Websnark

November 13, 2009

Eric: For the record? I do in fact miss all of you.

It is well known that Friday the Thirteenth is the birthday of King Friday XIII of the Neighborhood of Make Believe. Every time this day rolls around, we are to enjoy ourselves and make merry on this most lucky of days, by Royal Decree.

Which isn't enough writing for an actual post, mind, but it'll do.

For the record, I've had a rather... interesting autumn, health wise. Writing isn't happening except in convenient five panel format -- coincidentially, The Adventures of Brigadier General John Stark has started updating again. For some weeks now, even.

Happy birthday, King Friday!

Posted by Eric Burns-White in Self-Promotion at 12:42 AM | Comments (7)

September 11, 2009

Eric: Things Change, after all.

(From Scary Go Round.)

Oddly, given that it is the harvest time, September has become a time for beginnings rather than endings. It is the beginning of the school year. It is the traditional start of the 'new fall season' on television. It is the start of the Halloween buildup and therefore the start of the broader Christmas and Holiday buildup. It is when the new car lineups start to emerge from their showrooms.

But beginnings and endings are inexorably tied together. The new school year is paired to the end of summer. New fall television shows also mean cancelled shows disappear once and for all (this year into the giant sucking vortex generated by Jay Leno's ego chin). Before Halloween and 2010 model cars can take over store shelves and showrooms, there must be clearance sales for beach bric-a-brac and the 2009 Honda Fit. Ends must be tied or intentionally left swinging in the breeze.

Things change.

Which brings us around to Scary Go Round, which has wrapped up its seven year run today.

Scary Go Round began as the sequel to Bobbins, a strip that itself was a sequel to various other projects (most notably a non-'web' comic called Cat Flap) meant less as a direct sequel and more as an evolution of the comic's style and substance alike. New sensibilities accompanied the strip, and while old friends showed back up (and in some cases came to dominance), they were seen through a new lens. This was ostensibly a horror strip, but one as done by John Allison, which is to say with amazingly good dialogue, a wry sense of humor, and 'pluck.' Indeed, though I am not an Anglophile by nature (I have nothing against Great Britain, mind, but I do not have a reverence for it the way some I know do), I find myself enjoying the strip like I would a cracking boy's yarn from the 50's. "We will do our best because we are British and British is best" Shelly Winters said in the penultimate chapter, and that may be as good a description of Scary Go Round's philosophy as any.

And in many ways, Scary Go Round was indeed the best. It had some of if not the best dialogue on the planet -- Allison's command of banter is not unlike an expert jazz guitarist's command of a twelve-string: you might not entirely know how he'll get to the coda, but my God you're going to enjoy the trip. His style -- both of art and of language -- has been influential. (There was a time when people accused Jeph Jacques of 'stealing' John Allison's mojo for Questionable Content, most notably, and to be certain there was a clear path of influence. However, Questionable Content's evolution went in a very different direction. Still, one can see echoes of Allison's work in QC if you look for them, and QC is itself one of the seminal webcomics of the current era.) It never became complacent -- Allison constantly reinvented his style and his toolbox, unafraid to bring even popular characters to horrible ends and to launch new ones in their stead. None of the characters (not even dear old Len Pickering) from the first few strips made even cameo appearances in the last few strips. Grade school students became high school students and now are off to University. Every so often, someone ended up condemned to Hell.

And now it is done. As with Bobbins before, Allison is ready for a fresh start free of monumental and dense backstory and intimidating if beautiful archive pages. After fifty one chapters, Scary Go Round ended today.

So long live beginnings. On Monday, September 21st, a new comic strip will begin -- starting at least at Scary Go Round's site (which itself is undergoing change) before no-doubt migrating to its own domain. The early twentiesomethings of Bobbins and the melange of children, adults, elders, fish-men and the deceased that were Scary Go Round will give way to something new -- something that perhaps reflects Allison's current state of mind better. We know that the next strip will grow out of this one, though in what way and to what degree we do not currently know (we don't even have a title as yet). "Things are going to change," we've heard for some time now, and this is when it starts.

He has stated that Shelly Winters -- she of Doctor Ladysounds and the Ginger Ninja -- will not be a part of this new strip. And indeed, the strip ends with her driving out of Tackleford once and for all. Perhaps Ryan and Amy will be the centerpiece of the next step. Or perhaps Lottie and her chums will take the whole town over. Or perhaps it will be someone entirely new, with only hints here and there of who came before. I don't know.

What I do know is this. Change isn't bad. Like conflict, change can be scary but in the end it's what makes these things worth pursuing. Scary Go Round has been a good web destination, but it's time for something new. The New Fall Season is upon us, and new beginnings are in the air.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to work. I have changes of my own which must be wrought, after all, and September waits for no man.

Posted by Eric Burns-White in Webcomics at 10:25 AM | Comments (4)

August 24, 2009

Eric: No, I don't have "Star Trek: Online" on my brain to the point of obsession -- why do you ask?

(From Starslip! Click on the thumbnail for full sized OH JUST KISS ALREADY!)

I like endings and beginnings. When you hit a resolution that's done well, it perks you up and makes you a happy person. When you launch into a new storyline after a few days of quasi-denoument and one-shot jokes and japes, you can feel the nice, clean potential.

Starslip's at that point right now, as they get ready for a (probably relatively light) storyline following the single most brilliant Science Fiction Move ever done in sequential art, which might also rank up there with literature and movies while we're at it.

Hold on, my hyperbolomatic's running a touch hot. Sorry about that.

Kris Straub, not content with being shockingly good at what he does, has done something that makes Star Trek seem like a piker. Having found a new universe that Deep Time isn't about to blow up real good (and I can't help but think we'll see some kind of return to that situation -- perhaps the Paradigm will encounter a rift in space/time that will let them see what Deep Time has sown for themselves. But it won't happen today if it happens) and setting a new set of ground rules for faster-than-light travel and interstellar government, Kris began to run a more traditional Star Trek parody -- albeit one that was very well realized.

The Paradigm encountered a race they called the Anthelerix Polygmeon -- a race far beyond the technology or even the comprehension of the United Star Configuration. Starcon -- the organization of explorers and mili-- look, it's Starfleet. Okay? It's fucking Starfleet under a different name -- demanded they make peaceful, diplomatic contact with the race... by any means necessary. It took a lot for the crew to even be noticed by the Anthelerix Polygmeon, but when they did the race teleported the Paradigm all the way back to Earth. They wanted to be left alone.

Starcon's generals, however, didn't think "oh, they want to be left alone." They thought "oh my Fucking God these people have the technology to teleport entire starships hundreds of light years with pinpoint precision we totally have to get our hands on that shit make friends with them!"

All right, it's a more realistic version of Starfleet.

So, they sent the Paradigm back out, and this time the ship's protocol officer spent the entire trip learning to say one word-symbol in the Anthelerix's language. He used it as a greeting and was instantly killed in a probe-kind of way (Quine, the officer in question, dies horribly on every mission. He has a thing that makes him better, so, you know. Thing.)

This time, the Anthelerix decide their message wasn't clear enough, so they clarify. By teleporting the Paradigm to Earth, and then teleporting Earth, every planet in the United Star Configuration, and every other planet that the United Star Configuration has had contact with to an entirely different part of the galaxy.

In other words, the USC is still there, all the standard races are familiar... but every other star in the sky is different. In one monumental step, even though everything familiar is still within reach, everything else is a complete unknown.

It's like if Star Trek: Voyager took the basic premise of "a powerful entity decides to yank the ship to the Delta quadrant 70,000 light years from home" but instead of yanking the U.S.S. Voyager, they yank the entire Federation, the Klingons, the Gorn, the Orions, the Romulans, the Cardassians -- Hell, the Ferengi -- into the Delta Quadrant, putting all their planets in exactly the same configuration and the same distance away from each other but otherwise not disturbing the existing framework.

That's utterly brilliant. In one fell swoop, Straub has both wiped the slate clean and created the universe that we used to see in 30's Science Fiction, where we didn't know Jack or Shit about what was out there so it was entirely reasonable to assume Brian Blessed and a legion of winged Brian Blessed wannabes were swooping around shouting "dive!" somewhere over the jungle forests of Titan.

And, after all that, it makes perfect sense that the next storyline involves revisiting the old ship, and revisiting the roots of the strip. When the foundation's been changed, the first thing you do is show how other things have changed along with it. It also gives us an excellent sense chance to see how Vanderbeam and Cutter have changed, both in their relationship with each other and in themselves.

And, most importantly, it gives Vanderbeam a chance to be entirely outraged over silly little shit. And that's always fun.

Posted by Eric Burns-White in Webcomics at 10:42 AM | Comments (5)

August 21, 2009

Eric: Hey, I can still have short entries.

(From Kevin and Kell! Click on the thumbnail for full sized allez cuisine!)

I have no in-depth analysis to give you. I just found this almost absurdly funny. If any effort had been made to put the fish's eyes in its head, it wouldn't have worked, but by going this far over the top--

Like I said. It's just funny. I pass it along to you.

Posted by Eric Burns-White in Webcomics at 3:13 PM | Comments (0)

August 20, 2009

Eric: On Being Super

One of the epic tales of Closed Beta, over at Champions Online, was an ongoing discussion on the game's challenge level. And by ongoing discussion, I mean "impassioned argument."

Put simply -- there were certain closed beta testers who didn't like that lower level enemies were still a threat to their character... and they weren't too happy about same-level enemies being a threat either. If they got two or three levels ahead of a pack of NPC bad guys, they felt that they should essentially be invulnerable to them. If they left the keyboard for a drink, leaving their L15 character in a hazardous area, and nine L11 or L12 bad guys spawned while they were away and proceeded to beat their character into a pulp... well, they found this to be suboptimal.

And, whenever this argument raised its ugly head, the same argument came up. "I just don't feel super" they said. Each and every time.

It's a familiar complaint. I heard this dozens of times over the past five years connected with City of Heroes. "I just don't feel super" inevitably meant "I don't have the opportunity to bust out equal doses of Cool and Kickass often enough." And, there was something to be said for it -- the early opposition in the game, even though you were told they were enhancing themselves one way or another, just didn't seem like they should be that hard for a super hero -- even a young and inexperienced one -- to take down. Further, you got powers slowly, and some powers were arbitrarily spaced out (why someone needed to hit L14 to fly in a Superhero game has always been a mystery). It was showing some of its MMO roots: cool things came at higher levels. Want to ride a horse or war ram or pink elephant? You need to hit 30th level first, Toby Nightelf, and even then don't expect the horse salesman to sell you a horse if you're not in good with his race: economics be damned, horses are human technology and not just any Elf can be trusted with one!

(As a total side note, both World of Warcraft and City of Heroes have been drastically reducing the level requirements for travel options or powers -- it took quite a few years, but they finally figured out no one's that excited by jogging. But I digress.)

The problem is, and always has been, that 'Super,' the way these people mean the term, means 'Unchallenged.' For a lot of people, 'superhero' means 'unstoppable badass,' and anything that makes their character seem like less than an unstoppable badass means by definition their character is not being a superhero. From there, it's simple to see the formula reduced down to its component level:

character + defeat = nonsuper

That's what their argument really boils down to. "I lost the fight, and Wolverine never loses fights, so I'm not a superhero." "I got knocked out, and Batman never gets knocked out, so ergo I'm not being super."

Oh, in debating this point the people in question will make allowances. Sure, the archvillain at the end of the scenario can take you down -- at least every now and again -- and that's okay. Batman is sometimes knocked out by the Joker, after all. But in everyday life, there shouldn't be anything -- but anything -- that leads to you being beaten. It was perhaps made worse in early City of Heroes levels by the type of opposition you were facing, of course -- even if the Hellions use magic to beef themselves up, it's rough to be a mighty hero and have a bunch of street punks who think orange is a good color choice take you down because you bit off more than you can chew -- but the principle still applied. Superheroes didn't lose, they kicked ass.

The problem with this argument, in the end, is that it's wrong. On every level. And that's true in City of Heroes, it's true in Champions Online, and it's true in Marvel Comics. And it underscores something that every writer, developer, artist, or gamer needs to understand: Challenge is Good. There needs to be real stakes involved. Accomplishing things should take effort.

We've talked about such things before. Conflict is good, as I was wont to say in the days when I was wont to say things. When bad things happen to characters in fiction (sequential-art based or not), that set up interesting and engaging situations that became fodder for drama, comedy or both. Well, when reading about super heroes, there has to be a sense of challenge. You have to believe that Spider-Man could get shot in the head and die even if it was desperately unlikely he would. You need a sense that your heroes have to work at their goals, and that there would be consequences if they fail.

The seminal example of this, of course, was the difference between Superman and Spider-Man in the sixties. In the end, the Mort Weisinger era Superman is exactly what those guys who "just don't feel super" are gunning for -- a character who is so powerful, so indestructible that his enemies are less threats than annoyances. Sure, there was Kryptonite, and sometimes there was magic or "the rays of a red sun," but for the most part Superman was amused by the silly gangsters with their silly guns. An MMO that centered on a Lois Lane type character breaking two hundred pairs of scissors on your invulnerable hair as a requirement to level up wouldn't be fun -- it would be excruciating.

(Actually, if someone wants to create a game where you play an all powerful godlike superhero who spends all his time tricking his friends, teaching them humiliating 'lessons,' and being amused when accidents turn them into monkeys or insect people, a la Superman in the sixties... well I'd buy a copy. But the challenge of that game wouldn't be physical danger -- it'd be setting up the perfect humiliation of the pathetic love interest whose major crime is wanting to marry you. But I stray from my thesis.)

Now, Champions Online is good at giving you challenges. In particular, it doesn't reward stupidity. If you stop paying attention because everything around you is two or three levels below you, you will in fact be defeated. If you engage 30 lower level enemies and lack a decent Area of Effect attack, you will in fact lose. And sometimes, this pissed people off. "These guys are mooks! I shouldn't lose to them! Sure, I was stupid, but still -- I'm supposed to be a hero! Batman wouldn't lose to them! I just don't feel super!"

In one of these exchanges, where Batman was in fact brought up, I chimed in. For me, one of the joys of Batman -- when he was written well, at least -- was that he was constantly having to outthink his opponents. Oh sure, he was a great fighter -- but his strength came from using every advantage. He had gear in his belt designed to confuse, surprise and subdue his enemies. He used fear (and the dark) to panic them, forcing them to make mistakes. He was patient, and quiet, and took them down two or three at a time in ways that made the remaining crooks increasingly jumpy and paranoid. And yes, if he were to drop all that and charge into the middle of the room, he'd probably get beaten. Lord knows he'd been knocked out by lucky saps to the head any number of times. It's why he kept waking up in dark rooms tied to a chair with dynamite underneath it (or chained in giant hourglasses that would slowly pour sand on him until he suffocated -- Batman's enemies spend way more money on death traps then they ever take in from bank robberies. But then, Batman's enemies treat crime like performance art.)

"No way," my debate partner responded. "Batman doesn't need to do all that. He's the greatest martial artist who ever lived! He could take them all down!"

What can you do?

Amusingly, I'm reminded of The Dark Knight Returns. In one of the most famous scenes (which I'm about to entirely Spoil, so, you know. Spoiler Alert on a 1986 comic book that 97.6% of the people reading this have read dozens of times) Batman -- now old, of course -- sees the young, vicious warlord ruler of the Mutant street gang, who challenges him to one on one combat. Batman has enough pride to be pulled out of the safety of his Bat-tank and goes at him hand to hand. And the mutant leader -- younger, stronger, in better condition, and much faster -- proceeds to beat him nearly to death. He would have died right there had a fangirl not spontaneously become the new Robin and pulled him out. He had let himself be coaxed into acting stupidly, and that nearly killed him. When he had a rematch with the mutant leader, it was on his own terms, using psychological effects to prod the leader into a rage, then dropping him into a mud pit. That takes away his speed advantage, and while he's still younger, stronger and in better condition, Batman is smarter and more experienced, and utterly in command of the environment. He proceeds to take the leader apart, brutally beating him down in front of his gang, and completely breaking their morale (and leading to a number of them aping his style and eventually becoming his army).

Batman wasn't super the first time. He was stupid, and he got pounded into mush for it. Batman was super the second time, when he used strategy and tactics to accomplish his goals. And that led inexorably to Batman fighting Superman -- the last hurrah of that Pre-Crisis, all powerful, Mort Weisinger super Superman -- and beating him.

That last scene, by the way? That scene where Batman takes down Superman? That completely redefined Batman and Superman in popular culture. That took the World's Finest team of best friends and made them barely tolerate each other. And that cemented in the minds of comic fans everywhere that of course Batman would beat Superman in a fight. Duh. Before that scene, Batman was just that guy with the ropes, the car, the sidekick and the Bat Shark Repellant. We made fun of Batman in the Super Friends.

But Batman was the character who had challenge in his stories and overcame them, and in the end the indestructible man couldn't compete.

I have always liked the challenge of City of Heroes. I like that I have to pick and choose my fights and be intelligent about them. One of the key complaints about City of Heroes these days is that because the underlying A.I. is five years old and so many of us are so experienced in its nature, we've become too good at it. The challenge is less. And NCSoft is responding by allowing us to alter our difficulty with incredible granularity. If you want to solo a mission as though you had a full 8 man team on Unyielding, you can.

And I like -- I really like -- that if I run through Maniacs territory in Champions Online, even if they're a few levels below me, and I don't have my head in the game, they'll wrap chains around me, haul me off my feet, and beat me into paste. If I'm going to be a hero -- if I'm going to win -- I'm going to have to use my brain and my skills in the game to overcome the odds.

And there's nothing that makes me feel more super than that.

Posted by Eric Burns-White in Philosophical Snarks at 11:04 PM | Comments (19)

August 19, 2009

Eric: Honestly, aren't we all just doing our damnedest to tease the nubbin from its sugar pea?

(From Achewood! Click on the thumbnail for full sized Escaladeapult!)

Looking into Achewood after a long hiatus is always an interesting experience for me. Obviously, we have entered into one of those forays into the odd that Onstead uses as a counterpoint in his work. Things grow, organically, out of the banal and become epic. It's how it works.

Let's take the current storyline as an example, shall we?

Back at the start of July, Ray and Cornelius are discussing the industry reports one can receive in the bodice-ripping field of Romance novels. This inspires Ray to pay Cornelius to produce near-porn based upon the Williams-Sonoma catalog, with an eye to setting the results to the overpriced upscale kitchen supply stores as a new breed of advertising. Cornelius agrees.

As a side note, Cornelius then says that he "shall do his damnedest to tease the nubbin from its sugar pea" as a euphemism for inspiring female sexual arousal. It is entirely possible that the entire development of the English language, from its origins as an argot of the Angles and Saxons, who by way of the Jutes were influenced by Latin phrases via trade with the Roman empire and became the use language of the various tribes who invaded the British Islands and fought the Picts, which led to later cross-contamination with old Norse by way of Viking raiders and flavorings from Greek and later forms of Latin as Christianity took hold, before the Normans skewed the language into Middle English and then its modernization as a byproduct of the development of the printing press and eventual evolution into the modern language we know today had as its sole purpose the creation of the phrase "I shall do my damnedest to tease the nubbin from its sugar pea." We are now free to move to Esperanto.

Cornelius is entirely successful with his tasteful yet suggestive advertising copy, and though Chuck Williams, the nearly one hundred year old founder of Williams-Sonoma, decries the decline of the fickle market for his goods and Ray's lurid solution, he gives his blessing to the endeavor. Cornelius sets to work (with a side business of 'completing' the stories through to their inevitable bedroom encounter on Ray's behalf).

Ray's persistent and ill-advised need to edit Cornelius's work proves infuriating for the aged writer, however, and after a few days (or hours -- Ray changes his clothes multiple times, but that may just be Ray) he quits the project, leaving Ray to muddle through himself. Ray gets the inspiration to change the strategy from hot romance to lesbian erotica. This offends Chuck Williams -- not because of the subject matter, but because Ray's Lesbian 'erotica' is blunt and lacks grace. He proceeds to attempt to school Ray in the art of "Sapphic erotica," though he has a habit of interjecting notes parenthetically. Ray is amused by this, and challenges Chuck to a freeform lesbian erotica slam, the winner of whom will be (or remain) the founder of Williams-Sonoma. To level the playing field, the pair would wear identical Elephant costumes.

I honestly can't believe I typed that last sentence.

Anyhow, somewhat to Ray's surprise Chuck Williams texts him a reply, agreeing to the event. After all, he is almost one hundred years old -- what does he care? The event, titled "The New Kings of Sapphic Erotica," is set to take place. Ray and Chuck begin doing research (Ray's research consisting of finding out what ugly Suburus or Pontiac Azteks can hold the most dogs, and Chuck calling a lesbian acquaintance to find out her dinner prefences and what vacation location she would choose given unlimited resources. For the record, her answers are Eritrean cuisine and the Scottish highlands.)

Ray is overly confident of his abilities, until Téodor tells him that the crowd judging the contest will be harsh. Ray protests, but Téodor makes his point. ("You think when they get together without men, they get pruder?" Which I'm not entirely sure is a proper word, but never mind.) Ray gets cold feet and asks Téodor to take his place in the elephant costume. Téodor agrees, so long as he will get to be the founder of Williams-Sonoma if he wins.

Téodor meets Chuck Williams, both in their elephant costumes. He shows Chuck his cookbook, and Chuck is stunned at how good a cookbook it is. He trash-talks Téodor's erotica-composing abilities, thinking he is Ray, and Téodor resolves to destroy Chuck in the contest.

Roast Beef, in the meantime, has decided to engage the services of a Palmist, to read his future. He is humble and Lady Bourré is calm and comforting, until she begins... and discovers that Roast Beef has the legendary Lash of Thanatos running through his Life line. Visibly shaken, she asks Beef to leave and never return. Before Roast Beef can digest this frightening news, Ray calls him at the last second, puts him in an elephant costume with sunglasses, and has him emcee the Erotica contest. Beef rejects the telepromter and decides to make this event his last Scream, before death takes him.

But, unexpectedly, Lady Bourré texts Cartilage Head (who receives said text message on an antique stock ticker) of the existence of Roast Beef and his Lash of Thanatos--

That's right. Mother fucking Cartilage Head.

--and Cartilage Head responds, bringing 'the Sineùfendo,' a horrific weasel-like creature Cartilage Head issues commands to via the same series of preprinted note cards he uses to communicate with at all times and heading out to the theater in his black triplane.

At said theater, the Slam is on, with Chuck Williams accusing Téodor of cheating. As the contest continues, the Sineùfendo (whose name is Mary) arrives and terrifies Roast Beef into fleeing out a window. Beef lands in the Triplane and he and Cartilage Head leave. Cartilage Head asks (via preprinted card) if he can 'use' Roast Beef's death -- the Lash of Thanatos is one of the rarest of the 'collectors' of man, and he has already prepared a venue for Roast Beef under the title of 'The Dying Man: Final Remarks and Expiration' at Alberquist Hall. As he asks, the window Beef fell through closes... and disappears.

Ray, meanwhile, is on the phone arguing with Lyle, who wants Ray to bankroll a downtown teppanyaki cart. Ray receives an invitation and ticket to The Dying Man (while Lyle screams on the phone for Ray to hurry up and come back). Remembering his earlier encounter with Cartilage Head Ray realizes Beef is in trouble. He collects Téodor and the two leave, leaving Chuck Williams to soldier on alone (which leads to problems as Williams begins to insert product placement into his erotica, and the crowd turns ugly and prepares to bum rush the stage).

Beef, flying with Cartilage Head, reads a book Cartilage Head prepared on the nature of the Lash of Thanatos, which makes a victim susceptible to a hastened death. There are various potential triggers. Sadly, the wind carries away the book (it is an open cockpit triplane, naturally) before Beef can learn what tree's fresh bark will alleviate his condition. (One suspects Cartilage Head somehow arranged this. He does such things.) Beef therefore ends up at Alberquist Hall, in an elaborate bed, with gaslights on the headboard, waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

Téodor and Ray speed to the scene, to try and help Beef... but the lost book that Beef had been reading before falls from the sky, smashing through the windshield of Ray's Cadillac Escalade and bifurcating Ray's head!

Seriously.

The book bifurcated Ray's head!

The Escalade smashes into a car and flips through the air (almost certainly echoing Michael Phelps's recent accident in his own Escalade, though Phelps's head was not bifurcated at the time), leaving Roast Beef on the stage, in his gaslit bed, waiting. Is Ray dead? Is Téodor dead? Will Beef die? Will this death be any more significant than any of the other deaths we've seen in Achewood (remember, Molly and Charley Smuckles are both technically dead, Beef has been to Heaven and Hell, Ray died and went to Hell, Todd passes through Hell on a regular basis and Téodor once died and got stuck on the ceiling as a ghost. Which then caused his corporeal pants to fall down). And....

...and....

Okay, up above I mentioned Onstead likes the Odd? Yeah, this isn't Odd. This is fucking insane right here. This is full on batshit insanity of a grade usually reserved for Little Orphan Annie. This is Oh My Fucking God insane. The book bifurcated Ray's head! Cornelius did his damnedest to tease the nubbin from its sugar pea! Chuck Williams is almost one hundred years old! Lesbians!

Honestly, Onstead's last few story arcs have felt tired and forced, but this? This is the hardcore stuff. This is Achewood on all cylinders. And I am bloody well glad for it.

Now, I need to figure out how to use 'doing my damnedest to tease the nubbin from its sugar pea' in a sentence -- especially one without involving sex -- in casual conversation. I charge all of you to do the same.

Posted by Eric Burns-White in Webcomics at 11:04 PM | Comments (6)

August 18, 2009

Eric: Six thousand words on video games is one way to say "I missed you all," right?

So... yeah. I've been gone a while.

In a way, it's been symbolic of a deeper thing. I haven't just been away from Websnark since... yeesh, May. I've been away from writing. I haven't updated my livejournal. I haven't written fiction. My word processor hasn't actually been launched more than twice in all that time.

This is, as I've mentioned before, very unusual for me. I'm the kind of person who writes to keep my brain on an even keel. Which is really where all this has gone -- I hit the point some time back of full on writerly burnout. My mind simply stopped working in that way. I needed time away from... well, from everything like this.

Am I back now? I think so. We're going to give it a shot, see what kind of momentum we can get going. We'll see. Weds and I also have some plans that I won't go into now, but suffice it to say Weds is a very cool person who knows things I do not.

So what have I been doing with my time these last few months? Not counting stalking the wild Transformer toy with Weds and having a pretty decent married life, anyway?

What else. Video games. Specifically, I've been playing City of Heroes, The Sims 3, and, most significantly, the closed beta of Champions Online. And I have thoughts on all three -- thoughts which will turn into longer essays later, but for now let's get something 'inked,' shall we?

City of Heroes

It's weird. Not counting games like Soulcalibur, where I'll play each new edition that comes out when it comes along, I haven't stuck with a single video game for a long period of time before City of Heroes. Really, City of Heroes has been a reliable standby for me -- something that has kept my interest, that has continued to engage me, that has inspired me, that has been tons of fun for over five years now. I've been playing City of Heroes longer than I've been writing Websnark, for Christ's sake.

And that is a testament, really, to the job that the developers have done over the past years. They have continually updated the game. They have strived to push the envelope. They have expanded the game's content and gameplay. They have added yet more hot babes, some of them in loincloths. And they are continuing in that vein. It's a remarkable achievement.

Which is somewhat bittersweet, because City of Heroes really has crested the hill. While they are doing a yeoman's job, it is in fact all downhill from here.

That seems odd, in one sense. Certainly, Architect was a monumental shot in the arm. As I've discussed before, it was amazingly fun, especially for a person like me who lives to dig into backstory and adventure design. During the beta process, I freaking lived in the Mission Architect. And after release, I filled my slots up almost immediately.

Well, I mentioned in that linked essay that the biggest problem with Architect was how fast you burned through your arc slots. That was very true, and it took a long time for Paragon Studios to resolve that. Too long, really. When they finally announced that you could buy additional arc slots, the momentum associated with the launch of the system had turned to inertia. And, unfortunately, there were some major issues that came up which ended up harshing the buzz on Architect. People had developed any number of 'farming' missions -- designed to powerlevel characters or farm the Architect badges. Paragon Studios responded with changes -- some of them pretty draconian. They dropped dozens of badges from the game. They even deleted some of (what they described as) the most egregious examples of powerleveling from the game entirely....

...and unfortunately, they caught some innocents in the process. See, they have a feature called a 'leveling pact,' and that leveling pact allows two players to link their characters, so that if one earns experience while the other is logged out, the experience is divided between them. It's a great idea and a nice system in the game.

Unfortunately, a number of leveled-pact characters looked like powerleveled characters to the search algorithms they were using. And got wiped. Right at the same time that they were eliminating those dozens of badges from the game.

Now, here's the thing. A lot of people were pissed off that they were eliminating badges. Badge hunting is a popular pastime in City of Heroes, and a lot of players had devoted weeks to hunting these badges down. By eliminating them, the players who were legitimately hunting badges were being punished alongside the players who had found exploits in the system. It is never a good idea to take something away from your players, after all. Sometimes it's a necessary idea, but it's never a good one. There's almost no way to spin it as a positive, after all. So, tempers were already high because of the changes.

Now, add to that characters getting deleted. And add to that innocent players having characters deleted because of an error.

Paragon Studios fixed the issue. To my knowledge, lost 'innocent' characters were restored with all their perks, as quickly as the GMs could do it. But, the damage had already been done -- and between all of that and continuing issues over players gaming (or trying to game) the rating system, the Mission Architect honeymoon was pretty well over. It didn't help that at the time they still hadn't had ways to buy additional arc slots, so the most passionate users of the Architect system were already out of the loop, cutting down on impassioned defenders when it was having growing pains.

It's still an amazing innovation, but it's not enough to sustain the game at this point.

Paragon Studios knows this. They came out with a new content update -- Issue 15: Anniversary -- in hopes of invigorating the game. But Anniversary -- despite the fact that it returned the coolest villain faction ever developed for the game to the game (and reversed one of the worst early decisions City of Heroes made) -- was an extremely lackluster content update. Sure, the Fifth Column was back... but their return was focused on a single hero task force and a single villain strike force. Task forces and strike forces are problematic, because they can't be run solo. You have to have a team, so players who don't have a regular group have to grab a pick up group or else just skip the content.

For the record? My regular group of City of Heroes players jumped out of the game and started in on World of Warcraft many, many months ago. My only recourse for anything that requires a team is pick-up groups, and I don't actually like them. They're just too uneven for my tastes. So despite my absolutely love of the Fifth Column, I haven't actually seen their return as yet. Well, except in player-made Mission Architect missions. I fought Nazis on the Moon at one point, and that's entirely cool. It just doesn't help Issue 15.

Otherwise? They added some new costume sets, added a bunch of new character faces (several of which honestly aren't to my taste), and added some costume change animations. All of which is cute, but don't really affect gameplay at all, and the gameplay in City of Heroes is pretty stale right now.

Oh, and they added some refinements to the Mission Architect -- in particular, to quote their update page, they made it so "[missions] can now be selected for both 'Hall of Fame' and 'Dev Choice,' allowing players to attain both badges," which would probably be more exciting if A) more than 0.04% of the total number of arcs had gotten either Hall of Fame or Dev's Choice, and B) if they hadn't eliminated both of those badges as part of the purge.

Issue 16: Power Spectrum is currently in closed beta. It adds a feature people have been asking for since, oh, Issue 2, namely the ability to customize the look of their powers. Generally, that means being able to change the color of powers, as well as changing some animations here and there. That's awesome... and absolutely necessary, since Champions Online will be out soon and it's shipping with powers you can customize. It also includes more "powerset proliferation," which gives different archetypes access to powersets previously reserved for other characters. (Which also feels like a response to Champions Online, since they let you mix and match powers as you will). And you can tweak your difficulty more easily, which is a good thing. All of these are good things, really. They're just not overwhelming. At least in theory -- like I said, they're in closed beta, so I can't report on their actual implementation at this time, which neither confirms nor denies whether I'm in said closed beta.

At least the powerset proliferation constitutes new gameplay, which the game really needs at this point. Really, the game needs a monumental influx of new content and new gameplay, including major AI revisions, a ton of new maps, new zones -- the whole nine yards. As it is, new issues come out and they're just not as exciting as they used to be. The Mission Architect is partially to blame -- who cares about new content when there's 50,000 story arcs ready to be played in one building? But part of the problem is... well, it's over five years old. Its underlying technologies date back to the first Bush Administration. The biggest, most innovative games of its graduating class were Halo 2, Half-Life 2, Katamari Damacy, and... oh yeah, World of Freaking Warcraft. We've had multiple sequels to the first three of those games, and not only has WoW had monumentally more success and several major content updates (including two huge paid sequels)... but it too is showing its age at this point.

The future still looks bright for City of Heroes. Their second paid expansion (and the first since '05's City of Villains), City of Heroes: Going Rogue promises to resolve many of those issues. New gameplay systems (including the long long long overdue capacity for heroes to fall from grace and villains to redeem), a whole new world (cue song) with new zones, entirely new powersets and a move forward in their mythology is all really exciting stuff. At the same time, they've announced a loyalty program that's a bit telling: if you stay subscribed to City of Heroes from August through November, you're guaranteed a spot in the City of Heroes: Going Rogue closed beta test.

Champions Online releases in September. They practically could have named this promotion the "please don't quit our game when Champions Online launches" campaign. It's certainly the most telling sign so far that Paragon Studios knows it needs to step up to what could be a major blow to their subscriber base.

Still, Going Rogue does give some hope, and I for one am keeping my account for now. Besides, I've stuck with them for five years, and it's still a good game. I'm not ready to cut the cord. There's too much history there.

For now.

Still, one hopes they either have a lot of real gameplay followups behind this... or else City of Heroes 2. (I for one think a true sequel should be named Nation of Heroes, but then I'm weird.) While City of Heroes may last years before it becomes uneconomic to keep the servers running (Hell, The Matrix Online just shut down at the beginning of this month, which is just stunning when you consider no one on the planet thought it was still online. And the original Everquest is still getting new content, much less still running! Seriously! The Underfoot expansion's scheduled to hit servers this November!) there will come a point where the major development of the 'City of Heroes' universe will require a new engine and design, to take advantage of all the lessons they've learned over the past five years.

Of course, there are those who say Champions Online is, in fact, City of Heroes 2. Paragon Studios needs to fight that perception tooth and freaking nail, and Cryptic won't make that easy. But that's for down below in the third section.

The Sims 3

The Sims has been one of those franchises I've plugged along with from "small times" as Ray Smuckles would have said in happier times. At this point, they know how to sell us this thing. Each new generation of the game is a significant improvement in gameplay and design. You get hooked on the (mostly mundane) beginnings of the new generation, and then expansions come out that build on your game in weirder and weirder ways. This was true back in the days of The Sims, it was true in The Sims 2 (and I'm still pissed off that the last two expansions never came out for the Macintosh), and it's true now in The Sims 3. The major innovation this time is that you're not playing a household, you're focused on one household of the whole neighborhood, but as time passes all their stories evolve at the same rate yours does. People don't just get old, they get married and have kids. New people move in as old people die off, and if you want to send every one of your household's residents to entirely different lots in the neighborhood, all in real time, go for it.

It's all smoother and slicker than in previous years, and the expanded sense of scope really is an improvement. It feels far more like a town now. There's lots more to do. There's challenges to achieve. There's a truly startlingly large amount of fishing. And there is a real feeling of evolution. You're meant to have your characters hook up, procreate, grow old and die while their children do the same, and on down into the ages.

As with almost everything in the world, there is an up side and a down side to this.

The up side is an increased sense of the Soap Operatic reality that has always been the Sims. Friendships are reworked, so it's less important that you befriend everyone and his brother. Mistakes can last for a long time indeed. Ghosts (the token magic of this first game) can be a part of families and even if they're not, you have a sense of the past becoming the future and beyond. And, if you don't like all that, you can turn aging off and say the heck with it.

The down side is some loss of effective functionality. In The Sims 2, when children grew up and moved out, that became a different playable household. If you wanted to jump over and see what they're up to and play them for a few weeks, leaving your main house alone, you can happily do so. Not so in the Sims 3. If you change the household of focus in the Sims 3, your old household continues evolving -- they just do it without you. They become NPCs. You can turn off story progression the same as you do aging, but at that point what is the point? You might as well play The Sims 2 and get the ability to send them Sims to college or send them into a hot tub for unhygienic sex.

(As a side note -- the lack of hot tubs in The Sims 3 is the first thing everyone notices. Somehow, the Hot Tub experience has become emblematic of the Sims as a whole, and its lack feels palpable. So, while I maintain that The Sims remains a Soap Opera simulator, let's not rule out scrambled soft-core couples porn as a secondary goal. This is only exacerbated by your ability to seduce the pizza delivery guy or the plumber.)

The tradeoff of tight continuity over ease of shifting plotlines is a relatively minor one. The major strike against The Sims 3 is economic. Now, it's worth noting they've made it trivially easy to recolor and repattern... well, anything in the game. If you want to have a Toyota Prius painted like a cow, you can. If you want your bookshelves to be painted like a cow, you can. If you want your clothing, kitchen appliances, laptop computers, carpet and juice bar to be painted like cows, you can. It's the cow apocolypse! Run!

On the other side of it, if you want new objects to paint however you'd like... well, you go to an online store and you spend "Sims points" on it. Which is to say they've implemented the same kind of microtransactions that every other video game has. Yaaaay. I suppose it's not significantly different than the DVDs of new clothes and stuff you could buy for The Sims 2, only it feels chintzier somehow. They know it's easier to get someone to spend a hundred 'points' (in reality, about a buck) than it is to get them to shell out thirty bucks for a DVD collection -- even if the collection then comes to significantly less money per object than your online purchasing.

When hot tubs become available, it's a pretty safe bet they'll cost a few thousand points in the store. Assuming they're not going to be part of a paid expansion, anyway.

All told, The Sims 3 remains a lovely way to accidentally spend nine hours reminding your character to eat while forgetting to do so yourself. And with the upcoming World Adventures expansion scheduled to hit personal computers in November, EA is going to continue to print money off Wil Wright's legacy for a long time to come.

Champions Online

Not long after my last City of Heroes essay (and in part thanks to an offhanded comment in that essay) I got into the closed beta of Champions Online. As with all closed betas, Champions Online has been a bit of a rough ride, especially since their beta schedule was two nights a week, typically -- Wednesdays and Fridays. The first (pretty unstable) build of the week would be pushed for Wednesday, and a bug-fixed/stabilized version of that build would go in Friday. Sometimes it would be spectacularly broken, and sometimes it would be pretty amazingly flawless, but all in all it was... well, a closed beta. Betas aren't there for the fun of the testers -- they're so that the game breaking bugs get caught before someone actually pays for that thing.

Still, those sessions gave me a pretty good idea of how Champions Online was supposed to go. And now that the NDA has been lifted and we're into Open Beta, I can share impressions with you guys.

Now, before I got into Closed Beta, most of what I heard about Champions Online was... well, pretty awful. Generally, the word came from disgruntled beta testers who'd up and quit, often for legitimate reasons -- though naturally that gives you a pretty one sided sense of things. I'll write a bit about the nature of a closed beta process -- and what it is and it isn't -- later on in the week, luck willing. Suffice it to say I've watched the game evolve a tremendous amount since getting in, and I can make a few subjective assessments.

On the whole? This is a really, really good game.

Seriously. Cryptic Studios developed City of Heroes before the NCSoft buyout and development split (though all of the developers who were still working on City of Heroes at the time of the split stuck with the property), and their experience with the older game informed Champions Online tremendously. In particular, Champions Online addresses a lot of the long standing complaints people have with City of Heroes. Hitting some of the high points:

• Characters can be built out of any combination of powers, eschewing classes (or archetypes) and permitting a broad spread of abilities, which themselves can be customized in color and often in animation or anchor point. (My current open beta character concept is a techno-shaman whose basic abilities are reflected by light blue electricity, along with some sorcerous powers. The technological spirits of the character's shamanism are reflected by various summonable robots and toys. Needless to say, this character couldn't exist in City of Heroes.)
• Travel powers are automatic after the tutorial finishes, and are far more usable in combat. One can legitimately have a flying hero who never touches the ground. Further, there are a lot more travel powers available -- tunneling underground, riding a flying disk, having an ice bridge carry you a la Iceman, flying wreathed in flame a la the Human Torch (or, if you colored it green, Fire from Justice League International), an acrobatic style of flips and bouncing, and swinging. Swinging. Screw fighting crime -- I'll happily swing half-way across the desert for hours on end just because it's fun. There is far less of a sense that your character has to slog on foot everywhere in this game.
• The character creation engine is astounding. Not only does it have broad uses, but almost everything is adjustable by sliders. What's more, a good number of the costumes incorporate not only patterns but textures. (A leather bodysuit is different than a cloth one, and both of those are different than metal -- and all three of these can be put through a knit weave or various patterns and cuts of jumpsuit, and that's just bodysuits.) You can have a stag's head. Or a shark head. There are jet packs and rockets and backpacks and freaking quivers. You can change your character's eye color. You can make his eyes glow, even, or go with the Batmanseque 'pupilless eyes' look. (I may create a Little Orphan Annie parody with no pupils, if I can figure out a good batshit insane powerset.)
• Barring names that infringe on trademark, names are tied to a specific account instead of a server. Which means that anyone can have any name, but only one character in their own account can be named that name. So, if I want to name a character Force, the fact that my friend Mason might have a character named Force wouldn't stop me. Messages or mail to our respective characters would just go to "Force@ericburnswhite" or "Force@masonkramer" (neither of those are our real global names, for the record.) So, the days of trying to find a misspelled variation of the name we wanted in the first place? Are over.
• Immersion is immediate and heroic. As much as I've always loved City of Heroes, the City of Heroes tutorial, while good at teaching you how to play the game, was terrible at making you feel like a hero. You were in a sealed section of town, beating up sick men (with, admittedly, glowing eyes) who were throwing small rocks at you and hitting you with pipes. And it took a few hits to beat them at that. As much as the backstory of the game justified the events, you never quite shook the feeling that the freaking Wondertwins could have solved this 'crisis' in ten minutes and still had time for a heartfelt moral and some cruel mocking of their monkey.
  
  By contrast, in Champions Online the entire of Millennium City is plunged into abject chaos by an alien invasion. Forcefields are everywhere. The police are cut off. You have to fight insect aliens, rescue hostages, free trapped people from rubble, rescue a lost freaking cat and return it to a grandmother, figure out where the alien menace came from, mount a counterattack, and storm the contested headquarters of the signature heroes in the game. Along the way, you meet several of those signature heroes, not a some L1 newbie unworthy of their attention, but as a peer, save at least one from a horrible fate, then fight alongside the game's Superman figure. And in the major supervillain fight near the end of the tutorial, almost always that Superman figure will go down and you'll have to save the day in his stead. And that is followed by a celebration, and for the rest of your time in the game, whenever you're in Millennium City random people will run up to you and gush over the fact that you saved their lives and the whole freaking city.
  
  Now that's superheroic.
• While there aren't many zones, they are positively huge, and you move back and forth between them throughout the game.This also means there aren't loading screens all the time, and you get a real sense of city. (Or of desert or frozen countryside, depending). They're also totally beautiful.
• PvP is in the game from the beginning and works the way you'd expect superheroic PvP to work. You can invite anyone in the game to duel, and then (after a rocket drops from the sky to mark the duel field) you two can duke it out. Or, pretty much anywhere (with no travel time) you can queue to go into team based or free for all PvP (under the title 'The Hero Games' after the original publishers of Champions). PvP grants experience and in-game rewards. If the model sounds familiar, it's because it's been largely taken from World of Warcraft, who did it as well as anyone in the business. I hate PvP in general, but this is a fun occasional diversion, and because I don't need to travel to special arenas to participate it can be done whenever I have a vague yen -- or see someone on the street I want to have a zero-penalty slugfest with. At the same time, I can never touch it at all and I'm out nothing.
• Because they have access to the decades-long Champions intellectual property, they have hundreds of fleshed out supervillains and organizations to fight. You fight an actual supervillain in the tutorial. You fight a couple of Supervillains in whichever Crisis you choose after the tutorial. You actually run into costumed supervillains as a part of the missions you take place in, even outdoors, in the game. At any point you might discover yourself facing a full on spandex-clad nemesis -- and for those of us who've been playing Champions for half of forever, you'll also do some undignified squeeing during the process. (I was pathetically happy to fight Ankylosaur at one point.)
• Viper (which by the way predates "Cobra" from G.I. Joe by several years) is a monumentally cool recurring enemy. They'd take 'the Council' from City of Heroes any day of the week.
• Environments are moderately destructible, and your stats give you environmental options. A character with an area of effect attack will often lay waste to cars, boulders, computers, lampposts and the like. At the same time, the stronger your character the heavier an object he can lift. The first time you have a superstrong character who manages to pick up a tank, fly into the air, and hurl it an an enemy as an opening attack will stay with you for a long time.
• You can make your own costumed nemesis, and that nemesis actually engages you in the game proper. I can't overestimate how cool it is to have a pack of your nemesis's minions show up and reinforce your opponents because they cut a side-deal to specifically take you out. Further, your nemesis is among the hardest opponents you face in the game. And after a while, you get the option to create more, until you have your own Rogue's Gallery.
• The game is beautiful and laden with little touches. For example, going into a simulated wild west saloon in a robotic theme park, you see a saloon like interior. However, there's also a robot piano player. And he's merrily playing a slightly out of tune piano. And a whole line of robotic cowpoke girls are dancing in a choreographed western style line dance to it. That doesn't add a thing to gameplay, but man it's cool.

This makes it sound like Champions Online is in all ways a better game than City of Heroes, but that's unfair. There are still plenty of issues that need to be ironed out, and lots of those issues will only come with time and development of content. Let me hit those high (low?) points too:

• The game is incredibly linear right now. You must start in the Tutorial (and no matter how awesome that Tutorial is, the fifth time you launch Ironclad you're pretty sick of his bizarrely Ted-Cassidyesque voice). Once finished the Tutorial, you must go to a crisis zone either in the Desert or the Canadian Wilderness. You must do the multiple missions to complete the Crisis. Only after all that is finished are you in a position to take control of your own path, and even then it's strongly suggested that you stick to the non-crisis version of the zone you're in until you level your way up in that content. One won't realistically start having adventures in the 'main' location of Millennium City until L11 or L12 at the earliest. (Though that does give an in-game explanation of how they were able to clean up the damage from the alien invasion so quickly). Someone who enjoys building lots of alt characters is going to get really sick of going through that same content over and over again. While one gets to know all the City of Heroes content (not counting Mission Architect), there's a lot more variety in the early levels before you end up following mission chains. World of Warcraft, which really is the gold standard for MMOs right now, has two major factions and those factions each have three different starting locations and quests, not to mention lots of quests that are specific to given classes or the like.
• On the other hand, Alts are hard to come by anyway. You get a whopping eight character slots to begin with. You can earn (or buy) more, and people who get a permanent account during the promotional period get an additional eight. Compare that to World of Warcraft's fifty total alts, and bear in mind that if you spread alts between servers, you can make a whopping one hundred and twenty one alternate characters on City of Heroes without even touching on earned or bought additional slots.
• While the character creator has incredible depth, it's also mired in a specific house style that's less comic-book and more cartoon. Even if one turns off the trademark 'black outline' surrounding characters to make them look inked (as almost everyone seems to), characters look closer to Kim Possible's wide eyes, the Tick's chin, or Justice League Unlimited characters than they do to a Greg LaRocque drawing. In particular, though you have a ton of sliders that let you change a person's features, those faces look very much alike unless you make them full on grotesque.
• Crafting is, charitably, a work in progress. They're trying very hard to make crafting useful and relevant, and having it incorporate the capacity to swap gear and change your stats and abilities in other games while avoiding changing the lovingly created costumes in the game to something canned. However, the result misses the visceral joy of turning leather into pants that's such a bizarrely addictive subgame within World of Warcraft and other fantasy games. The three professions -- mysticism, science and arms -- feel arbitrary, and they've recently added a byzantine series of specializations within the main fields that just muddle everything. (As a side note, I have long maintained that the 'crafting' system in a superhero MMO shouldn't be goods, it should be based on in-game professions. For example, crooks could drop 'clues,' which a character can gather. If that character is a reporter, he can smith those clues into leads, which in turn could be made into a story you can sell, or you could take several stories and smith them into a series or expos�. Those could then be made into mission arcs or other in-game benefits. Meanwhile, a 'Detective' could take those same clues and smith them into leads, which become full cases. And so on. Sadly, that seems unlikely anytime soon.)
• As cool as your Nemesis is, you don't see very much of them, and what you do see feels canned. You don't even create them until L25, which is more than halfway to the current maximum level. Even after you get your nemesis, you spend a lot more time being ambushed by your nemesis's enemies than you do actually confronting your nemesis. I really, really hope they drop your nemesis's entry to L15 or even lower, and make the Nemesis himself a more prevalent part of your day to day adventuring life.
• Rather than have multiple 'named' servers, all the characters in the game officially exist on the same server, which then will spawn additional virtual servers to reduce load as much as possible. This was meant to put everyone into one pool, so that you don't have separation of players by what server they exist on. However, the dynamic splitting of servers means players are never really sure which instance their friends are going to be on and there can be a lot of confusion.
• On the other side of it, as weird as it is to type this... it's not like the game goes out of its way to encourage friends to meet up in the first place. It's got plenty of social options, but in terms of actually adventuring together? The game is much more solo-friendly. In particular, though there's a mechanism to 'share' missions, it seems like most missions can't be shared via that mechanism. Most teaming that takes place are very short ad hoc pickup groups so that everyone waiting for mission objectives to spawn can clear the mission at once, then split up and go their separate ways.
• The above probably highlights the most obvious weakness. Almost all the missions are live on the streets, in shared areas, rather than in discrete instances. As a result, during earlier levels when there's a lot of people trying to work their way up the only possible way to complete missions is to camp the various spawn points for objectives. There's something innately unheroic about camping a spawn point to beat up Canadian separatists before your fellow heroes have a chance to do the same thing.

As you can tell, the exciting parts of Champions Online boil down to the new and exciting gameplay options in the game. (It is certainly worth noting Champions Online has a much smarter AI than its predecessor. The days of taunting a room of bad guys around a corner and having them all pile around it to let you fry them with AoE attacks seems to be done.) The problems Champions Online has largely boil down to the game being brand new and immature. While there have been plenty of broken and bugged bits (culminating in the first day of open beta being kind of a disaster as everyone hit the patching server at once and it melted under the weight), I won't officially hold those against Champions Online until after launch. That is, after all, why one has Beta tests.

Needless to say, however, I'm preordered on Champions Online. I'm really impressed with what they've done, and the game is fun and fast paced and has shiny bits I rather like. What this means for City of Heroes only time will tell, but I think I can officially state that right now? We have ourselves a ball game.

Posted by Eric Burns-White in Video Games at 2:55 PM | Comments (15)

May 12, 2009

Eric: It's my second post in two days. Ergo, it's about City of Heroes.

So it's been a long while. And hey, no promises about how long it'll be this time. It mostly depends on whether or not I actually have things to say.

That's a more powerful drag on blogging than you might realize. In the several million plus word history of Websnark, I've said a lot of things. Some of them haven't sucked. Others have. On the whole, I've done okay. Mostly.

On the other hand, very few bloggers manage to get married as a result of their blogs. By any standard, I'm way ahead of the game. But I digress.

The thing is... I don't have a lot of impetus to repeat myself. When I have new things to say or something catches my imagination, I write about it, but there's only so many times you can write about putting a fucking cast page on your webcomic and keeping it at least moderately kept up before it all sounds repetitive. That's what ultimately killed my enthusiasm for State of the (Web)Cartoonist, by the by. It's not that I ran out of strips I read. It's that the stuff I was saying about them just felt repetitive. "X does this pretty well." "Y used to do this better." "Z writes a better strip than I gave Z credit for." Blah blah blah blah blah.

But, there's still stuff I like to write about. And every now and again I'll bring them back up. Sometimes it'll be old hat, sometimes it won't.

Which brings us back, yet again, inexorably, to City of Heroes.

A lot of my friends have given up on the old City. "It's too repetitive," they say. "Gameplay doesn't evolve," they say. "I'd rather play World of Warcraft because it has variety," they say. So, you know. They're weak. Weak like flowers. Weak like children. Weak like children of flowers.

But they have a point. For all the (pretty freaking amazing) content updates that City of Heroes has had in its five year history, it's also pretty long in the tooth. There's only so many times you want to fight Skulls and Hellions. Only so many times you want to contend with Nemesis or run the horror that is the Positron Task Force. Only so many times you want to do the Portal missions or claw your way into Grandville. And when something new comes out, it's usually pretty limited. When Issue 12 hit the servers -- that being "The Midnight Hour" -- it included what looked like a ton of new content. New missions for Levels 10-20 of both heroes and villains. New post-35 content in a co-op zone back in Roman times. The epic archetypes for Villains, giving redside players access to Widows and Wolf Spiders and their various paths for growth. A remaking of the Hollows trial zone to give it more gameplay and missions and stuff. UI improvements. And "powerset proliferation" that opened new powers to new archetypes and even added more powersets to the game entirely.

That seems like it should be enough, damn it. That seems like it should be more than enough, for a good long time.

But... more powersets means more alts, not more content. The Epic villains only applied to the relatively small subset of players who took a villain all the way to 50, and then the custom content for those new epic villains was... relatively sparse. The new Midnight Squad missions pretty much included a pizza run to read content (customized for your character origin, not that it seemed to make much of a difference other than as a proof of concept) about the origins of superpowers, a single mission string at lower level, a mission string to 'become a member of the Midnight Squad,' and then access to an entirely new and pretty zone with... not a lot to do in it. There was an introduction mission string, plus the chance to have continual repetitive missions, and a really good task force which needed six players to try out. They came right out and admitted that the new zome of Cimerora was more a proof of concept and a place where content could be added than a fleshed out zone in its own right.

Put simply... it didn't take long for everything new in Issue 12 to feel played out. A nice fresh influx of content... which quickly felt kind of stale.

This might seem odd, but you have to remember something important about most new content at City of Heroes. If they build new virtual sets, that can be really pretty and really interesting and there can be lots of easter eggs and the like. However, new missions really come down to new text to read and maybe a few new enemies to fight, but for the most part things work the same way that they always have. You click the glowing object to 'disarm' it or 'collect' it or 'interact' with it. You use essentially the same tactics to fight enemies regardless of what their outer appearances look like. It really, really comes down to what you read in the text boxes, and once you've read them... you've read them.

(I have some friends who clearly don't care even slightly about what's in those text boxes. For them, new content is meaningless without new gameplay. There's not much to be done for them, though.)

Cryptic NCSoft NorCal Paragon Studios rallied, though. They came out with two more content updates and announced a third within that same year. The first (Issue 13 - "Power and Responsibility") gave a new system of 'day jobs,' letting players get bonuses for where they happened to log out (and badges badges badges to boot). It also filled out Cimerora's sparse missions (somewhat), and put in several new systems (like a leveling pact that lets you pair your experience to someone else, keeping you both in sync, and a system that lets you earn some of the better trinkets without having to do some of the more repetitive content and the like). It was okay, and kind of cool, and once again lost its new content smell pretty quickly.

The next issue -- Issue 14 - "Architect" -- was the big one. It got monumental press, and was almost universally loved, in part because it really did change the City of Heroes experience. Now, players can actually create their own content. They can create their own missions and create their own enemies (which are actually considerably harder to beat than most of the in-game enemies). It's amazing. And the Mission Architect itself is really well put together. There is amazing flexibility, and tons of maps, and the same capacity for costume designing you get for character creation with the added bonus that all the special event costume bits are available too (with the use, admittedly, of skee-ball tickets you collect when playing in the Architect. And no, I'm not kidding.)

If you wondered where I was in, oh, February and March? I got into the closed beta. I lived in the Mission Architect. Weds was very, very kind and understanding despite my spending hours a day creating new enemy groups and building mission strings, playing other peoples' Mission Architect missions, and in generally just devouring this thing. And then it released and it was a monumental and fast success, with incredibly fast growth....

...which then stopped.

See, you have three slots you can develop. Three mission arcs, with up to 5 missions each. That's it. When you've built three mission arcs, you can hope for one of the Developers to decide your mission is one of the best they've seen -- out of the literally tens of thousands being written -- and make your arc "Dev's Choice," making the arc permanent and freeing a development slot for you. Or you can manage to get a plurality of players -- several thousand being required -- to rate your arc as one of the best in the game, putting it (at least temporarily) in the Hall of Fame, which does the same thing.

Otherwise, if you want to publish a new arc, you have to delete an old one.

I'm sure their intention is to keep the database clear. After all, there are so many more thousands of arcs than there are players to play them. (Before the Beta finished, one of the Dev's admitted that the Beta testers alone had managed to create more content than the Developers had made in the official part of the game over the five years City of Heroes had been out). But the problem is, the kind of person who loves this kind of shit doesn't want to delete their arcs. Someone might play them, after all. They want to hold onto them. They want to build sequels to them. They want to keep going.

Only they can't. It doesn't take that long to make three mission arcs. Even three good ones. Inside of a week or two the kind of person who... oh, I don't know, buys the freaking "Architect" edition of the game on a store shelf is going to have more content than he can publish.

And it's not even a matter of letting your content out to play for a while, then rotating it. If you unpublish one of your story arcs to make room for another, even temporarily, all the ratings and evidence that people have played the first arc disappear. You are starting from scratch. So if a few dozen people have played your arc and you're still sitting at a 4 rating or above, you really don't want to shoot those ratings in the head so you can publish something untested.

I said above -- the only ways... the only ways to get more slots right now are to catch the eye of a developer (and get "Dev's Choice") or to earn your way into the Hall of Fame. And as of this writing there are exactly fourteen missions selected for Developer's Choice (out of 168,000+ arcs that have been published to date). So only fourteen different people (no one has more than one Dev's Choice, and the rumor is no one will get more than one) can have a fourth arc published by that method.

And Hall of Fame? Please. Hall of Fame is conditional. You have to keep your averages up. Groups of players formed coalitions to auto-five-star everything they produced in order to try and force their way into the Hall of Fame. Other groups of players began auto-one or zero-starring everything with five stars to combat it. The rating system is currently so polluted it's eligible for Superfund cleanup money. With over a month of play and over 168,000 missions published (though not necessarily active), a grand total of none have hit the Hall of Fame. It is, at least for the moment, not only a non-entity but not worth going for.

Which is not the worst of their problems. Hand in hand with all that have been a startlingly large number of farming missions that have been built, and a lot of people who are exploiting the Mission Architect to create powerlevelers' dreams. I've heard rumors of characters going from L1 to L50 in a day, and I can believe it. They've started to crack down on these things and redesign the badges you can earn from the system, but it's going to be an ongoing problem and it's further coloring the long term success of the Mission Architect. It probably doesn't help that the people who are really into the creative side of the system run out of arc slots and either have to dump their output or stop creating, while the farmers can cheerfully nuke a farming mission that gets compromised and build the next one in their list without batting an eye.

Now. I'll let you in on a little secret. You know those 14 Dev's Choice missions? Yeah, one of them is mine. Arc ID 1006, Ripping Out Reform. It's a low level villain romp where you're trying to keep efforts to reform the Rogue Island Police from succeeding. I'm proud of it. I'm very proud of it being one of the fourteen Dev's Choices. And as a result, I have not three but four published arcs. Of my three non-Dev's Choice arcs, not one of them... not one of them is below 4 stars in rating, for whatever that's worth in this environment. I like them all. I don't want to delete any of them.

As a result... the Mission Architect -- which I'm apparently pretty good at -- is meaningless to my ongoing City of Heroes experience. I can't publish any more story arcs. I'm done. And I only have so much right to complain, since I'm already ahead of put near everybody else.

I sent a message in the system, begging for a chance to send them more money and open up more arcs. (I honestly can't afford to spend the fifteen a month extra it would cost to have another account purely so I could have the three slots open to that account, but I can drop some one-time cash on getting new slots over time.) Sadly, a few weeks later, that message hasn't even been read. It doesn't matter, they've heard it from a lot of other people. C'est ca. There's nothing to be done for it. I can play other peoples' arcs, but barring a new system that lets us buy new arcs, there's nothing I can add.

Amusingly, we now have new content pouring into the game. New missions, new challenges, new text to read, new costumes to look at. And some of it's freaking amazing. And so people who don't care about creating content are sitting pretty. They can play all kinds of new stuff. But the major selling point of the new update -- the content creation system -- either has a very short shelf-life in a player's experience or encourages the player to not get emotionally attached to what he writes.

Also amusingly, the bar for further new content issues has now been raised. We have a new issue announced for early summer -- Issue 15 - "Anniversary." It sounds pretty damn spiffy, with the return of one of the best of the villain groups the game has ever had, the 5th Column. (Long time readers may recall I had rather firm opinions about the removal of the 5th Column from the game.) But while I'm glad to hear there's going to be some new 5th Column content in the game, it's no longer as exciting for me because... well, because there's tons of 5th Column content in the game right now -- it's just in the Mission Architect. I had an incredibly fun time not too long ago fighting Evil Deep Freeze Nazis on the Moon. Do you know how awesome the official return of the 5th Column will have to be to engage deep enthusiasm compared to that? And even if it is awesome, just knowing there'll be a couple of new Taskforces (solo players need not get excited) to play is no big deal. There's vastly more content in the Mission Architect than can be played, and a lot of it's as good or better than anything the developers come up with. They also have new costume stuff and the ability to change costumes by doing a backflip (which is an extension of a recent paid 'booster pack' that lets you infringe on DC's trademark transform by being hit by lightning or infringe on Warner Bros' trademark spin around into a new costume, among others.

In other words, it may be cool stuff, but it's not amazingly cool stuff the way it would have been, say, a year ago. And they're going to fight that impression with any free content update that doesn't have a significant gameplay experience improvement going forward.

On the other hand, an accidental leak (which actually seems accidental, this time) has revealed the first paid expansion since City of Villains is on the horizon. City of Heroes: Going Rogue is going to cost money, but will also include at least one and perhaps many new zones, plus a new "alignment system" that lets you ultimately Fall From Grace (making a hero into a villain) or Redeem Yourself (making a villain into a hero). That's exciting, and it opens up some really cool possibilities.....

...until people get used to having Corrupters and Masterminds (probably under new names) on the 'hero' side, in which case it falls under the heading of 'new text boxes to read and costumes to look at until you've seen them all' again. And with my luck, half the stuff will only be available to a group of six players or more, or be locked to level 40 or above, which quite frankly is boring. (The chance to Redeem a villain is exciting. The chance to have my L50 Mastermind gad about in Paragon City instead of the Rogue Islands isn't.)

Still, we don't have hard details yet, and I'm optimistic. It's certainly possible there will be a wide range of new things, and there may well be solid new gameplay options. As the first paid expansion since City of Villains, with its own logo and everything, it's possible Going Rogue will include new archetypes to play. It may give us new power customization options (a system that's incredibly hard to retrofit into City of Heroes, but a paid update may give them enough resources to do it). It may let us start as a 1st level character in an entirely new City/Universe, with multiple zones of entirely new content on the level of Wrath of the Lich King over on World of Warcraft. It may add new functionality. New options. New ways of playing. New powersets. New more robust tactical situations. It may be a complete upgrade across the board. It may be a retrofitting of old content into new and exciting things. It may be an excuse to rebalance powers (and endure huge arguments from people, including very possibly me) to help roles fit together better. It may be everything City of Heroes needs.

And almost certainly it will keep City of Heroes's competitive edge over Champions Online (which has been delayed and which has had rumors of being... underwhelming in many ways, none of which I can confirm since I've not been selected for that beta) and the eventual DC Universe Online (and the re-announced Marvel MMO). No matter what the new MMORPGs bring to the table, it will be a long time before they can offer the depth that City of Heroes does.

The problem is, if one of them offers truly next-generation gameplay over City of Heroes, there will be defections. Maybe a lot of defections.

City of Heroes needs to keep really innovating and building truly new things -- not just content-wise, but gameplay-wise. And when they do, in fact, develop a truly new and innovative thing like the Mission Architect? It's probably a good idea to ensure their players get to use it for more than a couple of weeks.

You know. I'm just saying.

Posted by Eric Burns-White in Video Games at 5:08 PM | Comments (21)

May 11, 2009

Eric: On Treks into Heroism and Reclaiming Ashes: Star Trek and the Heroic Journey

Let me open with the non-Spoilery part of this here essay -- and I do indeed plan to spoil heavily in this here first post in a billion years. I really, really liked the new Star Trek movie.

Let me elaborate with an anecdote on one of the few times I've seen a movie more than once in a theater, and just about the only time I've seen a movie in a theater twice in a short amount of time.

It was early 1987, and I was a young tyro at Boston University. I was still new to post-high school life and a bit drunk with the power of a T Pass. I got a stipend from the United States Government as part of an early -- and unfortunate -- flirtation with the United States Navy. And I had a piece of plastic that let me ride the Boston T wherever and whenever I wanted.

And so in January of 1987, I took a ride on the T on an unseasonably warm day to the Government Center stop, just to tool around and see the sights. And I noticed that Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was still playing in a theater. I hadn't yet seen this movie, because... well, I have no idea why I hadn't seen it yet. My friends had, and they liked it. Still, I didn't have much to do and hey, the theater was almost empty -- it was the middle of the day and Trek had been out for weeks at that point. So I went. Why not.

Two hours later, I marched out of the theater on an absolute high. I was charged -- no, I was supercharged. The last thing I wanted to do was go back to my room. So I turned around, and walked right back in, and proceeded to watch the film for a second time.

I'd never done that before. I haven't done that specific thing since. I've seen movies more than once in the theater since then -- but that was always because I had seen it with one group of friends and then a different group of friends wanted to see it too. It was group activity, in other words, not "oh my God I need to see that movie again." And certainly in recent years I've felt no need to be a repeat film watcher. The DVD will be out soon enough, after all. And there's always way more to watch.

On Thursday at 7 pm, Wednesday, a mutual friend and I all went to see Star Trek, at the first possible showing.

On Sunday, Wednesday and I saw it again. I couldn't imagine waiting for the DVD release -- I had to see this movie again.

So, taking it for what it's worth, I liked the movie.

We're about to move into the main part of this essay, so I'm going to bring back the ancient art of the Cut For Spoilers. Don't continue unless you're okay with them

Seriously, I'm going to reveal everything and its brother about this film.

Up to and including stuff that was misleading in the trailer.

Okay, not a lot of that, but a bit.

Okay, a bit involving hot chicks and underwear.

Right. Last chance.

(RSS readers -- click the link to the main entry on the site, or just click here to continue.

Continue reading "On Treks into Heroism and Reclaiming Ashes: Star Trek and the Heroic Journey"

Posted by Eric Burns-White in Philosophical Snarks at 2:35 PM | Comments (15)

April 1, 2009

Eric: On the Cusp of the Fool

As near as I can tell, at least looking at social networking sites, absolutely no one likes April Fool's Day.

This seems odd to me, especially in the era of GenX hitting their forties, because if there's one thing my Generation and those that followed us love? It's shit for kids.

Seriously, man. We're the ones who made Spider-Man a monumentally successful movie franchise. We're the ones who moved Cartoon Network out of the business of making cartoons for children and into the business of manufacturing pop culture. We're the ones who keep Boomerang in business, especially after 7 pm. We're the ones who were rabid about collecting plastic toys that changed from robot to car and back until it hit the point that it too became a successful movie franchise. (And on the heels of it, we have ourselves a G.I. Joe movie coming out too. And it's not starring the Joes from the Baby Boom and it's not starring the poor Sigma Sixers who came after us.)

Oh, we call it "irony," or we demand that "comics aren't just for kids," or we tell people that Superman S's in sparkle-pink (I'm sorry, Supergirl S's, as if Supergirl ever wore sparkle-pink in her four-color life) is a fashion statement. But part of the reason Easter and Halloween are growing in our culture is that Gen-Xers and those who follow don't stop celebrating them when they graduate from college. We want our Christmas Stockings. We eat Count Chocula and watch Scooby Doo on Saturdays. We love shit that's for kids, and we're (officially) not ashamed of it.

But we fucking hate April Fool's Day. Which is so weird to me because it's the absolute pinnacle of "shit for kids." April Fool's Day is the last refuge of 9 year olds, because the 19-49 year olds don't want it. Because they fucking hate April Fool's Day.

We talk for days leading up to April Fool's Day about how much we fucking hate April Fool's Day. We talk about how annoyed we are that when we get up and stumble over to our computers on 1-April that "it's international don't believe anything you see on the Internet day." On April Fool's Day, Gen-X and the Internet Age put on their crotchety old man pants and declare themselves to be entirely too grown up to enjoy people making fun of themselves and of us.

Which is the cusp of it. No matter how ridiculous we get in our love of things from our youth (seriously -- the chief complaint about Watchmen wasn't that it took liberties with the source material, it's that it didn't take enough liberties with the source material and one of the most revered comic book series of the last six years was All-Star Superman, which seemed pretty pedestrian to me, particularly after Moore did it eight times better in Supreme, but because Morrison aped the more ridiculous -- and cool -- elements of the Silver Age Superman instead of declaring Superman too cool to have enemies with a square planet it's being held up as seminal and groundbreaking) we have absolutely no sense of humor about ourselves. None. No matter how good a prank is, "you got me" is never said cheerfully. It's said behind clenched teeth as we fake being a good sport and secretly plan how to kill the fucker with a car.

So, we're buzz-kills about this one, because we don't like to be made fun of. We're okay with other people looking stupid -- Jon Stewart, Matt Groening, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Steven Colbert, Seth MacFarlane, Seth Green and put near everything else we do like comes from mocking other people -- but we don't like to look stupid. We laugh at the depiction of a hopeless nerd on Robot Chicken so long as that depiction is so broad and so unrealistic that we can pretend we're not the ones being laughed at. We laugh when someone looks like a fucking moron, so long as that someone isn't us.

And the heart of April Fool's Day -- the absolute point of it -- is that it makes fun of us. It says "hah! You bought this hoax! HAH HAH!" And we have to grit our teeth and mutter "yeah, you got me." And as stated above, we then plan vehicular murder. No one likes April Fool's Day.

Except, of course, for kids. Kids love it, because they're just young enough to not give a shit about looking stupid.

And the thing that gets me, beyond everything else, is that's exactly what we're looking for. We're looking for that essence, that moment in time, that part of ourselves who didn't give a shit about looking stupid, they just wanted to have a good time. When we read a comic book on the bus, we do so ironically or we do so defiantly, or we change the entire comic book industry to be more mature all in an effort to legitimize the act of reading a comic book on the bus, because deep down we just want to read comic books but we don't want to look stupid while we're doing it. We go to things like BotCon or Anime conventions or SF Cons or one of the various ComiCons in part because they're a good time, and in part because once we walk through those doors we don't look stupid liking what we like. It's safe. And the one thing that pisses us off is the television crew that shows up and films us, because we know we're going to have Stormtroopers, chicks in slave Leia costumes and unshaven fat guys dressed as Sailor Moon on the evening news, and the one thing we can't stand is that makes us look stupid.

Fuck that noise. Fuck it in the ear. I like silver age comics. I don't like them ironically. I don't like them nostalgically. I don't like recontextualizing them for my adult sensibilities. I don't like them because "they're not just for kids." I like them for what they are, on their own merits, because I enjoy super heroes fighting supervillains. I like them. I enjoy reading about the Levitz era Legion, or the Wolfeman/Perez Teen Titans, or the Claremont/Austin X-Men. I enjoy reading about Steve Rogers dressing up as Captain America and fighting Nazis while defending the rights of minorities and challenging us to be better people. I enjoy reading about Billy Batson saying his magic word and becoming the quintessential good guy without feeling like we have to make him, his sister and his disabled best friend suffer unimaginable torments to make them 'edgy.' I like it.

When I watch Super Friends on TV, I watch it because I fucking like Super Friends. I don't need to redress it or dismiss it or make jokes about it to enjoy watching Superman get shaken by Solomon Grundy or Sinestro trick Green Lantern into moving the planet Earth closer to the sun and then forgetting to fix it. Yeah, I know it's dopy if I pretend to be an adult when I watch it. But I like it on its own merits.

Yeah, I enjoyed Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, but I also enjoy Birdman and the Galaxy Trio. I like this shit because I like this shit.

And I like April Fool's Day.

Let me say that more obnoxiously.

I like April Fool's Day!

I like it when people are clever. I like it when they take the time and effort to build something well, even if the purpose is to make me look credulous. I like when David Willis ends Shortpacked, launches 'Ultimate Roomies,' and redesigns his entire website based on the new strip. And works really hard to sell that fact. I think it's hysterical and I think it shows a great sense of self deprecation on his part and I think it shows a lot of time and effort to, in the end, celebrate a day where the world is whatever the fuck we want to make of it, and if we buy the hoax, even for a second, that's okay because god damn it, it's April Fool's Day. And it depresses me that in the Webcomics World, what was once a day of joy and anarchy (and for many years a day when artists would trade strips and try to do each others' jobs) has become a day when people solemnly declare that they're not going to be having any pranks or shenanigans, because they know that people hate that.

One of the comments to Willis's tour de force performance on his blog? "And so the worst fucking day of the year begins."

Jesus fuck, man. Get over it. It's April Fool's Day. Enjoy it for what it is. Read the epic saga of Cadie. Try to buy some Squeeze Bacon or just wince at the thought of it. Get excited for the Groundhog Day musical. Have some fun with it.

And if you can't, stop being a fucking buzzkill because you're terrified of looking stupid. If you just can't get in touch with your inner seven year old enough to just enjoy what this is, don't actively try to ruin it for everyone else. If nothing else? Because the only way to really look stupid on April Fool's Day is to preemptively try not to look stupid on April Fool's Day.

Seriously. Your declarations and your bubble-bursting? Is the ultimate victory of anyone who ever fooled you. They managed to take a thirty-second joke no one will ever remember and change your fucking life with it. You not only were 'gotten?' You never stopped being gotten, and everyone knows it because you keep telling them.

Now that's comedy.

Posted by Eric Burns-White in Philosophical Snarks at 11:03 AM | Comments (34)