RPG Articles

Let me get this off my chest. The iPad is cool, and likely fun for a given value of fun. It is, however, generally slightly more useful than a thumb on my left buttock.

There isn’t a single compelling feature for the thing, at least for me. True, I’m not the target audience because I expect a computer to be, what’s the word, oh, right, more useful than a thumb on my ass. I hear people go on about how it’s for casual computing, whatever the hell that is. Let’s cover some points.

Cool stuff-

It’s light and runs a long time.
Very nice screen.
Syncs with iTunes (who the fuck knows about Banshee).

Retarded stuff-

There doesn’t appear to be a way to organize apps.
OS is a crippled joke OS.
Form factor and material is perfect for not being able to hold it securely while moving around.
Menu button conveniently located nowhere near where you’d like it to be.
Not USB ports. Not a single fucking one.*
No support for Adobe Flash.**

*- Some people have mentioned some bullshit theories about this, like having to support device X, Y, or Z. Let me ask you, has Apple ever bothered supporting any fucking thing just because it can plug into something and should work? No. This is just some bullshit aesthetics choice that also conveniently makes people buy accessories if they want to use it to get pictures off a standard fucking device.

**- On this one I’ve read some nonsense about how it’s a tactical decision because they’ll be leveraging HTML 5 for media. Well good for fucking them. Thank goodness there’s no games, web site menus, or anything but videos on the web in Flash format. Don’t get me wrong, I think people fall back to Flash for shit quite too readily, but really now, not having support for it is stupid. Probably related to the stupid joke OS.

Now then. What do I want in a small computing device? A real OS is a good fucking start. I hate to say it but even Windows is better than some shit phone OS, and least if it runs Windows I can likely jam linux on it. A USB port. On the outside. Where I can get to it. 4+ hours of battery would be good. More is nice, but not required by any stretch. A battery I can change. Wireless should go without saying, but I’m saying it. Some kind of camera and mic would be good, if for no other reason than the parts cost about a nickel and take up about the same amount of space.

That’s kind of it. The nice thing about a real OS is that I can just use my normal real applications. For me there’s plenty of options, from netbooks to the direct iPad competitors, and predecessors, such as JooJoo and this one that’s been out for a couple years but the name is escaping me.

Thank goodness for the options too, because I’d break my own collarbone before buying something as nailed shut as the iPad.

A friend of mine was looking for something to backup her whole computer, and in my travels I found this little gem. It’s really flexible, easy to use, and it’s free. There’s a pay version that can do more, but just as they intend the free version is plenty for most home users.

So far I have literally no complaints about it. Which, if you’ve ever talked to me, is amazing.

I was taunted by the videos showing off travel powers. Taunted I say! Since it’s only $20 to begin I decided to hell with it, may as well go in for a pound.

Made two characters thus far- Fex and Rivet. Each with wildly different senses of style, powers, and whatnot. Fex is level 9.

So. Let me start off by saying that my previous review largely still stands, in that the intro area is sort of terrible. It feels mashed together and does nothing much to actually get you into the game, at least not for me. One thing I have to go back on is the block function. Turns out you can hold shift to maintain that, as I finally noticed after seeing the tiny sh in the corner of that ability. It also works rather well, which is nice. You can also dick around more with the controls and graphics, and for me it was critical to dick with the graphics since apparently the game assumed I’m running on a six year old computer or somesuch. I may try fiddling with the controls some more, because having mouselook always on would be wunderbahr, but since the rest of the game makes a different assumption about the interface it can be a bit bothersome. I also don’t care for the way you interact with things, like picking up a big rock to throw, because you either have to hit a key or click a little onscreen button. It’d be nice if, say, double clicking would make me pick it up, then click to throw, as opposed to again having to click the little button or hit a key.

Onward. Time to eat some crow. Holy fuck is this game deeper and better than City of Heroes. I would still love to see some better initial stat control, and explanatory text, when building a character, and I still don’t really grasp all of the underlying fundamentals, but I love that they’re there. The best thing, however, is the “builds” system.

A build is, essentially, a game role and determines things like how your offense and defense work. In CoH you picked one when you made a character, and that character was always that way. In Champions you can save various builds for each of the roles, including your various accessories that buff your stats, then switch between them on the fly.

The travel powers. These are the things  that got me into this mess. Why? Because they actually have some variety. Like there’s at least four ways to fly and three of them do it with unique speed and maneuvering and general feel. The other is Fire Flight, which is identical to regular flight but, well, you’re on fire, so that’s fair enough.

The power stuff is all very cool, and has surprising depth. You level up at The Powerhouse (which sadly makes it feel sort of generic, like a K-Mart) but you can buy new powers, try them out, then undo that expenditure if you don’t like it. You also aren’t stuck in one specific power path. While powers may have pre-requisites, they’re fairly easy to fill and you’re otherwise free to pluck from the tree of ass-kickery. You can also go into your powers menu (also never described or pointed out to you) to adjust effect colors and, at least for some powers, where they emit from, such as palm, fist, eyes, so on.

I’m a slave to concepts, I have to admit. Fex is a person turned demonic by the black flames he was forced to feed souls to while enslaved in some hell dimension. His abilities are all based off his flesh and spirit being saturated by the flames and the shadows they cast. So when it came time to pick a travel power I knew it had to be either something very spry and athletic or teleportation. I really enjoyed teleporting (which is awesome in this game), but acrobatics just felt like a better fit, so I went with it. I could have bought one of many different powers, but so far all he’s gained is a shield made of shadow (to replace the standard block) which can be upgraded to do some really interesting things, a new level of his basic shadow blast, and a passive power called “shadow form” which kicks in to make me hard to see and take less damage. I figure, should I play that long, his second travel power will be teleport because by then he’ll be powerful enough for it to make sense. See what I mean? I choose to run around and hop like a retard instead of the safer, cooler power because it fits. Now Rivet is a dude in power armor, inspired by Megas XLR actually, and I am so glad that I can assign him a number of abilities, because dude does he beg for an array of small attacks and the like.

Rivet has jetboots, which is sort of tough to control but goes like a bat out of hell.

The fighting and missions are fairly nice, though also pretty standard.

We’ll see how it goes. I tend to lose interest in these things fairly quickly.

I saw that they have some free play for this, whilst perusing the offerings from Steam, and figured what the hell.

Character creation is ok in general, and good for an MMO, at least within my experience of the genre thus far.

Obviously there’s the cosmetics, which I’ll spare you the details of, and then you select your powers. There is virtually no information on the power selection screen. You can pick a package of powers or customize. Since you only get two powers I figured what was the point and just went with “Darkness”, which seems more like a melanin condition, but whatever. It startled me to see that there are attributes to the character, yet they were totally untouchable by the player, again leaving me to wonder what the fucking point is.

Onward. I made my character, he looked ok, then entered the game proper. Everything looked like ass and for a bit I was concerned my vision or display was going. Looking in the options I see a “use half resolution” checkbox. So my options are fuzzy detail lacking hell or full throttle quality. Thankfully(?) full throttle quality wasn’t anything special and even my little laptop was up to the task. Still, why not give me some real options here, like a real game?

Forgot to mention, you’re asked if you’d like to use a control layout like a fantasy game, a something else game, or the one made for Champions. What kind of burnouts are they trying to get to play this thing?

Upon entering the game proper you’re dropped into a bullshit scenario, which is the norm but is always still retarded and ham brained. Some aliens have blocked off a chunk of city and are doing something something. Everything is weirdly static. Literally there’s a bunch of schmoe npcs just standing around while a hundred feet away monsters from the beyond idly ignore the fleshy bits and sort of halfheartedly attack you whenever you wander over.

Terminal boredom set in so I deleted the game. City of Heroes was actually better than this, in almost every way, even in the patch crazed days when I finally got fed up and left. No, wait, it was better in every single way aside from some of the character cosmetic options, leaving Champions to look like the unattractive, kind of stupid kid brother.

There are a few things that this experience led me to consider though.

Control idioms.

Why are these asshole controls the norm in MMOs? Is there some technical reason that I have to do weird shit to look around with my mouse? It’s not like there’s ever anytime where you have to click on something that you can’t look at, and walking around would be a lot easier.

Why do I have to click on the douchebag that’s weaving me a new scrotum from the bits of penis I have left before attacking it? I don’t know about you, but I think it’s important to stop that kind of thing.

What is with the shit all over the screen? Find a more elegant way people. Stacks of fucking menus, maps, pointers, shit over people’s heads, target boxes around things and whatnot all serve to take me out of the game.

If you’re going to have a “block” or “defend” style action, make that shit something that can be toggled or held down. This is a fucking MMO. Fine tuning the timing of shit is not your forte, so don’t make me try and guess when I need to block for exactly one second.

Artwork.

Why are MMOs ugly? You always hear it’s so as to run on as many machines as possible, but what the fuck does that have to do with it? You can set the detail for different machines just fine, just like a real game. I don’t expect it to be pushing the envelope, but it should at least look stylish.

Culture clash. Instead of having a number of different “origins” or “types” of hero, how about stem it all from a single event? Like the mutant gene in X-Men or the White Event in that weird spin-off reality or the mutagen from Static Shock.

Don’t mock me. Static Shock had some good times.

If you are going to have multiple origins for these guys, then make it count. Make the way things work different, instead of just “I fire a bunch of small, yet somewhat differently colored than my compatriot’s, projectiles”.

Anyway, in a nutshell, if you got bored with City of Heroes don’t come to Champions looking for a better time.

Edit: I decided to give it another shot, see what it was like with travel powers and beyond the intro area. Turns out that while you can muck about until level 15 in the intro area, you can’t actually leave the fucking thing. This is insane. I wasn’t expecting unlimited access, but wow man.

Now, the reason this really irks me are twofold.
1) You can gain levels in the intro zone but cannot actually level up, meaning upgrade yourself, see how new powers work, and so on.
2) Instead of a message saying “Sorry dude, this is the end of the line for free accounts” you just stand there like a jackass pressing the “Travel to <Canada or The Desert>” while nothing happens.

We’ll see if I feel like paying to experience this thing more fully. Not today though.

Edit 2: Fine. I’ll fucking buy it. Stupid videos tantalizing me with the larger world.

Up front here, I am no fan of Millar. Wanted was shit with a couple of warmed over ideas, some stuff for random shock value, random racism, and buried in all that was one or two interesting things that would be good in the hands of a competent author. The artwork was also bad, in that it was drawings of various actors for some reason.

Enough about Wanted, though, this is about Kick-Ass. I went back and read the comic just out of curiosity spurred by the upcoming movie.

Premise- nerd decides to be a superhero. Not groundbreaking, but not common and a good place to start.

One of the biggest mistakes, in my opinion, is that Millar feels that being bored is enough to make someone go through all this. There is nothing further, there is no development. There’s only some narcissism, gore, and dick jokes. Even that description sounds better than it really is.

This is like trying to describe why Shoot ‘Em Up is awful. The descriptions fail to convey how shitty it all hangs together.

Throughout the 8 issue run the characters are never engaging, the action is just sort of a boring smear of blood, and nothing seems to stick, despite the premise hinging on only mild hyperbole of reality. Spinal trauma and severe blood loss? Forget about it. Testicle torture? What consequences?

The story proper doesn’t exist. The main arc consists of perhaps two key scenes, with a number of clips filling the space between without adding much.

Oh, and of course there’s some not quite racism combined with a “It’s ok, his dad is fucking a black chick” moment.

On that note for a moment, I’m of the ilk that heroes should be flawed, sometimes significantly, but that needs to be anchored to some substance worth contrasting it against.

So yeah, this crap gets a movie, while The Black Pearl is nowhere to be found.

I checked this out from the library yesterday and finished it before bedtime. Not bad for a book from 1951.

The book starts out with our protagonist waking up in his hospital bed, eyes bandaged from an incident, not knowing if his sight will return, but knowing that something is terribly wrong. One of my few complaints about the book is we don’t spend very long with the character being blind, it would have been a neat trick. That said, everything is tense enough.

You see, everyone that watched these green flashes in the sky (which was most of the world) went blind. On top of this there’s predatory (as in walks around and stings you to death from ambush) plants, called triffids. Relatively harmless when managed, and providing high quality animal fodder, but the blind population is terribly exposed to the danger they present.

There’s other bits, but I won’t spoil them for you. The best part, for me, is that there is no external agency to this story. Aliens and wizards played no part, it was all the fault of our own hyper aggressive cultures.

I’m not sure how to feel about the despair and lack of functionality people in this story take on when blinded.

Oh, and I found the whole thing drew some strong parallels to 28 Days Later. I never saw the movie made from Day of the Triffids, and it’s certainly not unique enough to say for sure, but it wouldn’t shock me to find out that either movie or book lent a strong hand to the formation of Boyle’s movie.

So yeah. Turns out Superman is totally lifted from this book. Looking around it seems like people try to say that this is just a maybe, but let me tell you, this dude is exactly how early Superman was.

Allow me to expand on that. Our protagonist, Hugo Danner, has blue black hair, superhuman strength on the order of lifting and carrying at least four or five tons, bulletproof flesh, leaps tall buildings in a single bound, and outruns a train. There’s even elements in there that you can see developed into the Superman character. At one point he goes on about how if he had even one weakness, an Achilles heel, it would humanize him, allow people to connect with him. He also builds a sort of fortress deep in the woods, and while he swiftly destroys it upon discovery, it reminds me so much of the fortress of solitude that it ain’t even funny.

Published in 1930, the language is a little distracting, but it’s nothing too troublesome. The actual character of Hugo is quite different from Supes. Imagine Superman, only a bit bipolar, and not naive.

I don’t want to spoil the arc of the book, so if the following analysis is too vague, just go check it out from the library and come back. I’ll wait.

Ok, back? Good.

There are, in my opinion, three main concepts explored here.
Science defeated by mysticism
Individual defeated by the group
Exclusion from the group due to an unusual level of prowess

The big thing tying this all together is, naturally, frustration. Science, of which Hugo is presented as a pinnacle achievement, is constantly presented as potent but horribly naive when it comes to the staying power of religion, politics, greed, and other petty matters. Every scientist in the book seems to believe that simply showing a truth to someone should be enough, that all it takes is more evidence, but as Hugo discovers this just isn’t true. He is an honest thing, a sort of living truth, and despite his power he is incapable of correcting or energizing anything.

I have to say that the hardest part is knowing that we still live in this world. Religion, mysticism, and plain old corruption continue to trump reason and, quite frankly, good will.

It’s a very depressing read, but I still recommend it.

First, and most importantly, is because it’s a tired storyline tied to a not really all that impressive setting. I don’t care how pretty a movie is supposed to be, this one looks sort of like melty cheese ass to me. And at nearly three hours it better have more than eye candy anyway.

The story is bound to be crap, so let’s look at these visuals. Yep. Sure are some blue fuckers running around. And some bullshit floating continents. Why are we mixing live action and cgi like this again? Don’t feed me shit about how good the cgi is either. District 9 had fucking amazing cgi, and the best part was that it was only used as needed. This is a bunch of shit that tries putting a vague bloom effect on everything to get your attention away from how the people and animation don’t visually mesh. Don’t get me wrong, it looks like a lot of hard work went into it and all, but it’s dumb to mix animation and live action on this sort of scale, unless you’re doing something like Cool World or Who Framed Roger Rabbit where that’s part of the setup.

So, it begs the question, why was it done this way? I think it’s because they didn’t want to be seen as making a cartoon, despite things like Reboot or Battle Planets being (presumably) more engaging because of the consistent visuals and rather less pretentious storylines.

Please, movie makers, stop ejaculating money onto the screen by the tera-gallon and calling it good. It’s usually just rehashed shit. For examples see the remake of King Kong, both Transformers, the Ang Lee Hulk, and so on.

Edit: Somehow I forgot to mention that one thing that absolutely angers me is how given a medium of incredible flexibility we’re given blue cat people.

I was recently convinced to try out C&C3:KW (what a long fucking title) by a friend of mine.

Those of you who enjoy RTS games may be familiar with Emperor, which was the predecessor, technically, of all the 3d games in the C&C line. This particular episode strikes me as the most like that old, yet amazing, game, only lacking certain features and generally not advancing the game in any meaningful way.

New features (to me anyway) of note: The ability to take over husks left by certain fallen units. Also the whole unit integration with a supertank called MARV. Very cool.

Yeah, really that’s kind of it. They also lifted the shift click command queue from Supreme Commander, but it’s not there by default.

Old garbage: Special unit abilities that you have activate in a very fiddly manner. Not quite as bad as Starcraft, but still irritating. You still can’t queue up structure build orders, only units, for reasons that I’m sure would boggle the mind if anyone asked the developers. As far as I can tell there’s no way to group units together on the march, unlike SupCom, so you’re left with a bunch of weak units running off into the fight all on their lonesome.You’d also think that in the tiberium infused future we wouldn’t need ten powerplants to run six buildings.

I don’t recall if this was true in other C&C games, but you can’t repair units for a teammate either.

New garbage: There doesn’t seem to be a way to give units or resources to teammates, unlike Emperor, which is retarded. If you lose all of your harvesters that’s it, you just have to hope you can sell of enough stuff to build a new one. In Emperor, at least, you would always get one free harvester.

This is another good one. In RTS games repair units come in two flavors: those that run up to whatever you just ordered everything to attack, and those that don’t move at all when you issue the order. If anyone gives this more than a second of thought, it should be pretty apparent that what you’d like to have happen is for the repair unit to stay with the main clump of your units. The same thing frequently happens with anti-air units.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of fun, it just isn’t exactly new.

Edit:

So, what I thought was shift click mode is actually a way point mode. Similar though. Overall the various command options are, what’s the word, non-smooth? Wait, no, unrefined bullshit.

Allow me to start this review by saying Go Buy This Right Now. Or at least grab the demo.

The gist is you design ships from components and then unleash them in various challenge scenarios. That’s it. Actual combat is automated, with only your designs and the general orders you give your ships before deploying as input.

The developer, who has a great blog, seems to actually like games, which is something you start to wonder about in larger developers. For instance, thinking like this has lead to a fun game, whereas whatever passes for thought at Rockstar made GTA IV into an irritating cell phone and relationship simulation.

Anyway. Try it, because also unlike major studios there’s a demo.