2nd Lieutenant Mira: a woman in sensible armor

2nd Lieutenant Mira - 203 Cadian Gaurd

I recently discovered Women in Sensible Armor over on Tumbler and I'm not sure that this sort of nerd feminism is anything new, but it certainly puts a fine point on the realization that all of us have made after playing through our first few RPGs.  And that realization is, why the hell would that chick be dressed like that to fight Orcs?

Now, this site certain gets it's share of traffic thanks to digital boobs and hot chicks in video games so I'd be a little hypocritical to say I haven't been guilty of the "digital male gaze" from time to time.

But still I was pretty gratified when I stumbled across this character in the recently released Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine.  Full disclosure, I work at THQ, so I should probably point out that I am a huge warhammer nerd and would have played this game even if I didn't work for the publisher.  But I am also going to give any sort of review.  But what I will give is kudos to the character designers who chose not to give 2nd Lieutenant Mira a cleavage revealing slit in here breast plate and chose to let her wear pants into battle.  She's even a pretty imposing figure when stood next to the emperors own champions, the Ultramarines:

Working at a video game publisher and playing through a lot of games co-op with my wife I find that I am often more than a little embarrassed by some of the crop up.

Take for example a character from the recently released Wii title Conduit 2.  She basically fills the same role in the script for Conduit 2 that 2nd Lt. Mira does in Space Marine, she's a tough military woman that the main character meets up with early on in the story.  She wears battle armor...but of course it's been designed  to ensure maximum "cleave":

Hell, even Red Faction Armageddon had a Kara, a "tough military woman the main character meets in Act 2" role in the script that 2nd Lt. Mira has.  Let's just take a look at her next to the main character for a second:

Sensing a pattern here?  As I'm writing this I'm starting to realize that there are two overlapping tropes here. One is the "cleavage armor" and the other is the "tough military woman the main character meets in Act 2".

Follow up post?  Most likely, but for now, let's all make the sign of the aquilla in honor of 2nd Lt. Mira and her sensible armor:

Fallout 3 Armor Mods

OK. So I started playing Mass Effect yesterday. I know. A little late to the party. I actually bought Mass Effect right when it came out , but got caught up playing a bunch of other stuff(mostly bioshock and Halo 3 if memory serves) and never opened it (just like Fable 2 actually).

As usual, I make my avatar a hot red head and named her Bekka just as I had done in Knights of the Old Republic, Fallout 3, and Sacred 2.

Anyway, one thing I wish that these games had was some kind of HTML based avatar viewer, so you could upload your avatar and post it on your blog or what not and it would update as your avatar got new armor or whatever. I haven't looked, but I 'm sure there is stuff like this for World of Warcaraft characters. Hell you can even get statues and action figures of your WoW characters.

So anyway, I was poking around for some kind of Fallout 3 avatar view and I came across a great (if somewhat tangentially related post over on Gosip Gamers. They have a post up which details 5 Awesome Fallout 3 avatar armor mods, and I have to agree, they are pretty Awesome.

First up ,you've got the Persona Mod:
























Which seems to be related to the "Temptress of the Wasteland Mod", the weakest one of the bunch I'd say:























Now that we have the T and A out of the way to "GET THE CLICKS" let's move onto the good stuff. First up there's this incredible Warhammer 40k Space Marine chapter mod:


























Not to be outdone by the Zero Suit Metroid mod:




























And finally one of the "true" Fallout fans. The "Advanced Power Armor" from the original fallout games:


























And here's one that I found while I was skimming around for more. Looks like a riff on the Persona mod. But this chick is way more bad ass then those two hussies up top:






File Planet has a nice repository of these mods if you are playing Fallout 3 on the PC and want to spice things up.

CG Artist of the Day - Tyrone Maddams

Today's CG Artist, Tyrone Maddams, is another guy I stumbled across when I was looking for 40k wallpaper. According to his bio he's worked on a number of CG Cinemas for games including:

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, Warhammer 40k: Space Marine, Warhammer 40k: Dawn Of War 2, Ghostbusters, Bioshock, S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow Of Chernobyl, Edge Of Twilight, Mafia 2, Borderlands, The Darkness, Tomb Raider: Legend, Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Hitman: Blood Money, Hitman: Contracts, Constantine, NBA 2K9, Ultimate Band, Justice League, Duke Nukem .

He works for a company in Australia called Plastic Wax. These guys were responsible for the amazing opening Cinematic in Dawn of War 2 (that's where the above space marine comes from).

Here's a couple more stills of his work. It's intersting that most of the 40k Guys also have Bioshock stuff. Guess when you get good at "Bulky guy in a suit" it just goes hand in hand.

CG Artist of the Day - Erasmus Brosdau

Today's artist is Erasmus Brosdau. Naturally I was drawn to his work because of this incredible 40k image that he and another artist created:



Here are some close up views, as you can see this picture is incredibly detailed:















He also posted some "Clay Renders" I'm not up on my CG to know if this is a render done in a program like Maya or if he actually sculpted this...that's how good CG is now, I cna't tell if it's a render or a real clay model. Check out the detail:





A HUGE version of this image can be downloaded here.

But the guy also has a lot of other incredible stuff up on his CGPortfolio. Stuff like this:





this:





this:





this:





this:




and of course "Breaking through the ice":






I don't know if this guy is working professionally or not, but I hope so, he has a lot of talent.