Is the recent lack of updates here at Metaleeto.com causing you to suffer comic withdrawal symptoms?  Well good news!  My colleague and fellow Gateway comicist Faye Campbell has finally gotten herself a website for her most amusing strip, People Watching.

 She only has a few up right now, but that’s bound to change in the very near future, so you best go to www.people-watching.net right now or at your earliest convenience.

Splinter Cell: Conviction, like Command & Conquer 4, is a newly-released game trying to capitalize on a longstanding game-series but ultimately ruining the beloved franchise. In fact, I find Conviction akin to Rainbow Six: Lockdown, another Tom Clancy game that tried to innovate by destroying everything that made the previous games good. Both games gave me a feeling of surreality, putting familiar characters into a completely foreign environment with radically different gameplay, all wrapped up in a story so complex yet uninteresting that it lacks any kind of emotional impact. What’s more, it’s simply not fun.

 Conviction gets rid of the exploratory stealth action of its predecessors and instead focuses on action with stealthy elements. All the complex moves have been reduced to single button clicks. While this feature is useful in some cases, it robs the player of free agency thus making the game fairly boring and unsatisfying. The game is very linear; you follow the arrows to your next objective, every so often running into a gaggle of baddies whom you must dispatch, stealthily or not, to proceed. And therein lies the major fault with the game; you have no choice. The hallmark of past Splinter Cell games was that the player could choose how to approach a problem: you could sneak past all the baddies, you could take them out one-by-one, trap them with wall mines, distract them by shooting fire extinguishers, etc. The guns-blazing approach would certainly get you killed, but Conviction forces you to do this and also makes it easy for you. Gone is the risky but oh-so-satisfying tactic of lurking in the shadows to get in close to a baddie, grabbing him by the neck neck, dragging him back into the shadows, then bonking him on the head.

 What’s also surreal is that the main character, super-spy Sam Fisher, looks absolutely nothing like his earlier incarnations. He looks like a cross between Harrison Ford and Max Payne. Anna Grimsdottir, another returning character, looks equally contrasting. The voice actors remain the same, but familiar voices coming from these completely different people is just off-putting.

 Finally, the story is convoluted, uninspired, and doesn’t gel with past events of the series. Sam Fisher is in hiding because of all the stuff he did while undercover in the previous Splinter Cell game. Then some people come to kill him for no reason. A good reason would have been because he is still wanted for terrorism, but the developers must have thought that was too logical. The overall plot is that a shadowy government organization is trying to kill the president so somebody else can be in charge who will somehow do things that are better for them. What? That plan is retarded! Plus we’ve already seen it done in much better games (see Hitman: Blood Money). Also, how many times have we seen scientists be gunned down by their own security guards because the authorities caught wind of the evil stuff they’ve been doing? Heck, the exact same thing happened in the first Splinter Cell! Not only is it stupid to murder skilled personnel instead of evacuating them somewhere else where they can continue their research, it’s also a cheap ploy to make the bad guys seem cartoonishly evil and paint scientists as innocent victims of the military-industrial complex…despite voluntarily working for them knowing full well they were evil.

Oh, and the shadowy organization is spy-agency Third Echelon, Sam’s former employer turned antagonist. What used to be a top-secret office of the NSA with only a handful of personnel is now known by everybody, employs hundreds of gun-toting morons and has an entire building with their name printed on it in big, friendly letters. Likewise everybody seems to know about Sam and his legendary exploits, despite all his missions being classified by the super top-secret agency he once worked for. Go figure.

Without spoiling anything, the lacklustre ending of the game hints at an even bigger, more powerful and evilishly evil syndicate that is behind all the bad stuff in the world. Commence facepalming now: they’re trying to make Sam Fisher into James Bond. The super shadowy criminal syndicate is exactly like SPECTRE, or more recently QUANTUM, from the Bond films and books, and Sam himself has been turned into an unrealistic superhero, the only one who can stop them. This means that if they don’t axe the series outright, UbiSoft is going to churn out a bunch of schlocky action games wherein Sam foils the various plots of Dr. Claw, without any of the realism, agency, or character consistency of the earlier games we loved.

So in conclusion, I don’t like this game. Mass Effect 2 does much better at being an action game, so go play that. I know I will.

I’ve got to hand it to Bioware; not only can they spin a good yarn with kickass gameplay, but their games are also good for replay value.  I just played Mass Effect again with a female protagonist, and I appreciate the attention to detail in making the playing experience sufficiently different, including sexist remarks from NPCs and girl-talk with your female crewman, and thinly veiled lesbianism.  And see the guy in this picture?  I rocked his world with my womanly sex-powers.  I consider it payback for leaving him to die in my first playthrough (plus he’s srsly hawt, omg!).

That said, I bought and am currently playing Mass Effect 2 with a protagonist who’s all man, and if I’m able to, everyone’s getting pregnant.  That said, updates may continue to be infrequent.  Sorries!

Hey guys! You’ve probably noticed that there’s no comic this week. Sorry about that, but I was stricken by a rare disease called Mass Effect. It’s known to affect 1 in every 1 writers of Metaleeto.

I bought ME1 for $10 over Steam several months ago, but only recently had the time to play it. And it is pretty damn awesome, so I’ve been splitting my time ‘twixt playing it and working thus leaving little time for comics. Once again, my apologies.

I entered Dick Freedoms #1 & 2 into the Alberta Student Film Festival, and for some unfathomable reason, I won the prize for Best Director!

This is a bit weird, considering I didn’t direct much of anything - I just did it. I’m not giving the cheque back, though. And honestly, when you’re working with a production team of this calibre, who needs direction? My thanks go the the U of A Society for Creative Filmmaking who organized this festival, and particularly James Cadden who ensured that my film got entered despite postal errors.