Playing Pokémon GO

I downloaded the app last Saturday (16th) when it was released in Sweden and immediately started playing. It was fairly easy to figure out, and by the time I watched a Youtube video about tips & tricks I already knew most of it :P

Since Saturday I've been playing every chance I get. Until today that was mostly during car rides. The app works surprisingly well in cars, but I can say from experience that the GPS tracking can't keep up when you're on a train.

I'm more of a collector than a trainer tbh. I want to complete my Pokédex! That's my main concern. But I've slowly started to power up some of my Pokémon and I'm always excited when I manage to catch one that has almost 200 CP or over 200 CP.

Today I got back at work in Stockholm and since work finished just before noon I decided to walk instead of taking the bus (I now have the sunburn to show for it). Here's my route:

I hadn't even walked for 10 minutes before I caught one Geodude and then a Jynx. Walking along the water I managed to get several Goldeen, Krabby and Magikarp, as well as Golduck, Psyduck, Shellder, Tentacool, Horsea, Poliwag, and Squirtle :P When I got to the Royal Gardens I bought a popsicle and ice tea and then sat down on the grass in the shade, between two poké stops that both had lures on them. Then I sat there for about half an hour and caught Slowpokes, Ponytas, Doduos, Mankeys, Nidorans (both kinds), Zubats, Pidgeys, Rattatas, Magnemites, a Bellsprout and even a Pikachu! I then started walking towards the central station with the goal of having lunch somewhere on the way. Going there I caught a Psyduck, a Voltorb, a Magneton, a Rhyhorn, and an Ekans. Going strong!

All this walking and I also hatched three eggs :P

When I got home I caught a Drowzee on the bed! xD

Here's my current Pokémon (most of them are caught today but I had some special ones from earlier):

Dealing with backlog: Total War: Shogun 2

This game and I have some history. I used to play a lot of Medieval II: Total War about 9 years ago and I remember being very excited about Shogun 2 when it was released. So I got it and started playing it, but for some reason I found it complicated and strange compared to Medieval II. So I got rid of it. Then I bought it again at Steam Summer Sale in 2013. And then I didn't play it until now.

You never really complete a Total War game, but I decided to play one grand campaign and then move on to the next game on my backlog list. I started with the clan Chosokabe. But that started badly and just continued to go badly. So I restarted the campaign as Hojo. Two starting regions felt better than one. And for a while it went really well. "For a while". From 1545 to 1575 (with four rounds per year) it went really well. I had lots of money throughout that time, no rebellion or disease, I could upgrade my buildings to max and build a very tough army. I allied with Takeda Clan and together we wiped out the smaller clans as well as Date and Oda who had begun to spread over Honshu. Then I got greedy. I tried for Kyoto. The seat of the shogunate and a zone that you're required to hold to win the campaign. I collected a huge army with every single one of my generals in it and marched. I lost spectactularly. Which also meant that for a while my daimyo's wife had to take command until her other son (the daimyo's little brother) came of age. I was at war with Chosokabe at this point and they had taken over almost all of the southern parts of Japan. Chosokabe took over Kyoto instead of me, but left only a small army there to occupy the town. So I seized the opportunity and took over the city for myself. It worked. For a few years I was the shogun. (But I needed 60 zones to win the grand campaign and I had only 13).

The loss of my army and leadership at Kyoto meant I had to scramble to build up a new force, but I was out of food and the army upkeep became too high so I had to raise the taxes to avoid going bankrupt. The people complained and I got rebellions all over. The small clans I had defeated came back and around the same time I was backstabbed by Takeda, and both Honma and Amako declared war on me. So there I was with rebellions that brought back Tokugawa, Saito and Satomi, and war with Chosokabe, Takeda, Honma and Amako. I was bankrupt, out of food, no money to hire soldiers, and war on all sides. All I could do was watch as they one by one took down my carefully annexed 13 zones.

 This is going so well and they all like me so much ^^;

Winter 1580 was the end of Hojo clan. Once the shogunate and a fearsome power.

It was a lot of fun to play Total War again :) I don't know if my way of playing has gotten worse since I last played a TW title (which was Empire), or if Shogun 2 isn't just harder than both Medieval II and Empire. The food factor isn't really a big deal in Empire or Medieval II, and I think the army upkeep cost was higher in Shogun 2 than in the others. Or I just got less money from resources in Shogun 2. In Medieval II I can easily get a full army in every city I control, while I sweep through medieval Europe and claim every country for my own. Same with Empire. But in Shogun 2, for some reason, my ordinary way of playing didn't work. I need a new tactic.

This game also gets a major gold star for having all the marching units speak Japanese! はっ！次のご命令は？(Yes! What's your next order?)

Playing Skyrim quest mods: The Forgotten City

Next up in quest mods was The Forgotten City. It's in the top tier of Top Rated All Time on Steam Workshop and the comments promised an amazing time. It was fully voice-acted (and tbh the voice-acting was better than Falskaar), but putting voice-acting on some of the notes felt a little OTT. I read faster than that character is saying the letter, but if I don't wait around for the character to finish the letter then it doesn't show up as completed in my journal. -.-'

But anyway, you get a letter from Cassia asking you to come to a forgotten Dwemer ruin in the south west corner of Skyrim. Her brother has been gone in there for a long time and she wants you to come and save him.

The story is a mystery that needs to be solved. Time-travel is involved as well as paradoxes. What is the Dwarves' Law? Are the Dwemer busts on the walls really watching your every move? How does the sun under the ground work? And who will be the one to break the Dwarves' Law and condemn the whole city to slaughter? It's non-linear and there are multiple possible endings.

SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ON

When you take the leap of faith you arrive in a deserted city. There are burned corpses everywhere and on the square in front of you, from a branch in the tree in the middle hangs the corpse of an old man. Approaching him he falls down and you pick up his suicide note. That's Altrius, Cassia's brother. How did he get old?! The letter mentions a loop of events and the key to the Lakehouse. The Citadel is the only door that can be opened and exploring it you find several letters in the inhabitants' rooms, as well as an indicator that one of them was clearly a member of the Dark Brotherhood. On the top floor you're attacked by Altrius' ghost and then you find the key to the Lakehouse on the Jarl's balcony. The balcony collapses once you pick up the key and you almost die. Then you head to the Lakehouse where you find a letter from the Jarl saying that he opened a portal to the past with his life energy as the price and asks the player to prevent the horror that happened.

So you go through the portal and end up in the past. You're taken to meet the Jarl and after explaining that you got there from the future and giving him his own letter he asks you to find out who is most likely to break the Dwarves' Law and doom them all.

SPOILERS OVER

As I talked to the characters and collected clues. I accidentally triggered the bad ending that made everyone die. I reloaded and went on. I kept on following up on clues and before I knew it I had found a good ending and completed the mod. Without even having discovered everything. When I watched gameplay videos on Youtube I realised just how much I had missed by discovering a good ending just like that. I didn't even go into the Palace or the barricaded Underground tunnels. I could of course reload and go through it all again... But I still feel like I completed it. My good ending made everyone (except for one) get out of there alive. But I have a hunch that there is another good ending that removes the Dwarves' Law from the city and people can live there without being afraid of a single mistake killing everyone. A part of me wants to replay to get that ending, But most of me is content with the ending I got.

My last 5 books: Biographies, comics, classics, and Japanese

1. J.K. Rowling: The Wizard Behind Harry Potter, by Marc Shapiro.

This is an unauthorized biography, which means that Shapiro has taken every interview and news snippet he could find and pieced together the story of J.K. Rowling and how Harry Potter became the phenomenon that it is. I have the updated version which was published just after the release of Deathly Hallows in 2007. As much as I know about Harry Potter and his fictional world, by reading this I discovered that I didn't know much about Rowling and I enjoyed getting to know her (albeit through the eyes of another). The book was alright, though it contained a few things that were obviously nothing but speculation on the author's part. It was also obvious that it was written so that the many children who enjoy Harry Potter could enjoy it. The language was simple, which felt very unprofessional after coming directly from an adult biography about Alice Cooper. But I really did enjoy reading it.

2. Alice Cooper: Golf Monster, by Alice Cooper with Keith & Kent Zimmerman.

My second Alice Cooper biography and I liked this one a lot more than Welcome to My Nightmare. In general they both talked about the same things. But Golf Monster was written with the help of the man himself and so it feels more personal and it has more details than Welcome to My Nightmare. Golf Monster stayed on the course of Coop's life, while Welcome to My Nightmare strayed into the changing music scene over the decades and started describing how that affected Alice. Which was interesting as well, but not nearly as much as reading about him. I haven't read many biographies, but this is the best one I've read!

3. Fables: The Deluxe Edition, vol 1, by Bill Willingham.

I got interested in reading the comics after I played Telltale's The Wolf Among Us. The game is based off the comics. I found this at Swedish Comic Con in Stockholm about 2 years ago and bought it then, but I haven't gotten around to reading it until now. The comics are very good and I didn't want to put it down once I started. I know a lot of fairy tales, but there are some nursery rhymes that have never been translated to Swedish (simply because they don't work in translation) and so I was never introduced to them growing up. So I know the fairy tale characters (even the slightly obscure ones like Rose Red), but I know hardly any nursery rhyme characters. I loved the relationship portrayed between Snow White and Rose Red, and I also enjoyed discovering how the relationship between Snow and Bigby differed between the comics and the game. I'm definitely looking forward to picking up the next volume!

4. The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas.

This was a major project. When my grandmother moved from her big house to a small flat, she gave away a lot of her things to her family and to charity. I picked up this beautiful collection of the Three Musketeers translated into Swedish in the early 60s, so the language is somewhat old-timey but not really old style. Does that make sense? I started reading this in May and I finished just last week. I was half expecting the books to be dull (French writers were really ruined in my eyes after university French), but they turned out to be very exciting and I couldn't put them down. I remember watching the movie (The Man with the Iron Mask) when I was little and my favourite back then was D'Artagnan, but after reading the books my favourite became Athos. Also because of the movie, every time the books mentioned Porthos I got a picture of Gerard Depardieu in my head. I originally thought the 16 books were parts of the same book (Les Misérables was 2000 pages long so...), so imagine my surprise when in book 6 everything starts to pan out and be resolved and there's an epilogue! I continued reading the books of course and realised that the other 10 books were part of the sequel Twenty Years After. The suddenly new setting messed with me, and to begin with I really didn't like the new setup, but it grew on me and after a while I was back to not wanting to stop reading. Checking it out on wikipedia made me realise that there's actually another story that takes place 10 years later. I don't think I'll be able to find it as part of my beautiful collection, but now I just really want the last part.

5. Durarara!!, vol 1, by Akiyo Satorigi.

I watched a few episodes of this anime back in 2010 and it grew on me. So when I found the manga in Japanese I decided to read it. My general opinion is that "maybe it gets better in the next volume". This first volume was basically just an introduction to the characters, and while the characters are interesting it became a mess to keep the names apart after such short introductions. It sets the stage that something is off in Ikebukuro, and presents the mystery that is the Black Biker. This volume is just a major stage setting, if the story kicks off in the second volume it will probably be better.

Dealing with backlog: Clockwork Tales: Of Glass and Ink

Clockwork Tales is a steampunk point-and-click game that I bought at the Steam Summer Sale last year. I really like point-and-click games, although they have been known to drive me temporarily insane when I don't understand what I have to do next.

The story of the game is pretty simple. A professor is investigating some mysterious tremors, earthquake-like tremors, and he gets into trouble. He sends a letter to his protegé who arrives in the town just before he is captured, and you spend the rest of the game playing as this protegé trying to rescue the professor as well as stopping the evil plans of the mastermind who's behind the tremors.

Ever since I was little and played Freddi Fish I've enjoyed games where I pick up seemingly random items from anywhere which will be important at a location at a later time. Going through my inventory and trying to figure out which items could fit where is a lot of fun. But my favourite thing in this game were the many hidden object puzzles, where you zoom in on a place and are presented with a mess of things. In the bottom are either silhouetted icons of the items you need to find in the mess, or a list of the items.

Examples of hidden object puzzles

The other puzzles were a bit more time-consuming and I admit that I used a guide for most of them. I've done a lot of point-and-click by now and after looking over the puzzle I can usually tell quite easily if this is one I can solve on my own without much trouble or if I'll need help before long. It's my safety mechanism to not go temporarily insane. I'd rather have a guide telling me what to do than staring at the screen feeling stupid.

Examples of puzzles. These are the ones I found pictures of, and these are also ones I managed without help.

The cutscenes were nice and the voice-acting was very good for a simple point-and-click. The cutscenes felt like watching cartoon shorts.

The only thing that really bugged me was that it was so short. I thought it'd be around 8-10 hours long, but instead I was done after 4½ hours. That's basically the only complaint I have. I wish it could've been longer.