that the official opposition backed by USA is a corrupt right-wing piece of shit. Bolivia, I totally believe USA tried to remove Evo Morales and put some bullshit right-wing government that would let them steal the countries resources by bribing them. 

Same way, and considering how they don't want to release information about it, I'm totally convinced Kennedy was killed as an act organized by its own government and security agencies, because he was too progressive for their tastes. 

There has been proof about the surveillance that USA wants to apply to us all as revealed by Snowden. And there has been proof that, in Spain, there's a number of policemen, lawyers, judges and other law members, plus politicians and parties that are organized to lie, prosecute and condemn people that do not follow their right-wing fascists ideals.

So yeah, there are secret conspiracies in the world. Usually by right-wing fascist, by rich people, and by strong authoritarian powers. I will not talk about Russia and China because they don't hide it, so it's not secret they want to control their population and such things. They don't care as much about PR, and they're happy to point at the hypocrisy of other powerful countries that pretend to defend "justice" and other such concepts and then they do the same shit and try to justify it or hide it, like Spain with political prisoners as Russia pointed, or Spain with the police repression as China indicated too.

In general these conspiracies are "easy", usually. The surveillance one was a bit more complex, but we suspected it would be possible by just adding certain code to apps or by not sharing security holes in programs and such things. Other conspiracies are more in the sense of  "give money and weapons to this South American party", or "accuse this person of something so we can put them in prison", or just "kill this person". They tend to have a basic idea and with a clear objective that benefits certain people. Like, "this guy wants to prevent us from making money from this business that exploits people", so "we kill this guy, we scare others, we manage to make money exploiting people".  It's pretty straightforward, you can see the logic, it's basic.

We need to consider that people are idiots. Even powerful evil people. So, complex plans to achieve difficult weird objectives are quite unlikely, really. 

This virus is not a fucking conspiracy. The vaccines are not a fucking conspiracy. And for fuck's sake, the bloody stupid masks are NOT a conspiracy. 

Do I like to wear masks? No. Do I like to stay inside home? No. Is this some stupid "plan" to control us? Of course fucking not.

So, let's discuss some of these comments. 

-The Vaccine will control us and monitor us: Do you have a smartphone?  If you do, I can assure you that there's no need to provoke a global pandemic and to create a fake vaccine so they put a chip in us. We carry the chip every day, use it and provide information to it. I'm not saying different companies and organizations don't want to track us, but that there's a lot of easier ways to do it and they're already doing it in simpler ways. Also, most of us are not interesting enough for particular information, they just want "Big Data" to try to create models for prediction and control. Yes it's scary and not good, but vaccines and current situation has nothing to do with this. 

-The vaccine will modify our ADN: First, that's not how the ARN thing works. Second....why? What is gained by "modifying our ADN"? What basic gain will this provide to the organisers?? This enters the terrain of believing that someone has researched some way to modify our behaviour via ADN or some crap like this, which is just ridiculous and not worth mentioning.

-The vaccine is actually the illness and the thing that will kill us:  That's why before the vaccine people were dying left and right, correct? I mean, we're hiding at home for the shits and giggles, because before the vaccine everybody was healthy, yes? Actually scratch that, some people may believe this is the case. To that, please volunteer in a COVID ward in any hospital.

-The virus has been created in a lab by China/USA/Bill Gates/ Etc: First, virus occur naturally. Second, the people and countries you're proposing benefit from having big amounts of population to exploit, so they win nothing by killing it. Third, the people and countries you're proposing got hit nastily by it and are in shambles. For this to be some type of plan to destabilize the others, we'd need to accuse the country that has dealt with this better...which probably is New Zealand! Known conspirators for the fall of civilisation, of course. 

-Masks are "muzzles" that want to silence us / they make us breathe CO2 so our brains get smaller: Here it's just a matter of looking at people that used them before this, basically doctors and nurses and lots of Asian countries. They were doing fine while using masks and were using them to avoid transmitting diseases long before this. So, no, masks are a bit uncomfortable but they're not controlling you or killing you. And yes, if you don't use them you're certainly a narcissistic egotistical piece of shit.

-Confinements are attacks to religious freedom, they don't want us to to meet in churches/other religious meeting points: I mean, if you think you need to meet in crowded places yes or yes to practice your religion, here I'm not going to argue, please do so. But please don't meet anyone else outside this community of people, and when you catch pneumonia, please stay inside your house and don't cough at anyone else.

- The whole pandemic has been planned and it will create a new world order: So no, it hasn't been planned because there's several important business that have been hit by this and they would rather not have been hit, even if others are having more benefits now than before. And about the new world order stuff, look, there's already a war ongoing as I said before, where rich and powerful are trying to fuck with the rest of us, yes. But they want to fuck us by making us powerless and make us work more. Closing us inside houses or killing us is just not profitable long term. So just consider profit, this situation is not nice for them either. 

All these have this issue of complexity, strange goals and dubious benefits. However, there's a few things that may be true, because they fit with what we've mentioned before, simplicity and direct benefit: 

-Some vaccines are not being approved or bought, or they're stopped suddenly from being applied, because different governments want to give money to only certain companies and countries: Yeah, I totally believe that, and you can see it by which vaccines are being treated worse in which areas. 

-Going to work with public transport and working in an office is a much worse infection vector than they say: Indeed, but they have to pretend it's outside work that people get infected, or they'd be forced to force employees to provide teleworking, pay more for risks or temporarily stop activity, and the economy cannot deal with these things so they ban the "fun" time people may have while keeping the "boring" working part, when both are equally dangerous, because one produces money and the other does not.

After saying all this, I have to say I'm as tired as anyone about the situation. However, being selfish about it and defending it with a conspiracy theory is not helping anyone.

Resident Evil 7: Awesomely Creepy

All this time that I played the older RE games was to lead to this point, to play RE7. This one I was told that it was again scary and good by several people, so I was very curious about it. 

The game clearly breaks itself from the past trend and decides to reinvent the saga, in another direction, a much better one. For starters, even if it's the 7th installment, the official name is Resident Evil: Biohazard, a way to start anew somehow. And what they did was to go back to its roots in some ways, regarding important details and regarding horror. RE7 is finally a horror game. Yes there's action, of course, but this game is again properly scary, properly tense and visceral and dark and very creepy. 

I have to confess I love creepy atmospheres. Creepy is a subtle feeling of dread. Not too obvious, not too evident, it's achieved by creating an environment that just feels....wrong, for some reason. And where you expect you'll be jump-scared at any moment, or that reality itself will crumble around you or something bad will happen. It can be lots of things, but when done right it creates a tension that is amazing to feel. It's like scared but interesting, like you cannot stop watching now and wanting to learn more, and it's fascinating. You don't achieve creepy by just making gore, for example, you can make gore creepy but it needs to be subtler than this. The creepiest things are the ones that look the most normal or innocent right before they don't. 

 RE7 achieves high levels of creepiness. It's also a bit disgusting sometimes, or not as subtle as it could be, or very gory at moments, but the feeling you get playing it has this special something that makes it extra interesting and compels you to go on and find out what's happening. 

Let's start with the "boring" part: Graphics again have been improved, the game looks very realistic. Humans appearing in it have a lot of detail, while still clearly being fake they are high on the scale of realism, to the point that they're a bit uncanny-valley too, a bit disturbing sometimes. The game is dark and greenish, somehow, that's the best explanation I can make of the general colors you see. The game happens in a single night, regardless of how many hours you really play, so you notice as you advance around, when it's still dark, or when you finally get to a point where the sun starts to raise, almost at the end. Most of the time you're inside some house, and the details you see are both gruesome, sometimes a bit too much, but also detailed and creating this special atmosphere. It feels claustrophobic at times, and it does make you wonder sometimes why the main character didn't run away like after the first 5 minutes of the game. 

The game is done now from a first person perspective, which makes it very immersive. At the same time it's not like a shooter, it's a first-person survival horror so you don't have a lot of ammo or health to just splurge and waste resources. Also, the main character is not an action hero. He does a lot of stuff for being a normal guy, but the game manages to make you feel like you're not comfortable with all this action around you somehow. You do need to aim and shoot from a first-person perspective though, but sometimes you need to run around or evade, more than fight. It has some similarities at times with Alien Isolation, in the fact that some enemies are only really vulnerable in some moments, and other moments you can only run away. These moments are a bit arbitrary, it's not clear why in one instance you can and in the other you can't, but it's fine, it's not too confusing anyway. Your inventory is very similar as to how RE1-RE3 worked, with limited space that you can increase if you find extra bags, but a general storage unit that is interconnected between locations so if you find one you can find all your items, regardless of the place. It has also this concept of a "Safe spot", the room with the storage that also has a save point, a place where you will not be attacked or followed. 

Weapons are varied. You progress from a knife, to a pistol, to a shotgun. You can get a flamethrower and a grenade launcher, you can find better pistols and shotguns for the second half of the game, and you can unlock a Magnum with very limited ammo, useful for the final boss fights and particular moments. You also find explosives, that are nice sometimes for the slowest but tough monsters. To heal yourself, you use disinfectant, which is frankly funny because you just pour it over your hand and ta-dah, you're cured, but it's part of the charm of the game, not taking itself very seriously but this time clearly being in parody-style, not like in RE4. Plus, there's another reason that I suspect about how you heal, but it's not confirmed, we'll talk later about it. In this game you need to combine base materials with chem fluids to obtain ammo, disinfectant or other useful items, and the end result is that you need to manage your inventory to have space but also have ammo and health. There's special injections that you apply directly into your arm that make you reload faster or have more life, but those are rare and hard to find or unlock, usually only as secrets. There's also sometimes secret pictures that show the location of those secrets. In general there's quite a lot of variety of things, rather interesting.

Puzzles are still simple, but better. You need special keys for different areas, you need to examine some objects, you need to think a bit for some sections and get the proper combination, or shadow, or examine the right thing, and overall the game feels less linear, having to go back to areas and re-explore them or access previously-shut doors. Linear games feel like movies, less interactive, plus purely linear environments feel very fake: Our houses and streets are not one long corridor, so when previous games did that it didn't feel right and here this is corrected. The maps themselves are interesting and very creepy, although most of the action happens in a central group of houses. The only weaker place is a section that happens in a salt mine that feels more monotonous and less creepy in the main game, but the rest do feel scary and tense. 

So, let's talk about the plot/campaign, and its ramifications. Previous RE were very old  (RE6 is from 2012) so I didn't warn, but here I do, even if it also has some years already: Spoilers ahead. 

In RE7, you're Ethan Winters, a married guy. Your wife, Mia, had some weird "babysitting" job a while ago, and then she disappeared, with one last message telling you that she lied to you, and that if you see this, to stay away and do not search for her. However, you get another message from her, not even a message, some card mentioning an address in the middle of nowhere, an abandoned plantation in  Louisiana, USA. Basically redneck/hillbilly territory. So you go to investigate. 

The game is set in the current time, but it has this strange very retro feeling, and it uses a lot of retro things. You don't bring a phone with you it seems, and you just get there at the fence of the property, leave your car and start walking around the forest. I'm not sure if you warned the police as well about this place, but it seems like you didn't exactly. 

Ethan....seems to be not very bright or something. Soon enough you find proof Mia has been in the area, her driving license, but at the same time you start finding dead birds and animals, and some weird sculpture made of cut up cows. At this point you should just call the police and leave, and there's actually two points at the start where he should have done that, this is the first one. You seem to see some guy in a yellow raincoat passing by, but he disappears. So, you find an area with several houses, and only one is accessible, marked as "the guest house". Inside everything is disgusting, with rotten foot and mold and worms, dead crows, etc. It's an abandoned horrible place, that also has some articles talking about disappearances in the area. Here you also find your first save point, in this game represented by cassette recorders. Yes, like if we were in the 80s or something. Also, you find an old CRT TV with an old videotape. Again, this feels...strange, there's no explanation why in the game you're finding usable old things. I have my theories but we'll get back to that. 

In RE7 when you find a tape and play it, there's this cool mechanic where you actually play what's happening on the tape, you turn into the character that is filming. In this first tape, you observe a crew investigating old "haunted" houses for a Youtube channel or something. You're the cameraman, accompanied by the actor and a producer I think. You enter the guest house, that looks exactly the same as not although maybe a bit better, and after a bit you lose track of one of the guys that seems to have disappeared into thin air. You discover a secret chain in the fireplace that opens a secret door, you go through this secret door to a basement and you find the guy standing against a wall and not saying anything. When you touch the guy so he answers you, he falls backwards on top of you, apparently dead, bleeding from his eyes, and the video gets cut there. That's the second time Ethan should just say "screw this" and leave as fast as he can from the place, but he doesn't: Instead he has the awesome idea of opening the same door and going the same path. The stairs to go down break, preventing you from going back up, and you need to navigate through horrible water covering up to your neck to get out of the area. You do find the body that you saw on the tape again, he floats suddenly in front of you, all gross but very dead and not a zombie or anything...and then you arrive to an area with a prison door and a woman inside. You unlock the door, and there's Mia!

Such a short game! And so easy! You can just go back now :).

..Except you don't, exactly. As you try to find a way out with her guiding you, she says she lost her memory, but that "daddy's coming" and asks why did you come. You tell her she wrote to you and she says she didn't. You find some door, but then while exploring another area she screams and disappears. You explore a bit forward, find some stairs out of the basement and go up, but find another locked door. You hear noises, go back to the basement and find Mia in all fours, making weird scary sounds and looking paler. She screams at you, hits you very very hard and her face contorts and changes, turning uglier somehow with rage and glee. She pushes you into a room where you grab an ax and are forced to hit her with it until you hit her neck and she goes down, dying. You leave the area for a sec, but when you get back her body is gone, and the locked door opens. As you exit, she appears again saying that it's ok, she understand...and then she goes crazy and ugly again, hits you, stabs your hand to the wall with a screwdriver and proceeds to cut your left hand with a chainsaw. You escape, find a gun and shoot her until she goes down, while bleeding from your left hand like crazy (yeah, that's impossible), and she goes down again...and then this other big guy with the yellow raincoat, Jack, hits your head and takes you and Mia away.

And that's the intro of the game :D. It's visceral, violent, creepy and scary. It resembles more a ghost horror story about possession than an old RE game. And it's amazing, cannot compare at all with the action-based crap they did before. 

So, you get kidnapped by a crazy family,: The husband (Jack), the wife(Marguerite), the old lady(?), and the son(Lucas). There's also a daughter (Zoe) but she somehow remains sane and actually helps you, she contacted you before on the phone and said she wanted to help you. They seem to regenerate, which explains why Mia is not dead, she also regenerates. And someone has stapled your left hand back to your arm, and it seems its working as if nothing has happened, which is ridiculous but funny. In this first half of the game you explore one of the old house and then another older one, where you fight dad and then mom, in that order. Jack is super strong and regenerates, and follows you around. You end up beating him and he explodes into goo, but you don't know if he'll stay dead, because he shot his head in front of you before and still recovered. Mom seems more fragile but she turns into a giant bug and her area is full of big flies/mosquitos, bug swams and other such nasty things. The old lady meanwhile keeps showing up at weird places around the houses, smiling at you, seeming catatonic and following you with her eyes but not moving more than that and being all creepy. You sadly cannot shoot her, the game prevents that if you aim in her direction because you know she'll try to murder you at some point....

Soon enough, apart from the family and the bugs, you run into "Molded", which seems to be converted almost-dead people, that have been covered in mold until the mold controls them and creates claws and giant mouth with teeth. They're quite disgusting and scary, especially because they're black and tend to show up on dark places, plus they look like some of the molded background walls. As you progress, you find out that Mia arrived to their house from some crashed boat found in the swamp with "Eveline", a little girl, and Eveline gave them a gift. Seems clear Eveline is somehow responsible for making them almost immortal and for creating and controlling molded. After the first house and before the second, you find the trailer where Zoe lives, apart from all the madness. She's not there but she talks with you on the phone and mentions a serum that can cure Mia and her from Eveline's influence. 

After defeating Mom, you find Eveline's room, where you can see that she's some disturbed little girl, and you find some disgusting weird arm, an ingredient of the serum together with a head. You hear Eveline for the first time, although you don't quite see her. She seems mad at you but wants you to be the new dad of the family or something, together with Mia, so you can turn into her parents. As you escape the molded she sends your way, you go back to the trailer to discover Lucas has kidnapped Mia and Zoe, and has the head. Lucas is quite the psycho, and seems he was disturbed long before Eveline arrived with Mia, his house is full of traps, in "Saw" style. After playign his little games and not being able to kill you, he escapes and you manage to get the head and liberate the girls. Zoe prepares two doses only of the serum. Jack appears again as some weird giant monster and you're forced to use one of the doses to "heal" him and kill him for real in the process.

After this you only have one dose, and you're forced to choose between Mia and Zoe. This is quite interesting because it's been a while since RE games had the courage to pull multiple endings, and I approve of it. However, it was badly implemented: saving Zoe gives you a bad ending, the game progression makes no sense and then her and Mia get killed, while saving Mia gets you the best ending, is internally consistent and saves both of them in the end. Saving Zoe seemed like the "morally" right choice, plus Mia has been clearly lying to you about some stuff, apart from being possessed, and Zoe has been really helpful and nice to you by contrast, but the game punishes you harshly for selecting Zoe, and I think there's room for improvement here, they could make the final sections more different based on your choice or something.  Anyway, let's pretend we save Mia, Zoe gets mad at you but says she didn't know what to expect, and you say not to lose hope, that you'll send help and rescue her too. 

You leave with Mia but find the ship that had the accident, a huge tanker that is just sitting there, and at that point "Eveline" attacks you, a giant-molded tentacle. At this point you change perspective and play as Mia, where she sees Eveline taking Ethan. You explore the big ship as her, at first with no weapons which creates a lot of tension when you do find some molded crawling around, and while having hallucinations where Eveline shows up, really a little girl that seems quite psychotic. You seem to start remembering things, and Eveline shows you a tape that shows what happened. This is the moment you quite see that "tapes" in this game seem more like an illusion, a mechanism where I guess Eveline transfers knowledge to you mentally, because there's no way Mia was recording what happened on the boat in first person and then she transferred this into a VHS tape inside the boat. Which makes sense, since no one would use tapes and CRT TVs in this current time.

In the tape it's clear Mia worked with some Umbrella-like bad organization that was developing bioweapons, and they created Eveline, a girl that produces fungus spores that can infest and control people, give them powers but also turn them into monsters. The girl itself then has control and communicates with the infected people and creates illusions in their minds, which is why Mia sees her and gets possessed. Mia and another guy acted as her parents for transport, but she reveled and escaped, while keeping Mia as a mom figure. After reviewing the tape in which she infected all the people in the ship and made it crash against the swamp, she asks you if you'll be her Mommy, and when you reject her openly she gets mad and dissappears. In this section you search for Ethan in the boat, replaying a lot of things you've seen already in the tape, which makes it a bit repetitive. The only enemies in the area are molded and they're scary but less interesting that the family, so this was the more cumbersome part of the game, although still interesting. You rescue Ethan but Eveline possesses you, and you kick Ethan out of the ship before she makes you kill him. 

Now back as Ethan, you escape the ship and reach an old salt mine. You go inside the mine, and found out Lucas was cured from Eveline's control by the company that made her in exchange for reports, and he's just bad, he's not really possessed, although he is regenerating. Eveline unleashes a lot of molded on you while signing a children's song, being all creepy, and after you survive the attack you find yourself back at the guest house. You also make a special venom from her cells, that Mia gave you, that is the only thing that can apparently kill her. In the guests house you confront Eveline, who is plaguing you with hallucinations of the attack Mia did to you in there, but now you see she was controlling her and guiding Mia's actions. As you advance towards her as she unleashes psychic waves against you, you inject her with the venom, which disperses the hallucinations: Eveline was the old lady that you kept finding, that you assumed was a grandmother of the family. Leaving the lab made her get old super-fast. As she complains no one liked her, she dissolves.....just to come back a second later as a huge tentacle mold monster with her face in the middle. You fight her one last time, until a passing helicopter drops a special gun against bio-weapons, that you use to freeze and finally kill her. The helicopter lands, and Chris Redfield, this time with human proportions and being a lot nicer, rescues you and shows  you Mia is in the helicopter (if you choose her instead of Zoe). And the game ends. 

So, there's a few loose threads: What happens with Lucas? And What happens with Zoe? These are solved in expansions that I will comment quickly. The first expansion is free, you play as Chris Redfield, working for Umbrella. Yes, Umbrella turned its head around and decided they had done horrible things and now they have started working to fix what they have been doing. And you fight Lucas and his traps, in the Salt mine, now saturated with spores and quite claustrophobic, I have to say, very good atmopshere, you want to get out of there as you play. You again lose a lot of soldiers from your squad (that's starting to becoming ironic, Chris loses people left and right) in Saw-like traps (the movie, I mean), but you manage to hunt down Lucas and kill him The second expansion I had to buy, you play as Zoe's uncle, a big strong guy that decides he can punch molded until their heads explode (yep, this one is a bit ridiculous). You find Zoe infected but are told there's a cure, and you punch your way around enemies till you manage to save her with the help of Chirs. Chris tells her Ethan sent him, and Zoe is happy that Ethan fulfilled his word.  

And thats RE7, at least what I played and found interesting. I will comment a couple of extra things: First, the fact that Ethan has glued his hand back and also sees Eveline as a girl that appears and dissappears, and is affected by her powers may mean he's actually infected but not yet controlled. That would make a lot of sense and would explain how can you survive all the crap that you do, or how come you see tapes with what happened in the past: All those are Eveline making you see things or somethign like this. However, a bit like the indoctrination theory in ME3, this is not explored, at least in this game, which is a bit of a shame.

Second, that I loved this game a lot. I found the plot quite dark but interesting, and that it was the right decision to reduce scope so much and focus on a little story here in a small place with a few houses. That's how you do horror well. Horror that is at planetary scale is not really horror, is usually just action. Great horror needs to be minimalist, and here it was done perfectly. I liked this so much I don't mind playing it again and sometimes I have replayed some section or watched some area again, and it's still interesting and compelling. 

Apparently, RE8 will come out soon. The game is set in some village, and there's apparently werewolfs and vampires ans who knows what else. This doesn't fill me with excitement, because reminds me too much of RE4. However after an RE7 that was this solid and good, I'm definitely curious...

Resident Evil 6: Some Improvements

 Although I enjoyed RE5, I didn't really feel interested in RE6. I've heard it was more of the same as RE4 and RE5, no original ideas. The one I was curious was RE7. However, for completeness' sake, I played it too. 

In the end, I have mixed feelings about RE6. There's aspects of it that are great and huge improvements, and other aspects that are just like in RE4 or even worse. RE6 tries to combine lots of ideas, consisting in 4 different campaigns with different characters that are all interconnected. It returns back to the zombie/virus concept, while keeping also the parasites(now they're called J'avo for some reason) although they're also caused by the virus administered differently, so it is quite diverse, that's true. The action happens in different parts of the world, and the timelines of each campaign overlap, and sometimes you play the same moment twice but from another character's perspective.  

Let's start with the easy part: Graphics are still awesome, even more now, and the detail and color it achieves is great. The setting is more focused in dark areas or at night-time, and the end result of shadowy areas feels again scary, finally. It is still an action game, but it recovers some horror elements that I've been missing from RE4 and RE5. Zombies are so much creepier somehow, maybe because they show they've lost their intelligence in the process, or because they're rotting. Not that parasites are nice, but with parasites in previous games it seemed like they were still people, and it hits very different if they're like mutated people with superpowers and mind-controlled or if they're actually dead, rotting people that were alive before. Zombies now die gruesomely, falling apart, while the parasite enemies show varieties of mutation that are also disgusting, like the two giant grubs that explode. Hunters return, together with plenty of other varieties of animal-like creatures, and regenerators too, although they don't have spines this time but still move creepily and jump at you.

The gameplay is almost identical to RE4 and RE5, third-person view where you aim at where you shoot and you need to be mobile. They added a lot of physical contact, which is nice: yes, now you can punch and stab enemies as a valid way of killing them, and it works well except you're limited by a fatigue attribute that gets used in these attacks or while running. The interface is a bit more chaotic, even changing between campaigns, and the inventory is weird, I didn't really get it apart from the fact that you grab things until you cannot grab them any more and then you may need to use something or just discard it. This time you don't upgrade weapons nor grab money to purchase anything, but at the end of a chapter (each campaign has 5 chapters) you can use the points to get specific boosts, although you can only have 3 active boosts at a given time. Your save file actually registers your status, like in RE5, allowing you to replay chapters, change settings or re-select boosts, but there's less motivation for it, since you don't have the shop system or the money or the individual weapon upgrades. Overall the changes are not bad, not great either, just shuffling a bit the situation, or even simplifying it I'd say: You don't need to worry much about anything, you just need to keep playing the campaigns. Enemies continue to drop ammo and health, and sometimes points (since there's no money and you can use the points to buy boosts). You will get the weapons, they're not secretly hidden or anything, and you need to use all of them in different situations. Each campaign even has different ones, although some repeat of course. 

There's a lot of characters you play as, because each campaign has 2 except for the last one, with only 1. You can select who to play as, although the game has a very sexist bias and the "proposed" main player tends to be a guy in every campaign where there's a choice between guy or girl. To talk about the game it's easier to talk about each campaign separately now, because they're very different experiences.

Overall, what we need to know is that Umbrella is now called Neo-Umbrella (which is ridiculous, why would you change your name to that) and they've developed a C-Virus that turns people into zombies or mutates them into J'avo or turns them into cocoons that then transform into big monsters or, basically, turns them into whatever the plot needs.

The first campaign you play as Leon or as Helena. Leon has turned into less of an asshole, although he's still "defending the president of USA" and such crap. he's still quite intense, more than in RE2, but now he seems more reasonable and he's actually likeable. Helena is a new character that is also part of the people defending him. And the game starts as you shoot the president because he turned into a zombie. Of course Leon is like traumatized by it (while I cheered as it happened), and Helena says she was somehow involved and that has info about it, but she won't tell until going to some church. You need to cross the now-infected city, helping survivors (although they all have awful cutscene deaths or similar) and reach the church. This area is full of zombies, it's dark and it's scary again, finally. You get back the feeling of RE2 and RE3 of an infested city, which is dramatic and tense and proper horror again. The church is like very very far from you and you go through a cemetery, where zombies are even creepier, as they're old corpses that are coming out of their tombs, again a move in the right horror direction. Helena keeps saying she'll explain something but she doesn't, you reach the church and find some secret lab with some disturbing things, like a video where apparently Ada Wong emerges from a C-Virus cocoon, although that makes no sense at the time. You find Ada there too, all cool and mysterious, also not telling you what's happening, and Helena finds her sister that was kidnapped, but she's infected and you need to fight her (while she's naked, of course, turned into a monster but a nice-looking naked-lady monster. Sexism is still a big thing in this game). Eventually you learn that the president wanted to explain publicly how the government was also at fault in RE1-RE3 because they were working with Umbrella, and this other guy from the government, Simmons, that is kind of your boss actually works for Neo-Umbrella and infected the president, gaining access from Helena after kidnapping her sister. After all this you decide to go against this guy, which for some reason makes you travel to China, where your plane gets infected and crashes, of course. You meet with Sherry from RE2, now an adult and also working with you, and some guy that is helping her called Jake, that has taken the mantle of  asshole protagonist in this game. Together you all fight a big monster similar to Nemesis from RE3, Ustanak, that is following them. You get separated and fight some regenerators, and then you meet Chris Redfield who's very angry at Ada and wants to kill her. Together with him you find an Ada, that has different clothes(purple dress) than the previous Ada(red jacket and black pants) and acts more evil, but you convince Chris to not kill her because you trust Ada. Somehow after that the whole city gets infected from a C-Virus missile that is launched on it and is full of zombies. Then Simmons gets infected too, and he becomes a huge monster that you end up defeating with the help of the first Ada(the red and black one) before she disappears, ending the campaign. 

This was a bit confusing, because it was. In the first campaign you don't know why Chris is so mad at Ada. Also, it's weird that Ada keeps switching between two outfits, but Leon or Chris never analyze this further. Also, it was a bit anticlimactic to kill the big bad guy in the first campaign. A problem this game has is that we've run out of Albert Wesker as charismatic bad guy, so they had to introduce random ones and pretend they had control over a global conspiracy while also being quite easy to track and kill in the end. And this push of being bigger and bigger and bigger, started in RE4, makes it hard and ridiculous because stakes are higher and higher, crazy people want to basically destroy the world for no apparent reason and well, doesn't makes much sense what's their ultimate goal, really.  Having said that, this campaign has a creepy vibe that is much welcomed, with proper zombies and dark and mysterious areas and catacombs, stuff that is actually creepy and I like in a horror game.  

So, second campaign: You are Chirs Redfield again, more buff and gorilla-like, angrier and more soldier-like than before. You're joined by another soldier, your second-in-command, called Piers. You seem to have forgotten something that happened and are just drinking somewhere, and you're brought back to commanding a squad to fight J'avos in china leading a new platoon. In the process you somehow finally remember a previous situation like that some months ago, fighting J'avos, where your platoon discovered some C-Virus lab. You cross paths with Sherry and Jake, and Sherry has the mission to bring Jake back so you let them go even if you and Jake get all alpha-male on each other and seem to want to fight (blergh). You end up finding a lab, and in there there's Ada Wong (purple one), that betrays you and infects all your squad with the C-Virus, turning them into horrible monsters, except Piers and you. After this flashback you go back to current time, where you again loose all your squad except Piers to monsters and are following the purple Ada. You find her, but Leon stops you from killing her because he trusts her (by now it's clear there's two Adas, the original red-and-black and the doppelganger, which seems to be the one you saw emerging from the cocoon, but Leon and Chris didn't understand this and cannot tell them apart even after seeing one in different clothes minutes ago.). Things get confusing, and you follow her again to an aircraft carrier (both Adas are there but you don't notice the difference) where the purple one gets shot to her apparent death in a very anti-climatic way. You travel to some sunken platform where a superweapon is being created, and also discover that Jake is the son of Wesker, he's immune to C-Virus and his blood can be used to make a cure, and you again fight stupidly with him, just saying you killed him and kind of taunting him to kill you in an unnecessary way. You split ways in the end and as him and Sherry go away to extract the cure you and Piers stay to stop the super-weapon. The super-weapon seems to be some type of giant skeleton/mutant/zombie thing that emits C-Virus stuff, and Piers ends up getting infected. However this just means he gets cool superpowers, and together you defeat the monster. Piers sends you away while remaining in the sinking lab, and giving the final strike to the monster and dying together. You survive and are seen again about to lead another platoon of soldiers on some other mission.

Ok, this clarifies some things, while others remain as obscure as ever: Why exactly is Neo-Umbrella creating a giant zombie that infects everything? I mean, what's the benefit of that? Apart from being able to cackle maniacally, of course. And why is Chris still doing missions when he clearly has a horrible case of PTSD? Also, the fake Ada is killed so easily and it's also not clear what exactly she expected to gain from her actions. This campaign starts to have over-the-top action too, although the plane crash on the previous one was pretty exaggerated (and how you survive it so easily). The different timelines crossing is fun, but the plot is still an absolute mess. Also, Piers was clearly conscious enough, maybe he'd be able to control the virus, but he stupidly decides to kill himself for some reason when he had cool superpowers. Sure he was ugly, but well, he's a soldier and shouldn't care that much about that, should have seen if he could be stable and have powers, that'd be cool. But the writers of this one were too conventional to let that happen, that's clear. This campaign felt a bit like a drag after the second half, I have to admit. But well, we deciphered some other aspects of the plot, while still having some doubts (ignoring the ridiculous parts that are just bad writing). 

Let's move to the third campaign: You're Jake and Sherry. Jake is a mercenary that has been infected by C-Virus but doesn't transform, and Sherry is tasked with rescuing him and convincing him to give a bit of blood. He accepts for some ridiculous price, and joins her into leaving an area infected with J'avos. You cross paths with Chris and Piers, play a bit together and then you go separate ways. At this point you meet the Ustanak, that seems another version of Nemesis in charge to capture Jake to avoid him giving the cure for the virus. You avoid it as much as you can, and it's revealed that Sherry can regenerate from wounds thanks to the infection with G-virus her father gave her in RE2, or something like that. There's some discussion about bad fathers, of course, and you end up being both captured for some months. You're not killed so in the end you escape. In the process you're mysteriously saved several times by a shadowy figure (it's clearly the good Ada, even if you don't see her right away), and meet Leon and Helena. You fight the Ustanak again but now from their perspective, and somehow after this and some more plot about Simmons you get captured again and send to the secret platform. In there you again escape, find Chris and Piers and go your separate ways. As you're exiting the place, you have a final confrontation with the Ustanak and you finally kill him for good. Jake decides to help for less money, and accepts his father was a kind of bastard in the process but that he doesn't have to be. 

So, this campaign ties up the cure subplot, but apart from that doesn't introduce much else. I think it's the one that felt more like a chore, because it has a lot of areas that you already explored with other characters. Also you fight J'avo, which are more annoying than zombies. There's also the fact that this campaign exaggerates a lot the action, even more than in previous ones, with car-riding through houses, impossible jumps, surviving falling from helicopters, etc... However, the biggest "sin" this campaign makes is that has been labelled as "Jake" campaign. Jake is a new character, a rather selfish person, clearly an anti-hero, and not even as half as interesting as Sherry! Sherry from RE2! I wanna know what happened to her, how she discovered she's almost immortal now, regenerating from horrible wounds as if it's not a big deal, how is she working against the monsters that plagued her as a child, if she kept in touch with Claire too...I mean, I have so many questions about Sherry! And guess what? The game doesn't answer any of those. They focus on Jake. That's, to me, the biggest, worst problem of RE6, the blatant sexism in this campaign in particular, the inability to see that we don't need more stupid male protagonists, we have already lots, we could have explored this other character a lot more. I mean, of course I played as Sherry, but the focus of the campaign is Jake, and it's the main thing in RE6, the introduction of this guy. There's also the fact that we haven't heard anything else from Jill or from Claire, and that would also be interesting. RE games do have a good list of interesting female characters, and they could have split the game between them, really. But well, in RE6 we did get a little treat, the last campaign.

In the fourth campaign, you play as Ada Wong. The real one, in red and black. You play alone of course. First you start in a submarine full of J'avos, a submarine that proceeds to sink, quite a cool section actually. In there you find proof of the other Ada, which puzzles you, and you don't know what's going on. Then you go to the research facility Leon and Helena also visited, and you help them fight Helena's sister. At this time when Leon asks whats going on and Ada says she doesn't have time to explain, now it makes sense: Ada, you, have really no idea either and are just investigating. You discover the video with the fake Ada, and you go to China to investigate too. You find out about Jake and Sherry and decide to help them a bit, saving them from the shadows, what we experienced in the previous campaign without knowing who saved us exactly. You follow the fake Ada to the aricarft carrier where Chris and Piers are too, and they confuse you with the fake one and chase you. You see how the fake Ada "dies", but this time you manage to talk to her, she infects herself with more C-Virus and turns into a giant face monster that you need to kill, a better end for her, considering she was the other evil guy in this game, apart from Simmons. You figure out she was another person, a research partner of Simmons that turned into a copy of you for some reason and to blame you on stuff, so you go back to where Simmons is and help Leon and Helena in killing him, as in the first campaign. 

Ada's campaign was the most enjoyable I'd say, because even if she did outrageous action stunts, it had quite original settings plus she was the smartest character of them all, really. The others could be quite stupid, but Ada being herself means she was more aware of the general plot, and it's nice to play as a character that is actually intelligent enough. It was also nice to help others, and in general her campaign felt shorter and more informative and tying all general loose ends. It seemed easier too, somehow. The only problem is that at the end, instead of getting some little video of Ada doing something, they show Jake killing some random monster-guy, which is again a wasted moment to show more of whatever Ada was doing next. But oh well.

 So that's RE6. The campaign was very ambitious, a bit too much, and it goes into exaggeration. The different timelines crossing is a bit confusing but not bad, although repeating scenarios does get tiresome. It's main problems were the need to make everything bigger, the stupid over-the-top action, Chris' evolution and the focus on Jake instead of Sherry, but the 1st and 4th campaign were quite solid and it went back to being more scary, which I find I prefer.

Since they had gone that big, they had to do something for RE7 to change the trend or they would have run into issues. So, for RE7 they re-analyzed the situation and took some risks. We'll talk in the next post, but I loved what they did in RE7.

Goalpost moving

 Recently I've heard again that sentence of "The extremes touch", referred to political movements. I've discovered that in English, this is referred as the Horseshoe Theory. 

I really hate this sentence, because it's usually used by "moderates" to justify not taking the side of the oppressed, and I wanted to address it. 

I've commented before and I'll comment again, that we're at war with strong forces that are aiming for a big regression of rights and the funnelling of all wealth towards a little few. Part of this war has been based strongly into a constant moving of the goalposts.

By that I mean that the right-wing parties have pushed and pushed and pushed their ideologies to the right. "Moderates" consider that in any situation, the average approach is the most reasonable, and by pushing the right-side, the "Moderate" becomes really just Right-Wing. 

I am baffled why people eat this up all the time, or why would you think that anything outside of a radical change in the situation may really improve our general lives. Or by the fact that a lot of people that believe that a radical change is needed tend to go to the extreme-right side when it's organized by the same people that created the problems and want to make them worse. 

Anyway, this goalpost moving makes people forget what is extreme left and what is just moderate left. Plus people confuse the point of extreme left, and compare them with extreme right. 

Basically, any time you criticise extreme right, you're presented with: "Left equals Communism! Also so bad, killed thousands! Therefore, your argument is invalid!".

So, let's start by saying that yeah, dictatorships as seen in communist countries are bad. But they're bad because of the "dictator" bit. Someone or some group of people with limitless power that can do whatever they want is bad, period. You need checks and balances. We said that before with the police, and the same applies to the government. If you can do whatever the hell you want because you make the rules, you execute them and you judge people as per your whims, yeah, that's always bad, no matter anything else. This is not a political spectrum of anything, this is what happens in any situation you give that much power without balance to someone or a group of people, and it's always bad because people tend to abuse this power like a lot.

The core idea of socialism/communism? Less bad: We all share resources and provide for everyone so we have equity, and we don't let people hoard wealth. I mean, this is nice. The opposite of this is unfettered capitalism, which basically says that if you can become the richest person in the world, you deserve it, even if this fucks indirectly or directly with 98% of the rest of the population. Then it's a matter about how to implement it efficiently, and please remember that in the world, any place that has tried to apply such things more strongly has seen USA and their allies fuck them so very hard that it polluted any results. Also have in mind China is not communist any more, they just kept the dictatorship part and are now ruling a capitalistic hell-scape with a brutal social control.  

But I digress. What I also wanted to say is that people don't even know what is an extreme leftist any more. Extreme leftist would be to, for example seize all factories, all service providers (like water or energy), seize all fields owned by companies and not particulars, dissolve all companies by law and enforce them to be publicly organized, or seize any house owned by a company or that is owned by a particular that doesn't live in there and already has two main residences.

That's just a few policies that are extreme leftist. And I have to say that I agree with several of those (for example, the house thing or the energy thing). However, it's true that some competitiveness can motivate sometimes to do better things. So I'm willing to compromise and accept more moderate approaches, like limiting company sizes but letting small companies work and try new things in a capitalistic approach to competitiveness. 

Anyway, my point is that NO ONE currently is even proposing that. What most "left" parties are proposing is just some more regulation of the markets, plus dedicating public money to reduce inequality and taxing the rich (and just fyi, you're only rich if you could have afforded to do nothing all your life without anyone paying for you and would never had any issues buying food or paying for a place to stay. Anything else is just poor or middle-class, and in denial about the situation). 

I'd be perfectly happy with just seizing the money of rich people and turning it public, videogame-style: after your first million you cannot gain more money, it all goes to public funding, as if you were missing bytes to write the money you have. But again, the "left" parties are not even proposing this. 

They're just asking for small reforms that would benefit everyone indeed, but they're not like radical reforms, most of them. 

And even that is seen as suspicious by people, because it seems everyone thinks they're rich but temporarily poor or something, and the idea that the money you earned goes to a few that don't deserve it is such a strong instinct that people are like wary of these ideas. 

But, guess what?

YOUR MONEY ALREADY GOES TO THE ONES THAT DO NOT DESERVE IT AT THIS TIME!!

Or what do you think is happening when the right-wing governments give funds to big companies that are failing, like banks, and they don't have to return that? Or when they let rich people avoid taxes? Or hell, just producing value for a company that goes to their net benefit while you,as employee, never participate in that net benefit is exactly giving your money to the ones that do not deserve it! Left-wing policies just try to redistribute it more, which means you will see more of a return, while right-wing is letting the same 10 families that always had money to just keep having more and more money, YOUR money!

And again, the little measures that left-wing parties tend to propose are just slightly moderate! They're just saying "maybe we should not let markets do whatever they want to the point that a global crisis can be nice for them and then they may want to keep an ongoing crisis forever?" "Maybe we should regulate things somewhat?". That's mild! And no one with a sane mind should propose dictatorships anyway, and no one in the left is proposing that any more!

You know what also touches the extremes? The fucking middle! So, please, start thinking a bit more and realize that one side is not like the other, and what all these excuses are defending: they're defending the same people as forever, the ones that have power and wealth and want to keep it from everyone else.

PSOE/PSC is a right-wing party

After Catalan elections, a number of in theory progressive people keep insisting that JxCat is extreme right and PSOE/PSC is left-wing.

Among them, there's the En Comú Podem people and Podemos in general. And it's baffling that they're taking this attitude. I mean, they're currently ruling with PSOE, yes, so some protection is understandable. However, claiming JxCat is worse than PSOE/PSC in right-wing matters is simply not true. 

Let's just look at facts here, shall we? I'll just list their latest actions:

-PSOE has a big number of people in executive positions in the most powerful Spanish companies, and has legislated in their favour several times.

-PSOE reformed the constitution (together with PP) just once recently in order to include the clause that the country's public debt  must be paid first, before any other expense, in 2011

-PSOE increased the age of retirement to 67 years. 

-PSOE applied a labour reform that made firing cheaper, made it easier to fire people if a company is having loses, and allowed companies to bypass worker agreements if they managed to negotiate this with employees (while not having an even ground since the company has a lot more power). This resulted in a big decrease of job quality in Spain, plus created the perfect conditions to fire people that had better contracts.  

-PSOE defended not investigating the previous king of Spain and helped him exit the country as if that solved the corruption issues. They're also a big defenders of Monarchy as a good thing to have.

-PSOE is refusing to regulate the price of rent to try to stop it from raising indefinitely. 

-PSOE tried to rule with Ciudadanos (right-wing) before negotiating with Podemos (centre-left).

-PSOE made a pact with CIU in Catalunya to make corrupt healthcare organizations that control and privatized a big section of the healthcare market in here. The people in CIU that were part of this are currently in PDECAT and not in JxCat.

-PSOE has made pacts with PP to split important positions inside the tribunals and has been using the judicial system as a repressive arm of the state exactly the same way as PP. 

-PSOE has not removed recent laws promoted by PP that constraint freedom of expression and is using them to jail critics and repress different sections of the population.

-PSOE members are part of several economic circles that do not follow any democratic laws, are there with PP members and support more power and money for the economic elites. 

-PSOE privatized several public companies that were having benefits with the only objective to transfer this benefit to private owners. 

I will add that during the 15M protests that directly resulted in the creation of Podemos, a common slogan was "PPSOE" and "PP and PSOE is the same shit". This served to indicate that both parties were complicit in keeping the status quo where a few companies and rich people keep the power and society doesn't improve their well-being. PSOE may implement some social measures like defending abortion, promoting more equality for women, hinting at allowing euthanasia, or trying to protect LGBTQ+ rights, that is true, but that's about it. These two parties were correctly identified as the problem that is preventing Spain from improving the life of all their citizens, and Podemos until recently understood they had to defeat both to change things(Just a clarification here: PP is the same as Ciudadanos which is the same as VOX. All these are the same, so defeating PP in the past now means defeating these three parties so they never have power again). That is, until they lost support and realized they could not rule alone, and then they decided to try to associate themselves with PSOE. They forgot about one of the core principles of the protests, and now they're unable to create much change because of it, and are losing voters left and right because of it.

I would not vote for JxCat (too centre for my taste), but they've separated with their worst elements, now found in PDECAT, and they've voted for the following laws, to say a few:

-Tax big bank deposits

-Force energy companies to provide service to poor people. 

-Tax empty houses

-Forbid fracking

-Regulate apartment prices

-Forbid kicking out people from their houses

-Promote protections towards climate change and use renewable energies and good practices

Of course Spanish government and tribunals have annulled all of these because they considered them anti-constitutional or that Catalunya has no right in regulating these things or they created worse laws soon enough (like a national 0% tax on bank deposits) that made these invalid, so we couldn't experience this effect, but they're certainly a lot more to the left than what PSOE has been showing for a long long time now.

Any party that says JxCat is more right than PSOE/PSC is straight-up lying and not acting thinking about real left-wing policies, and this really undermines any respect and good reputation they might have before this.

Resident Evil 5: We're not racists, we have a black friend

After the bad experience of RE4, the saga lost plenty of my interest. However, when the fifth game appeared for my console I did give it a try after some time had passed from its release.

RE5 surprised me at the time. It's still very similar to RE4, but it did streamline some parts of the game, trying to get rid of some unnecessary things in the process. The end result was...not bad. Better than RE4 definitely. 

It's still pretty ridiculous, mind you, but the way it plays out has some improvements. 

First, graphics are better and more colorful. Not everything is brown and this makes the game prettier. The graphics are even more realistic and well, it's fun to see so much detail, I cannot deny that. Technologically speaking it's clear there has been improvements and the game is using the new consoles and looks. 

Second, the gameplay is almost the same, although movement is easier this time. You still need to aim and shoot, trying to get certain points of the enemies. The enemies themselves are again parasite-based, which means they're highly mobile, strong, smart, and sometimes they have parasites inside them that come out when killed. The inventory has been revamped and reduced, but every item occupies one slot only. An important difference now is that using the inventory doesn't pause the game, and you need to be fast using health items or changing weapons. This is definitely more realistic and adds to the action, you cannot just pause and heal, you need to run away far enough and then lose some time to heal yourself. Also, this time there are two characters, you control only one but you're not escorting the other, the other also has weapons and shoots enemies and defend themselves. If you're hurt, or they're hurt you can revive each other, with a bit less life than before but still better than outright dying. 

In general the game is trying quite hard to enforce multiplayer where you play with somebody else. This is not bad per se as long as you're left with a single-player mode that is strong enough that you can play and not be penalized, but I do prefer games that are designed around single-player and expanded with multiplayer and not the opposite. In this case playing alone is perfectly possible, but your partner doesn't help as much as they could, and you need to be careful because if left alone they may, for example, use all the ammo of the good weapon for a mere mook instead of the final boss. Its AI could be better, that's what I'm saying, but at least you're not left with a permanent escort mission, that's true, and it is useful that when you "die" your partner automatically comes to save you before really dying for real.

The game is divided in chapters, like in RE4 (I forgot to mention this), but one streamlined aspect is that you save the game only at the end of a chapter (before that there's automatic saves and checkpoints too), and that at the end of a chapter is when you can spend money, sell or buy things. What's more, your saved game saves the status and progress, but you're free to repeat a chapter as much as you want to get extra money for example and then buy improvements for your weapons that will help you in the next one, before continuing. This makes the game more "agile". IF you feel stuck, you can revisit a previous one, get better equipment and then continue. You know you won't get stuck because you were playing the game wrong and you need to restart the whole thing, you can just play some sections again and gather resources and train. This is not bad with such an action.oriented game, where all pretense of survival horror has been lost. 

That's the thing with RE4 and RE5, though. They're action games, they're not scary, really. At max, some areas are dark and some enemies feel more creepy than others, but that's about it. The game continues to be very very linear, and also doesn't have difficult puzzles, although there's a bit more complexity in some areas sometimes, having to solve simple tasks, a bit more than what RE4 had.The game is also shorter than RE4, but in a nice way. RE4 felt outstretched, with some chapters taking forever, and some areas feeling more like a chore or fake padding that having real substance. It's hard to tell fake padding from just nice game content sometimes, but in general if a section brings no originality, no new enemies, no new puzzles, and it just prolongs a certain area unnecessarily without advancing plot, that is there so they can claim the game is long but without giving new stuff in that area. RE4 had such things, RE5 has a lot less of them and this makes it better. 

Ok, after mentioning the good parts, let's have some fun with the bad ones. 

Let's start with the setting: A fictional country in Africa. This should tell you a lot already, but to elaborate, yes, this game feels racist as fuck. This fictional area is poor and violent. Of course this is explained as in RE4, because the people are infected, but still. Then, the main character is Chris Redfield, again, a very very white and typical action guy. Seeing a white guy mowing down black enemies in the first images that were released of the game? Not great, nope. So, developers rapidly said they did have white enemies too, it was just a representation of the general population of the (fictional) area, and when the game was released you could see that not all enemies where black, yes, some of them were white too, but still feels quite wrong, really. Also in the first half you see black people dressed normally, but soon enough you find an area where they say "the parasite made them more primitive and regress to ancient traditions" or some bullshit like this and they're living in mud huts, wearing leopard-printed little cloths and handling spears and shields. VERY racist indeed. To try and counter this a bit more, Chris partner is a local woman, Sheva Alomar. Sheva is black, but just a bit black, not like the black enemies. You know, not like dark black, that would be probably not beautiful enough for the developers of the game and is just reserved for enemies, as I said. But like this they can claim that, hey, we're not racist! This is our token black friend! 

The game doesn't let you play like Sheva on the first time you play, another thing I believe to be quite nasty, it forces Chris on you. And once you complete it, you can play again as her, which shows that they could have allowed you to do that from the start and just didn't want to for Reasons (a.k.a. sexism).  Sheva is also the one that is more "nimble" and therefore gets thrown or jumps in certain sections where you need to do so. It's now worth mentioning too how Chris has been modeled in this game. In previous games he looked like a buff strong guy, but here he's like deformed. His biceps is the size of his head. Let that sink in. I mean, it could be he has a very small head, sure, because his intelligence seems to have downgraded since the first games (especially in RE6 where he also appears and he has the same big muscles/small head and serious intelligence issues), but still. Sheva is more proportionate, although of course girly-style with less muscles (buff women are too scary for the developers, probably), but one of the evil guys, an evil female CEO, does have the breasts with the same proportion of Chris biceps and head, so maybe they used the same ball model for all three of them? Probably. 

The plot of the game is...a bit of a mess. You're investigating something in that area, because you are working for some organization against bioweapons. There's a company that is supposed to be good, but you find out they allied with Umbrella actually, and there's some old virus found in some caverns where some investigation happened, and this virus can make a new type of enemies, Uroboros, that are like black slime/tentacles that tend to consume everything and is hard to eliminate. You find 4 enemies successfully infected with this in all the game, and it's true they're pretty tough to defeat. Another thing is that this virus can infect and consume or, if you're "worthy" enough, you gain control of it (only the last one has control of it). The parasite-infected enemies (called Majini now) are just a by-product of bad guys operating in the area it seems, like their foot soldiers basically. Also, the final goal of the "bad guys" this time is to directly infect the whole world, so only the strong will live and it will create a new type of humanity or some crap like that from the wet dreams of eugenicists and incels about alpha men and all that. As I said, a mess. 

In the game, they say that Jill Valentine died in a mission Chris and her did, where they visited the umbrella founder, and found Albert Wesker, now with superpowers, had already visited him and killed him. Then Wesker seems to kill Jill by cliff-jumping together, which clearly means she's still alive. You find Jill again, being mind-controlled by Wesker and being all fast and cool as if she also had superpowers, and discover she's controlled by some conveniently-placed gem that you can then remove to make her feel better. Jill has turned blonde in this game for some reason, smaller and more in distress than previous games in the natural trend starting in RE4 of making everything a lot more sexist than what was needed. At least you save her, that's true. The game is full of over-the-top action and nonsense scenes where everybody involved should end up very very dead but they don't.

And as I said, the big bad in this one is Albert Wesker, who's turned into megalomaniac evil by wanting to change the world and all this crap. He's still a superhuman, he betrays everyone just because, it seems, and moves (and dresses) like Neo in The Matrix, dodging bullets if you shoot him. The final fight with him is pretty hard because of these reasons, but somehow you end up managing to kill him for good this time, in an active volcano surrounded by lava (because of course this game exaggerates everything plus lava is only deadly if you step on it, everyone knows that). He's the final guy that infects himself with the virus and takes control of it, but before that you do have some other fights with giant animal/monster hybrids, Uroboros-infected people, and the aforementioned possessed Jill Valentine. Special mention too to the lickers, that reappear and are fun to fight although you get to fight a bit too many of them for comfort, and also special mention to the incredibly racist big black guys with heavy weapons. 

The whole thing as I said continues with the ridiculous trend of RE4, but at least it's shorter, you defeat a big guy from the saga and not some random weirdos in a cult, and the gameplay has been adjusted and made better overall. While RE4 felt long and a chore sometimes, I have to recognize that RE5 is fun enough that I did play through it several times. The saga continues with its ridiculous and action-based trend though, plus their usual total lack of research, which is still very shameful. New plot points are introduced, new companies, new world situations, and there's really little sense of continuity between the games like this. In a way the game is trying to go globally, but that's a lot to take and in general the plot has become very messy. I believe around this time some movies were produced in the same style as these games, which explains maybe that there are unexplained concepts and things between these games. This sucks, I don't want to have to see a movie to understand what has happened in a game.

Anyway, it seems there's hope at the end of the tunnel with some clear improvements done in RE6 and specially, RE7. We'll talk about RE6 next in detail, because it does some things good again. Some other things, it does even worse than RE4, that's also true, but there's a clear intention of evolving and trying to go a bit back to better roots than action-based ridiculousness, even if RE6 is still very very VERY guilty of that.

Who guards the guardians?

In the last days, Spain has again done something repressive (big surprise) by jailing a rap singer. 

Let's not focus on that right now, although it's worth mentioning Spain is the country that has the biggest number of artist in prison. Yeah, ahead of Iran or Saudi Arabia or other places that are repressive dictatorships. And the European Union is not doing anything about it. 

Anyway, there has been protests in defence of freedom of expression, in Barcelona and other cities of Spain. And the police has answered with charges. In front of that, protestors have created fires and barricades to defend themselves, and now the main TV channels and newspapers that support the elites are crying for burned trash containers and making it equal than being beaten with sticks or losing an eye, something that has happened to a protestor when she was shot in the face with a special foam bullet.And I'll redirect attention to my other post of Declaration of War, and say that they expect people to just silently comply to everything bad and we're past that phase, and you can either support the repressed or be part of the problem.

In Valencia for example you could see that a protest was ongoing in a peaceful manner and police with riot gear just went against it at full force all of a sudden. And actually these images are similar to what happened during 1st of October in Catalunya when the referendum took place. 

In all these, police can do whatever they want. There's never any repercussions for them. They're supposed to avoid hitting heads, to avoid shooting in the face, to avoid creating panics or making situations more dangerous, they're not supposed to insult or say racist or sexist crap, etc. And they do, and nothing happens. 

Police is a problem. Society does need some type of mechanism to guarantee that you will not be robbed, raped, murdered, attacked,etc. and when these things do happen there needs to be a mechanism to follow them up, find the authors and deal with them, by re-educating/re-inserting them or, if that's not possible, locking them up. Society does need some type of protection against abuse. In most countries, it has been decided that there's a security force, like a small army, that should take care of that, the police.

However, then you have several other problems. First of the issues is what is a crime. There's evident ones, like if you are on a street and randomly decide to murder the next person that crosses you. Yes, that's a crime. But then, there's a lot of grey areas, like what if you were defending yourself from said murder and ended up murdering the attacker? It was self-defence, right? Well, some countries decide this is allowed, and some others say this is still a crime. And that's just an example that things are never that clear-cut and usually they need to be analysed in detail to understand context. Then there's the matter than robbing a food shop because you don't have food is considered a crime but raising rent to the point where your tenants cannot afford to eat is not, which also shows that crime can be quite subjective and the big powers can make it so their activities, while more damaging to society, are considered not a crime. 

Second of the issues thought, is that, who's going to check that this force is not committing crimes themselves? This is a very old philosophical question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who guards the guardians? If a police officer is a piece of shit that hits his wife, their comrades and friends will gladly stop him from doing so and arrest him, or will they cover for him? If the police decides to beat people up for fun and revenge, who's going to stop them from doing this? If the police is full of bastards, how do we clean  them from the system if we need the same police to arrest them or protect us from them?

In theory police itself should try to find its worse elements inside it and remove them, but why should they? They're being trained to support each other, trust each other and work together. Especially in sections like the riot police, they're trained to act like an army, like soldiers, and you cannot expect that this training does not produce a certain brainwash against reporting your fellow officers. Plus there's the fact that most people that join these sections are more than happy about not reporting them even before the training, but we'll get back to that too.

So, what are solutions to this? Sometimes police departments have what in movies call "Internal Affairs", which is a side that investigates police officers themselves and, of course, in most cultural works they're painted as "the bad guys" from preventing "good officers" from doing their job. Only that will tell you that they're probably not popular if they work well, and that they have huge pressures against them. Plus in the end they're part of the same force, they may have started working with the same people and have friends in there. 

In Spain, I'm not sure internal affairs exist, I think most forces just investigate themselves, but there's a curious kind-of alternative: We have different branches of forces. We have national police, sometimes regional police, and then we also have Guardia Civil, which is like a different force entirely that works also at national level. This solution was initially implemented to have an alternative force from the military, for all the wrong reasons (at the time the military had turned more progressive). 

This idea could work, if implemented properly: You have two forces that are independent, with different uniforms, different training, different circles. You divide the forced by region, so depending on the region one applies or the other, and you then make any crime that one does to be investigated by the other, plus having each other in checks so no one gets corrupted or does something bad, some type of friendly rivalry for being the best and more clean. Since they're not connected or part of each other, this would reduce the feeling of "betraying one of us" that lots of them seem to have. Spain hasn't implemented this correctly, of course, but it's something that could help. 

However, Police has also another problem, a third one, that is in the end the root of everything that's wrong with it: The profiles of the people that want to join and are accepted. In theory and in an ideal world, police should be formed by people that want to defend society from bad elements that live in it. Compassionate strong people, with a high moral compass, that even if they're not a judge, they can decide when someone is worth arresting or if it's better, for example, to pay for their meal once, or just warn, or well, really understand the situation and do what's best for society in the long run.

That's not the case at all, at least in Spain and in plenty of other places. Here the main focus is to find people that will obey commands. That's the most important detail. Then, people that will uphold laws regardless of if they're unjust or not. So it's better if they're not too bright or moral or they may see the problems in persecuting poverty without addressing the root causes. They have to be loyal people, loyal to their partners and bosses, not loyal to real legality or morality, but to the force. And in the case of the riot police, they have to be people that are happy to hit others. 

So, who then applies to these positions? Well, bullies. Fascists. Military fanatics. Violent people. And then you end up with forces made up of sexist neo-nazis that are quite happy to beat these progressive protesters, grope women as they arrest them and bully pacific people into submission. Or they're quite happy to ignore the openly neo-nazi that works with them because he's a "nice guy" and they have beers together later and he's a companion. And then it happens that when real dangers to society, when actual fascists are marching around saying we should kill all jews and leftists, these police officers are happy to defend them, because they're their friends. Hell, in Spain lots of times with different forces, in these fascist marches one force is defending the other force, because the other is marching but without the uniform, not officially.

And it's not me saying this. It's lots of ex-cops, ex-military, ex-security forces. There are people that joined these professions with real care and, when they protested about the situation, were directly expelled because they didn't "fit in" and such things. Which means that any good people left in there may disagree with these things but they're not willing to say it out loud either and accept it as something that just happens inside police. 

The power that these positions offer corrupts, and attracts corrupted and violent people, apart from people that just want to defend others. And for very long the elites have accepted the bad ones because it was useful for them to have mindless violent guard dogs that they could send to anyone that bothered them.

Not every police officer is like this and it also depends on what they do, if they investigate murders, are just information analysts, or are patrolling or riot police. However, there's way too many, it's not just a few, it's a big majority inside that prevents any real change. Most Spanish police worker unions are openly supporters of VOX, for example. Another example: a lot of domestic violence cases are caused by police officers themselves, in a proportion much superior to any other profession.

Recently two police officers in a bar decided to say sexual things to a 14-year-old, and when his dad protested they put him in the hospital. This case was so evident, so bad, that they have been arrested, but we'll see if they're really condemned. And when a similar thing happened in Euskadi, the police officers said the others were terrorists and they're currently in jail for terrorism, when they just defended themselves in a bar fight. 

The worst offenders are Riot Police, as I said. Riot police should be there to defend us from, for example, the fascists groups that were roaming the streets recently and hitting people. But the reality is that it's impossible for them to do so, for the same reason Spiderman can never be seen saving Peter Parker. Riot police shot live ammo against protesters, after the 14-year-old incident I mentioned before caused locals to go to the police station to protest. Riot police shot to the face a girl and she lost an eye, this week. Riot police hit people voting on 1st of October during the referendum. And riot police have again and again been abusive, violent, brutal without reason, not following laws themselves at all. And they've faced very little repercussion, or even being awarded for their "brave" service of hitting people in groups while wearing full-body armour.

Riot police as it is, should be disbanded in Spain. And the profile and philosophy of  police needs to be reassessed in order to have proper democracy, otherwise we'll keep having huge problems with them. 

Any party that says they're progressive should defend that and do it if they have the chance. Otherwise, they're not.

...and the results are in

 Let's comment on the results of the elections for a moment here now.

The results are...not bad. Could be better, but well. 

First of all, more than 50% of the total votes went directly to parties that support independence. This is a big deal, because Spanish unionist never got tired of saying that independence supporters were never winning by counting the total votes and not the total representatives, and ignoring that there was a party were the votes could go either way. Now, even without counting that party, it's clear than more than half of the people voted for independence. 

Of course now unionist will say participation was low, at only 53%, compared to the previous 80% which was a record. While participation was lower, it's true, the fact remains that we're in the middle of a pandemic and it wasn't the best moment to vote, we were forced by the Spanish tribunals thinking the results would be "good" for unionism. They were not, so yeah, fuck them, that's a problem they created in the first place. And make no mistake, if they had won, participation would have never been commented as an issue. 

Then, the "winner" party: PSC, with 33 representatives and a bit more votes but barely, than ERC, and they both have the same amount of representatives. Here we can see the lack of democratic culture so often found in Spain: They claim PSC won. And while PSC did get more votes than any other, they got less than 25% of the total votes. This means it's irrelevant which party has more votes, what matters is which parties can work together. And unless ERC betrays all they've said during the campaign, PSC just doesn't have enough support among the other parties to win or rule.  

The independentist parties won, with 74 representatives, out of 135. ERC has 33 representatives, barely had more votes than JxCat, but JxCat has 32 representatives and has conceded, ERC will have the presidency. CUP has managed to get a respectable amount of representatives, 9, and they can condition the government and its actions, which is always good. In summary, it seems like these three forces could rule. However, negotiating may be difficult, since they tend to be very aggressive with each other. 

Ciutadans has crashed beautifully to only 6 representatives. PP is even worse, with 3 representatives. This is amazing news, because these two parties are a bunch of lying fascists. However what's not so good is that VOX has gotten 11 representatives. People are crying about this, and for sure it's bad, but as I keep saying, Ciutadans and PP are also fascist. It just happens that, when your voting base is fascists idiots, they tend to prefer the party that is openly fascist. So, fascism didn't grow, it's still there at the same level as before. And make no mistake, a lot of VOX votes come from rich areas, that's the elites defending the fascist control over Spain. However overall, these extremist parties are doing so much worse than before: Last time they had 40 representatives in total, and this time they have 20.

PDCAT disappeared and has no representation, which I also think it's beautiful. This party privatized a lot of healthcare in Catalunya, voted against protecting the vote of people living outside Spain and are guilty of destroying public education and healthcare, which means they're guilty of plenty of deaths during this pandemic. Their support was inflated, and now that they had to defend themselves with no protection under some other name or cause, the real result has shown nobody wants them anymore.

En Comú Podem (ECP) didn't do very well and has only 8 representatives. As I said, their problem is that they don't get at all Catalunya, they say things like independentism is racist and excludes people, which are not true (apart from some idiots on twitter, and all sides always have a minimum of them, no side is free of that) , and because they don't get how society works here very well, they keep losing votes and support. What is a shame is that PSC voters should vote them instead, they defend much better the people that are voting PSC than what PSC will ever be able to do. Having said that, they insist again and again that PSC is left-wing, when it's not, and they're not considering CUP as another left-wing option, and they keep being quite hypocritical and misunderstanding everything. As long as they make these serious mistakes and they keep some questionable people inside the party, they deserve this too. 

So, the possible combinations are as follows: 

1-ERC+JxCat+CUP: The "easiest" option and more reasonable, with these it's possible to control the parliament and the government. 

2-ERC+JxCat+ECP+CUP: That would be weird, but ERC wanted to "open their hand" to ECP. Problem is ECP keeps repeating JxCat are right-wing extremists and cannot pact with them, but then again this is not true at all, JxCat are center-right at max, and more to the left than PSC actually. 

3-ERC+PSC+ECP: The preferred option for ECP and probably PSC too, ERC has given doubts they could accept this but lately they repeated they would never pact with PSC, so to do that now would be quite damaging to their image. 

4-PSC+ECP+C+PP+VOX: This one is the nightmare situation where the independentist parties would fight enough that they didn't agree to rule, and then ERC didn't vote against this for some reason/allied with this somehow and let this happen. Highly unlikely because it needs an independentist party to betray all their voters and that would be suicidal. This would also be damaging for ECP and PSC, since they would have to ally themselves with VOX, although they have allied themselves with Cs other times and they're also pretty fascists...

Overall, not bad results. Catalunya is moving towards a strong independentist center-left, where the Catalan "right-wing" is actually left from the "leftist" traditional parties in Spain.

Now expect the Spanish tribunals to start bullshitting and creating charges against the independentist politicians, it will happen soon enough...