Today is my birthday! and I will be studying for a college final... The good news is that I just made an amnesty agreement with my grandfather and the usual income will return, I lost a lot of money with this stupid cold war, what saved me during the economic blockade was the crazy untouched stack of games I managed to amass during last year. Nevertheless, I suffered some casualties, I could have bought Dead Space 2 limited edition, saved money for MvC3 and the buffer would be smaller.
2011 is a good year to be a hardcore gamer, 2 new portable consoles will be launched, a bunch of AAA games are coming out and most important of all, one of them is Mass Effect 3 (Sorry Uncharted, I love you too but I'm a ME junky).This is maybe the first year in a long time that I'll spend the greatest part of my gaming money in full price day one purchases, 2010 was easy on my wallet since I got a 360 and a PS3 late on the cycle and most of the games I got had several price cuts on them or I managed to find fine pre-owned copies.
The backlog sliming-down initiative
Yep, I didn't have the long trousers As a 'story gamer', the way I define my self, it is pretty hard to maintain a steady flow of games to play without going bankrupt, Killzone 3 is maybe the competitive multiplayer FPS that will make me go back to my roots and sink a few hours every night. There is still a lot of games that I have to get to keep sliming down the backlog since I'm a little ashamed of enjoying stories and the expanded stuff of games and at the same time having in my list of games to play, gems like Bioshock and Dead Space. To start closing the gap in the home console front, I will have to finally buy a Wii and get the must have AAA games, damned 3DS and NGP, I was going to be up to day!. Apart from old games I have these day one buys planned.
The expanded universe initiative
Most of you have read them, I didn't Having so many games available since mostly 2010 made me go through a lot of them in a very short time, keeping the trend in 2011. The problem with the crazy speed of beating games is the lack of time between them to dig into the expanded content, books, comic books, story DLC and even art books, elements that give a game collection a bit more depth than a shelf full of games. I'm not talking about collector edition thingys but material that can add pieces of information to fill the gaps between games and make every setting a more realistic touch. I imagine my future kids, after some IPs had grown old and perhaps no more new games or remakes are coming, going 'retro' and enjoyed all the money I had invested in this pricey hobby. It' won't be an easy task to buy English written video games books, I live in an Spanish speaking country and there is nothing like Amazon or Barnes & Noble to help me, the only way will be asking a friend that travels to Miami several times a year for work related duties or usually orders books from Amazon that are then shipped to the International Airport, an impossible location for me to go and pick them up by my self.
The Charity initiative
Heal the world, at least be good with it till the inevitable end in 2012 If you had paid attention at my user icon you surely had notice my love for MJ, the most talented genius of our time that sadly passed away in 2009. Leaving aside the controversy of child molestation trials, trials in which he was found not guilty, MJ was a very eccentric philanthropic rich man who invest several hundred million dollars to help children and needy people around the world (more money than the latest times debts he ended having). You may remember his speech at the Clinton inauguration gala, to ask the new president publicly to invest money in the search for an AIDS cure or the 'We are the world' single to relief some of the African famine, the Heal the World organization, between others. The influence of this man life work made me think that I had to contribute in some way to relief some of my country's problems, the hate that emerges from my heart to the Peron's party that made us go from being an European-esque gem located in South America to a poor narc paradise full of famine and ignorance (if you watched the movie 'Evita', the birth of the evil, you surely understand what I'm talking about) My initial idea is to do an online show with a gamer pal, something between The Speed Gamers and NoobToob, the paypal money would go to Argentine charity to help kids, you may be thinking helping foreign kids if you can give away that money to someone of your own country, the answer is simple, with a few bucks or even cents per donator, a lot of things can be done in this poor country, it's like the EuroTrip movie scene where they go to Bratislava.
Games that I was already planning to play or were left unfinished that could be a good Let's Play/Endurance Run experience:
Lost Odyssey - 360(abandoned at disc 4 but I want to start over again)
Tales of Vesperia - 360 ( I wish I knew Japanese to get the PS3 full voiced acted one!)
Bioshock 1, 2 and Minerva's Den - PS3.
Mass Effect 2 and 3 - PS3 with a custom lady Shepard (I want to finish ME3 first with my default 360 male Shepard ME1 and 2 save)
GoW Collection and GoW 3 (only played GoW: Chains of Olympus, never played a home console GoW!) - PS3
Final Fantasy 1,2 and 4 Complete Edition - PSP
Final Fantasy Type-0 - PSP (If it doesn't come out this year it's ridiculous)
Dead Space 1, 2, Ignition and Extraction - PS3
Persona 3 Portable - PSP
Ratchet & Clank Future Trilogy - PS3
I already own some of those games and others will be bought during the year, I'll make another blog post only about this when we get ready to start, after buying the capturing equipment and figuring out what to do.
I'll be improving my KZ 3 skills at the beta to be a good Tactician when it comes out (PSN ID: Valkyr-R), see ya!
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No, it's not the king of pop (sadly), it's the king of modern console manufacturers, our beloved Sony and his jovial chairman Kazuo Hirai ('Kaz' for the friends). As the other king's Breaking News lyrics says: Just when you thought he was done he comes to give it again, yep he is here, after all the haters believed and wished Sony had lost the next generation handheld war early retreating to the citadel to come with some crazy stupid peace of hardware as his last stand, he came prouder and stronger than ever playing his game the way he knows, fighting fire with even more fire, shameless of what every gamer, journalist or analyst were already predicting, the raw power itself becoming a portable game system.
The NGP specs, mind-blowing? Hope it won't blow up your wallet too The prediction was right but the real impact in the industry was hugely underestimated, it's not the PSP all over again, this time the raw power needed to close the gap between the home console and the portable experience is ready, thanks to the capabilities of the new portable processors provided by new successful hardware manufacturers such as ARM whose revenue is now bigger than Intel's which lacked the revolutionary vision to pay enough attention to what the market was mutating, a market flooded with smart phones and tablets that use tiny powerful efficient and cost effective processors, technology and production investments that Sony now will use in the aformentioned new handheld.
Kaz happily holding the NGP, isn't that charming? The other gap closing factor is the addition of the second analog stick, now developers won't be coinstraint in the gameplay deparment. The PSP had only a single uncomfortable analog nub, which forced developers to dumb down some games that could have been more critically acclaimed if a second analog input had existed to do things like aiming a gun with an over the shoulder mechanic or simply control de camera that usually tends to be a mess by itself. Entire game genres were marginalized on the PSP, it was impossible to develop AAA FPSs or dual stick shooting experiences for example. So, what can Sony do to recover the crown of the industry?
Gaming on the go
A Bobby Kotick minion, his family is worried about the killing the messenger trend There is no doubt that the NGP will have a great day one roster for every brand new comer with native launch games and the upscaled backward compatibily feature of psn psp games providing high quality platform exclusives titles and a lot of ps2 enhanced ports. But the revolutionary factor is the new possibility of the multiplatform development of PS3 and NGP games, this does not mean cheap ports but augmenting and giving the gamer the ability to continue gaming on the go with the same quality he would do with his home console. No more transitions between HD jaw-dropping graphics and comfortable controls to the unusual use of a stylus or the lack of a stick, in the near future we'll be living the same competitive cross-platform multiplayer games on our daily train/bus trips. What Sony should is force first party and ecourage second and third party developers to take the multiplatform road and sell games instead of the <console of choice> edition of <game of choice>, this is already happening with Valve's Portal 2 that will be bundled with steam codes to dowload the game on the Mac/PC because Valve is smart and wants you to feel that you are really buying a game and not only an implementation. You may think that Activition will not lose the oportunity to charge you twice for the next PS3/NGP Call of Duty, that may be true, but we as a consumer are choose wheter feed the beast or not.
Trophy addiction to the rescue
It is a fact that early PS3 multi-platform were graphically inferior to their 360 counterpart but another issue was the lack of a rewarding addictive feature such as the xbox More trophy enabled games for you, junky achievements. More and more gamers succumbed to the need of increasing their gamerscore and chose to buy their games on the competitor platform and a lot of ps3 worthwhile early exclusives didn't catch enough attention because those gamers considered that they were losing time to invest in s-ranking their 360 games. Sony addressed this issue on the PS3 with an enhanced rip off of the feature, the PlayStation trophies but lacked the will to implement them on the PSP, failing to gain the achievement lover gamer who tended to dismiss the handheld in favor of using that time to unlock more trophies/achievements. This time Sony is aware of this from the start and the feature will be available on the new portable device from the start, we still have to see if they are clever enough to unify the system with the PS3 to make sure that addicted consumers jump in and get the new platform as another trophy source.
The Japan portable craziness
Good time to be a japanese stalker ugh? The land of the rising sun is an strange exotic place to our eyes, most gamers are wealthy enough to be enjoying huge 3DTVs hooked up with PS3s but they choose to invest their gaming time on Monster Hunter, Pokemon and the usual JRPG releases on the PSP and the DS. The latest phenomenon was the one that was born with Dragon Quest IX for the DS with a feature that encouraged players to gather in person at some place to unlock stuff just by being near another dude with the game or crawling cooperatively on random generated dungeons. The NGP using the built-in GPS, the 3G/Wi-Fi and the Near App (right screenshot) will let you track by location in search for other gamers to play and look for statistics related to where you are located, this will be useful to implement a DQIX-esque feature in every NGP popular japanese game but will also incentive stalkers to search that teen gamer girl of their dreams, hope they don't learn to use the privacy settings.
The PSP was a financial success, the profits covered the development and production costs by a great difference and it managed to be on the radar since it launched in December 2004 (Japan). Despite of the huge installbase it amassed, it failed to be more than a hardcore gaming platform with a horrible battery sucking noise media and it also ended up being a very japanese centric device, with tons of games that only meant something on the east but that settled a very good start of Sony in the portable console market competing against Nintendo, a portable manufacturer that steadily rocked since the launch of the original Game Boy. Let's hope Sony manages to tag the price under us$400 to justify the additional tech over Nintendo's and that the huge list of third and second party developers have some cool games ready circa the launch window.
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The NGP announcement blew my socks away so hard that my weak mind it's still trying to recover so I can write a good blog post about my impressions (and other gaming stuff), so many variables, so many crazy Japanese corporation tech savviness. Meanwhile...
I thought I wasn't going to succumb and wait for Killzone 3 but the awesomeness was stronger, thank you Mm, my wallet said no but my heart said yes.
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I bought the Astro A40 Black headset + MixAmp (wired) for just us$130 , I was trying to find it since they came out some time ago but no retailers had them in this poor and stupid country, a dude had a big stock but failed to sell them for Christmas so he wanted to get rid of it (too good Headset for this country market). It works fine and it was sealed, no refurbished/preowned shit. It came with a bunch of cables and adapters but to experience the best sound quality I ordered today a TosLink premium cable (the only one that was not included) to hook the MixAmp to the optical out of the monitor.
Yep it's me again, my Aunt has been using my bedroom to sleep and my back can't stand anymore the uncomfortable air mattress I've been using since my dad came back from the hospital. After drinking a few cups of coffee I started reading 'The art of game design: a book of lenses' so I can stop acting like the software engineering student for at least a few days till I start studying for the final exams I have to go through during February. After a while I started thinking about the design choices in games I've played recently, FF XIII and MGS4, the latter completed yesterday.
Final Fantasy XIII
To give you a general idea of what I think about it: the fact that a 'level designer' received money for the abomination the game levels are is something I can't even compute in my head. So, some dude was paid during 5 years to draw this:
A lot of programming talented nerds developed the Crystal Tools engine (formerly known as White Engine), an engine that delivered one of the best PS3 looking games so far and yet, some stupid dude with the same amount of imagination of an inanimate object only managed to grab a pen and draw a stupid line an get paid for doing it.
The battle mechanics unlike the level design have to be praised, it is really fun to change paradigms according to the situation and the AI that handles the rest of your party is awesome, it always uses the best skills finding and taking advantage of the enemies weakness. The medic paradigm for example, allocates the healing time for each character it is supporting in almost the optimal way possible.
It is very clear that small concepts and pieces were developed in small teams and then assembled, resulting in a very inconsistent an incoherent experience, first you have a never-ending 'tutorial', you traverse the linear hallways and paths killing enemies in order to reach the next cutscene, this process repeats tills an important event triggers and you receive new skills, summons, etc. The game manages to do this for at least 25 hours till you reach the 'open world' part , where it becomes one of the most grindy experiences this generation. By this time you are given 'quests' which are only 'hey! kill X enemy'. Apart from this, the equipment leveling arises as the most important activity, you just go kill a bunch of monsters, buy the materials and upgrade your weapons until you have the optimal equipment for every character. After this I have no idea if the game will change again because I yet have to go through this tedious part if I ever manage to do it.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the patriots
Get one of this before beating the final boss, you'll need it What I feel about it matches almost everything this dude wrote Link . The only thing that comes to my min d is that the level design is very good, you can always find some new way to traverse the levels, especially during act 1 and 2, acts 3,4 and 5 have very little real gameplay and is instead full of behemot cutscenes, the ending one being a 93 minutes 38 seconds cutscene!!!, stupid and amazing at the same time, JAPANESE best describes it.
MGS 3 in my opinion is one of the games of all time, I even cried at the end, A LOT, this time although I knew that the story of Solid Snake was coming to an end, the game didn't manage to get a tear from me, a big let down, I expected to get very emotional but to be honest I didn't like the way the plot was wrapped up
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Honey, I Shrunk the Cells Recently a report showed that Sony wants his Nagasaki chip plant back, the one sold to Toshiba back in 2008 ( see). Also IBM in october stated that the Cell processor is still important, that is in fact they way to stay in the Power business and that they are talking to console manufacturers to use them in 'next generation gaming', which could give a hint that some sort of Cell architecture will be used in the PS4, the PSP2 (which is rumored to used a 4 spu shrinked version of the Cell) and maybe other platforms such as Nintendo next gen home console.
The crazy PS4 theory
It is believed and also proved that the Cell is an excelent number crunching processor, with a manufacturing cost of $400 when the ps3 was released but with a processing value of $10000. This high per dollar value lead some companies and even the us air force to set up ps3 clusters using linux. It is also proved that the use of serveral Cells talking to each other has an impresive increase of performance, you can read more about this subject in a recent Digital Foundry article. Some time ago even Toshiba released some Qosmio laptops with a form of cell processor as a third processor (CPU+ GPU + Cell) in order to improve video decoding duties of software written to take advantage of this configuration.
The landscape
The fact that Sony expects to sell at least 15 million PS3s during 2011 fiscal year, that their next gen handheld device is going to use a 'mini-cell' and that in order to make a higher profit per ps3 sold they must already be improving the manufacturing process to keep shrinking the chip, the key of a future ps3 price drop and the launch of the aforementioned PSP2 at a competitive price.
The landscape is suitable for the cell manufaturing process to keep improving reaching such a low cost that could make possible its use in the next Playstation iteration as a co processor to improve duties like post processing, screen space antialiasing, AI, physics and other cpu bound tasks. It would also make possible PS3 backward compatibility, a feature that is a MUST whenever you want to launch a new console that is obviously going to suffer the initial lack of games.
You must be thinking, it's the ps3 situation all over again, putting old hardware just to enable backward compatibility ended up bad, with the emotion engine chip being removed to reduce costs and the feature lost, nevertheless the current situation is very different as explained before. The cell processor will still very good at number crunching, the emotion engine was shit even by the time of the ps3 launch and now you have the advantage of the PSP2 and other products (Toshiba TVs, IBM Blade servers, etc) pushing the manufacturing process evolution at a accelerated speed.
The advantages
The PS4 could still carry a standard multi-core cpu, with only general purpose cores, making multiplatform and indie development easy and cost effective but at the same time giving second and first party studios the edge with a co-processor to offload some of the work and make their games shine among the competition. You need some extra raw power to keep exclusive franchises like Uncharted (currently praised as the best looking console franchise to date) as the flags of your system, just imagine water, sand and snow physics using the power of the co-processor + the current and future gen Nvidia chips that keep improving their use in that department. Remember the 'free' antialiasing of the Xbox 360 using the dedicated eDRAM, well, this could be Sony's free antialiasing standard method, offloading and using MLAA on the cell,saving a lot of GPU power at the same time. Most important, the expertise on cell programming gained during the ps3 generation could lead to a very good initial results, saving us from abominations such as Genji: Days of the Blade or any launch title that look like an upscaled version of a last gen game.
To sum up, there are enough clues showing that Sony could be using again the cell in the PS4, we know it's crazy, we know it may not be cost effective to have two processors but we also know Sony, they like to make things this way and with the recent rumors of a Playstation Phone AND a PSP2 as two different upcoming products we can say that they are the same old stubborn crazy japanese console manufacturers we all know and love.
Mass Effect 2 PS3 letdown
Why didn't I buy you before?, why????? Since the announcement of the ps3 port, the media rumors and even bioware statements that the graphics were going to be superior made me not buy the 360 version of the game, today I played the demo and holy crap, it looks like shit, no AA at all, over saturated colors and very heavy shadowing, insane amounts of screen tearing even during SD(yeah SD!, why not a 1080p reencoded version, why?!) FMV cutscenes. Ok, this is running on the future PS3 Mass Effect 3 engine but Bioware saying that this looks better is a let down and a LIE so I ordered today the 360 version and it will arrive in a few days, that gives me enough time to beat Mass Effect 1 on the 360 (I originally played it on the PC as a Soldier) as a Vanguard, the class that I think I would want to use till the end of the trilogy.
Rant of the day: Insomniac and Resistance franchise
I think most of us agree that Insomniac has a pretty good record of high quality games, making their business the introduction of new IPs and developing games exclusively for the Playstation platforms with well received and beloved franchices like Spyro and Ratchet and Clank. But what happens when you stop focusing on what you best do and start looking at other over saturated market like the fps genre? Things like the Resistance franchise happen, a franchise whose story was written to be spammed through at least three games but failed to deliver a high quality experience in order to create the minimum fanbase to maintain the initial schedule, the end result, little to no profit.
The genesis of the failure
We all remember the first trailers and information about the first game, the hype built around the idea that Sony needed a Halo Killer, a sci-fi shooter with good graphics and multiplayer that could stop the userbase bleeding from turning to Microsoft and the already great online platform they started with a failed console, the original Xbox while at the same time setting the cornerstone of one of the greatest industry landscape changes since the launch of the Playstation 1, a industry reigned by Sony.
The failure itself
As most of us hardcore gamers think, the game failed, the art direction was bland, the main character sucked, nobody gived a damned about him, the multiplayer was not as good as the competition and the fanbase was not big enough to secure that the sequel wasn't going to be another failure. Time passed and Resistance 2 came out, although the multiplayer was substantially better in comparison to other choices PS3 users had at the moment, the game failed too. The problem was increased by the fact that the art direction was changed again, the sequel, while keeping the vibe and the setting of the original, looked really different and the graphics weren't good either from a technical standpoint.
Not even your mother was hyped Ted, and she loves you!
Now with the in game footage of the third resistance revealead at the VGAs (and the screenshots that we saw some time ago), we know that the art is different again, what the hell is wrong with you Insomniac?, haven't you learned anything?. We all know that a franchise has to maintain its art and soul for at least several games till a 'reboot' takes place and we can start all over again. Halo 1, 2 and 3, looked almost exactly the same, only with a few changes from 1 to 2 but 3 art was almost kept identical from 2 which was the most iconic original Xbox game. Even the Ratchet and Clank and Spyro games respected this basic gaming axiom. We have a lot of of other examples, Tomb Raider, Devil May Cry, Prince of Persia, Splinter Cell, Zero gba/ds games, Sonic gba/ds games, Metal Gear Solid and the list goes on and on, all franchises which games have a very similar art direction till some kind of reboot or spinoff comes and changes everything, from the looks and the gameplay to the story.
Stop resisting please, move on!
Resistance 3 will be a failure, shadowed by Halo:Reach and Killzone 3 in the sci-fi fps genre, with an almost inexistent consistency between its iterations. I hope that Insomniac, now a multiplatform developer, starts focusing again on doing what they do best, platformers, a genre that is dying in the home consoles, with only Mario being really successful, we a new character that can carry the flag and make gamers of all ages love a game for the sake of being a game, pure nonsensical and fun gameplay, withouth the need of headshots, chainsaw executions, crazy convoluted stories or space marines, please Insomniac give us another R&C/Spyro-esque IP.
Personal stuff #4
After the inevitable wall of text, here comes the update of my personal life. Dad's already home after the aforementioned pancreatic cancer surgery, he's doing fine but I'm really worried about his mental health because he acts like nothing happened and sometimes he even believes his own lie, that with the surgery everything will be the same as before, that leads him to act rebelliously towards his new diet and medication, which could be a real problem. He has very little chances of entering remision, the only and miraculously way he could live more than expected or get cured, and he only makes things less possible if he doesn't obey his sugar free, quemical free and mostly alkaline diet. Relative to me, just playing a lot of games after a successful year at college, looking forward to get some cash in christmas eve to buy a Playstation Move Starter pack, Gran Turismo 5 and save money for Killzone 3, that Wii seems to always slip out of my hands!, there is always other things I want more, shame on me, almost every human being in the world owns one by this moment!, I'm now scared that Nintendo will make a Wii HD announcement the day after I buy one, maybe if I get enough money for my birthday on February I'll finally play Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2.
So yesterday I started playing MGS4 (yep a bit late in the cycle) and I discovered that it is a technical mess. Let me explain my feelings before thinking 'what the hell is he talking about mgs4 has the best graphics ever'.
A quick recap of the PS3 games graphics since launch
At first multiplatform games looked like shit compared to their 360 versions and exclusive AAA games were being bashed by the press for not delivering native 1080p and photorealistic graphics. As years passed, we learnt that it was better to render things at 720p or less and use that gpu free time to increase the overall beauty of games. Also the expertise of programmers using the Cell architecture showed us that engines developed exclusivily for the ps3 could have awesome results like Killzone 2, Uncharted 1, Ratchet and Clank(s) and later the critically acclaimed Uncharted 2. Finally someone at Santa Monica Studios took a new screen space antialiasing technique, optimize it and implement it in the God of War 3 engine using the Cell, delivering the most crazy antialiased game on a console to date, with very little artifacting here and there ( see an old blog post about it). The technique is already being used in the Killzone 3 beta and preview codes, stepping up from KZ 2 and getting really close to the 2005 target render trailer of KZ2.
Kojima the unethical
Kojima and his team has been bashing Sony for hypeing up the real effective power of the PS3 and have used that as an excuse to explain why the retail version of the game ended up looking like shit. 'We wanted to do self shadowing but we didn't have enough memory', 'The Cell processor was not as good as the Dev kit emulated one', 'The Dev kit had a nvidia 7800gt and the RSX is not so powerful'. So how did Guerrilla or Naughty Dog manage to add more features to the engine with the same resources?. The answer is that the MGS4 engine is a technical mess, we've seen this same picture when the Kojima team developed an entirely new engine for MGS3, apparently they always take wrong design decisions with the new hardware they have at their disposal, something that other more efficient developers are getting right from the beginning (with tighter budgets and less experience).
The sad part is that now Kojima is behaving in a very unethical way, using his critics towards the PS3 hardware to prevent his fans from hating him for not making more exclusive games for the platform and developing a new multiplatform engine for Rising instead of using a heavily optimized version of the old one to remake gems like Metal Gear 1 and 2, games that are only known by hardcore MGS fans and that represent an important part of the Metal Gear story.
Even the release of Uncharted 1 half a year before MGS4 was a proof that hardware was not the only and main constraint, of course that didn't prevent Kojima to avoid some questions during several interviews that were related to the amazing graphical superiority a game that was already out was having in comparison to its upcoming title, answering again and again that Sony exaggerated the power of the PS3 and wasn't enough to materialize his vision.
I know some of you may be thinking 'you can't compare a 2008 game to newer ones', the point of my rant is not the graphical quality itself is about developers blaming the PS3 instead of trying to find what went wrong with their games.
Kaz Yamauchi emulates Kojima
Another Japanese developer that is acting unethically is Poliphony Digital CEO who has recently said to the media that the hardware lacked the power to make GT5 the game he wanted to be. Again, the media and fans complaints (leaving matchmaking aside) were:
Clumsy and convoluted UI/menus
Premium cars look awesome but only 200 of the 1000+ cars are premium, the rest are mostly high definition assets ported from GT4
Inconsistent graphical quality, again, some imported tracks that look like shit compared to the native GT5 ones
So, taking account that the premium cars and tracks are the best looking on any console game to date, have these complaints something to do with the hardware or we better start talking about a poorly distributed working time during a never-ending developing cycle?
To end my rant, I'm f* tired of developers blaming the hardware at this point of the cycle when we already have some working examples which show that applying the right wizardry you can get insane results like the ones we all know.
I was going to post about other stuff too but this is already a wall of text, see ya!.
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*Warning*: I know this is a gaming site and my story is very sad so if you don't want to read it or think that it is very inappropiate I apologize in advance
They came to his room just in time to take him to the surgery room, he and us broke into tears as he was being placed on the stretcher and taken away to the unknown. We waited patiently from 12:00 to 19:00pm (the amount of time it was ment to last) till we started worrying, one of the recepcionists called someone and found out that they were still working on him and that the surgery will last 3 more hours. The main dude came out at 22:15 and speaked to my mom, one of her cousins and me, the surgery was a 'success' but they almost didn't do nothing because they found out that the state of the cancer was a little advanced to qualify for this operation, anyway they discussed for some time after checking some more and decided to do it. He also confirmed us that the tumor was bad and that we will have to wait at least 72 hours to be sure that no bleeding or anything bad could happen, there are some serious changes like the connection from the stomach directly to the small intestine (after removing the duodene that it's the real connector), the removal of the head of the pancreas and more. The sad thing is that they let my mom talk to him when he was settled on his new room (at intensive care) and he was already awake, one of his first questions was "Do I have cancer?" (he only knew he had a tumor but he never really heared that word) and my mom was strong enough not to explode in tears and lied to him saying that some tests using the extracted material are still to be done, it was too soon to give him the bad 'news', we decided that first he should be relaxed at least the first 72 hours then we'llsee how we tell him. Thank god he didn't ask me, I would have exploded really bad revealing the truth We still have to discuss with the doctors about the post-surgery treatment but I already know that after this point the average life expectancy is 10-12 months, only 15% are alive after 5 years that the initial tumor is removed.
This is like a nightmare to us, in 25 years he barely had a cold and now one from week to the other we know that he has very little time to live, I have to be strong to support my mom because I'm her only son and both my dad and her have no siblings but I really feel dead inside, I didn't event fully recovered after I lost my fiancee 3 years ago when she went on vacation with her mom and never came back (he had a Muslim family that made her settle in the Lebanon and get married to a cousin), the success at university since she left and my passion for gaming was the only thing that prevented me from going nuts but now my whole world is tearing apart again.
Thanks for reading, my next blog entry will be only about gaming I promise
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