Disappointed but not surprised

I haven't written in a long time again, and also not about politics, because situation is shitty. But wanted to comment on a certain aspect of it. 

First, to say that the two majoritarian "independentist" parties, ERC and Junts, haven't done much at all lately. They've used elections just to get into power, get salaries, and then keep the status quo, making pacts with parties that, in theory, should never agree with them like PSOE/PSC and PP.

These two other Spanish parties have responded by betraying them at any chance too, so it's really really stupid that ERC and Junts still try to pact with them when there's solid proof their word is worthless and they will not fulfil what has been said. Although Junts and ERC are also very very guilty of that. 

So, people are pissed at these two independentist parties. The third big one, CUP, has acted much better in general while not being perfect, but has been added to the group for some reason(even though it never had enough power to act on much), maybe because people, once they distrust their original choice, apply the thought that "the rest are the same" when it's not actually true at all.

So now, there's an undercurrent of thought that these three independentist parties must be punished. And way too many people have decided that they will punish them by not voting at all.

That's the stupidest, STUPIDEST thing I've ever heard. 

For three reasons:

1-The less votes there are in an election, the more votes the right gets (and here I mean PSC/PSOE, PP and VOX. These three parties represent right-wing politics, from moderate on the first case to extreme in the second two ones).

Parties don't give a fuck that people didn't vote as long as they get representation. 

Basically, if there's 100 people able to vote and only 10 people vote, let's say, and they vote 4-PSOE, 3-PP and 3-VOX, these parties will not say "oh, why no more people didn't vote". They will say "oh yes, we won a lot of representation, we're the best!". And they will do whatever the fuck they want. And it will be BAD. 

These parties are the enemy of everything good. Simply put. Independentist or not, you should NEVER let these parties win at anything. If your actions are making their life easier for them, your actions are automatically BAD. 

2-Not voting doesn't give any power to your cause. 

If you want to change things, there's two options, revolution or voting for things that represent you in some way. 

To all these people that don't vote: will you automatically take arms and start a revolt in the streets? No? Then what you're doing is harming your cause. 

Nobody, nationally and internationally, gives a fuck about why you didn't vote. They only care about the people that voted. It's been proven time and time again. There's been lots of elections in the world where for several reasons people didn't vote that much. Nobody has ever commented. The final results were the only ones that counted, and that was taken as "the will of the people". 

I totally agree not voting should be considered as a bad sign. But nobody cares, so not voting will be ignored, and if something it will be considered as a fact that "independentism has lost strength, nobody wants it anymore". So, do with that what you will.

3-Dont vote for the parties that you don't like, but change your vote!

It seems like once there's a party that is yours, it's them or death. If they don't do a good job, lots of people stop voting altogether. A lot of people didn't change their vote from ERC to Junts or CUP or some other combination of this, they just stopped voting altogether. 

This is stupid! You don't like your last vote? Change it!

If people don't vote, less votes means more representation. Let's say that you have 10 people voting in total. 5 vote to ERC and 5 want to punish ERC. If the 5 that want to punish ERC don't vote, ERC gets 100% of the votes, so 100% of representation ->great success! We're on the right path, people love what we do!

Do you want that?

If instead, the 5 people that want to punish ERC vote Escons em blanc, CUP, PACMA, anything really that is not ERC, ERC gets 50% of representation ->they're punished. 

I will concede that there may be not many options available that seem good. But not voting will do NOTHING whatsoever to help you or your cause. 

See what the right-wing parties do.

They never, ever, miss a vote. That should give you a clue. 

Fresh stories

 I have been playing some more games, and I'd like to comment of them.

The first one of them is one that I've been replaying now but I actually finished last year and a half or so, and it created a big impact on me. Somehow the story and the characters felt very real and well-made. The game is called Horizon: Zero Dawn, and recently they made a second part, that I'll also explain a bit at some point.

Let's start with general mechanics: The game is an open world sandbox style of game, where you play as Aloy, a girl from a primitive tribe. The game is based on sneaking around and using bow and arrows mostly in order to debilitate and kill the enemies, which can be other humans or machines that look and behave like animals. You gather resources from killings, can craft ammo, potions and traps, and has also some close-combat mechanics with a spear. There's some skill trees where you can get upgrades as you level up, and it has a strange healing mechanic where you collect herbs and use them to transform them into health, as if they're communicating fluids somehow. Early on you gain the skill to scan your surroundings to find enemies and items and analyse their path and weaknesses,  and a bit later you also get a skill to "hack" some of the machines in order to gain control of them. The animal machines tend to have differentiated parts that you can target, and you usually use this to target weak parts with specialised arrows that damage more that part, in order to weaken the machine or remove some of their weapons. Later on you do get more specialised bows and some specific weapons, like one that lets you put traps or another ones that ropes down machines. You can buy and sell things, and there's mods you can apply to armour and weapons to improve them, with different rarity and power. All in all some original ideas but nothing groundbreaking either.  You're gathering resources as you find them and kill things and build more stuff and level up, in a kind of flow that is nice and feels fun most of the time, as you explore the world. You can climb some places but not everything, they're special marks where you can do it and usually they indicate a certain path you need to follow as you move up.

The graphics are really great, with different types of regions including jungles, deserts and snowy mountains, and you're always surrounded by nature, being able to gather resources by hunting too. The machines are beautiful and original, just copies of real animals but in a robot format, and how they behave, the lights they emit and how they move and react it's really cool, and definitely one of the big selling points of the game. Some are like current animals but others are like dinosaurs, with the most fancy one being a T-Rex in machine form and full of weapons. The game is set in what appears to be a post-apocalyptical setting, but at first you don't know anything, you just see there's ruins of buildings, of cities and towns, and there's sometimes caves where there's facilities with old advanced technology while you're just using a spear and bow. People seem to live in little towns without modern technology, but the ruins hold more advanced stuff.

To get you into moving around in this world, you find quests talking to people, where they ask you to find something or help them with something, where you use your scanning device, called focus, and find things that cannot be found without this technology. Quest tend to be interesting, although sometimes the middle of the quests adds some machines to kill to add action, when I think just the quest as they are would be nice enough and there's no need to make you kill enemies, but I know big companies tend to think that if you're not killing stuff the game will be boring and they force developers to add fights in the middle, so oh well. 

Anyway, all this is not that special, just quite nice and expected form a modern big game, apart from the machines that are amazing.

Where I think they made a huge difference is in the plot. I loved the plot, the world-building and the twists and surprises.

So, in the game you're Aloy, who is from a tribe, the Nora, that are particularly closed and not accepting of modernities, very traditional. You have lived apart from them all your life because you were born without a mother, one of the ancient abandoned ruins one day made a baby appear out of nowhere, and they were superstitious about it and thought that was evil somehow, because they're matriarchal and a person without a mother cannot be a good sign. Another shunned person raises you and becomes your dad, and in the process you find a special ancient device that lets you read and learn stuff about the ancient civilisation (our civilization but in the future) that somehow got killed for unknown reasons. 

Don't want to spoil too much of the story itself, but once you manage to leave that first closed area and explore more ruins with your device, you learn that some capitalistic CEO idiot made an army of automated killer robots that feed on organic matter for fuel and self-replication, and then was unable to stop them. However some humans started a massive project, Zero Dawn, to try and do something about it. 

Since you see that there's humans, vegetation, and some small animals the world seems fine now, but there's also the machine robots, of course, that seem to be performing tasks of bigger animals that are no longer present in this world. So, you assume something was done that worked. 

As you investigate, you see that people thought Zero Dawn was a weapon, but eventually discover that it was just a project to create underground facilities that hid AI-controlled storages that would be able to kickstart life back on earth, including humans, after everything on the top got killed. And the last people just did their best to try and save as many species, data and people as they could, knowing they wouldn't get to see it. And the world did end, it's just the project worked enough to restore life.

There's another plot on top of this as things happen nowadays that are threatening everybody in the world again, but this setting I found it amazing, very sci-fi, very anti-capitalistic, and I don't know, it was an experience to see what had been done in this world and how it made sense and created an incredible sci-fi apocalypse story while remaining positive and encouraging. 

Then there's the fact that Aloy herself is charismatic, nice and funny and smart, and several characters you encounter also feel well-developed and interesting. You feel this is a group of people you wanna help and improve things, and the general tone is very positive, even when things seems quite bad and hopeless. I also loved how progressive is everything that happens on the game, where foolish traditions and prejudice are frowned upon and marked as stupid since the beginning.

As you move around the world and discover different societies, their styles, their customs, and uncover more and more information the game sets up a very interesting premise and world-building that kind of makes sense, while keeping things epic enough.

The game also manages to end the current plot in a satisfactory manner, while leaving details to solve and discover in future sequels and letting you made theories about what happened and what's going to happen.

In an era of game clones and repetitions, this game felt very original, very fresh and hopeful and full of life, and I loved it. It definitely influenced me in wanting to get a PS5 so I could play more of it. Definitely worth playing. 

Just walking

Happy new year! 

I didn't post many things nor many political rants lately because I haven't been inspired and things didn't change much since last time, and it's tiring to repeat how fucked we are and all that, and I'd rather talk about video games when I can, really. 

However, I thought I rant a bit anyway, just cause it's been a while, and apparently next year there's going to be some elections.

Instead of explaining Spanish and Catalan situation (it's shitty), I wanna talk about a quote, by Eduardo Galeano:

    "Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I'll never reach it. So what's the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking."

This, beautifully said, is a very important point to make regarding progressive ideas and policies. Conservatives, fascists and totalitarians have it easy, because their preferred state is one of paralysis, of right reduction, of stasis, and therefore they're content with status quo, with dictators and idiocy, violence and repression and being brain dead.

Opposite to this we have the progressive parties.

And we have to be realistic here: they all suck. 

Of course they do. They try to defend progressive ideas but they tend to be too moderate, or with ideas too improbable or too hard, or too idealistic, or they may have corruption in their files (conservatives are corrupt by definition though, make no mistake here). They're falible and not good at their job sometimes, and they make mistakes. 

And none of them will be a perfect option. 

However, this means that what you should do is pick the least bad. What you should never do is to stop walking, to stop voting and participating in polítics. 

We're aware they're not perfect because no one can be perfect. We should strive for perfection and walk towards it, while accepting there's flaws we need to work on. 

Not participating in polítics is giving free reign to the other side. And the other side is evil incarnate. The other side will fuck you up, chew you, spit on you, burn the fucking world down and give the ashes to the rich. Never forget that.

Leftist and progressive parties are not perfect, but they're definitely less bad than this. We should demand perfection from them, but not to the point of punishing all of them out of being able to make changes. Because for sure the others won't be punished for being the abhorrent monsters they're used to be, that's their default, what people expect of them and what their voters want and support. 

And remember, we're just walking towards an impossible goal, the point is to get closer.

Feelings of achievement

 I have a backlog of games to talk about. Haven't written in a while after all...

The first one I wanna talk about is Elden Ring. 

Elden Ring is the latest game made by From Software. From Software are famous for making the same game over and over again, with slight variations. The most famous of their games till now was Dark Souls. They did Demon Souls before that, but it wasn't as successful as Dark Souls. Dark souls became a trilogy, and they also did Bloodborne (which I've played a bit) and Sekiro. 

All these games, including Elden Ring, feel....extremely, extremely similar.

They're all RPGs, where you start with a chosen class. In most of them the initial class has different attribute distribution but does not limit you and you could level up different attributes to change class or favour a particular play style. In most of them the initial class may change a bit your initial equipment, and your initial equipment tends to be really really good, actually. In all of them you get better by upgrading your equipment more than levelling stats, and equipment scales with certain stats. In most of them you have skills and spells. In all of them you need to find "safe points" (not to be confused with save points, the games save all the time) from where you can reset the whole word, resurrecting all enemies except bosses and special ones, and when you die you start from the last one visited. In all of them you level up in these safe points. In all of them you use the same currency to level up than to buy things. In all of them it seems that the plot is something that is just hinted at, that you need to figure out with item descriptions and cryptic conversations. In all of them you dodge-roll, and sometimes parry. In all of them you just have a basic weak attack and a stronger attack, plus some skills/spells that you can equip. In all of them you  explore huge areas that interconnect with each other, sometimes finding shortcuts, but not always with a clear defined path or a clear reason why you're advancing there or where do you need to go next. In all of them if you see some big structure far away, it tends not to be decoration and you can actually get there, traversing the world. In all of them there are rooms with bosses, separated with a fog wall that you need to traverse to get there. In all of them you play "multiplayer" all the time, and you can invade other games or be invaded for PvP or offer help to other players or request help, in certain moments only. In all of them the game saves your current status up to a second ago and you cannot reload the game before you did something or died, so actions have consequences that you cannot easily fix sometimes in that playthrough. In all of them when you die you need to find again your body to recover the currency lost, and if you die before that you lose what you had before.

And all of them are REALLY HARD. Like exasperating, unfairly hard. For example, you fight a boss that is pretty hard, and then when you've managed to kill half of its life, a copy of the same one appears and it's 2 against one.  Or you enter an area and the boss jumps from behind and kills you. Or there's an enemy hidden next to a cliff so they can attack you and push you. Plus just the fact that most enemies deal incredible damage, are really hard to evade or block, and it's just really hard to advance or do anything.

I've played Dark Souls, managed to reach a hard area after a long time, and stopped playing because I was afraid I'd be very frustrated in that area and didn't feel like trying again. And I've played Bloodborne a lot less, getting into an area with a boss fight that felt unfair and too hard, and abandoned it. 

So, I was wary of Elden Ring. At the same time, it seemed a fascinating game. The engine of the game seemed exactly the same as before, with some differences, but the graphics had been greatly improved, and it just looked beautiful. The mechanics that people talked about seemed very flexible and with lots of options to explore, more than in any previous game. The atmosphere seemed very mysterious, a very strange world. And most importantly, while all other games were linear, kind of, Elden Ring was the first one that was an open world. That meant that you could find a place too hard, and instead of being totally blocked there was the option to explore a different area, train, level up, and get back there and try again. This and the fact that there was a new mechanic that allowed you to summon AI helpers made me think that maybe this time I could give it a try and play the whole thing. 

And that's what I did. 

The game is really good. Really really good. It's addictive in a way. It looks beautiful, and just makes you wanna explore it and find everything it has to offer. The game is also as hard as advertised, but it's true that summoning helpers is a game-changer, and it's the difference between impossible and doable, sometimes. 

Yes, it's frustrating. But it's part of the fun, to repeat a section or boss, to get better, to finally win and to succeed. The feeling you get when you do that is amazing, and you cannot get it from an easier game, it has to be that difficult to feel that good once you manage to beat it. 

The plot is weird and confusing as said. Apparently George RR Martin helped with some initial ideas, names and lore, and then From Software did the rest and the actual details. The end result is interesting, although it's very very hard to figure out what is going on really, plot-wise. You're in charge of getting the Elden ring, a magic device, and rule the lands as the Elden lord. However, it's not really even a ring, more like a collection of powers that you can somehow receive after defeating people, until you get enough fragments that you can challenge the current ruling powers, to replace them. Where you are and why, and what is happening is really obscure and requires you to read item descriptions and fragments and piece things together, and even then it's like very very strange. The world itself is rather grim and almost everything that you encounter is trying to actively kill you, with some npc exceptions. Nevertheless it achieves in making you always curious to see what will be the next monster or the new trap, and if you'll be able to survive it. 

The game has "quests" that happen besides the main task, but they're as obscure, if not more. Using a guide seems like a must, but I have to say it's still fun to just wander around and see what you discover and find. But without guides, it's really really easy to miss steps or not understand what you need to do. I also have to say that most quests end "badly", with NPCs turning against you and you killing them or just dying as an effect of advancing the story, and it gets tiring after a while. It feels you'll end up ruling an empty land with nothing interesting in it because you killed everything. That's also why it feels nice to be able to protect and save some of them, which can be achieved only by following guides to avoid bad outcomes. In order to save one, for example, in my main playthrough I forced myself to do the hardest bosses of the game, that are optional, in order to get the right combination of elements that saved a particular NPC.

The game has several endings, and some of them are hard to get. The standard ending feels very short and rushed, like just saying "oh you won! congrats!" and that's about it. Then there's like three other variations of the standard ending, that require too much effort considering the result is the same ending, with a different colour filter, and with one different sentence, but that's about it. Finally, there's two endings that are more worthwhile, a bit longer and . In one of them, you help an NPC enough that you become partners and marry or something, and at least it seems less lonely and that you achieved something because you're guiding the world to a different purpose. The other ending is the "worst" one, where you burn and destroy the world as it is, but also it's not so bad, considering the world is shitty and all interesting NPCs may have died or been killed, so a lot of people say it's the true ending and the one that you're supposed to get. 

The nature of the game makes it that you cannot re-load and get a different ending, you need to play from the start. However there's a game+ mode where you start with all your level, skills and items, and enemies are just a bit stronger than before, and if you do that you can play again and beat the game in record time. I got the partner ending and then I replayed the whole game just going towards the end and got a second ending, one of the more generic ones, out of curiosity, and watched the rest online. 

Even if the endings are not that great, the whole experience of completing the game is still very nice and feels quite amazing, as if you have finally managed a very hard task and you can feel a bit proud of yourself. 

Definitely worth playing.

Mind browsing

Recently Double Fine finished and published Psychonauts 2. Considering the first one was 20 years ago and finished with a cliffhanger situation and plenty of unexplained details, that's a lot of time to pass.

The original game was amazing. Original, colourful, deep and full of innovative mechanics. Basically the game allowed you to navigate people's minds and each mind is different, of course. Each mind represented a number of traumas and obsessions and problems, and lot of them introduced unique gameplay for their sections. 

The game was not successful commercially and caused issues for Double Fine, that took a long time to recover and stabilise. I didn't play it originally, only much later. I usually love all their games, so I'm glad they managed to recover and continue with this plot, even if it took that long. 

The second part continues just a few days after the previous game, and answers all the mysteries the first game left. The mechanics are the same, this is a platformer game with special "psychic" powers like levitation or telekinesis, and sometimes you enter minds and have to deal with special mechanics of that particular mind. 

The graphics of the game are cartoonish, better than the original with more details but still with the same look, that could seem more childish and cartoonish, also because the main character is a small kid. They've improved and polished them though, with vibrant colours and effects, making them more alive and cinematic. 

The controls remain a bit strange. 3D worlds are hard to navigate if you need to jump and move fast, that's a problem that has always plagued 3d platformers, and this is no exception. Sometimes it's hard to figure out where are you and if you'll fall in a ledge or not. However this feels just charming, and part of the game.

The combat is functional, but a bit chaotic too, with lots of powers to balance depending on the situation, while you only have 4 mapped to buttons. The common enemies also feel sometimes like "extras", not integral parts of the normal game, added because you need to fight enemies sometimes in a game but not because it makes sense thematically, while the proper bosses of each area are great.

All these traits don't look impressive. However, the plot is where this game shines, like most of Double Fine games. The plot is amazing and deep. Quite moving at times, quite inclusive, and surprising and mysterious, even if I called some of their twists. The characters are also great, developed and funny and interesting. And the mind levels are a treat, visually stunning, imaginative, complex, etc. 

Special mention is needed for the sensory overload level, which needs to be experienced, Jack Black song included. This game is pure art, plain and simple.

The game may not attract people initially, like the first one,  because the synopsis of the plot, the character description, the style of game, etc...all conspires against it somehow. By the game description you would not expect to have complex puzzles like a graphic adventure. By the game characters, you wouldn't expect too much depth. By the graphics, you would not expect serious topics discussed. But the game has all that, and it's infuriating that a studio as good as Double Fine seems to have to be begging for scraps while horrible bland games are made by the hundreds. 

So yeah, I'm recommending it strongly: Even if it seems like it's not your kind of game, give it at try. And try to buy the first one too, they're a pack and they're incredible, even if there has been 20 years between each other.

Remastering and Remaking

 One of the reasons I wanted to get the PS5 was because I wanted to play the Final Fantasy 7 remake.

I played the original FF7 with my laptop when I was young. I spent one whole month not doing anything else than playing FF7, during summer, and it was an incredible experience. It was like playing an anime series. The music was incredible, the combats were epic, the plot was complex and curious, dramatic, with twists and funny moments too, and well, it was a very emotional experience overall, especially at that age. 

So, when I saw about the remake and actually played the demo, I was impressed. Much better graphics, like a permanent CGI movie, better than the CGI movies of the original game, and with expanded story? I mean, evidently I wanted to get it and try the full game. So I did. 

For starters, the game is just the first part of a series that will remake the original game, but with unknown changes. This game only covers the plot until the party leaves Midgar, which is a sizeable chunk but represents around 15-20% of the total of the original one, I'd say. That's a lot of game left to do, which is a bit annoying, but oh well. 

The graphics are incredible. I didn't really play any FFs after the 9, and therefore I didn't see how they progressed, last I played was with the original PlayStation. Therefore the current graphics feel amazing. This is how the game played in my imagination basically, like when reading a book when you create your own visual world, the first game's limitations created such a world inside your head with the actions you could see. This new version actually plays as if you see what your inside world looks, with all the details and movements and everything. It's amazing. 

The gameplay, I have to say, is interesting, but now being more action-oriented instead of turn-based was not a plus for me. I quite like turn-based games, and while it's cool to perform actions yourself, the way this game works means you're usually controlling one character while others do whatever, while in the original you did order all characters, because there were turns. This new combat system means you always start with Cloud attacking, while sometimes I'd like to start with another character. It's cool though, that's undeniable. Again, maybe I missed the previous FFs that prepared the terrain for this gameplay and I'm just not used to it, but well, for me this is not an improvement from the original. 

The plot remains amazing, but with more in-depth. Some topics are explored with more detail, new characters are introduced, some characters are developed more, and in general it remains interesting while feeling also fresh. And there's a little twist: The game introduces the concept of....how to say it, continuity guardians. Basically, there's creatures trying to make the plot to happen like in the original game. However, you can fight them. And as you do, some plot things change. This has incredible potential and it's a great way to make the remake while changing the plot, and also allowing for a new fear/hope in this one: will Aerith die again, or you'll be able to change things enough to save her? It's a hard question that is not answered in this game, but the fact that now the plot may change opens up this interesting possibility. For sure there are several characters that all of a sudden have survived their previous demise, so it's clear that they're catering a bit to the fans and opening up possibilities. I'm quite excited about this, actually, and I found it was a genius move to go in different directions while having an explanation as to why is that possible, by linking both games as two different dimensions. 

The music...I have mixed feelings. Some songs are amazing as in the original or even improved with the better sound quality. However, some others have been...reduced? They feel more generic somehow, when trying to make them more commercial-like and actual, pop-like, which detracts from the experience. Some themes still caused goosebumps, that's for sure. 

In general, the game is pretty great. However, there's one little detail that made me...not like it as much as the original. And that's the combat length, and the new "padding" sections. The combat, again maybe I missed the previous FFs and it has evolved to be like this, but now every single monster has ungodly amounts of HP, which means that it takes forever to kill even the simplest ones. This feels like cheating, extending the game length and difficulty simply because some bosses require 30-min marathon sessions or similar. There's also the fact that in the original you could train and become god-like yourself, totally breaking the game, but hell, it was fun to achieve that and overpower all the enemies easily and quickly. I feel this change detracts from the game, especially considering I don't always have time to dedicate uninterrupted attention like this. Then there's these "padding" sections, sections where you need to do the same thing 3-4 times instead of just one, like the plate lights or Hojo's lab, apart that this last one breaks an important tense moment and delays it, which reduces drama. It feels a bit of  a copy-paste to extend the game without adding to the plot much and without advancing much, and doing one of these tasks just once would work perfectly well and enough. The game is long enough with the added content, so this feels like "cheating" to claim it's a very long game when some parts are repetitive.  

Nevertheless, I enjoyed it, especially the parts that deviate from the original, and the PS5 exclusive section with Yuffie was a lot of fun and quite interesting too, and it was great to see a final secret video after finishing it. 

I have also to comment that playing this made me wanna play the other FFs I played, 8 and 9. I found them remastered and I've been playing 8 again lately, with slightly better graphics but same game. And I have to say, it's awesome still, and I'm enjoying it a lot and finding it was not as long as I remembered. For sure the remakes can be fun, but it's also really good when you can just replay the remastered version, getting all the original content.

Anyway, now I'm waiting for the next instalment to see in which direction they will go...

Challenges can be fun

With the PS5, I also managed to get some games to play with it, of course, but most of them were PS4 ports or adaptations, not exclusive PS5 titles that really used its potential. 

That's why recently I got Returnal, which is a game developed only for PS5. I got it second-hand, because I was wary of the game. I did some research and I've heard it was really difficult and frustrating. At the same time it's crazy expensive if you get it as new. After completing it now, I have to say it may be worth it, the game is THAT good, but with some disclaimers.

The game is hard, really hard. One of the reasons why is that the game has sections, or biomes as they're called, and after one of these sections (and their boss fight) you get some permanent upgrades sometimes, but before that anything that you manage to get gets lost after death. After death, you start from the beginning, again, with nothing. This is rough, since you can have a great number of items and stats that you managed to scavenge from around, and then you have a misstep and you lose everything. There's also the fact that every time, minimum, you need to go through the first section to get to the second or third one. And the same applies with the last 3, you need to go through the 4th section always.

There's also the fact that it's a rogue-like, which means that after dying the next map will be automatically generated and randomised. In this game that means that each biome has an X number of rooms, with Y number of places that can have items in each room, from a Z selection of items, and with V types of enemies available for that biome and room, and every time you die the game randomizes this selection of combinations. Each run is a bit different. You can find the same rooms, yes, but now the items are different in them, or now there's this type of enemy when before there was that another type or no enemy whatsoever, or now there's this trap, etc. 

The gameplay itself is a strange one, a third-person bullet hell: You control your character from a third-person view, use a weapon to shoot enemies and the enemies launch thousands of glowing bullets, circles and other stuff that can damage you and tends to fill the screen with colours that you need to avoid. In order to not get damaged you should not cover but run around, strafe, jump and use dash to avoid most attacks, although you can occasionally cover too, yes. 

The graphics are incredible, the game looks beautiful and alien, and the different biomes look different and cool. Boss fights need to have a special mention, they're incredible, with so many colourful attacks and strange designs, they feel quite epic and are just beautiful to see. The sounds effects/music is great also in putting you in a tense position, you keep hearing the monsters sounds around you and lots of little actions have their sound clue. And here we need to talk about the controller. The PS5 controller promised some type of "haptic" feeling: That is, that it makes you feel things that are happening in the game through special vibrations. It sounds a bit strange, because haptic feelings need usually some strong electric engine and a fixed base, but what they've achieved without all that is quite amazing. There's a lot of actions that make the controller vibrate and sound, and then you feel what's happening. Like the rain, you feel tiny drops falling on you through the controller, and it's really really cool and immersive. It´s hard to describe, you need to experience it a bit, but it´s really impressive.

The story is...very weird. This game is quite the mind-fuck. I'm not sure I have a good explanation about what happens and why, even after unlocking the second ending. However, it is quite an interesting experience, and open to interpretation. I don't wanna spoil anything in this case, but I´m not entirely sure what to believe or take as true after the experience.

I finished the game recently, and while it's hard, I had a lot of fun with it. I was immersed quite fast to the pace of this game, and I got better and better at it, with some moments thinking there was no way I could pass a certain element, and then after some training seeing I could, or even making it easy thanks to a special combination of luck, practice, the right weapon and the right consumable item.

The game is a challenge, and like all challenges, if you do succeed, it feels amazing. Not only that, you discover yourself doing very hard stuff that you thought you'd never be able to do. This is a great feeling, but requires patience and time, and also some predisposition to it. I was lucky to be able to master the game more or less, but it's true it was time consuming and could be quite frustrating sometimes, when you think you have a great weapon and items and some random encounter that is not even a boss or side-boss destroys you and you need to restart from scratch. But I have to say, I enjoyed it immensely nevertheless.

It's a beautiful, exasperating game, and it's totally worth it.

 

 

 

Resident Evil 8: Action-horror like RE4, but good this time

Recently I self-indulged a bit and got myself a PS5. I only had the original Playstation, so this allows me access to plenty of exclusives that, over the years , I had to miss. 

For the moment though, I'm also using it to see some of the newest games at their best, since it's quite a powerful thing. And one of these games that I got new was this Resident Evil 8, or VILLAGE (written so the initial "vill-" looks like VIII, like 8 in roman).

There was a lot of hype about this game but what I've saw beforehand was not very inspiring, reminding me a lot of RE4 (which I hate)....but I gave it a try, and was pleasantly surprised. For starters, the graphics are still amazing, very realistic, painfully so when getting hurt. The gameplay is streamlined and it's a lot more action-like, with less focus on the survival part and easier to manage and kill enemies. You need to pace your resources but there's more of everything. The inventory is huge and it separates consumables and weapons from keys and treasures. There's an upgrade and shop system, and well, some parts of it feel a lot like RE4 but somehow in a better way (the shopkeeper even jokes, saying the same sentence and intonation from RE4 and saying he's joking, he knew someone who said that).

You continue after 7 playing as Ethan Winters, living in "Europe" (probably Romania), and in the first 5 minutes of the game Chris Redfield apparently kills your wife Mia and kidnaps your daughter Rose, only for her to be stolen from him 5 minutes later too. So that's the main drive of the game. Things are not really as they seem, spoilers ahead, just in case. 

After waking up from the accident where your daughter gets taken by someone else, you end up in a village. At first the initial house looks very much like RE7, but soon enough you just go out and it's dawn, and you see yourself  in a small rural area with a huge castle and some weird houses, windmills and a factory. 

You discover the village has been attacked by these monsters that looks like a half-zombie half-werewolf, and after finding some survivors that die immediately afterwards, you're captured and brought to the presence of the 5 big bads of the game: Mother Miranda (the leader, like a religious local figure that has protected the town till she decided to kill everyone), Lady Dimitrescu (the lady of the castle, very very tall and drinks blood), Heisenberg (the one managing the factory, with magnetic powers), Moureau (an ugly half-fish person-monster) and Donna Benevento (a girl that has creepy puppets that talk for her). 

These people have...charisma, really. Maybe except for Mother Miranda, who is more hidden, the other characters are quite interesting. They're bastards, but interesting bastards. You kind of wanna know more about them, as you see them verbally fighting to decide what to do with you.

After escaping their little games, you go back to the village and meet Duke, the shopkeeper, who seems like a weird 6th member of the family but that is trying to help you somehow. He's quite mysterious. He tells you your daughter may be in the castle, and you go there to find her. There Lady Dimitrescu and her daughters try to kill you to drink your blood, together with their zombie-like servants, but after some going around you do manage to kill all of them, in the case of the lady with the help of a poisonous knife that turns her into a monster, because otherwise she's perfectly immortal. This castle section was really cool and big, mysterious, and the vampire theme, while ridiculous, was cool. It was also very nice to see their total disdain for males (they call you man-thing), although they treat their female servants quite bad too. You end up picking up a flask, and Duke tells you that's your daughter, split in 4 pieces, but that your daughter is special and is not dead, she can reform if you gather all 4 flasks, in hands of the 4 lords (the bad guys, apart from Mother Miranda).

The castle occupies quite a lot of the map, but after finishing this section you never go back there. Next there's Donna Benevento and her house. She's in fact making you hallucinate. As part of these hallucinations there's this little segment of a very creepy autopsy you perform on a doll that represents your wife, and you discover clues hidden in the doll that allows you to escape and kill the creepy main doll, which in fact was Donna. I really loved this part too, it was like a ghost story, without enemies (except for a specific one that is best left to discover, that is extremely creepy and unsettling and not a doll) but with puzzles and mysteries. You do feel a bit of pity for Donna, she seems to have some mental problems or something, and she did attack you somehow but she could have killed you from the start and she didn't, it seems she wanted you to like her like a daughter or something.

Between these main sections you always return to the village for a bit, discover new areas in there and can gather some special treasures and recharge on ammunition. You also find out that all monsters are usually created though the use of the mutamicene from RE7, the mold thing, but with different variants and results, and that Mother Miranda was the one that found it, became immortal, gave immortality to 4 "childs" of hers, the 4 lords, and was isolating the village, getting tests subjects from it and keeping it uncommunicated from the rest of the world.

Next is Moureau, that lives in a reservoir with water. You find him fast, but he turns into a giant fish monster that is also blocking escapes with disgusting mucus-like substances, and you need to drain the water and fight him to escape. This section was a bit more painful, more generic, and you feel sorry for Moureau too, because he's not all that well in the head and he's not that much in control, it seems, and wants the approval of Mother Miranda. 

Finally there's Heisenberg. However, he contacts you and tells you he wants to help and get rid of Miranda, but you need to prove yourself. He leaves his flask in a stronghold with the werewolf-zombies, and after defeating lots of them and returning you can access his factory, where you talk. He keeps saying you need to use your daughter to kill Miranda, but Ethan says his daughter is not a weapon and gets all angry about it, so Heisenberg pushes him into the basement of the factory, where a weird monster with an airplane engine in the thorax and chainsaws instead of propellers chases you, till you fall even deeper. This section is full of robotic zombies, improved by Heisenberg with metallic parts. While talking he seems nice and a person you can reason with and the verbal fight you have with him seems extreme, but in the notes you find later in the factory you do see he's quite psychopathic too and has conducted horrible experiments with people in there. 

This area is long and dark and labyrinthic. After learning the paths it's not too bad, but it's quite hard to orient yourself and the map doesn't help, with levels and corridors that go up and down and up again interwoven with others, so when you see them in a 2D map it's quite confusing and then it's hard to find where you need to go. There are cool mechanics in there, but it felt claustrophobic and a bit too long. After clearing several floors and having to fight and kill the airplane-engine monster, Heisenberg drops you again to the bottom, which feels a bit annoying. In there you find Chris, who finally tells you that your wife at the beginning wasn't your wife, it was Mother Miranda, because she can transform into others and wanted to get the baby. This is very ridiculous in the sense that most of the tension between you and him could have been avoided with this simple explanation, but oh well...even other soldiers that work with Chris keep telling him later that he should have explained this to Ethan, so it's referenced inside the game that it's a very stupid decision. 

Anyway, he gives you control of a special tank that is immune to Heisenberg's magnetic powers, and you get into an elevator to the top and end up fighting Heisenberg, turned into a metallic monster. This fight is ok, but if he had remained in human form and instead used his magnetic powers, there's no way you would have won, while as a monster and just hitting you it's relatively easy.  Once the fight is over, Miranda appears, shows you she has your daughter and proceeds to rip off your heart with her hands, leaving you, Ethan, dead on the ground. 

You continue playing as Chris now, raiding the village with other soldiers (that this time do not die), because the mold in there is going wild and Mother Miranda has made a mold fortress around a place where she expects to do some ceremony. Some guys from an organization that was good in RE5 but is now bad seem to be trying to access it too, but they're killed by the mold. You fight waves of werewolf-zombies and get into the fortress, only to find Mia, Ethan's wife, alive and relatively well. You also discover that Miranda learned that the mold keeps consciences of dead people that died around that area, and wants to resurrect her daughter's consciousness inside Ethan's daughter, and all her experimentations have been for that purpose, to find a worthy vessel, while her other "childs" were not good enough. They also explain that this mold is the original one that was used to develop Eveline from RE7 later on, and that Umbrella's founder met Mother Miranda and was inspired by her to do the viruses and parasites, even using her symbol as the company's symbol. Chris tells Mia that Ethan is dead but Mia seems not worried, and says that's impossible, because there's something she has kept secret...

...and you start playing again as Ethan. You're having some type of dream where Eveline tells you you're actually dead, and that you died in the first scene of RE7, after Mia attacked you and the dad of the family basically killed you. But Eveline resurrected you, and you're mold, yeah. Which explains also why your daughter has some mold-like properties. Here I feel totally vindicated from my theories, as I expressed in my post for RE7. I mean, it wasn't that hard to guess, but still, I totally called it. It didn't help that Ethan glued his hand back in RE7, has flashes from Eveline, he can glue his legs too in RE7, and also in RE8, after Dimitrescu cuts your other hand during the castle, you just put it back and use some disinfectant to heal it. I mean, it's quite obvious, but still nice to have guessed it correctly. 

Anyway, even if you're mold, you're in horrible shape. You make your way to where Miranda is, and find her with your daughter. Your daughter does something to her, apparently trying to help you even if she's just a baby, which makes Miranda vulnerable. You fight her, and she's just very very tough, but you manage to kill her. However you're crumbling too, apparently, and you just give your daughter to Chris, and grab a bomb detonator and wait for the mold to come to you to detonate it, destroying everything and yourself, as Chris and Mia leave in a helicopter with your daughter. A final scene after the credits shows Rose, your daughter, older now after an indefinite number of years, visiting Ethan's grave. Then some guy in a suit escorts her out, saying they have a mission for her, and calling her Eveline. She gets annoyed and says her name is Rose, and pushes the guy but goes back to the car. This implies that she has some part of Eveline in her, and I really like this idea, because in her last moments Eveline sounded pitiful, she was a little girl that people experimented on and she just wanted a family and to be loved, so it does feel kind of nice to know she has had some type of redemption and can re-live a bit through Rose. 

And that's the game. I really really enjoyed it, although it can be ridiculous at times or make no sense too, but I think it's a similar idea to RE4 implemented a lot better. It's not so much survival horror this time, it's more action-like, but the gameplay and the characters give it a life of its own and made me replay the game several times. After the first playthrough I got some bonuses and managed to get some infinite ammo for some weapons, which helped in me wanting to play it again. It was also nice to try and complete many of the challenges the game has, which return special points that you can use then to get special weapons and stuff. Some of the challenges are insane, but there's a lot of replayability value. People said the same of RE4, that it was a good action game, but for me in RE4 the story implementation specially ruined it, and didn't make me want to play it, while in this case I'm happy to replay. The only shame is that the 4 lords were dispatched very fast. They're very colourful characters, even if evil, and I wouldn't mind seeing more of them in other games or DLC, but well,for the moment that's all we'll get it seems. 

Quite enjoyable and good, in summary. I'm pleasantly curious about what they'll do next after such strong 7 and 8.

How to fuck up stories because of ego

 I haven't written in a while and have some games and comments pending, but I wanna finish my comment on the Mass Effect trilogy (I haven't played Andromeda anyway and I understand it should be considered apart). 

The third game in the series seem to imitate a style of making series and science fiction, popular in the first decade of 2000, were things are bleak and very unbalanced, and anyone can die. Recently I finished Battlestar Galactica (I got tired at some point of the drama and had not watched it all), and certainly the style of ME3 reminded me of that. 

I've talked about ME3 in the past, when it came out. It has epic moments, and there are plot points that are amazing. Curing the genophage, or making peace between geth and Quarians, both things optional and only available if you had done the right choices in previous games, felt very good and adequately epic. Apart from that, graphics are still great, more detailed now and a lot more gory, and the gameplay still holds quite well, although the downgrade of the shockwave ability done from the previous game hurts a bit, I have to say. So, the game is quite decent overall, and does delivery in some of their promises.

Where it fails, it's in other aspects. First and foremost, the fact that Earth is made as this special place that is worth saving over all the other races and planets. This is so human-centric that is annoying, and one cannot help but make easy parallelisms with colonialism and white supremacists, where there are countries "worth saving" and others that are not (like recently in Afghanistan, for example). Other races have planets that fall or get hit pretty hard, but earth is the one that seems to endure the most and also where everything needs to happen.

Then there's the fact that, while some decisions from previous games are truly explored and expanded, some others are translated into points. These points mark if you'll be able to reach the "best" possible ending or not, or if you will fail while trying. The point system feels...weak. A cheap way to translate decisions into something that affects the game. The ending of ME2 took decisions and made them matter. ME3 turns them into "+100", definitely a downgrade. 

What is most grating, though, is probably how the ending has been managed, and how it turned out to be. In the end, the problem is that some race decided that any universe that has AI, will then have these AI revel against their creators and kill organic life. Which is....not true, even in the ME3 universe. As part of the game, we could make peace between the current rogue AIs and their creators, and the AIs showed they just wanted to help and coexist. So this argument is pure bullshit and undoes plenty of things inside the story. Then, I mentioned it before but the last decision about what to do about it is taken there, without considering previous ones, which is....easy, very easy, not taking any risks. An ending that changes based on one last decision has been made before and is boring, you just reload and see the different ones. ME2 did this a lot better. 

What's worse in all this is that I understand this ending was the result of some boss that, instead of deciding what to do in a committee, like all the rest of the plot points of the game, decided to do whatever they wanted without external supervision from the rest of the creative team. This sounds....awfully familiar to how Game of Thrones ended, or also the creative process behind the movie Prometheus, that left plenty of bullshit too. More and more, I've seen "famous" people that did great things do shittier stuff the moment they're considered famous and don't have a support team around them that helps them streamline their good ideas, to make them really good, instead of assuming they're great and going forward with horrible stuff because no one dared to tell them they suck now. I mean, see what George Lucas did in the prequels. Check the latest movies Steven Spielberg has done, or the 4th Indiana Jones (or as we like to say, the movie that shall not be named). Check Ridley Scott, James Cameron, etc...hell, even Terry Pratchett in his latest novels where he clearly was mentally affected by Alzheimer and no one dared to tell him it wasn't that good anymore, although in this case he's quite innocent and more understandable...there's sometimes these ego trips by people that fuck stories really bad, and it's quite a shame.

Well, anyway, after all this negative comments, I have to remind that ME3 is still a great game, and I really enjoyed this replay. And I have to make a special mention to the DLC. DLC can be quite "evil", when it greatly improves the original game or adds important plot points, and I have to say, yeah, ME3 DLC is quite evil in that sense, because it's really really good and it makes up for the flaws it had quite a lot. 

ME3 has 3 big DLC packages that improve the plot a lot. First, there's Leviathan, which explains the reaper's origins (interesting but maybe it was better to leave them a mystery), is quite epic and feels a bit like Abyss (the movie). Then there's Omega, which doesn't add as much but explores a bit more an "asshole" character from ME2, Aria. She's still an asshole even if she's nice with you, but you understand her better after this and the whole plot is really cool with action. Finally, there's the Citadel DLC. This one is just amazing. It's funny, intense, curious, introduces cool concepts, and has some of the greatest moments and dialogues of the series. This DLC is an apology letter to the fans of ME3 by the creative team, showing what ME3 could have been, and it's a proper send-off for the trilogy, allowing you to interact with all the people that have been part of your squad (unless they died, and then they also get a special moment for them) . I know it's paid content and I'm against it usually, but in this case it's totally worth it and amazing. Originally I didn't get it when I played for the first time, but now I did, and this really redeemed ME3, because I think ME in general shines more when it's funny and warm and properly epic, instead of when it tries to just be epic in a very limited and overdone military-style way. 

And it's best left unexplained, so you can experience it if you'd like :)

Mass effect 2: Bigger and better

Following up on my previous post, I want to talk about Mass Effect 2 this time. The game came out some time after the first one, enough time that I had partially forgot about these games the first time it came out. It promised to continue the epic tale, although the scope seemed a bit less epic from the description. 

The game said that now you worked for Cerberus, a racist organization in the first game that performed dubious research and were bad guys, focused in humanity first and fuck the aliens, basically. And that your mission was to attack a base used by a race called "Collectors" that were kidnapping humans. When stated like that, this game seemed initially a downgrade from the first one.

Therefore, it was a big surprise to see the game ended up being awesome. I'd say, overall, it's better than the 3rd game. The 3rd game requires another post, of course, but let's say that, without DLC, it has several screw-ups that made it inferior. With DLC this is compensated, but that's "cheating". ME2 is really really good since the start, with no extras. 

The game is basically a "heist" story, with the heist being the attack I mentioned. To succeed you must find a group of people willing to help you and you need to gain their trust. Some characters repeat from the previous game, although there's plenty of new ones. You work with the white supremacist organization but they give you free reign about what to do and you can put distance with them, and there's a lot of character development, for you and for your partners.

Graphics are still awesome, slightly improved from the first game. Gameplay is similar, but with a lot more action: the power system has been remade, and biotics especially have been improved and are pretty awesome now, more dynamic, you can keep using them instead of a weapon.The weapons have been changed, and they've backtracked on the idea of having no ammo, and now they do have ammo, which I think it's a downgrade and makes no sense story-wise, but it may be true that it accelerates combat if you compare it with the previous game. Enemies are a bit more varied and there's less feeling of padding or combat repetition, although some sections do feel a bit elongated. 

What has been developed a lot are the side missions. You no longer explore deserted little squares with the same 3 interiors copy-and-pasted, now you don't really explore with a vehicle but you do missions, each with their layout, their objectives and goals. This feels fresh, interesting and does not seem repetitive at all, and the game gets really better from it. The resources mechanics, where you scan planets for resources, is still a bit tedious but in no time and just checking the ones around you as you do side missions you can get all you need.

The game now mostly consists of recruitment missions, where you find a new crew member, and then if you interact enough with them, crew members also give you loyalty missions, missions that guarantee their loyalty to you. All of this is purely optional actually because from the start or at any point, you can try and trigger the suicide "heist" mission, but if you don't have enough ship reinforcements, the right crew and the right equipment, the mission will fail. As you recruit members, there's a few special missions that let you gather extra information that you'll need to at least be able to start the suicide mission without failing immediately, and after these are completed you're free to try and do it, but if you don't have everyone's loyalty, people will die, and sometimes it won't be the person not loyal the one that dies.

That means that what makes sense is to delay the mission as much as possible while you make sure your whole crew is loyal and happy, while at the same time not delaying it too much after a certain event that happens after the third special mission. Some of them are tricky to convince, because certain pairs will fight each other and you need high diplomacy/intimidation stats to make them both happy, and the same apply to some loyalty missions where you need to do some convincing, but nothing crazy if you've been consistently trying to increase one particular stat of these two. 

Where the game shines is in the fact that you interact with all your crew members, establish a relationship, get to know each other and befriend them. This game is basically a huge character development plot for all your team members, and it's brilliant to see and experience. This is a strong character-driven story, and their diverse stories are original and interesting, and they make you wanna try and help everyone. After you've developed relationships with all of them, friendly or romantically if you romance one of them (you can only romance one person), you want to keep everyone alive, and then you try extra hard for the final mission. 

The final mission is also a very bright moment for the game. It's epic, it's big, and it's made in such a way that there's a lot of possible outcome combinations. Some characters may die, and you need to select the right people for the right tasks to avoid it. If you mess it up enough, you may also die while still completing the game, which is a pretty awesome thing, although it's a "bad" ending. The level of care about your previous choices and options is amazing and I've never seen anything like this in other games that mention that all your choices matter, since in other games it's more common that this is not true at all (and I'm including ME3 in this list, which makes the case of ME3 all the more annoying, because they did do it well in ME2).

This time I played with a female renegade vanguard Shepard, and I have to tell, it felt amazing and awesome to launch enemies left and right with biotics, or to dash towards them and hitting them hard to then shot them with a shotgun, and being able to be sarcastic and foul-mouthed and just a lot more aggressive than what I used to do the first time I played. I still don't like to be mean in such games and I tried to be quite gentle with the crew, they were friends after all, but it was liberating to play a female character like this, and I totally recommend the experience.