PixlBit

Look, it's my pup-of-the-month! He's delicious.

The time has come again to fire off a hot pup-pic and talk to you about games. According to the hard-line intricacies of bird-law I should owe you two pups, seeing as it's been two months since the last blog. Do you feel entitled to such? Would you raise your levies and mount a rebellion if I broke my oath and denied you those pups? Are you willing to disembowel me if I break this honored tradition? This is a fine line we tread, let's take it easy for now and talk games while I mull over the fine print of bird-law.

Books I finished

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey - Super good. If you like epic space operas, if you like Firefly (who doesn't?), detective noir, space ship battles, space marines, and vomit zombies, you should check out Leviathan Wakes. It's the first of a trio of books called The Expanse trilogy by James S.A. Corey and it's a fantastic opener. The book reads like a blockbuster movie script, in all the best ways. Hopefully somebody makes a film adaptation, and hopefully they don't screw it up. This would make a fantastic film.

Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb - Super good. The first couple chapters were tough to get into. The writing style and prose were confusing at first, I couldn't tell who was talking, what the perspective was, and what was even happening. Also, it's perhaps halfway into the book before the main character actually gets a name for you to call him by, other than "Boy". Despite the odd beginning, this novel develops into a beautiful and dark high-fantasy world with a coming-of-age tale, political intrigue, assassination, loneliness, betrayal, camaraderie, honor, and human-to-animal telepathy (not in the anthropomorphic Disney style, but more like Jon and Ghost from Game of Thrones). Highly recommend this book to fantasy fans.

Books I'm reading

A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin - About 200 pages in, it's pretty good so far, I have nothing to gripe about yet. Nothing to say other than that since anything would be a spoiler to the people watching Game of Thrones or who are behind me in the books.

Games I've finished

Dark Souls 2 - During these past two months that you haven't seen my blogs, the guys in our Pixlbit forums have seen me regularly, it turns out that the forums are where I've been! The game is pretty good, I'm in my second playthrough now with a different character build. In the forums we have been talking lore, gathering evidence, and sharing theories on how the DS2 world works and what its history is.

Overall the game is fairly solid in its design and combat, but the best part of any Souls game is the part where you get together with the community for months afterwards, chasing every detail down its particular rabbit hole to figure out the proper sequence of events, the motivations of characters, and the epic drama that begins to take shape once you have all the small pieces of evidence put together to give you context to the larger events. We have been real dorky in the forums for the past two months, and it's super good.

Splinter Cell: Blacklist - It's a long epic campaign but I finally finished it, and this newest entry in the franchise is my second favorite, behind Chaos Theory. I've been a silent fanboy of these games since day one in 2002. There's isn't a SC game I don't own, and I've never played a SC game I didn't like, but Chaos Theory has always been my favorite, and for years I've been waiting for Ubisoft to make an entry that would do CT some justice and get back to the idea of giving players the ability to ghost through levels (go undetected, and without touching anybody).

Blacklist is everything I wanted, the levels are huge and designed with the full variety of play-styles in mind, and the mechanics and playability of it are the best in the series by far. If you want to ghost through levels you have all the mechanics, nooks, & crannies to get that done, and it's satisfying. If you want to blast your way through people you can do that too and the mechanics work better than they ever have. It's a fully featured and well thought out AAA Splinter Cell game on every front. The only one that can compare to Chaos Theory. These games are finally back on the right track with Blacklist. Hopefully it made enough money that they'll decide to keep making SC games.

Time to quickly discuss character design, animation, and ludo-narrative-fashion-dissonance. I still have a crush on Anna Grimsdottir, she's prettier than ever in this game, but they made a bad decision putting her in a pencil skirt and furry booties, that outfit is in contrast with her personality and her job.

I'm a stickler for seeing character designs where people wear clothes that are practical, especially when their jobs are active and can involve combat. In the previous game, Conviction, Grim had solid boots over her jeans, a jacket to keep her warm, and she was able to be limber and get into gun fights. In Blacklist her pencil skirt and booties look adorable but are in contrast with her no-nonsense personality and the level of action in her job.

There's a cutscene in Blacklist where Sam and Grim get into a firefight with some bad guys, and by the way its directed you can tell they are unable to show Grim much because there's no elegant way to rig and animate a woman in a pencil skirt maneuvering, crouching behind crates, and doing things you have to do in gun-fights. Not really because of upskirt chances but just the geometry of it all. They cut to her quickly and when you look at her skirt it's just a mess of texture because there's no way to make that character look natural. In real-life the skirt would limit your flexibility and agility, and in a video game trying to rig your character and get her into those action-positions obviously make a mess of the model and require you to use cinematic tricks to not have to show her much, and keep the shortcomings from standing out to the player.

A lot like Alyx Vance from Half Life 2, very practical. Even the belt allows for some storage. Anna Grimsdottir is written and portrayed as a bad-ass NSA field agent with a high minded yet no-nonsense approach, and in the world of video games she surprisingly has no sexual tension with her boss Sam, the protagonist (in fact they have quite the opposite situation). She's a master of analytics and logistics, loyal to her country and team, lacking any naivety. Willing to kill, and to hatch desperate schemes without ever expecting public praise, notoriety, or riches. Her personality is every bit as sexy as her aesthetics

She's still super pretty and the way her strong personality is written hasn't changed, but the outfit doesn't make sense this time around. Also, the belt is all for show, no storage. No jacket to keep warm. It's not offensive, it's just impractical and dishonest. The Grim you get to know in the SC games wouldn't wear this outfit to her job if she had the choice. This is what a desk-jockey would wear, and Grim is as far removed from a desk-jockey as you can get

Boy is Grimsdottir gorgeous though, she's been my big cyber-crush for years now and Blacklist continues the tradition. And the vertical stripes in the blouse and skirt work to make her appear taller than she really is. Not that there's anything wrong with short people, I prefer petite women. Well, before I turn this into a fucking episode of What Not To Wear, I'll wrap this up. My bad.

What to look forward to in my next update

I wanted to keep this blog shorter and more digestible than my giant blogs of yore, so I'll update you again soon about how my school situation has been going. I registered for fall classes and I'm super excited, so soon I'll tell you about the classes I'm taking. There's a couple games I'm currently playing and some books I bought that I didn't mention. I've also begun experimenting with soup-making and creating potions with vegetables and ingredients I've only ever seen in Oblivion's alchemy system, and more often than not it's been turning out really good. All of that and more, next time.

The statutes of bird-law are quite clear, and I am no oathbreaker, so here's the other pup you're owed