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Cyberpunk 2077 Hasn’t Skipped Any Details

Excitement grows as we get closer and closer to the release date of Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red’s latest game set to come out on PS4, PC, Xbox One and Google Stadia on 17 September 2020. From the creators of The Witcher 3 comes an open world RPG set in a sci-fi cyberpunk universe, as the name suggests. According to the latest ESRB reports and sneak previews, this game is going to be all about violence, gore, sex and yes, the Cyberpunk 2077 twitter says, drugs too. This makes sense for the game’s setting; and its adult-only 18+ rating. We had already been promised a progressive character creation once you get into the game, but latest news has blown us away with a new fun fact, the characters will be totally customisable all the way down to the genitals.

Creating a character will no longer require you to choose between male or female in this game but allows you to create a character based on body type, and the parts don’t need to match. Anything goes. The ESRB’s report summarises that ‘customization can include depictions of breasts, buttocks, and genitalia, as well as various sizes and combinations of genitals,’ as well as whispering in our ear that players will be able to have sex with other characters and prostitutes in the game. This news comes as a relief to some communities, including the LGBTQ+ community in a big way. Scrapping the idea of binary genders and cisgendered character bodies has left non-binary and transgendered people glowing. Being able to create a body of any type is wonderfully inclusive, and an incredibly transformative move from the game’s developers. Being able to create a character that represents one’s own style or identity is a moving grasp on today’s culture, and while I’m sure people will create all kinds of atrocities we wish not to imagine, there will be a whole lot of minorities that are very grateful to be able to make a kickass character that looks and feels like themselves.

This huge step forward broadens the appeal of Cyberpunk 2077 to a gigantic portion of gamers who feel as though they don’t fit into those pre-made character models, whether by choice or not. The ESRB also mentions in their report that players will be able to change the size of their genitals too, so they’ve even thrown in a little pick-me-up for those who think they need some extra self-confidence.

So far, the game has run hurdles over the public’s expectations, and on 11 June we’re bound to find out more at the Night City Wire event. Perhaps we will gain a little more insight on this mysterious game’s brave new world.

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A Look at a Favourite

Ori and the Blind Forest was released 11 March 2015 on Xbox One and Microsoft Windows and within a week it had gained a profit, deservedly. It then released on Nintendo Switch on 27 September 2019. This is a 2-D metroidvania platformer, which for those of us that don’t speak ‘gamer’ means that it is a side scrolling game with a non-linear map to explore top to bottom, side to side. More bits of the map unlock as the game goes on and Ori, our protagonist and alter ego for the game, unlocks new skills to move around the world. It was developed by Moon Studios and published by Microsoft Studios. This game has a beautifully woven story around it that is said to be inspired by the Iron Giant and The Lion King, so get those tissues out.

You play as Ori, a little white guardian spirit with enough spirit to go on a quest to restore the forest after a cataclysmic event leaves it withering and dying. There are platforms to navigate and puzzles to be solved, and the game uses an interesting manual save system which they call a ‘soul link’. Ori needs enough resources to create a soul link and that along with some nasty monsters and prickly plants creates challenging but rewarding gameplay. As my boyfriend reports, this game is no walk in the park, even though its visuals are a cosmically captivating cascade of bright glowing plants and soft, starry nights. The soundtrack is immersive, appropriate, and a treasure for the ears to behold. It reminds one how important audio is to a game, and Ori and the Blind Forest certainly knows how to create an atmosphere with the audio. The composer of this masterpiece, Gareth Coker, also provided some music for Minecraft, you may have heard of it, as well as several other smaller games.

This game was reviewed very well and to prove it, it has a nice shiny ‘overwhelmingly positive’ tag on its Steam store page. It was also given a score of 90% from Metacritic and 87% from PC Gamer. Trusted Reviews gave them a 4 out of 5, saying that their only cons were a bit of slowdown here and there and that some of the dangerously spiky plants were just too spiky. They suggested that some areas were a little too challenging, and I think that’s no overstatement. After seeing some of the gameplay I can say I would be a little frustrated myself, as I think all gamers might feel in this difficult game. Despite this, Trusted Reviews still says that this is a small price to pay for the splendour of the Ori and his forest.

Fans of the game can get excited because a sequel has just been released called Ori and the Will of the Wisps. It was released on 11 March 2020 for Xbox One and Microsoft Windows, and already has had very positive reviews. The visuals have been beautifully remodelled into 3-D, making backgrounds and foregrounds as fantastic as they can be with modern animation, and the music is a continuation of Gareth Coker’s masterpiece of a soundtrack.

Ori and the Blind Forest set a new standard for 2-D metroidvania games, and a challenge for other game developers. A challenge to catch up that’s about as difficult as those really spiky plants.

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The Abominations That Are Pugs

I realise that pugs seem to hold a special place in many people’s hearts. They’re loyal, they always look happy to see you, and they’re…cute? Yeah, some others may agree with me if I say that I don’t really get the ‘cute’ thing when I look at a pug. Honestly if I had to choose a dog to look at everyday I may go with something that looks like a dog. Pugs have been pushed to the very boundaries of dog-breeding experimentation, and I actually feel sorry for them. It must feel pretty claustrophobic to breathe through a nose that looks like it’s been smashed in by a concrete wall. And it is difficult. Ever heard a pug breathe? That wheezing sound? That is the plight that a breathing pug must suffer. They don’t even have to be particularly out of breath or exited to run around snorting like the inside of their head is filled entirely with mucus and nothing but.

Maybe it’s something in the way you look at their faces, tongue oozing out and bulging eyes looking two different ways, and you realise maybe you’re not as ugly as you were feeling before. Speaking of they’re bulging eyes, do you know that pugs’ eyes have a tendency to just POP OUT occasionally? And if you talk with any owner who has a pug with this problem, they’ll tell you in a matter-of-fact way that you’ve just got to pop them back in when it happens. Like no big deal right? Wrong.

Pugs are a particularly potent example of dog breeding gone wrong. They are wrinkled balls of bad nutrition with barely four legs to stand on. Or rather to hold them up. There are many other dogs that suffer from being born from a shallow gene pool, keeping purebred lines a little too pure, or from breeding deformities into dogs because we think it’s cute. Often bigger dogs struggle with things like hip dysplasia and gastric dilation, and those really wrinkly dogs can have so many wrinkles that they cover their own eyes. Neurological problems, back problems, dislocating knees, infections of the skin, eyes, and under tails; these are all problems associated with selective breeding that is so common today.

As an example, here is a painting of a pug by Henry Bernard Chalon from 1802:

And here is a picture of a pug today:

The worst part is that there are so many mixed breed dogs living as strays or in shelters that would probably be much healthier, and definitely cheaper, than buying a purebred dog from a selective breeder. Those dogs without a home can be happy, healthy, and have a little bit of every dog inside them, making them a much more interesting companion, and isn’t that why we domesticated wolves in the first place? As mankind’s best friend, not mankind’s best show-and-tell toy.

-Lucy Ergot

There’s A Mysterious Shadow Watching You Play Valheim

Valheim is the newest boat to catch on the river of survival games rising in popularity. After the resurgence of Rust and the survival game genre, gamers are hungry for more in the same vein, and Valheim has come out at just the right time to satiate that hunger. It was released in early access on Steam, and in just a week it has already got over 100,000 players. A lot of these players have started seeing a mysterious cloaked figure appear in this Norse mythology-themed world, and a theory is quickly spreading that this could be the mighty Allfather himself, Odin.

Valheim is a co-op survival game with teams ranging from 1-10 players, and players must work together to gather and craft items to help them survive on one of the PvE servers. User reviews have been overwhelmingly positive due to the substantial amount of content and the huge world that players can explore even in early access. The narrative centers around Vikings and their mythology, with the game starting off by dropping players into purgatory as Viking souls, tasked with taking down the nine bosses that are powerful enemies of Odin, king of the nine realms. Although it seems that he might be popping in to check on the progress of his Viking hunters from time to time, despite the monsters that plague him.

According to PC Gamer, several players have seen a shadowy figure, cloaked and holding a staff or cane, watching them. They have been spotted in the swamps biome, and when approached or attacked, they quickly vanish. There is more than one theory floating around; some think the character might be the grim reaper, having seen glowing red eyes and guessing that what they carry is a scythe. Others think that it might be a wraith, the ghostly enemy also wearing a hood and spawning in the swamps. The most popular theory is still that this character is Odin, perhaps showing gratitude to the players after defeating one of his enemies, or perhaps merely taking a stroll through his procedurally-generated limbo.

Weird robed figure from valheim

Odin paid us homage after defeating the third boss from valheim

In Norse mythology, Odin is known for disguising himself as a traveler, with a cloak or a hood and a staff or a spear, which does sound an awful lot like the strange character watching from the shadows of the game. Some players have also reported seeing one glowing eye on the figure, and thanks to the MCU it is widely known that Odin only has one eye, although in actual Norse mythology he didn’t lose it fighting the Frost Giants, but rather sacrificed his eye to gain true wisdom and the ability to see all.

Hopefully more sightings of the mysterious figure will grant players a bit more knowledge of who it is, but for now it is a fun easter egg for players to investigate and trade their stories and theories about the character. Valheim is already a game with plenty to keep players occupied and guessing, but it is expected that the full game will only be released in 2022. In the meantime, developer Iron Gate Studio has assured players that they will continue to add updates on a monthly basis, perhaps with even more mysteries to solve.

Valheim is available on PC.

Source: PC Gamer

Candace Owens: The Republican’s Newest Pet

Candace Owens is a conservative, right-wing political activist in America. There are a lot of those in Trump’s America, but what makes Owens even more jaw clenching then the rest of them is that she is a woman of colour, voting against the Democrats, and against the equality of black Americans in her own country.

She grew up in public housing until she decided she couldn’t take her family’s ‘crappy, infested’ flat anymore at which point she went to live with her grandfather. She wanted to become a journalist, but flunked out of her degree and instead got a job at Vogue for a while, before she decided to go into finance. She now speaks at political events all over America, complaining about liberal movements, shouting about black people killing each other, and trying to coax people into her campaign “Blexit” which persuades black Americans and other minorities to ditch the Democrats.

She recently posted a video of herself batting at the Black Lives Matter riots and proclaiming that George Floyd is not a martyr, nor a hero. She starts off by telling us why this man is no hero, and that’s pretty much the extent of the online rant. George Floyd had a criminal record, and had been in and out of prison for years. She points this out, and according to her, therefore he is not a hero, and should not be remembered as an unjust death. I’m not saying that I think a criminal should not come to justice, but I’m also not saying that they should be killed with brute force while unarmed for using a counterfeit twenty dollar bill. Floyd is not a martyr by any means, rather he was the catalyst for the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter campaign, and that’s why he lives on so strongly during these times of racial unrest. She’s at least perceptive enough to see that Floyd has had an impact on the socio-normative culture in America, but she doesn’t like it, and you can see it in her video.

Link to her original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtPfoEvNJ74

Owens believes that black people and other minorities do it to themselves. She states multiple times in her video that it is black people killing black people, and then she pulls out a poorly interpreted statistic which she thinks shows that white men kill less than black men, no matter the ratio of racial groups in America (which leans heavily to the white). Right, so this is a black woman saying that she agrees with the Republicans. She agrees with Trump. She says that minorities, including black people, commit the most crimes. Even though she was sent racist death threats as a teenager by her own mayor’s caustic son and his friends. Isn’t that a little sad. Where’s your backbone Candace? Was it looted by a black rioter? Or stolen by a newly immigrated Islamic Latino? Maybe it’s in the same dusty drawer Joe Biden keeps his. Wherever it is, it may as well stay there because there isn’t much room for a spine around her big mouth. Every leftist liberal idea put forward she is against. She is sure there’s no such thing as hate speech. She doesn’t see the police brutality. She doesn’t think minorities are prejudiced against. She believes that feminism is a scam. And LGBTQ+ rights are straight out the window with her. Yet she herself is a woman of black ethnicity and has a history of first-hand racial prejudice and hate speech.

She is completely, undoubtedly, indubitably pro Republican, and it just seems too perfect to be true for them. Whenever a liberal movement arises she is there to tell everyone that she, as a black woman, disagrees with these leftist SJWs, and what more could the Republican party want? If I were to really think about it, I might say that she is being paid to say that. And paid a lot. It’s a funny coincidence that as she starts speaking on political matters, she has just gotten a job in Turning Point USA, a conservative advocacy group. She also makes videos for PragerU, an unaccredited university teaching conservative concepts, funded by two fucking billionaires. Fracking. I meant fracking billionaires.

Candace Owens claims to speak on behalf of the people she ties to the train tracks. She’s a Trump favourite, even trying to discredit scientific research that climate change exists because, and I’m not joking, the site’s URL ends in .com. If it were .org or even better, .gov she would believe it because those sites aren’t making money off their scientific information released to us. As if the thousands of sites making money aren’t saying the same thing about environmental changes. She has gone against everything you would expect a young black woman to believe in. And the most recent is Black Lives Matter. Floyd may not have been a hero, but he certainly didn’t deserve death. As a white woman I will say that I feel betrayed by a sexist woman speaking to the people, and as an ally to Black Lives Matter I think her betrayal runs further than skin deep. She needs to take a good look in the mirror for this one, literally and figuratively.

Cubone Has A Darker Story Than Seems At First Glance

Does the Cubone/ Kangaskhan theory have some truth to it?

There have been some bizarre fan theories over the long-lived world of Pokémon, but some less bizarre than others. Ditto as a failed experiment to create Mew? Where does Mt. Moon and the treasures it holds actually come from? Was it really Clefairies that colonised it from space, bringing their Moon Stones with them? Who really knows other than those behind the game’s strange loops and holes. One of the theories that has driven fans of the franchise crazy over the last three decades or so is that of Cubone and Kangaskhan’s relationship.

Cubone carries a bone around with him and wears a skull on top of his head, while Kangaskhan is a mother Pokémon that carries her child in her pouch. It is confirmed in the Pokedex that Cubone is an orphan that lost his mother, and now wears her skull atop his head. A dark backstory if I have to say so myself, but I don’t because most fans will agree with me. Meanwhile Kangaskhan’s Pokedex story tells us that she keeps her baby in her pouch for three years, until he is old enough to leave.

The maternal connection between these two Pokémon is easy to see, which is probably why it is one of the most well-known Pokémon theories out there. And now it has been confirmed, as if it already hadn’t been with all the evidence for it. Cubone is the child of a Kangaskhan who lost his mother before he was three years old. Out of grief or fear or maybe both, Cubone put on his mother’s skull and took one of her bones to keep with him.

This makes sense in the continuity of evolution within the Pokémon world. Cubone evolves into Marowak, and female Marowaks evolve into Kangaskhan, completing the circle of life. This has been a hugely debated topic since Pokémon first graced our gaming screens, but Pokémon apparently did not disclose any of this information, or in fact Cubone’s backstory at all, in the first edition of the game, Pokémon Red and Blue. They felt it would be too harsh a story for young children who were playing the game, and so left it up to our imagination for all these years.

Cubone holding onto the remains of his dead mother is quite a sad story to come to terms with, and it adds a layer onto Pokémon that wasn’t there before. Sign of a deeper, sadder, lore that comes from each of the creatures they have come up with. Who knows, there could be more tragic backstories to discover within this ever-growing universe. Cubone’s attachment to his mother, who left him orphaned and alone, is perhaps just the beginning as the players have grown up with the game and are now hungry for a deeper story. I only know that our hearts go out to little Cubone, who has fought through much more than a Pokémon battle.

A Game That’s Brave Enough

There are some amazing new indie games that are coming out or have come out over the past month or so while the world has been hanging in isolated suspension. However, there is a game that was released on the 18^th October 2017 that I think has some new relevance today; and that game is A Mortician’s Tale. You may have heard of it, especially if you are into smaller indie games as I am partial to. A Mortician’s Tale takes your hand and walks you through the life of a mortician working with her dead bodies and their families at the eventual funeral. The game takes a hard, honest look at death, and unfortunately during a worldwide pandemic this is something that many people must deal with all too closely. While most other games skip over death by just making the player take another go at the game with few consequences, A Mortician’s tale stares death right in the Y-incision.

Death in video games is often not thought very strongly through; or gives the player a misguided sense of what death means once gamers step back out into the real world. Or at least as far as we can step out during this lockdown. A Mortician’s Tale makes you ask questions about how death is treated today. It takes you through the embalming process and make-up of a dead body, and you might find yourself asking, ‘Why is it so important that the body looks alive and well before it is buried in the earth forever? Why am I sticking cotton balls into this dead person’s mouth just to make their faces look as though they are somehow alive again?’. Sometimes it’s a cremation job that you get in the game and these also provide lots of great and realistic insight into the process. Burning a body is not as easy as one might think. Just a tip. Then there are the moments at the funerals that make you ask yourself things like, ‘Why do families seem to fight with such selfishness when they need each other most? Is it right to ignore the dead person’s wishes to make the family happy? Are funerals for the dead at all, or are they for the ones left behind afterwards?’.

These are all very real questions, and although scary to think about, these are the questions we must face when looking at the overzealous death toll. A Mortician’s Tale, from developers Laundry Bear Games, say the game was inspired by author and actual mortician, Caitlin Doughty as well as The Order of the Good Death, her death acceptance organisation that advocates for embracing human mortality. Of course the concept of embracing yours and everyone you love’s eventual decay into death is not an easy task this organisation asks of you, but it is important to acknowledge the realness, the feeling, the texture of death as it brushes so close to us now. This game allows you to see death for what it is, instead of the commercialised faces of the dead and the glorious funerals that put on an analgesic show for those who are watching. A Mortician’s Tale is now more than ever in it’s lifetime a game that invites players into the murky world of death and makes one realise that when you die in the game, it’s very different from when you die in real life.

Those Who Can Teach, Teach!

I have recently completed a TEFL course, which, if you are unfamiliar with the programme, is a course that teaches one how to teach English to foreign students or non-native speakers of English. It then gives one opportunities to go overseas to teach English, or the chance to apply for online teaching jobs.

Previously, I didn’t think that I would ever want to teach. When people asked me, ‘What are you going to do with an English degree, teach?’ I would always crinkle my face in disgust and say ‘never!’. I didn’t think that teaching was a very worthwhile job. You know how the saying goes: If you can’t do, teach. And if you can’t teach, teach P.E. I never wanted to be labeled as someone who can’t do, so instead teaches. I never wanted to go back to school, even as a teacher, because there are a lot of bad memories from school that I have. I wanted to get clear of school the minute I finished my last exam and handed in my school shoes to be donated. Yet here I am. With a TEFL certificate, applying to teach online to as many jobs as I can find. And I’m actually excited about it. The TEFL course has taught me to appreciate the art of teaching, and has made me realise that it isn’t any less worthy to teach then to perform any other occupation. If I can help someone better themselves, I consider that a job well done.

And so find myself embracing the world of teaching, and feeling proud to do so. I don’t think people give teachers enough credit for all the hard work they put in. To make a class educational, engaging, fun, and motivating can be a very hard thing to accomplish I have recently be come aware of. So give teachers a break. If you can teach, teach!