I initially felt kind of bad that I missed out on the naval gameplay in AC3 or whichever one it was that introduced it, but now I'm glad that a whole new game is coming out with that mechanic used as well, and probably focused on a lot more and expanded. It should be pretty neat.
Lol, I hope it can live up to some of that as well. I'm trying to go into Black Flag with more of that childlike appreciation. I want a fun sandbox to play in, and I want to play pirate.
By now there's so many AC games that you can sit a lot of them out, kinda like yearly sports games lol. Football isn't my sport but I know that the Madden games are designed solidly. They're good games and great for people who love football (in fact the only game for people who love football, but luckily for them it's pretty good).
Same can probably be said for Assassin's Creed games. The stories are dumb and a new one comes out every year, but if you skip a few of them and come back to play an AC game every once in a while it's probably the best way to experience the series. Otherwise you'll get burnt out like many AC fans already have. I'm glad I haven't played any of them since AC2, it'll probably make my experience with Black Flag better.
Either Great Wolf Sif from Dark Souls, or one of the big walking colossi from Shadow of the Colossus. I want to ride either of them all over the world, and not kill them for once.
It's possible to play through without using guns like Julian did, but it's really difficult, not very fun, and the game isn't made well for it. Many if not most of the encounters and levels are designed as such that getting through an area without direct confrontation as well as without weapons is impossible or reliant on luck and brute force retrying. Getting into hand to hand combat is necessary at some point in pretty much every level I can remember, and although it's possible to not use weapons throughout the game the encounters aren't designed for it, it's simply a technicality that you can. It's been a long time and I'm sure there's been plenty of post-op and brainstorming on the team by now I'd suspect, so I hope that they cooked up a lot of ideas to make Mirror's Edge 2's levels and encounters to be designed for the various playstyles. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they will appreciate and provide non-lethal mechanics in ME2 and even some non-confrontational gameplay so that I'm not being forced into karate too often that it becomes stale, but at the same time I'm slightly worried and hoping the next Mirror's Edge game doesn't turn out to be the Splinter Cell Conviction of the Mirror's Edge games.
I'm not going to say I'm a feminist because in the current gaming climate it seems like white knighting, but feminists and myself are on the same page in many ways if not most. I've seen the tropes vs. women in games videos Anita has produced so far and I don't really get where all the rage against her comes from. She received a lot of money and it doesn't seem like she's put it to as good of use as she could, and some of her observations and critical thinking are only skin deep on some games, but I honestly don't see why people hate her so much. People complain that she disables comments, the fact is most people don't have to deal with regular death and rape threats and harassment like she's become a lightning rod for. Online harassment and hate speech is a problem and people shouldn't have to "just deal with it, it's da internet bro." Most humans are quite sensitive and can't sustain a life, work, or project that opens them up to that kind of treatment. Disagreeing with her is fine, but there seems to be very little of that going on in the gaming world, many people are either putting their heads in the sand to avoid it, or they're flinging hate speech (which I don't consider disagreement, it's more just psychotic), or they're white-knighting her and coming across pretentious.
Now that we've seen women in games become a front page topic across gaming sites for months now and all the debates and rage that come along with it, I think she had a lot of guts diving right into this topic in this kind of environment. It's clear very few people actually wanted to talk about women in games, and once it started gaining traction people either swelled with rage, hid away hoping for it to pass, or occasionally very few people have even made good discussions and arguments about it. Some of the arguments I've seen against Anita from men seem to boil down to, "HEY NOW, I'M A MALE AND WOMEN HAVE BEEN ASSHOLES TO ME BEFORE, AND IN GENERAL MY LIFE HASN'T ALWAYS BEEN PEACHY, SO THEREFORE FEMINISM IS BULLSHIT! ANITA IS FULL OF SHIT AND I CAN'T STAND ALL THIS!" Reading some of the counter-arguments has been more like a sad window into lives of some angry men. It's quite a mess on all sides. That's why I feel sympathy for her, people forget she's a human being, they just she her as a symbol and she becomes a lightning rod for hate and treatment that respectable people would never exhibit in a face to face setting. I'm not sure she knew what she was biting off when she came to the women in games dinner table, and it's possible all that hate and harassment could affect the quality of her analysis and her overall disposition towards the topics, that's another part that makes me sad about this whole thing. She isn't perfect and she's not supposed to be, ever since the beginning her arguments have sometimes been thin and her focus on the negative representations instead of a more balanced show hasn't been great, but the net might have only served to poison her and make her more down on this whole project.
Part of my disappointment in her work has been at the skin-deep analysis she's offered to some of the games she covers. When she covers games it's more like a lightning round and she blankets a lot of games with criticisms that aren't always well wrought. Her production is good, she's good in front of the camera, she speaks clearly, her tone is cool headed and calm, it's only the arguments that can get thin at times. I've seen feminazis before and she doesn't come across as one, it's possible she had a feminazi women's studies professor in school, but Anita herself seems much more approachable than actual feminazis. She'll bring up points about the tropes, but in the end she brings up the fact she doesn't think her suggestions should be law and she doesn't think that developers are out to stage an anti-women conspiracy, by simply watching the videos you can tell she's not crazy, she just thinks people don't often think enough about the stories they write, and don't see them from diverse points of view. Which is all true. When I watched her videos I knew well that they had a focus on the representation of women in gaming, but in the end the videos made me think in general about the poor writing in video game stories and the need for more diversity of portrayals and new ideas. I have yet to really be offended or upset by any of her stuff yet. It's not perfect and she's not the person I'd prefer to be the face of these issues, but her work has made me think about storytelling in general.
That landscape reminds me of the desert the Black Mesa base is in during Half Life 1.
For a few seconds I thought that a laser beam was coming out of the koala's penis and into the eagle's eye, and for those few seconds I was fully accepting that as the reality I was seeing in the drawing, and I was okay with it lol. I assume the eagle has laser eyes right? So that means the eagle is shooting the koala in the penis via laser? Either way, there's some serious wiener and laser business going on in this drawing and I like it. These koala and bald eagle shenanigans made my night, I can sleep now 
Glad you liked what you saw in that link, that Let's Play has been fun to watch and it sold me on the game as well. I've never heard of Hearts of Iron but it appears to made by the same people that make Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis, Paradox Interactive. Hearts of Iron is one of their franchises and it looks cool. Now that you told me about it I've looked a little a a Let's Play of it and it's similar to their other awesome grand strategy games.
Lol, thanks for that Matt
I got the paperback version too, and the text really is tiny but my vision is quite sharp still so I can tolerate it. It does hurt after reading for a while though, it's similar to looking at a computer screen and focusing for too long and when you look up things are blurry. After I've been reading these books for a long while, once I look up at the TV everythings a blur lol. I have some of the Halo novels in large paperback and I even have Cryptum in hardcover and having the larger text is real nice.
Congrats on finishing Clash of Kings, I really liked that one. My favorite chapters were always Tyrion's throughout that book. In the TV show Tyrion takes is the head of the principal cast during the second season (which covers Clash of Kings) and he is portrayed fantastically. A Storm of Swords is really good, and it's really intense and things get really crazy for a lot of characters. I think you'll be impressed by that book once you get to it, but I hear you on taking a break to read other things. When I finish Storm of Swords I'm going to read something different so I can have a change of scenery.
