Paulo Seabra

Glancing through some of the many random articles in this very blog might lead you to conclude that I, like most kids from my generation, like Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and Yu-Gi-Oh! games. I still vaguely but powerfully recall getting my first ever two packs, picked for no reason other than the color of the set, especially since at the time all the cards were in japanese, even if they were being sold in my local portuguese supermarket. I guess that just goes to show how huge Yu-Gi-Oh! became which is a pretty cool thing... Anyway, though I eventually acquired quite a few cards, including some very legitimate ones that might have been worth a decent chunk of money had I kept them in mint condition, most of my rarest cards were sadly fakes. At the time, being a naive kid and all, and the internet being what it was, I had no clue where to even get decent cards, and when I did find a place that sold them I didn't find much variety therein. This made it quite frustrating to watch the anime but...

Maybe all video games are a little bit like that, but some more than others... With speedrunning being so popular nowadays, you could argue a game can be beaten in an impressively short amount of time, but if you want to play it the way it's meant to be played, which would be something like spacing out gaming sessions and really taking the time to discover all of the game's features as you unlock them, then you might take much, much longer to reach the end credits. Even more so if you try to go for an ever-illusive one hundred percent completion run. Thing is, content can't be all that creative and varied, especially with some of the older games I love and aim to talk a bit about, and thus some of it is bound to be a little repetitive. The weird thing, to which I don't have a great answer either way, is when a game's difficulty, or even its whole run, is essentially based on dedicating a whole lot of time to it, that is to say, you have to grind until you get whatev...

In recent years I have more or less quit gaming, except for when a strange mood hits me for a little while and the only way to exorcise it is to actually play the game that has been resurfaced by that wave of nostalgia of uncertain origin. I have done so with Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories, Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, Fallout: New Vegas and Pokémon Emerald,  all of which I have previously written down some thoughts because I figured I might as well, and I reckon because I hoped someone just might like what I had to say. This time I was slowly overwhelmed by a game that came out alongside the now very distant advent of the PlayStation 2, a game with so much character in every detail and beauty in its entire story and music that its few but dedicated fans have never forgotten it and still cherish it to this very day. That game is, of course, Dark Cloud. Back in the day, buying games wasn't as easy as it is now. You couldn't just buy a game and, if you didn't like...

All things considered, this might be my favorite game of all time. Collectively, I must have played it close to a billion hours or so. As a kid I had an older cousin loan me his Sapphire version, I played it just a tiny bit, and before I even got to Rustboro, I fell in love with the game. So I returned it to him and, since my birthday was coming up, I asked my parents for a Ruby version, which I got and played non-stop, always taking my sweet time to discover Hoenn. But then another cousin of mine got Emerald and, though I initially acted like it sucked, I was just jealous. When I realized my love for Ruby could easily be upgraded, I asked my grandma to buy me an Emerald copy, which I then played on and off until I had close to four hundred hours on it. And I played with two of my cousins all the time, building nice memories that I won't bore you with. And though my trajectory with this third generation of Pokémon games zigzagooned a bit there, it was with this one that it end...

I don't think I'd wanna live under the Legion, but then again, I don't think I'd wanna live in a nuclear wasteland to begin with. And therein lies the big question. We could go on and on about the barbarity of the Legion, and of course, almost every single action they perform will appear as, at the very least, offensive to our sensibilities, and at worst, as a complete nightmare. However, that is something essentially seen from our modern perspective, a time when, compared to the utter violence of the past, we have it pretty good. It's not perfect, no time in human history ever was or ever will be, but we can count our blessings in that we don't really have to worry about running into radscorpions or deathclaws whenever we go to the supermarket. So, in a nutshell, why do I consider the Legion to be the right choice? Because, as Caesar says, when the bombs fell, society's progress was effectively set back to zero, and as such we need to rebuild by going all t...