My personal description of MaG, written when I arrived in 2024, prophesied a little about the events that took me this year. I do not miss much more, since I am now the happy owner of a beautiful old stone house at the bottom of a countryside not inclined to the hustle and bustle, and I took advantage of it to saw at the base many social relations that I considered useless or counterproductive. Or who would never have been able to come visit me. Just stay calm, and some friends, with whom I sometimes share bread, wine, and PS2 controller... What a peaceful and joyful life. It would almost be forgotten that the world mourns the loss of common sense, reason and liters of bitter blood. More than ever, I've skipped the news, far too happy that I was living for myself and my loved ones rather than reading the misfortune of others, on which I would have had nothing to say or think about anyway. So goes life, sometimes cruel, often insensitive to the evils it generates. And the video game in all this, will you tell me?! I'm coming.

This year, having cut the last branches still vaguely holding on to video news, I did not learn much about the use of the AI, which I am making fun of, and the closures of studios or layoffs deemed abusive, which, in any case, were to be expected after the boom known with the recent pandemic. I haven't played in many recent titles either. Enough to see that the trend does not go to originality, but rather to a wise recipe combining modern comfort and decades old ideas. Take Final Fantasy Tactics : The Ivalice Chronicles For example. Remake of a mythical title, which has the good taste to offer the player the option to abandon everything he offers of new, or to choose to enjoy the luxury of his softened systems, its integral dubbing and its convenient chronological frieze. What a feat. And yet, at first sight, it is a game of twenty-seven years old, based on another's recipe (Tactics Ogre, my love) aged thirty... In contrast, a Metroid Prime 4 who picks up some old man to make some new takes his feet in the carpet. And its fall is all the more painful as the wait has been long, and as Nintendo is no longer even hiding from its predatory sales techniques, with the Amiibo giving access to music for an area by being, without it, devoid of... What an indignity.

But while I have been flying over the news like a raptor in the wheat fields, some information has nevertheless managed to penetrate my serenity. Among them, the abject screams of politicized hatred against a Clear Dark Claiming an artistic direction deemed real by a handful of idiots paddling in gospels on networks spreading their red carpet. The one that, a few months earlier, everyone seemed to enjoy, became within a few days, following a game awards ceremony that was always so ridiculous, a subject of grim cleavage. Everyone who believes hard as iron to have a clean opinion, while all are the result of a cleverly calculated media beat, telling them what to think, then all feel in duty to preach for their parish. What a mistake, what a lack of taste, what a proof of immaturity and widespread imbecility. To believe that history has ceased to repeat itself, against all expectations, which until then had nailed to the pillory those who, believing that they had a divine mission, were actually spreading heresy. I would have a lot of grievances to address to these fools that the internet and politics blind and detest, but I would just go away again politely because my father taught me that talking to fools is taking the risk of educating them.

In a similar genre, but on the other side of the political spectrum, since it would be a shame not to recall that no edge is better than the other, the unfortunate Avowed suffered from complaints just as quickly pronounced, and just as stupid. It must be said that they are numerous, on the web, to jump to the ceiling as soon as a dust of social progressism becomes felt, even though it would only be a false alarm, as often. Now, if it happens to be right for these malandrins, when they give a random blow of sword in the torrent, they end up feeding a big fish (hello Dragon Age : The Veilguard), it is difficult not to laugh at them in the present case, as in so many others before that elsewhere. Because it was obvious from Obsidian Entertainment's liability thatAvowed would not be of the kind to make the apology of the musculoskeletal white male, like the frankness Gears of War always does. However, one must have a serious problem in order to soffusquer his end referring to a creature whose genre is uncertain (one remains in a fantasy universe, reunite yourself!), his homosexual relations most often evoked half-word and poetically, or his prominence of female PNJ.

I am all the more appalled that this ignorous comment quickly took precedence over any consideration as to the quality of the game, which is moreover not a great success. But striking a man on the ground will remain, no matter what it is said, the rains alone, and irrefutable proof of lack of honour. But what amazes the most, is that the racist words of the creative director of the game, having caused a scandal just a few weeks before the release, have since been completely forgotten, in favor of this incessant bell-tower war whose battle horse bears on one side the term of woke, on the other the term of progress. Double standards.