Sydney Hunter and the Curse of the Mayan

Every once in a while, I’m glad to see that the olden days of gaming haven’t entirely vanished. Of course, big studios won’t make a retro throwback title on their own, because that’s usually not where the money lies anymore. However, leave it to indie studios to dip into the 8bit/16bit era every now and then. The shining example of such is Shovel Knight, but there are many others.

Spears, fireballs, and a moving wheel with a
skull. Yep, everything's trying to kill you.

I was first told about today’s game for two reasons: First is the “retro throwback” aspect, which… Hey, I grew up playing NES and SNES games, I’d love to see more homages to those times. The second reason is that it was developed by an indie studio based in the province of Quebec. CollectorVision is a studio that creates homebrew games for various retro consoles. So far, they only have one title that made it to digital platforms: Steam and the Switch, Xbox One and PS4 stores. And considering how many homebrew games of theirs bear the name of this game's protagonist, I can safely say he’s their mascot.

"Gee, let's hope this thing doesn't trap me in."

I know the "Item split into many pieces" trope is common
in retro games, but these pieces are quite a bit bigger than
the usual objects a hero has to pick up on their journey.

Sydney Hunter and the Curse of the Mayan was released on September 12th, 2019. Its concept is simple: Adventurer archaeologist Sydney Hunter has decided to explore the Mayan ruins, but he falls and gets trapped within. As it turns out, the Mayan civilization is still alive in there, but struggling. The feathered serpent Kukulkan has shattered their sacred calendar into seven pieces, freeing their Sun God Kinich Ahau. Both appear to be possessed by some sort of curse. And this, just as Wayeb, the five unluckiest days of their civilization, are about to begin. If the calendar is not restored before the end of those days, chaos will strike the land… after which, time will freeze forever. As it turns out, this prophecy mentions an outsider coming to help the Mayan civilization in these dire times. And Sydney is more than willing to lend a hand!

Disneyland Adventures (Part 2)

I covered a lot of ground already, but I have a lot more to say than I thought, therefore I needed a Part 2. (Here's a link to Part 1.)

Let’s do this. 

Collect Me This, Collect Me That

Hook, Aurora, Ariel, Mowgli. Characters of
all origins and from very different worlds.

I’ve mentioned it already, but it bears repeating that this game is bursting at the seams with content. You can go on side-quests for collectibles; take pictures of everything that matters; get every costume; or go with the flow and do what the mascots ask you to do. And there’s a lot; you can gather quests easily by simply walking around and talking to the Disney heroes. At one point I had 17 concurrent quests. (And yes, the damn Golden Ticket bugged me about them all the time.) The quests are varied, ranging from “Talk to Character X” to “Take pictures for me” passing by “Buy this costume at the shop” and “Play attraction X”, and of course there's more I'm forgetting. 

However, more often than not, you’ll be sent on a collection quest where you have to gather, I dunno, three ropes or ten toffee apples or whatever. As much as I despise its interjections, I'll admit that the Golden Ticket's adventure trail comes in handy for those. Still, it’s bugging me how Disney characters will think of any excuse to send you on a quest to gather thirteen pangolins or twelve bats or whatever.

Seriously, look at this. Those are all things I was seeking at the same time at one point.

And since I took that screenshot, I accumulated
MORE collection quests.

Disneyland's Thousands of Secrets

But that’s not all. Throughout your journey on this neverending day at Disneyland, you’ll also be given magical items from time to time. The first is your trusty camera, which I’ve already discussed at length, but there are others, and since they are such an integral part of the “exploration” portion of the game, they all need their own paragraph. 

• 

  Please ignore the dancing trash cans.
  There's nothing whimsical to see here!
  ...It's TRASH CANS!

  The magic wand: You’re given an honest-to-Walt magic wand that can make items come to life. Why? Because, that’s why. It can interact with most objects around. Do you want to see parasols spinning on their own, trash cans dancing in place, manhole covers doing flips? No? Too bad, now you can. Playing with this item for long periods of time actually made me realize why this game needs so much memory and demands such long loading times: Dang near every single object has an animation that activates through an item in your inventory. It will even work on a few unique props in each area of the park! 
• The blaster: Given by Buzz, this thing has two functions. Like the wand, it can interact with objects, though in its case, all it can do is turn on any light fixtures for a few seconds. Its main use, however, is to play shooting games around the park; shoot at a target, and you’ll be taken to a mini-game. 
• The fishing rod: You’re given this thing by Stinky Pete (who is a good guy here for some reason, which feels weird). Can you fish out items? Yes in a rare few quests, otherwise you can only grab fishes. That’s it. Kind of extraneous. 

• 

  I still haven't figured out how to best work
  the controls to these mini-games. Something
  was lost from Kinect to PC.

  The conductor baton: An unofficial item (it’s not in your inventory) given by Prince Naveen, it allows the player character to enter music mini-games when they wave near playing bands around the park. Those mini-games were probably a lot easier to play with motion controls, as they were poorly adapted to mouse controls. I guess its limited use is why the baton isn’t registered in the inventory. 
• The megaphone: Given by Br’er Fox (a character I was surprised to see here alongside Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Bear, considering how badly the Disney company has tried to forget Song of the South). Much like the magic wand, it can interact with objects around, though not as many. Also like the wand, it will have an effect on a couple of unique props. It's also funny to see some mascots’ reaction to it… if they react at all. 

• 

  No? I can't even shoot water at them?
  Dang it.

  The spyglass: Given by Aladdin, this object makes visible the half-invisible treasure chests you could see around the park, but couldn’t interact with until you used this item on them. Doesn’t do much else. 
• The water squirter: Handed over by Donald Duck, this water gun with an unlimited tank will revive flowers and plants around the park. Aren’t sunflowers prettier when they’re open? And considering the sheer amount of plants in this open world, it’ll see use very frequently. I was disappointed to find out you can’t spray the mascots. I'd take any chance to be a jerk.

A different take on popping balloons.

All of these items will also see use in a couple quests each, so there was an attempt at justifying them, though their main use is to find Secrets. Activating all of the identical objects in an area will award the player with a “Secret”, and the game keeps track of the Secrets discovered. The park is huge, and some areas have a lot of elements that can be interacted with, sometimes in high numbers as well – in Toontown, there’s a total of 85 light fixtures to shoot at with the blaster. Good luck spotting of all of them.

And while the game keeps track of the secrets you find in an area, it doesn't have a screen to tell you the progress you've made on secrets you've started but not obtained yet. Keep guessing on your own, kid! Also, not all objects you can interact with emit colored auras to say “Hey, you can use an item on this thing”; the light fixtures don’t, as an example. Thankfully, after you've interacted with an item covered by an aura once, that aura will disappear and won't return.

All of these objects will drop coins when you interact with them. However, coming back after a loading screen will also reset the objects’ money drops and animation states. The sunflowers you opened will be shut again. The problem would be solved if each secret could be interacted with only once, no matter how often the world loads. An “If interacted once = keep final state, cannot repeat” switch for every object, perhaps.

Rides and Attractions, Oh My!

*Grumble grumble* I wanted the front row seat...

There’s another thing I forgot to mention so far: Rides and attractions. Rides can be found around the park and you’re encouraged to ride all of them. Well, all the ones that were made into the game – and even then, those that made it in aren’t worth it. It's also very sad to see so many places where there would be rides, and to which you're not allowed to go - the path is blocked. Attractions, however, are a whole other beast – those are mini-games arranged into story missions. Sometimes, a quest given by a park mascot will ask you to play through one or all of the missions in an attraction. 

"HEEEEEERE'S... BRUCEY!" Did this game for kids,
in a level based on Finding Nemo, just reference
The Shining through the shark named after
the animatronic from Jaws? ...Okay, I respect that.

Those events are based either on existing park rides (such as the Jungle Cruise), or events from Disney movies. As an example of the latter, in the first mission of the Alice in Wonderland attraction, your child character falls down the rabbit hole, then gets shrunk. In the second mission, the child, stuck in a sphere, becomes the ball during the croquet match on the Queen of Hearts’ gardens. It ends on Mission 3 with a dance-off against the Mad Hatter and the March Hare at their never-ending tea party. There is, again, a lot of variety here. You’ll even have the occasional boss fight (I remember, in particular, a fight against Captain Hook at the end of a Neverland-themed attraction). To my surprise, the missions are actually quite lengthy and can take a while to finish.

Okay, this fight was mostly quick-time events,
but I'll be honest, it was pretty fun to watch.

However, several missions will play one way: You’re flying around or floating or getting thrown and you move left, right (and sometimes up and down) to gather coins and avoid obstacles. This is most likely due to the original Kinect controls, where the kid could just move left/right (and maybe jump and duck) in front of their screen to control the character. 

Dance! Dance! It's a Disney character's favorite activity!

This isn’t the only instance of mini-games changing to accommodate the difference in controls between the Kinect and PC versions. Several mascots around the park have tasks where they ask the kid to strike a pose – this happens when taking pictures with mascots of course, but also in other instances. As a result, those tasks are frequently completed on their own, without the player on PC having to do anything. Some mini-game attractions also required the child to strike poses (such as the Tea Party dance-off), but the controls for that were replaced by quick-time events, which… yeah, I can’t think of something better. In short, we did lose a few things in the transfer from motion-control to buttons, but not much overall.

Why do I have a Weird Al song in
my head as I'm playing the Jungle
Cruise ride of Adventureland?

Although, to be honest, I almost forget about the attractions with everything there is to do around the park already. It says a lot about this game’s mass of content. By the way, each mission also has a lot of coins to gather, since those tend to impact the overall score of that mission; so when you finish a mission with 5 stars, it’s usually because you collected tens of thousands in coins throughout. Attractions also stack your cumulative score and give you extra pins in bronze, silver, gold and platinum colors for your overall performance in the whole attraction. 

And yeah, it’s made for children, but I promise that even good gamers will find a challenge in getting the platinum pin for any attraction – so imagine trying to get them for all 18 attractions! 

As a last point I am adding, note that this isn’t solely a single-player game; it’s actually possible to bring a friend and play through the park and the attractions as two players. It’s also implied to make the attractions a lot easier to beat, especially for high scores. And as a bonus, through Steam Remote Play, two kids can play without being in the same room! 

Final thoughts 

This game’s alright. It’s for kids, I know I’m technically not in the target demographic. But I’m also of the strong belief that you can’t just put anything in front of kids, since they’ll absorb what they watch and play, so it’s important to give them good media that carries good life lessons and morals. Or, in the case of video games, good stuff in general. And this is pretty fine on its own. 

Let me say it again, this game broke ground by being an open-world on the Kinect, an all-motion control interface. And yet, it all works. Or rather, since I haven’t tried the original version, I can say it (mostly) works on PC. It’s harmless enough, the child gets to interact with several famous characters of Disney’s history, there’s a large world to explore, thousands of secrets and interactions to have and loads of mini-games to partake in. It never ceases to amaze me just how much content this game has. Damn near everything will react to one or another of the items you add to your inventory, you can go on the rides, and the families wandering the park help make it feel like an actual park-going experience. With that said, so many things on the screen at once, all with their own animations, lead to atrociously long loading times.

Nope, still can't annoy the chipmunks.

Of course, I have critiques here and there, as I’ve laid out throughout these two parts: The sentiment of uncanny valley I get from the kid character interacting with mascots of various different styles. The game struggling to keep everything on the screen, which cause objects to beep in and out of existence, be they props or people. The Golden Ticket will remind the player of things they know and the quest they’re on, which may be tolerable at first but gets unpleasant fast; same goes for the shopkeepers commenting on every single item you purchase. The game keeps track of your progress on missions and collection quests, but doesn’t keep track of your progress on secrets in the eight areas of the park, which makes it really difficult to remember what you’ve done or what you have yet to do. While the attractions are fun, the majority of them will play one way: You move left and right to dodge obstacles, and stuff like that. The over-reliance on collection quests. Lastly, a lot of missions and quests involve posing, which is understandable per this game’s origins on Kinect, and on PC those are either done for you or swapped with button-mashing, quick-time event mini-games, which I feel is an okay trade. 

Add a little bit of magic to the world.

But that pales compared to all the great things it contains: The interactions you can have with all the mascots. The number of quests, be they the ones given to you by mascots or the ones you take on your own, like gathering all of the autographs or finding all of the hidden Mickeys. Playing the attractions can be great, and there is a genuine challenge in getting the gold and platinum pins for all of them. And not only are there secrets to find everywhere, there are mini-games everywhere as well, even in the open world – the conductor baton’s musical mini-games and the shooting galleries triggered by Buzz’s blaster come to mind. I wished there was also a fishing mini-game in places, it would have justified the fishing rod a lot more. 

I’m very happy I played this game. Even as an adult, I felt invested. Kids will love it, absolutely. Adults might enjoy it, as well, although it’s pretty obvious they’re not the target market. Harmless, cute and fun, that’s just what I felt I needed lately. If you do as well, it could be a game to check out. 

Next week: Hopefully something else! In the meantime... well, I'm still stuck at home without work for two more weeks. I might binge-watch some Disney movies, this game has put me in the mood.

Disneyland Adventures (Part 1)

I kind of want to be mean to this one. I’m split between “Well, Disney is like a trillion-dollar company so they can take some no-name blogger being nasty at them” and “But it’s Disney! I’d feel bad tainting this kid-friendly game!”

I know that the current pandemic has struck particularly hard in the United States, but it hasn’t stopped some non-essential businesses from staying open. Among them: Disney’s theme parks. Inexplicably. Last year, there was even a pitiful ad trying to convince people that going to Disneyland was perfectly fine as long as you wear a mask. “Welcome home”, you say, Disney? No, I’m staying home! People aren't careful enough! This sounds like several superpreading events waiting to happen. 

But it doesn’t make a difference for me, seeing as I’ve never been to a Disney park, nor do I know if I ever will. I don't have the budget; if I do have children someday, maybe I’ll try to save up to give them this experience I never had as a kid. In the meantime, I could watch videos taken before 2020 of people going to the parks… or I could play Disneyland Adventures. 

The recreation is accurate.

This game, developed by Frontier Developments and Asobo Studio, was originally published by Xbox Game Studios on November 15th, 2011… for the Xbox 360 Kinect. This game was one of a kind, really. I say that, as it was the only attempt ever made at an “open world” of sorts on the heavy motion control-only platform the Kinect was. Kids could now “visit” Disneyland (Anaheim, California) and interact with Disney’s most famous characters in the comfort of their own home! But I am not reviewing that version of the game… 

Disneyland Adventures was later re-released with new controls for PC on September 14th, 2018, on Steam and as discs, with all Kinect-based controls changed for PC compatibility. This is the one I'll cover today. I know this is a game aimed at kids, and I’m not the target demographic. But if it exists, it can be criticized! And you bet I will.

American Truck Simulator (Part 2)

Alright – we started a trucking business in Part 1 and got the driving and delivery mechanics down. It’s time to focus on the management simulator half of the game.

Yep - you're not just driving around in this game.

But First… Skills

Oh right, I was about to forget them. I mentioned in passing in Part 1 that when you level up thanks to EXP received from a delivery, you gain one Skill Point to spend on your Skills. Most of these skills yield extra rewards in EXP and money. There are six categories:

• 
  ADR/Hazardous materials: Explosives, gases, flammable liquids, etc., all the way to corrosive substances. Obviously, this means you need to be careful.
  
• Long Distance: At first, the longest delivery you can do is 250 miles long. As you add points to this one, the maximum length of deliveries will increase all the way up to 2500 miles. For the record, a delivery this long will take a few days in-game… and three hours in real-time. Yes, really.
• High-Value Cargo: Self-explanatory. You get more money because the cargo you’re carrying is valuable.
• Fragile Cargo: The goal here is to carry this safe and sound, meaning you must drive while avoiding all possible accidents and mistakes. In short: Good luck.
• Just-in-Time Delivery: This one has to be done in a tighter time requirement. Again, extras if you succeed.
• Eco-Driving: Reduces your fuel consumption at each level. Basically a dump stat to be filled once everything else is maxed.

Expanding the First Garage

As an aside, may I mention that I find it funny
that your profile "avatar" and those of your
employees are the faces of real people?

Okay, so we’ve got the driving mechanics down. What’s next? This is where the management part of the game comes in; it’s vital to take it into account. Growing your garage into a steady business is a tough thing, but you have options. First is the bank, which will gladly loan you some money so you can get started quickly, but you’ll then have to repay them an amount every day with some interests. Loans can be as low as 10,000$ or as high as 400,000$. It’s the only way to have any significant amount of cash early on, seeing as your first deliveries won’t yield much in the way of money (in part since you’re low-level and the more rewarding missions are unlocked by spending skill points) and trucks usually cost over 100,000$.

I'll say, the garage looks pretty nice once
it's been fully upgraded.

As long as you repay those loand in time, it's
all good, right?

By the way, those loans? If you go into a negative amount of money, the bank will gladly give you some credit, as long as you can pay them quickly. This can usually be done in one short mission, depending how much money you need to repay. I feel like the bank is very lenient, to the point where it would be very difficult to actually lose at the game. The bank may threaten to impound your properties if you owe them 100,000$ or more, but you have to screw up in a spectacular fashion to get there.

I might as well slip in a couple of truck-driving
pictures, or this part will be nothing but
boring menus.

Buying online is so much simpler.

Early on, you have to do everything on your own, since you’re not a respected name. If you want to buy a truck, you can’t do it online, you have to go there and then drive back to your garage with the new vehicle (your old one, if any, will be brought back to your business). This is until you’ve purchased three trucks; then, buying a truck online becomes an option.

But before you can buy more than one truck, you must upgrade your garage as the starting one has room for only one truck and one employee: Yourself. Each garage has two upgrades, and both are understandably expensive, but they’re worth it as each upgrade opens two more slots for trucks and employees…

From One-Man Operation To Small Business To Empire

Is it going to be easy, to add employees to the mix? Yes and no. The base idea is simple; but it gets complicated fast.

None of them start out all that great.
They'll get better under your supervision.

Thankfully, you don't have to travel to an
agency after you've found it in order to
hire new people.

To get employees, first you need to find recruiting agencies around the map, hence why exploring is necessary. You get more options for people to hire the more agencies you’ve found. Agencies charge a 1500$ base fee for each driver you hire through their services, too – nothing’s cheap. It gets better: These guys don’t do quick jobs. They’ll only work on freight market missions, so they need their own truck, each and every single one of them.

A fully-upgraded garage will have room for yourself and four employees – take into account the cost of upgrading the garage, then hiring the employees and providing a truck per person. It gets expensive quick. And if an employee isn’t given a truck, boy will they let you know; in-universe, they do this job to be paid, so they can’t lie around and do nothing.

While you own only one garage, this menu is
a bit empty. It'll take some time before it
fills up.

Each employee has a rating (up to 5.0), a wage they request per mission (a base amount + an extra amount per mile driven), and a number of levels in their driving skills, which are the same as yours. Under your employment, on top of bringing cash to the business through contracts, they’ll level up in a manner similar to yours, and you can select what you want them to upgrade – everything equal, or one skill at a time. More money will be made with the Long Distance skill. Also, it is entirely possible that some of these employees will actually cost you money early on, but they’ll get better over time as they grab contracts that bring out more money.

After which you can repay your loans thanks to the money you make, but also the money your employees bring back over time. Once this garage is on a roll, you can get some money and buy another garage – and then lather, rinse, repeat. I imagine that, in order to beat the game, you have to own all of the garages and, if not have them all working at full capacity, have hired every single employee available. I’ve been told that it’s impossible to fill all of the garages, apparently there are too many garages and not enough employees in the game’s code.

So Many DLCs

I guess another thing to do in order to finish the game is to visit 100% of the map. As I was writing this, I was in the process of discovering the handful of towns I hadn’t visited yet. And, of course, I have yet to purchase the DLC States I’m missing. The base American Truck Simulator already has quite a bit of content, but it’s worth buying the DLCs in order to increase the size of the map.

Custom paintjobs do look cool.

I personally don’t care much for customization in this one – I know I can buy a custom paint job for my truck, but… eh, money’s still tight and I have loans to repay, customization will wait till my garage is profitable. Still for those who want them, there are DLCs for bonus custom paint jobs and options for wheel tunings. The exterior’s not enough? You can also purchase packs of decorations for the interior of the cabin, if you love to use the first-person view.

If you think it's tough to drive 100% of the map
on three States, imagine when you have ten.

Some other DLC packs unlock new brands of trucks that you can then purchase in the game. Last but not least, three packs broaden the number of thing you can carry to their destination; one lets you carry forest machinery, one is all about heavy cargo, and the last involves very special objects to carry around (portable houses, submarines, etc.).

If you want to buy all of these DLCs, it’ll be expensive. But, to be fair, some are free. Arizona is one of those, so you can unlock a full State as soon as you start playing. And it’s not like all of them are mandatory – I’ll gladly skip the cosmetic ones. The option’s out there if you love to customize your stuff, though, and more options never hurt. It does annoy me a bit that several achievements cannot be obtained unless you have the required DLCs.

Wanna Visit Canada?

I actually bought this game in May 2020, but no, it wasn’t originally because of the pandemic. It was already bad at the time, but I wasn’t longing for open spaces yet. Nah, the game was actually advertised to me as very mod-friendly, with a very large community of modders adding their own stuff to the base content. Looking around the menu, I did find an option for mods, a place that stores them and lets you enable/disable them at will. I am not a big user of mods; I tend to be satisfied with the stuff I’m given, but I understand the appeal. I know there are very large modding communities for many big games out there.

Although, when it comes to American Truck Simulator, there’s a lot of possibilities. The most obvious one: Modders building the map for the rest of North America. All of the missing States (except Hawaii, obviously), then Canada and Mexico. I haven’t tried them, so I can’t really speak on the quality of those mods. Let’s just say that if you like this game, there’s an entire world of unofficial, fan-made content to discover.

Not sure I want to travel across the entire
continent to see my home town.

Thinking about it… I live in Quebec. Even if I did download the Canada mod, it would take me hours and hours to be able to get there and visit my corner of the world – I would have to drive all the way across the continent. Before I can even begin, I would first need a profitable business, seeing as unless the mod includes missions to deliver cargo all the way over to there, then I wouldn’t be making money for my own company. I also don’t know how accurate the depiction of Quebec would be, or whether it would be worth the trip. I imagine it would be stripped down, like all other places in the game, but how much? Would it contain the famous landmarks? Would it feature my home town? Would it have enough content to make me want to explore around? And what about the rest of Canada, the other states of the U.S., or Mexico? Still, I love that not only all those mods exist, but SCS Software encourages their creation and provides tools to help their implementation.

Speaking of - I was about to forget, but there's also a multiplayer mode in which you can join a server and be one of many truck drivers making deliveries. So if you see other trucks behaving erratically in that mode, chances are they're controlled by other human players out there.

Final Thoughts

American Truck Simulator sated my desire to go out onto the roads and see new places. It’s a bit disappointing that we almost exclusively see highways and roads, but that’s normal for the type of game that it is. And, of course, it won’t ever replace the real deal. Besides, the focus is on delivering cargo; it’s possible to drive freely, but first you need a steady stream of revenue. It’s really more of an “American Trucking Business Simulator”; not that I’m complaining, as both halves are pretty great.

Dammit! A roadblock!
At least that's not where I had to go.

Driving: The map is immense from the get-go and can grow larger with all the DLC States released by the studio (not to mention the modding community’s contributions). Although the towns and cities are stripped down to their bare minimum due to the 1:20 conversion and the world feels barren in places, you can still see some of the most interesting sights. It also means that longer deliveries are a serious time commitment, seeing as they can take upwards of three hours in real time to complete. The physics are great, and there’s a couple elements to make things feel somewhat realistic – your driver needs to fill the tank and sleep, but never has to eat or stop for bathroom breaks. It does also mean having to deal with road signs, speed limits, roadblocks, and the occasional idiot driver. 

I will never not find it funny that the game uses
what I assume to be the photos of real people
for the drivers you can hire.

Management: A lot of details are taken into account, as I’ve covered through this part. Managing your business as a single employee, then expanding the garage, the employee workforce, the squad of trucks, and eventually growing into a large business by buying garages all over the land. That’s pretty cool. I assume it could take a few hundred hours of playtime to become the biggest trucking business of them all. I think it’s neat to hire employees and conduct their own growth; it’s a bit annoying that we must buy 3 trucks and drive them home, before we can just buy them online; or buy 3 garages before you can buy them online. Annoying, but understandable since you start as a small name. Don’t you love when the annoying parts in a game are 100% justified by the gameplay?

If driving around, fulfilling contracts, visiting States virtually and/or growing a business sounds like something you’d like, for extended periods of time, then this game is for you. If you don’t like games that require some time commitment, it might not be for you; fair enough. All I know is, it scratched one itch I’ve had for a few months.

Another itch I’ve had was about going to places to have activities… like, say, amusement parks. Definitely not recommended at the moment, but thankfully video games can simulate that too. See you next week.

American Truck Simulator (Part 1)

(vehicle not included in picture)

I already wrote at length at the end of 2020 about how we needed laughter to carry through these trying times, though this pandemic. We do need laughter. We also needed pastimes since a lot of public activities were either closed or not recommended. Among them: Traveling. For a few weeks, in the province of Quebec, traveling between regions was prohibited outside of work or cases of utmost necessity. I did not go to any conventions last year, I did not go to the United States either (I do that for a weekend every summer), I don’t think I even travelled outside of my own region for any reason.

I don’t blame anyone for being fed up of staying at home due to the Covid-19 pandemic. I don’t blame anyone for wanting to go places and feeling angry that they can’t.

(I WILL, however, call out the idiots who have travelled to sunny destinations like Florida or Mexico, where safety precautions around the pandemic are lax, during the Holidays and who came back with a disease as a nice little souvenir from their trip, further spreading that damn thing. But I digress.)

Skyrim isn't the most welcoming place to
travel to, but screw it - at least it feels like
going somewhere.

It was a year in which we needed all the escapism we could get, in part to forget about the situation for a few minutes, in part to have… well, some form of escape. Video games, in particular, offered a fantastic outlet for that. It helps that we had a lot of strong releases in 2020, such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a game that encourages playing for long lengths of time. And Doom Eternal. But what for those who want to explore virtual lands, while they can’t explore real ones? Well, the open-world genre exists for that purpose. I found myself replaying Skyrim every now and then to just… get the impression that I’m going out to see the sights, however fictional they may be.

Today’s game doesn't describe itself as an open world, but it gave me the same impression that I was going freely to places, something I needed. It’s actually a simulator, but a large part of it involves traveling far and wide across a very large world. That world consists of a few States in the Western side of the USA… Only thing is, you’re not just visiting willy-nilly. You have a job to do.

2020 Retrospective

I assume we’re all thinking the same thing: “Fuck this year.” And I agree, this year was awful. Well, it wasn’t entirely bad… but the vast majority of it was. The atmosphere was grim all year due to Covid-19, and it led to a whole bunch of problems we did not anticipate from a pandemic. People violently resisting the measures put in place, conspiracy theories abounding about the pandemic, not to mention politics making a huge mess of the whole thing… Oh yeah, the United States dropped the ball on that one, but Canada won’t be doing too well either considering the extreme and ridiculous amounts of money our government spent to deal with the pandemic, which will likely leave the entirety of Canada in debt for at least a decade…

The post-pandemic won’t be great either, but we can at least hope for the situation to improve in 2021. The cultural scene was a mess as well, with theaters closed for most of the year… It still feels weird to me that the last movie I saw in theaters in 2020 was Sonic the Hedgehog, way back in February. Music? Bands couldn’t tour, so they either turned to virtual concerts or found other ways to occupy themselves with their art. Video games? Now this was interesting, as we got some new consoles and a lot of notable titles as well. And hey, video games were one of the best ways to spend time at home this year, waiting in confinement or quarantine or forced vacation or however you may call it.

Yeah, the year sucked. I think I came out lucky, however; I didn’t catch Covid-19 (and I hope I won’t in 2021), had stable employment through the whole year (several people didn’t), and I did not suffer too much from any of the other problems the peculiar situation this year caused. The year sucked for me in most of the ways it sucked for everyone; having to live in the new reality of a pandemic, having to learn to live with wearing masks and having to follow strict rules when going out shopping… Those rules aren’t pleasant, but I do see them as necessary. I am looking forward to the days where I’m no longer treated as a potential vector of disease first and a person second. I hate it, but I get why it’s done.

In spite of a handful of short hiatuses, I’m also quite happy with what I achieved this year on the blog. I wished I could do away with hiatuses, but it’s been difficult to keep a schedule where I post something every week. It’s time to look back on the year.