inspector-montoya-fox

[inspector-montoya-fox]

crazy how every time i play these games i have the exact same thoughts and then i discover that i already posted them on here

here’s why Bentley is Sly 3′s true main villain

no, this is not a joke - i truly believe the evil mastermind behind Sly 3′s events was Bentley, as he orchestrated everything behind the scenes, pulling the strings. let’s take a look:

in Venice, Bentley attaches timer-sensitive bombs onto Sly and gives him a limited time to run to where they’re supposed to be placed. he even goes so far as to say Place the dynamite when you get near the anchor, or KABOOM, raccoon parts everywhere!

in Australia, Bentley shoots Carmelita (while wearing the Mask of Dark Earth) as if he didn’t know what the chemical reaction was going to be, in order to put the gang in danger. to be fair, he might’ve also thought that it would kill her; we’ve often seen Bentley’s desire to see Carmelita die, like in Clockwerk’s lair or the Contessa’s Re-Education Tower

in Holland, Bentley urges Sly to enter a deadly dogfight competition just because he has a crush on Penelope’s fake profile. Sly manages to survive but Bentley is upset because Penelope has a crush on Sly and is willing to jeopardise everything because of her

also in Holland, Bentley tells Muggshot that his mother is a broken down tub of junk with more gentleman callers than the operator!

in China, Bentley overlooks the fact that his acting skills are trash and pretends to be a wedding planner for General Tsao’s wedding. this blows the gang’s cover and results to Tsao stealing the ThiefNet laptop. Bentley also sends Sly on a mission in which he would “pretend” to be arrested by Carmelita

in Bloodbath Bay, Bentley’s plan involves having Sly walk the plank and the Guru taming a mythical beast while he rests in the comforts of the cabin below deck. he also trash-talks Sly when on a mission with Penelope

in Kaine Island, Bentley decides it’s the right moment to throw a tantrum about Sly overshadowing him and gives into Dr M’s manipulations, once again putting Sly in danger. he stays back and convinces Murray to wait outside the vault with him, instead of going inside to save Sly from Dr M. as a direct result, Sly gets hit and loses his memory. the island and vault collapse as well

in the end, Sly survives a near-death experience and has to pretend to have amnesia, but Bentley gets the vault’s remnants and uses them to build a high-tech lab for himself. he probably wanted to kill Sly to solidify his relationship with Penelope. he also takes over the Thievius Raccoonus and writes inside, just to feel like a Cooper

#i mean... die i lie ? #she went a bit overboard with the punctuation in that second reblog but the point is SOOOO valid #and i'm so happy that my stance as a certified Bentley hater is being validated through the podcast #because even if we disregard the shitty behaviour outlined in the original post... that second part still stands

[inspector-montoya-fox]

the wifi at my house was down all day yesterday and i finished Flight of Fancy real quick, so here’s what i thought: i often praise this episode for its exploration of themes but the Black Baron as a villain is very weak. apart from the final reveal, he barely shows up and doesn’t even pose a major threat, as we spend the majority of the episode fending off Muggshot and whoever the fuck. when compared to Octavio and Tsao who overstep personal boundaries, snatching laptops and turtles with tomato allergies, the Baron is a joke lowkey. so, how could Flight of Fancy been better?

well, for starters, make the Baron more prominent. SP shouldn’t have relied on him being Penelope’s disguise to excuse his absence from the episode. give us the ‘Penelope has gotten too comfortable in sporting her Baron costume and has succumbed to the persona’s madness’ storyline we deserve. give us an extended first mission once Sly can’t find a switch to lower the drawbridge for Bentley at the Baron’s castle - instead of him illogically knocking off an entire catapult from the tower, have him break into the castle and try to find the switch, a mix between Sir Raleigh’s hallways and Pandora Palace.

anyway, i’m not writing a post on how to make the Baron better. i’m trying to solve Flight of Fancy’s villain problem and here’s what i’ve come up with: the ACES competition is comprised of five teams. Team Cooper, Black Baron’s Team (The Baronettes ???), Team Muggshot, Team Iceland and Team Belgium. i think it would have been really interesting if, in an episode which is all about overturning conventions, SP had multiple villains instead of one. give Team Iceland and Team Belgium leaders. make them characters and integrate them into the story. just like with Muggshot, have them foil our plans against the Black Baron and give each a secondary boss fight. with more main players involved, the Black Baron’s absence wouldn’t be so noticeable.

i made character designs and logos for both Team Iceland and Team Belgium but scrapped them because they were kinda hyper-realistic instead of cartoony. i’ll describe them for you: i based the logos off the items we steal from the two teams. Team Iceland’s logo was their blue fish in a red and white circle (national colours) placed over a viking hat. i didn’t get around to drawing Team Belgium’s logo because i figured it’d be the little symbol they have on their handkerchief.

as for the villains: for Team Iceland, a puffin called General Gunnar. he’s a good friend of the Baron’s and matches the you’ve got a short temper, lil’ guy! stereotype. he’s an ex-military official and still wears the uniform. for Team Belgium, a lynx named Alix, kinda serving Neyla 2.0 but only when in private. in public, she likes to play up the fact that she lost her left eye during a dogfight and acts as kind of like a veteran of the dogfighting world. if we got a reconnaissance mission, Sly could secretly stumble upon her and Muggshot making a deal or something, like something very rotten and shady, and since Bentley plays real dirty this episode, he could blackmail her? but anyway, i think Team Iceland and Team Belgium could have factored into the story a bit more to help balance out the episode by providing us with more villains, really delving into the dark world of what goes down behind competitions like the Olympics. have an awesome weekend my friends.

#took forever to find this #Sanzaru would take this pitch but make Penelope vape instead of smoke. this is the world we live in

[inspector-montoya-fox]

[inspector-montoya-fox]

i made you a Lost Precursor City mood board because i don’t want to study

#<3 #right there with you bestie

[inspector-montoya-fox]

hey . my boyfriend and i saw you across the bar and we're really digging your vibe

[inspector-montoya-fox]

Did a texture/mesh edit of the ps2 era cooper van

#ah yes the titular fourth member of the gang

[inspector-montoya-fox]

It's always really difficult to choose between An Opera of Fear and A Cold Alliance for my favourite Sly 3 episode, but it's safe to say that Flight of Fancy is easily the most nostalgic. Not because it's rooted in my childhood memories (it is) but in the sense that it shares elements with episodes from Sly 2 during a game which presents the gang at the peak of their career. Let's discuss

I think we can all agree that the series very effectively presents the gang's development, not only as individual characters, but also as a team of thieves. Sly 1 shows the gang as teens during their first set of adventures which sprout from Sly's desire for vengeance. They make many mistakes, they don't really have planned heists or jobs - Sly just casually goes into every level breaking shit and then faces off the big baddie - and they surpass their own expectations of themselves to defeat Clockwerk in the end. Then, Sly 2 covers a crucial point in the gang's career. It felt as if up until this point they hadn't truly fucked up so they went into it being very cocky, especially Sly. And when they got their asses handed to them by Neyla, getting separated tested their individual and collective limits.

In Sly 3, the gang has evolved to master thieves, capable enough to feel comfortable recruiting and as such mentoring strangers and also worthy enough to inherit an entire lineage's stolen loot. This is also shown in the missions, which up in scale and spectacle. It's no longer just "follow this villain" or "pickpocket this person". It's a combination of missions we grew accustomed to during Sly 2 like "follow Octavio and do recon under time pressure", or something completely new. Right off the bat, for example, we send a ferris wheel rolling across Venice squashing guards in its way, like this is just a mission not Thunderbeak or something. Every Sly 3 mission evolves explosions, high-tech and the eventual mini boss-fight.

So it's then a bit surprising to see the gang reverting to their sneakier, more subtle ways during Flight of Fancy. That's not to say we don't have explosions and thrill in the episode (the dogfights, Muggshot vs Carmelita, wolf-riding, shooting literal fucking windmills into blimps), but the way they choose to sabotage the competition due to how delicate its internal politics are creates some nostalgia. Paddling around the sewers in a blow-up rowboat and breaking into the pilots' rooms is very Sly 2. It felt like something 18 year old Sly would do. Also, scaling the Baron's castle harks back to Sly 1's platforming and is reminiscent of how small Sly would seem when approaching a villain's daunting lair.

The design choices for the Netherlands seem primitive too, enhanced by the fact that we're in the countryside. I feel like there's that Sly 1 and 2 rule of thumb at play here, where Sucker Punch chose the aesthetic or genre first and then chose the location. For example, they wanted a spooky level in Sly 2 so they chose Prague which would accommodate the genre through its architecture and gothic character. That allowed them to exaggerate a lot in terms of level design. And it's the same for Flight of Fancy, where we have a spooky castle on top of a very cartoony hill and you can hide under haystacks. Oppositely, the rest of the game's levels seem to have departed from the previous entries' design principle (except Kaine Island, which is fully fictional). It feels as if SP chose Venice and wanted to play up how European it is, or the wilderness of the Australian outback but without any radical stylistic choices. The genres are explored through the narrative, not through design.

Lastly, let's close off with some Thieves in Time slander because it wouldn't be a signature me tumblr essay without it. If we really use the entirety of our brain power and manage to look past all of the game's bullshit, one additional flaw would be how it doesn't consider the gang's development when telling its story. I'm not saying that in the series' fourth game the gang should have been infallible or indestructible due to achieving master thief status in Sly 3, but here the mistakes they make feel so unnecessarily stupid and like shit they wouldn't have done even in Sly 1. Falling for Penelope's schtick twice; Sly letting his guard down during the Le Paradox boss fight after the Contessa; whatever the fuck went down in Arabia... yea.

#sly cooper #self-restraint means writing a tumblr essay without using gay vernacular as a replacement for words

[inspector-montoya-fox]

Ashamed to say that i played a part in putting a Youtube Short™ out into the world and now live in constant fear of how the universe will choose to punish me. It’s funny and cute though so make sure to leave a like and subscribe if you haven’t already!

While @inspector-montoya-fox and I work on our Sly 2 discussion, here's a silly highlight from our episode on the first game!

(You can find the podcast on YouTube under the name Safehouse Chats!)

#hit that bell button for notifications ;p #sly cooper #Safehouse Chats

[inspector-montoya-fox]

His silly rabbit

[inspector-montoya-fox]

nyoom💨

[inspector-montoya-fox]

i needed an excuse to dig out my mic and this was as dumb as anything else i’d be doing with it

#lol

[inspector-montoya-fox]

what are they talking about?

[inspector-montoya-fox]

editing the following comic panels For Reasons and I really amused myself just by doing this

unfunny side characters are hidden behind The Box.

#Carmelita’s clumsy Interpol sidekick with a big heart: Box

[inspector-montoya-fox]

thanks everyone for submitting your favourite Toothpick moments i loved reading about them. did you know he is the first mammal villain to not have fur?

hey guys please hit the ask box and let me know what your favourite Toothpick moment is.

#my favourite villain #toothpick

[inspector-montoya-fox]

hey guys please hit the ask box and let me know what your favourite Toothpick moment is.

#the image is unedited

[inspector-montoya-fox]

let me hop onto this kinda underrated but definitely outdated post for a minute and ask: did Dr Michael PhD know about Clockwerk? it's not like i want the owl to be the ultimate catalyst in Sly's life - he was the end-all be-all for two games, it was time to move on for sure - but at the same time murdering an entire lineage of raccoons isn't um something you stumble upon everyday ?

i know how enticing it can be to want to connect all the dots when writing sequels and i'm so happy SP didn't pull a Roman Bridger told Billy Loomis to become Ghostface with Clockwerk and Dr Michael. actually, when you think about it, Sly 3 resists the urge to bring up Clockwerk in any way, which is very respectable. the way the game connects to the other two is through the aftermath of ClockLa (which is hardly mentioned) and returning villains as new gang members. if we removed those from the equation, Sly 3 could be a standalone entry. it's a very refreshing game after, again, two games that centre around Clockwerk and his subsequent resurrection but it's also a bit jarring to think that he is barely (or not at all?) mentioned during a game that involves two characters who worked for him as well as one who used his own tail feathers. at times it feels like the game is deliberately going out of its way to tiptoe around the subject.

personally, Honour Among Thieves left a lot to be desired, especially as the final episode not only of the game but of the series. more specifically, i love Dr Michael's conversation with Bentley so much but i feel like it was too little too late. i get that it acted as a climax for the 'Bentley wants to step out of Sly's shadow' storyline but the conversation gave birth to so many huge implications that it felt like we were just then getting to the juicy bits. why does Dr Michael have such vitriol for ConnEr Cooper? what happened between the gang members? was ConnEr truly a piece of shit or is it all Dr Michael's perspective? did every Cooper have a Bentley and Murray figure in their life?

whereas the player got to know Neyla through her various appearances throughout Sly 2, Dr Michael's character development is put on pause due to the fact that Sly 3's episodes aren't interconnected via the common thread of "a gang of villains". as a result, many questions arise in the final episode and never get answered. one of them being: what's his connection to Clockwerk? as highlighted in the paragraph above, there are other questions that are easily prioritised over this one because they are pointed at during the conversation with Bentley. that being said, it feels a bit bizarre for Dr Michael to not even bring up Clockwerk once. when he first sees Sly he thinks it's ConnEr, which raises the question 'does he even know about Clockwerk murdering ConnEr in the first place?' that's definitely one possibility. the gang dispersed and when ConnEr settled down as a family man, that's when Clockwerk came into the picture. ok! probable scenario...

... but idk i'm not really buying it. i don't want to be the tin foil hat girlie and i'm truly not, like in terms of narrative logic it makes total sense. but from a consistency standpoint, how can you create a character that is actually portrayed as more of an omnipresent, all-powerful entity, the literal embodiment of evil, to then just have him go *poof* ? Clockwerk is the stain on the Cooper legacy, the Cooper killer and Dr Michael, who prides himself on hating ConnEr so much, has no idea who he is? the evil scientist who is infatuated with the Coopers and creates animal hybrids doesn't know about the owl robot that survives on Cooper hate? mama what are the odds. again, i'm against trying to unnecessarily connect all the dots, but even a mention would suffice. cutscene appearance even. like what if Dr Michael acted as this Judas figure who approached Clockwerk post gang breakup and spilled on how to track down ConnEr or some sort of secret? it would also help flesh out Clockwerk's character posthumously, which i find so clever. this is something discussed on the new episode of Safehouse Chats btw (shameless plug-in sis), where we debate whether or not Clockwerk benefits from being shrouded in total mystery. as for my initial question? i think Dr Michael bottomed for Clockwerk. block me

#the Scream reference is the actual bottom behaviour here #sly cooper #what if Le Paradox was actually Dr M's son. that would also help flesh out Miss Decibel's character very nicely #god help me

[inspector-montoya-fox]

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