Coffee at Leblanc

Horizon Zero Dawn was one of my favorite games that I played in 2019 so I was eager to get my hands on Forbidden West and scooped it up on release day. It unnaturally took me over five months to beat it, but I finally have. So I played Horizon Forbidden West on the base PS4. I heard the PlayStation 5 version is ideal, but since I still don't own one and I was really pressed about getting this game on release I chose to get the PS4 version. In the years since Zero Dawn's release I noticed a graphical upgrade. The textures in the environments in Forbidden West have a higher res and one thing that bothered me in particular with Zero Dawn is how waxy the skin looked on black characters aside from Sylens. This isn't an issue anymore in Forbidden West . Every black character's skin texture looks believable as skin. I wish the hair looked as believable, but I already discussed that in my 4C Pixels article. There are also more textures in the skin as well. Aloy's fre...

  Jordan Peele's Get Out had been a revitalizing take on the thriller/horror genre from the lens of a black eye. It had become a cultural phenomenon upon its release. One of the reasons for that is because it took a real situation that Black Americans find themselves in and wrapped it into one of the scariest imagery ever. It was fresh and invigorating to see a Hollywood film like this from a black director. In the film industry movies with black leads and cast are pigeon holed a lot. We get a lot of movies dealing with the hood, drugs, slavery, sports, and comedy, but horror and thriller movies are rare. This film was like a tipping point for more diverse films by black creators. In 2018 we finally got the first black superhero Black Panther on the silver screen. We got Sorry to Bother You in the same year, See You Yesterday , and Fast Color for a few others not long after. Jordan Peele also brought his second feature film US in 2019. The public reception on this is mixed thou...

  So the Alamo Drafthouse theaters put Perfect Blue back in theaters for a special 25th anniversary watch party. Perfect Blue is one of the most famous anime movies of the nerd community. You may have seen gifs of it's most iconic shots in slowed and reverb music videos or in general use on social media. Now, I've seen them in context. I've watched Satoshi Kon's other famous movie, Paprika , years ago. Paprika was very weird and surreal, but I didn't really like it that much. Still, that didn't deter me from wanting to see Perfect Blue as others on the internet suggested I might like it better and I ultimately did.   Being a film from 1997 Perfect Blue is draped in 90s aesthetics with its animation, fashion, and dial up internet. The film was also meant for theaters. Although it's an animated film it's shot like a live-action film at times with zoomed out edits like one that centers on a character in the bedroom and pans out overlooking the city and...

 It has been reported this morning that the creator of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Kazuki Takahashi, has died at the age of sixty. Yu-Gi-Oh! had been a pretty big hobby interest of mine. It was one of the first animes I've ever seen along with Pokemon, Cardcaptors, Sailor Moon, and Dragon Ball Z. Back when the anime first aired in the US in 2000 it had a spurge of popularity. It wasn't quite on the level of Pokemon, but it still had a substantial popularity. While I liked the anime back then which I doubt holds up today, I was more entranced with the trading card game that the brand is most well known for. Yu-Gi-Oh! is a combative card game consisting of a forty-sixty card deck where players use spells, traps, and monsters to reduce the opposing player's life points to zero. What enamored me about this game is the strategy and collecting of all these monster cards that pull from various mythologies. I was collecting a lot of cards for a while, but stopped around the time of high school due ...

  On a previous article I talked about how afro-textured hair is represented in video games . This time I would like to talk about a different aspect of the black experience in video games, skin tone. The first thing other races notice about me before my hair. In gaming the first game to feature a person of color was Heavy Weight Champ in 1976. This arcade title by Sega was in black and white, but the arcade cabinet did feature art of what was obviously a black man. This was a simple boxing title. The two characters were a white boxer and a black boxer as represented in monochrome hues as was the limitation of gaming back in the 70s. Very primitive in the early days of gaming and a stereotypical start for representation in the interactive medium. One of the first games to feature a melanated woman was the controversial game Custer's Revenge in 1983. Now we're in the era where video games in color was in common. This 8-bit title for the Atari featured a cowboy and the player...