Super Spy hates light

I’ve been playing a bit of Splinter Cell: Conviction, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at my level of enjoyment with it. Normally, I have very little patience for stealth games, primarily because I am terrible at them, and since the cause of my terribleness is my impatience, it’s a nice circular arrangement.

Splinter Cell has so far given me a lot of room to succeed in sneaking. In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I am playing on the easiest difficulty level, so that’s probably helping my success and lack of frustration. The stealth system is clearly communicated and obvious: if the screen goes black and white, you’re in a shadow and ready to commit spy shenanigans. When you see colour, you are potentially in trouble. To facilitate the onset of forgiving, cloaking darkness, I endeavor to shoot out every light that I can. even in rooms that have no enemies and are far removed from my destination, I still crouch and methodically murder every glowing bulb I can see. At times, I’ve found myself wistfully looking at the full moon, wishing I could shoot it out too. It’s relieving to have some control over my stealth environment.

I have to also commend the cover system.  You can clearly see which location you will scoot to next when you hit the cover button, and you can weigh your options well ahead of time. In other games I’ve found myself stuck on the wrong wall as someone shoots my sensitive bits, so I give up on cover pretty quickly. Not so this time.

I know that the level I am about to play is the type I really dislike. If you are seen, you lose the level immediately, and I am far too sloppy to get through this one the first go. Especially if they ban me from indulging in my anti-light fetishism.

A Buildup of Orneryness

I think I need to post my rants to the blog a little bit faster than I am right now. I’ve got a backlog of griping and opinionated shouting to do, and I think I might be losing my ardor for the earliest ideas. In a nutshell, until I have time to fully expand each idea:

1.Cory Doctrow is wrong:the locked-down approach to hardware and software that Apple has taken with the iPad is very,very good for the device and wonderful for user experience. And they are under no business or moral compulsion to allow every snot-nosed jerk with a few lines of code under their belt to have free rein to express their poorly thought out ideas.

2. Ontario pharmacists are being greedy and deceptive when they whine about the impending changes. They are a for profit business that is taking kickbacks from the drug makers, which results in higher drug costs for no benefit to the consumer. And since the province is one of the biggest consumers, my tax money is being used to line the pharmacists pockets. No thanks. I’ll take my medicinal needs to a pharmacy who isn’t trying to mislead people with fear tactics.

Perfunctory Update

The interviews and subsequent profiles have finally been progressing. I have 3 more to do, one of which is in a tight timeline. Ironically, I don’t have  phone number for the hurried one, so there’s not much I cn do other than politely pester via email. I submitted an old one-act play to the cabaret, so we’ll see if they accept it or send it away for being far longer than the requested 30 minutes.

I’ve worked out the beginning of the space story: It will be a monologue from a female survivor of earth’s last days. I might do it for next year’s cabaret.

Various other story details, ideas and notes have percolated up while I’ve been slightly dormant due to cold. Hopefully I can kick into gear in the next few days, both creatively and athletically.