thedarlingone (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thedarlingone) wrote2025-02-24 06:52 am
thedarlingone) wrote2025-02-24 06:52 am
(no subject)
i just woke up from an unstressful dream. i don't know how i got one of those, but i was looking at red sandstone rock formations in southern spain for some reason when my alarm went off, and i woke up with a specific little folded anticline outcrop in my head as clear as day.
(the video games pokemon scarlet and pokemon violet are set in a pokemon universe version of spain. they've already done japan's four regions, new york, france, hawaii, and england, so they're having to stretch for region ideas. their geology is extremely simplified, not quite minecraft but you can definitely see the tiled patterns on all the cliffsides, and the cliff heights etc are artificialized to block progress instead of facilitate it like breath of the wild. they were badly rushed, shoddily made - i've literally never had another triple-A game just crash for no reason on hardware it was supposedly designed to run on - and forced to implement a badly-thought-out open-world concept that doesn't fit their basic pokemon formula at all, but i digress. my point is that the area around cortondo in the southeast-ish part of the map does resemble the actual andalusian plains in the parallel area in real spain, which i've only seen on film, in 1960's life-of-christ movie "the greatest story ever told" which used filming locations in southern spain to substitute for the middle east. my family being what it was, i've seen an assortment of life-of-christ films yearly throughout my teens, and while i can't easily go check whether i was dreaming about a real outcrop - i doubt it, it looked kind of textbooky - that movie did like to get distracted by the spectacular geology of the area. i was struck on waking up by how much the cortondo olive fields really do look like that part of actual spain, too, even if it's all pretty oversimplified. i think i will award scarlet/violet 1 point of effort. i tend to dismiss them as soulless cash grabs, but that's not quite fair. approximately half of the unique story was carefully written and quite thoughtful, and some of the design work and modeling is solid, even if i am getting really tired of the sagrada familia popping up everywhere in japanese media set outside japan and this is the second one in the pokemon universe alone. they were more ruined by crunch and the forced open world for marketing reasons, mainly.)
anyway that was a long way to say i feel slightly better than i did. at least i still have the ability to think about rocks (positive)
(the video games pokemon scarlet and pokemon violet are set in a pokemon universe version of spain. they've already done japan's four regions, new york, france, hawaii, and england, so they're having to stretch for region ideas. their geology is extremely simplified, not quite minecraft but you can definitely see the tiled patterns on all the cliffsides, and the cliff heights etc are artificialized to block progress instead of facilitate it like breath of the wild. they were badly rushed, shoddily made - i've literally never had another triple-A game just crash for no reason on hardware it was supposedly designed to run on - and forced to implement a badly-thought-out open-world concept that doesn't fit their basic pokemon formula at all, but i digress. my point is that the area around cortondo in the southeast-ish part of the map does resemble the actual andalusian plains in the parallel area in real spain, which i've only seen on film, in 1960's life-of-christ movie "the greatest story ever told" which used filming locations in southern spain to substitute for the middle east. my family being what it was, i've seen an assortment of life-of-christ films yearly throughout my teens, and while i can't easily go check whether i was dreaming about a real outcrop - i doubt it, it looked kind of textbooky - that movie did like to get distracted by the spectacular geology of the area. i was struck on waking up by how much the cortondo olive fields really do look like that part of actual spain, too, even if it's all pretty oversimplified. i think i will award scarlet/violet 1 point of effort. i tend to dismiss them as soulless cash grabs, but that's not quite fair. approximately half of the unique story was carefully written and quite thoughtful, and some of the design work and modeling is solid, even if i am getting really tired of the sagrada familia popping up everywhere in japanese media set outside japan and this is the second one in the pokemon universe alone. they were more ruined by crunch and the forced open world for marketing reasons, mainly.)
anyway that was a long way to say i feel slightly better than i did. at least i still have the ability to think about rocks (positive)