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Pokémon X: j’ai Xerneas

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I fly to Lumiose City and wander around looking for signs of Lysandre. Eventually someone hints to me that he likes red and he owns a café which is red, all while standing next to a red café. On entering the shop the two assistants are probably the worst people ever at keeping secrets, and they give away there’s a secret entrance to the underground lair. Down I go, fighting away red-dressed fools, until I find a floor with random arrows that send you spinning in a certain direction until you hit a wall.

I hate rooms which have random arrows that send you spinning in a certain direction until you hit a wall. Particularly when you can’t see the full room and so everything has to be done by trial and error.

I discovered Team Flare’s ultimate plans, to use a weapon that would kill all people and pokémon other than themselves, because … something about overpopulation and scarce resources. This weapon was a thousand years old and had been hidden in plain sight for years. There was another story about a man called AZ who saved his pokémon by sacrificing many others, but that seemed a bit unrelated. I was given the choice of a blue button or an orange button to press – one would launch the weapon, the other wouldn’t.

I chose blue.

In the end it didn’t matter because they decided to launch the weapon anyway, so I set off to stop them in another secret lair underneath Geosenge Town, which has now been largely destroyed by a big crystal appearing in the centre. It turns out that the ultimate weapon was being powered by a thousand-year old pokémon, who I released after beating Team Flare. It then attacked me.

This pokémon was Xerneas, the cover star of the game and the X-shaped legendary creature. They1 were only level 50 and most of my team was at level 62 or above. Luckily I’d saved just before the battle. Double luckily, my first hit with Aurorus took them down to about 10% health, and I caught them on my next move with an ultra ball. A bit of an anti-climax!

I immediately added Xerneas to my team, displacing Pikachu, and then Lysandre decided he wasn’t going to give up and demanded another battle. I one-hit-killed everything he threw at me, including a mega-evolved gyrados2 which didn’t last long against my mega-evolved Lucario. After that he finally gave up.

Everyone was very happy, and it felt like the end of the game – but, of course, for a pokémon trainer saving the world is just one side quest encountered on the way to the Pokémon League.

Yes, we can indeed. Back to Anistar City.

  1. Xerneus appears to be neither male nor female, so I’m using the generic “them”. ↩︎
  2. I don’t give my pokémon names, so my pikachu is called Pikachu, and my gyrados is called Gyrados, but other people don’t own Gyrados, they just own a gyrados. ↩︎

Pokémon X: journeys through the snow

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It’s been a while.

I remembered getting Lucario in Shalour City, and defeating the sixth gym after having travelled North. However, the trail went cold there, both in terms of which gym to visit and what Team Flare were up to. I last saved, in 2017, in Dendemille Town, without a decided path.

So my next thought was to look at which route number I’d just been travelling on. Route 15 goes to Dendemille, and Route 16 goes back to Lumiose City, so I decided to try and journey along Route 17. Easier said than done, since it was under a lot of snow and blocked by boulders, meaning I needed the help of a big Mamoswine to pass it. Luckily there was a Mamoswine nearby, but it was frit because of something happening in Frost Cavern nearby.

It was at this point I remembered my previous thoughts of Pokémon X – that the storyline seemed to include far too many little diversions and side quests. To progress on my quest for the gyms I had to journey though the caverns to find Team Flare being mean to an Abomasnow; defeating them meant that Mamswine’s friend was safe and I was able to finally get a lift to the next town. I picked up quite a few new pokémon while doing so.

So to Anistar City, and I stumble upon the gym pretty quickly. This is the psychic gym, and while none of my pokémon is ideally suited for this battle – I have a team consisting of Aurorus, Blastoise, Delphox, Pikachu, Pidgeot and Lucario – the higher levels mean I have no problems obtaining the seventh badge. One more to go!

Except the Team Flare storyline gets in the way again, and I’m summoned to Lumiose City to talk to Lysander who apparently was the boss there. Something else to do before I fulfil my destiny, then.

Poly Bridge: do you truss me?

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I’m not sure what came first, this or Bridge Constructor, but they are both very similar. I think I prefer Poly Bridge slightly, as it has more of a distinctive visual style as well as having useful section cloning mechanics, but the idea is the same for both games – build a bridge using a variety of materials to carry a car or other vehicle across a gap, with realistic physics determining whether the bridge holds or not.

This means you make lots of trusses.

I’ve completed almost the whole of the first world now, and the game is made more enjoyable by trying to set high scores as I go (in terms of lowest cost of materials). Not against the global leaderboards – those are full of people who’ve fluked a catapult for $5 – but against friends who’ve played the game on Steam. On the first few levels there were quite a few of them to compete against, but in later levels this has tapered off a little.

Although there is a certain challenge to building stable and strong bridges with a minimum of materials (shifting the joint points down a couple of pixels to make the wooden beams very slightly shorter), the biggest challenge for me comes in the sequencing – and particularly the hydraulics.

At the start of each level you’re told the order things happen. There may be a car going first, and then a van going second. There may be a boat coming down the river in the middle. When this happens you can be given access to hydraulic elements that help get the bridge out of the way, but these put their own stress on the bridge (and if you’re not careful can tip the whole bridge over). Alternatively you can try to build around the boat, but this can be much more expensive.

I am fast learning why I’m not a civil engineer.

Little Kitty Big City: completed!

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There was an update, and there’s a definite improvement to control responsiveness and general collision detection. It’s still a bit fiddly at times and sometime it just doesn’t respond to button presses – particularly when trying to pull items around – but overall it’s much more playable.

The overarching story – of having fallen down from your cosy perch, and having to make your way back up the building – provided enough impetus to make me want to seek out new abilities and areas. I met a tanooki who transported me 2 metres into a bin, but this indicated that there may be more teleportation in the future. I found a beetle who’d dropped his phone in concrete, who needed a new one – that unlocked photo mode. I found a chameleon who is particularly bad at hiding. I found sparkling areas which allowed me to take a nap. I found a worried duck who’d lost his ducklings, and he game me a useful map. Eventually I found a fish which I ate, which gave me the ability to climb ivy for a short way.

The map showed me where the other fish were. I suddenly became very interested in finding fish.

Each of the fish required a little puzzle. In the shop, I had to find some way to distract the shopkeeper before jumping into the fridge and wolfing the fish down. On a roof garden, I had to turn off a hose to prevent the fish’s owner spraying me. Each fish I ate gave me more stamina to climb. After collecting all the fish, I knew I could make it to the top of the building, and back home.

Of course, I didn’t do that immediately. I found a few more hats, and explored the world some more. I spent ages trying to find a clever way into a fenced-off area on the edge of the map, before noticing there was a little gap between the fence and the wall (left below); I also spent ages trying to catch a bird with a ring around its neck, who’d land in a specific spot but fly off almost immediately (right below).

But it was time to climb. The journey up the tower was largely uneventful, although I did get lost in the scaffolding a couple of times. With four stamina bars I had just about enough to climb onto an air conditioning unit near the top, and then I was home.

The ending was very sweet – being given a collar, congratulations by the crow, and then another nap on the windowsill.

I can jump down again to complete missions, find more hats, and steal more smartphones before dropping them in puddles. I need to find two more rubber ducks to throw in the pond, and another football and goal combination, among other side missions. For now, though, this is completed.

Farming Simulator 22: not farming

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Nicholas’s current great interest is Farming Simulator 22, after he has seen a fair few videos on YouTube talking about the array of machinery you can drive around. He has been keen to get me involved in a multiplayer game, and after weeks of putting it off, here we are.

It took us 20 minutes to get a game set up, mainly because he’s installed all sorts of mods and DLC onto his Steam game, which aren’t available on the Xbox (or, in some cases, I hadn’t installed them), meaning our games were incompatible. We worked out what we needed to do in the end, and so I entered the farm with some trepidation over exactly which crops I’d be harvesting or sowing or watering or whatnot.

I needn’t have worried. This wasn’t a simulation of farming, it was a simulation of driving around a town in big expensive machines, blocking roads, turning other vehicles over, and generally causing havoc. The farm we inherited had large fields of sunflowers and wheat, which were wrecked as two large tractors had a (slow) race through them. An irrigation machine with large arms was used to block roads. Combine harvesters pushed over quad bikes.

We parked a few vehicles on the train tracks, not expecting a train to come past. For some reason vehicles clip straight through your avatar, but interact directly with other vehicles. We found that there was a large beetroot-picking machine balanced on top of a house.

It’s all a bit silly. I asked Nicholas if we could actually try harvesting the sunflowers, and he tried to buy the right equipment and it still didn’t work. So he concreted over the field instead, so we had more space to park vehicles. As long as I don’t drive more of them into the river.