The Landing

And now for something completely different, a little short story I wrote, hope you like it:

Matt revised his instructions again. He already knew them inside out, but it felt like one of those tests back in college that you were never sure you'd pass, however much you did study. Check telemeters, check thrusters... his mind was about shut down again. There was no point in reading it again, but his churning stomach didn't really care how finely he had memorized it.
Then again, what he was most afraid was not the landing, but the speech. Crap, did Armstrong have this many doubts before landing on the moon?! Sure, it was just a speech, and he would be remembered anyway even if his words were not exactly literary genius, but at least he had to try and get close to the "one small step for man..." phrase.
Ethan, the capsule "pilot" was focused in his console; his job did not have much else to it, since the capsule pretty much piloted itself. He flipped a couple of switches and gave him an "ok" sign with his hand.

Matt nodded and flipped his own confirmation switch. His index finger caressed his "detach" button, and counted down to three in his communicator. 3... 2... 1...

The capsule creaked as it detached itself from the main module in orbit and moved lazily as two small thrusters fired simultaneously just once, setting them on route to the red planet.

Matt's eyes frantically checked all his controls and status screens, making sure that the acceleration was not in excess and that the route was inside the safety parameters. Good so far. Matt felt the capsule starting to speed towards the Big Red Ghoul, as Mars was sometimes called because of the difficulty of landing something on it without smashing it to pieces.

Their speed was rising steadily as they entered Mars’ thin atmosphere. Matt had gone through this hundreds of times in simulation, but seeing their speed close to Mach 5 in real life and knowing that they wouldn’t be able to slow down until they were just 10 km above ground was simply making his head feel like a pressure cooker.

But that was just the stress related to the situation - plummeting to the ground at such speeds was not exactly something you looked forward too. Matt could swear that his stomach was still somewhere in orbit, and he lost his sight for a second (not that he would tell anyone this anytime soon).

The altimeter raced down and the on-board computer showed the countdown for the deployment of the hypercone. Without the hypercone, this mission would be impossible and if it failed, Ethan and Matt would become two small stains on the surface of Mars, that is if that much of them was left of course. The hypercone should act somehow as a "super parachute”, if that makes any sense; it was like a donut covered with a silk bedsheet - and it should "open" like an inverted parachute, with the "donut" floating above them and the sheet holding it to the capsule.

Again, the countdown... just how many countdowns had they had since the start of the mission? Somebody back at home definitely liked them... three... two... one...

Matt felt as if his head had popped, and even through his thick, specialized spacesuit he could feel the brutal G's that his body was being subjected to... but it was working! They were slowing down drastically... Mach 3... Mach 2... Mach 1...

The capsule started to rumble as the landing thrusters fired up, and Matt could hear Ethan breathing deeply through his communicator.
The landing pad started extending from the capsule with a slow sliding noise and locked into position with a loud "clank".

Now, the only thing left was to touch down on the ground... Matt could feel as if his heart wanted to leap out of his chest, and his stomach was still somewhere higher than it should have been...

They touched down with a short but loud "thump!", and the hydraulic brakes on the capsule legs hissed like a gruelling serpent.

After that, there was a moment of silence. Neither Matt nor Ethan uttered a word, as if waiting for something else to happen... but no, it didn't, they were down, they were safe, they had made it!

They both exploded in a loud and almost tearful cheer of relief and pride that lasted easily for two or three minutes. Finally, when they somehow regained their senses, Ethan talked through his communicator.

- Control, this is Ares 3, we have touched down safely, I repeat, we are down safely!

They waited for what it seemed like ages for the message to reach Earth and the answer to reach them back, when in truth it was only about 6 minutes, and Matt almost became deaf at that very moment, the control room threw at them an even louder and longer cheer, followed by a long series of congratulations, bravados and similar screams of happiness and success that were barely recognizable because of the number of voices and tones of those uttering them.

Finally, the cheering and screaming quietened down and they received an intelligible answer.

- Ares 3, this is Control. Congratulations once again for your safe landing! We are receiving all the automated data generated by your landing module, and it seems that you're at stable ground and you are clear for a Martian walk. Boys, we are about to make history!

Ethan answered in an obviously nervous and cheerful manner.

- Roger Control! We'll go out in 10 to 15 minutes. The cameras are already rolling and transmitting.

Ethan closed his communicator and looked at Matt, smiling slyly.

- You ready to make history?
- Are you?
- Nope.
- Same here... I still have no idea what to say...
- I guess you'll know when you go out.
- I do hope so...

While they talked, they were already checking their spacesuits, following the same routine that had been repeated over and over back on Earth. All seemed fine; their air reserves were still high, they had no problems with sealing and all different sensors and transmitters where in working order.

Matt stopped for a moment after checking everything to put his thoughts in order… and some of the bad ones crept in. He knew, in fact, everyone knew that he was chosen to be the first one out of the capsule. Not because he was the best of the crew, but because he was black and it was politically correct and progressive. Ethan and the others had reminded him again and again that he also was one of the best, if not the best, and it did ease it somehow, but what eased it the most, was the thought that he, and not someone else, was going to be the first man on Mars. Greedy and full of pride, sure, but it tasted great nonetheless.

- You ready? – said Ethan –
- As much as I could be…
- Good enough I guess… open the hatch.

And Matt did so; he pulled the safety handle, and then the double handle that started the depressurization of the capsule and slowly but surely, the door to the outside opened, giving them a breathtaking vision that would stay with them for the rest of their lives.
Red, rocky and silent, the huge expanse of the side of Mount Olympus that they had landed in was waiting for them. The barren lifeless landscape went beyond the horizon, and as shockingly empty it was, it was also incredibly beautiful.

With no more sounds than their own breathing accompanying them, they started walking towards the wasteland. Each step seemed to take hours, and when they had to grab onto the ladder to go down to the ground, Ethan broke the silence and captivating atmosphere for a second informing Earth.

- Control. We’re about to go down, Matt is already on the ladder, keep those cameras rolling.

Matt breathed deeply and went carefully, even though he could have jumped down without worry as Mars’ low gravity made him feel like a feather, but he decided to take it slowly.
He finally touched down, his feet firmly on the red ground, his eyes looking up to the yellow sky and horizon. He closed his eyes for a second and finally spoke.

- It may look like the end of the road for some, but we must not forget, this is just another stop on the journey of discovery that humanity started the very day we became what we are…

Ethan didn’t say a thing, he just stopped close to him and handed him one of the two portable flags they where carrying on the capsule. They poked the ground with them and, finding it harder than it looked, after a second they used all their strength to stab the ground with them, leaving both firmly attached to Mars, marking the place where they started, rather than ended, one long and arduous journey for humankind.

After that, their communicators brought them a round of applauses that started slow and quiet and ended devouring them for minutes. Together, they looked at the horizon and savoured the moment of their lives and the lives of many others with their eyes in the sky that very day.

London, here I come!

In one of those weird chances that life has, I won a contest in an spanish videogame magazine, and in doing so, I've become part of the spanish team in the Dragon Age tournament that happens next week in London.

We'll have to play in turns the game for 24 hours straight and try and get more achievements and level than the rest of the teams.

I frankly don't know our possibilities... I do know that I'm probably the more "casual" gamer of my team (and that's not saying much), but none the less, I'll try to help the team and more than anything, have a good time.

Wish me luck!

The endless summer has finished at last!

Some years ago, I started watching an anime (Japanese cartoons) by the name of The Melancholy of Suzumiya-Haruhi, I watched the first episode and was utterly confused and bored about what I was watching but following some advice that was written in the site where I got the series, I watched the second episode of the series, and boy was I glad that I did.

It's difficult to tell what is good about this series without spoiling it, and even if I went ahead and spoiled it, it would be a serious case of better than it sounds.

Long things short, GO SEE THIS SERIES, it's one of the best to have graced us in this decade.

With that out of the way (boy do I like to take detours), I get to the reason of my post.

This year a second season of the series started, showing more of the chapters in the books it follows in animated form. And, in something that can only be described as either a "dick move" or "pure stupid", the people behind the series decided to make the same episode 8 frikin' times!.

This is not a case of laziness however, the animation on each iteration was a brand new depiction of the same events, and even the dubbing of the characters was brand new... over and over again.

This is idiotic on so many levels... like I said, it's not a case of laziness or filler, but how can anyone think this is actually a good idea?. It's not because they are following the novels letter by letter, since A) They never did it, B)In the novels it's only a short chapter!

Thankfully it's finally over, and we got a brand new episode. I really hope the stupid aneurysm that affected the creators it's over.

For those of you planing to see the series, you can watch episode 2 and then whatch episode 9, and you wouldn't have missed a thing... in fact, you can go ahead and watch only episode 9...

DLC, Languages and customer inconvenience

Though I bought Fallout's 3 "Operation Anchorage" when it came out some months ago, some problems with my videocard stopped me from playing it at all.

Yesterday I finally got it to work (even with the video problems the new quest never started the first time I tried it) and imagine my surprise when in my perfectly fine English version of the game, I start hearing some of the horrible Spanish dubbing...

Apparently, the language of the DLC is ALWAYS in the language of the country you set on your gamercard... in my case Spain (good thing I didn't change it to Poland!) and the worst part is that you can't legally change it!

Whose idea was this anyway?. In today's world people travel a lot so you might find yourself in a situation where you don't know (in my case polish) the language of the territory you're settled in, or maybe you just prefer it in your mother tongue, or maybe you don't like it to be translated at all because your local translation is horrible (my case).

So why am I forced to either ask a foreign friend for the language files in the language I want the DLC?, why do I have to mess with the game files?, which is something that, while easy, is not intuitive for some less tech-savvy people.

Things like this encourage pirating. I'm not that bitter, but I could say "screw it!" and just download the rest of the DLCs from a torrent site, that way I can have it without messing with the buggy as hell Games for Windows client (the thing is very prone to breaking and most of the time you have to reformat your system to fix it) and I also get to choose what language I want the content to be installed.

When the illegal option is easier than the legal one... well, let's just say that people ain't that stupid.

Looking for Monkeys

Ok. So that hustle from work is finished, thank god...

In the aftermath I've been reclaiming a bit of my life (the little I use) and, among other things, playing Monkey Island.

For those of you that don't know, a new Monkey Island game has been released recently (the day of my birthday no less!), or rather, the first chapter of said game.

The game has been produced by Telltalle Games, a little company founded by disenchanted Lucasarts employees, who already resurrected Sam & Max a couple of years ago.

Also, a new "remake" of the original Monkey Island, has been produced by Lucasarts, you can get it from Steam, for the cheap, though still unreasonable, price of 9 EUR (unreasonable because of dollar to euro parity).

As a person and a gamer who grew up with Lucas adventure games, I can only say that I'm pretty much thrilled by this turn of events, I always had the hope of seeing the "good old times" come back in the future, but it's one of those things you *want* to believe, not actually believe without doubt.

While the new game has a setting island that's not really as charming or interesting as the previous games ones (Monkey Island 4 not withstanding), as a game, it's undoubtedly a Monkey Island game, our beloved idiot genious Guybrush Threepwood (boy, I can't belive I can write that name without errors on my first try) is given life by his original voice actor from "Curse", and the puzzles from the game all use that "rubber-chicken-with-a-pulley-in-the-middle" logic that we know and love.

The remake on the other hand, is kinda of a mixed bag. For one part, it's awesome to "hear" the voices of all the characters in the game, finally. But on the other hand, the look of the game is weird as hell...

Instead of rebuilding the whole game from scratch, the Lucas crew decided to build the remake "over" the old game, repainting scenery, sprites and characters and redoing the inventory and verb system.

The problem is that the animation in the game is really old and stiff, and while in the old graphics this doesn't really show, in the new ones it kinda sticks out like a sore thumb.

The most awesome thing, is that you can change between the old version and the new one, with the hit of a key (F10 in the PC case). I miss some options, for example, having the voice overs in the old version, rather than the "all or nothing" aproach it takes... but on the whole, I recommend it.

I'll try to put my head in order for the next post, so It's less rambling.

Final Fantasy Tactics A2

I'm ambivalent to Strategic Japanese RPGs... I grew up playing games like Civ and the absolutely awesome X-COM (I'll post sometime about it), so I don't dislike turn-based strategy games, they tend to be more cerebral and more "strategic" than real time ones but, they do have their share of problems.

The most aggravating one for me on turn based games it's the flow of the game itself, I know it's a personal thing (most fans of the genre won't ever have a problem) but I get bored easily if the computer takes too long to end it's turns, cast it's spells etc... For example, the most awesome games in this regard are the Super Robot Wars games, why?, because you can swich attack/ defend animations on and off!, so If you are in a long and intense battle and you just don't care about the flashy stuff, and just want to know if that last attack destroyed your top tier unit or not, you can, but you can also see and rejoice on how your last attack destroys the enemy boss in absolutely brutal fashion. SRW games are not the only ones in this regard, Disgaea is also a member of this awesome club.

Not so with other games, which brings me to the grandaddy of the game I'm reviewing today, Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSX.

I remember playing this one when PSX japanese RPGs where the shit, I had played some FFs but sadly, never finished one of them (I'll try to research into that another day). This also happened to FF Tactics.

However, while the other FF games I stopped playing them mostly because I usually found better things to do with my time (meaning they where entertaining, just not as much as other things), FF Tactics was utterly boring.

Why?, because of the aforementioned "too long computer turns syndrome" I mentioned above. I don't remember the details since it has been almost 10 years since I played, but I remember just turning off the game one day calling it shit, and just leaving it to eat dust until it disappeared from my home, something by the way, I don't even remember how it happened.

When FF Tactics Advance came out, I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the GBA to be fair, and quite frankly, what my friends told me about the "judge" system in the games really put me off. So this one I skipped entirely, no big loss I though, since I already didn't like the first one.

And know I have in my hands FF TA2.

I started playing it out of sheer boredom, since I didn't have any other interesting games right now for my DS, but it has quickly draw me in and now I'm happily dedicating it hours of my time regularly.

For starters, it's a cute game, with a colorful cast drawn like a mix between an anime and a children's coloring book.

The story in the game it's quite simple, but it works, out hero funnily named by default "Luso" it's a kid in school (I think it's supposed to be Highschool, being this a Japanese game, but it really looks like a grade school) that finds a estrange and unwritten book on the schools library. He get sucked into the book and thrust into a world of adventure!

While Luso is a paperthin character as development goes, I cannot but sympathize with the little guy, as soon as he arrives in Ivalice, he's eager for adventures and travels, and is in absolutely no hurry to find a way back home, and it's a very refreshing thing to see in a JRPG hero, a genre thats clogged with brooding and indecisive heroes, nostalgic also, as it reminds me of "Justin" the hero of the original Grandia, who is also one of my favorite JRPG heroes.

The game follows a very simple mechanic, you go to a pub, take a quest, complete it. Rinse and repeat.

The battles are fought in turns (duh) and you have a variety of characters that can move through a really cool amount of "jobs" (classes). From this different jobs you get different skills, some passive, some active, some useful, other worthless and some absolutely gamebreaking... the usual stuff. This is, in fact, the most addicting facet of the game, you always want to try one more battle to unlock some class or equipment piece that will let you learn some new (hopefully) cool power, and the variety is such that it takes a lot of time to get boring.

The quests themselves are varied and try to spice things up a bit so they are not "kill all the monsters" time and time again, and somewhat succeed, although not for the right reasons, since I'm always happy to find a "kill all the monsters" mission again. The fact is that the "varied" missions tend to be rather dull, and most of them are actually "kill all the monsters with X handicap", which is horribly redundant because we have the judges for that.

The judges made their first appearance in FFTA1, I didn't play that game, but I do remember my friends cursing and bitching about "the fucking judge" on FFTA1.

The judge establishes "laws" on each quest, these "laws" are just a way of saying "handicapped", the judge will order things like "you must move every turn", which is easy enough, to "don't deal more than X amount of damage" which if you like to powergame as I do, is absolutely horseshit.

However it's bearable, the penalty for not following the "law" it's not being able to resurrect characters and not getting some extra "loot" at the end of the battle. Also, the "laws" are always the same for each battle, so you can come prepared if you somehow screwed up when you reload the game. This is far better than the original judge, if my sources are to be believed, since in FFTA1 the judge handed his "laws" randomly, dropping some stupid laws like "don't attack" and actually arresting your characters if you didn't follow them, with possibly humorous results.

Strategy wise... it's not really that deep, it's mostly a matter of having the right guy for the right job and investing time (and side quests!) in raising the skills and level of your units so they can overpower, over move, over... you get the idea. Which is not entirely bad, it just means that it's strategy it's outside the actual battle and into the "unit screen".

And yes, you gessed it, the computer turns are not overly long, I'm especially happy to see that Summons, the black sheep in FF games that it's absolutely awesome and totally boring at the same time (for the love of god Bahamut, JUST KILL THEM AND BE DONE WITH IT!!!) are rather quick, just like other spells, making the game not exactly quick paced, but fast enough to keep my atention.

All in all, it's a fine and entertaining game, and I recommend it.

Beginings...

Blogging... never though I'd end up doing this, but lately the prospect of being able just to dump some opinion or do some review or something else, it's surprisingly atractive.

So... how to start?

I know, I'll review a game, that ought to be easy...