Notes: Champions Online

A good friend hooked me into this against my better judgement, and so far I'm really enjoying it. I know that MMOs are inherently bad for both one's wallet and mental health, so I'm going to try to very carefully manage my investment of resources - short subscription periods with no auto-renew, doing my homework before playing, etc. That micro-payment store they're setting up looks awfully dangerous, but we'll leap that building when we come to it.

All that aside, Champions is proving to be quite a lot of fun. Made by Cryptic, it is essentially City of Heroes Only Better. While the previous franchise has fallen into subscription retention mode, eschewing further content development for easing player limits and offering free goodies, Champions revisits the whole superhero game genre and adds a lot of new functionality we haven't seen before. There are some embarrassing similarities, to be sure. Cryptic seems to have retained the rights to a lot of CoH's design assets - suspiciously familiar textures, meshes, sounds, and animations that pop up all throught the game. Luckily, the impressive sweep of original content and customization more than makes up for the legacy content.

Despite the similar paint job, under the hood, Champions runs very different from its predecessor. Gone are the cookie-cutter map tile door missions with the repetetive "defeat all" requirement. While there are a handful of missions like this, they are usually quick filler, generated dynamically when a citizen runs up to you asking for help. Most of the content is delivered in more traditional MMO style (think World of Warcraft), with parameters, locations, and rewards varying greatly. There is an admirable focus on scripting, which allows for a lot of interactivity and variable NPC behavior. There is also a lot of great writing, and plots tend to be engaging and spread out over discernible arcs. I particularly enjoyed coming to the rescue of the Action News Team (with Ron Mahoghany). Classy.

Game mechanics are fairly predictable - approach hostiles, unleash various attacks, manage aggro, win, recover, move on. Champions focuses primarily on energy management. Rather than forcing you to wait for regen or rely on a specific power to replenish your energy, as in CoH, Champions starts every hero out with a simple energy building attack power that you can fall back on between big blasts. Your energy also aturally recharges to an equilibrium state determined by your stats. The result is a very frenetic, flashy fight dynamic (as advertised) with very little downtime between action scenes.

This doesn't work out well for all builds. Melée heroes have trouble building energy until they can get in close, and have to really focus on defense if they intend to take on groups. Champions seems geared toward small squad battles instead of big street-sweeping mobs, which is kinda disappointing but it keeps things balanced. Holds and crowd control seem to become more and more important as you advance, as you face more and more singularly dangerous villains that need to be neutralized quickly. I haven't yet been able to make anything other than a well-rounded blaster work yet. Experimentation is key.

PvP is fun and fits seamlessly with the rest of the game - a first for superhero games, I think. There are lots of rewards just for playing, many inside jokes, and a lot of little features to keep players happy. You can throw trucks at bad guys. There are also some now almost standard MMO launch problems: driver issues, server crashes, balance changes, lag, forum drama, etc. Hopefully all of that will be ironed out soon.

But I do have some big complaints:

1. No documentation. They sell the game as something you can pick up and play without a lot of study. That's true, but there is also a very dense complexity under that "casual" veneer that becomes really engaging once you dig down into it. The problem is you have no clue how anything works. Every power framework has a gimmick. If you don't know the gimmick, you are likely to make some poor decisions that may go unnoticed until much later. Compounding this is the respec/"retcon" system, which forces you to backtrack character levels one at a time to make changes, and becomes prohibitively expensive more than 2 or 3 levels back.

2. Broken economy. The devs are starting very conservatively in managing the nascent economy, which means very little money going in. They have acknowledged that this is a problem, and will be adding more soon, but the rest of the infrastructure is also lacking. The market interface is poor, comparative values of items are hard to assess (see item 1), and most excess items get recycled into skill grinding. And crafting is basically its own reward - there's not much you need to buy unless you are ignoring the skill system entirely.

3. No need to team. The Ogre and I met up on Saturday to bust some suckahs up in game. In 5 hours or so, Foxy Chocolate and the Iron Ho each advanced 8 levels, stuck it to the man and kept it very Kung Fu funky. Very fun, but not very different from soloing. Missions to not appreciably change with more team members, and most of the very few team-oriented missions can be solo'd with a little work. Maybe team content gets fleshed out at higher levels.

So overall, a solid game with a lot of potential, some lessons learned from previous outings, and assets quietly stolen from the Marvel Online development cycle. Plus you can launch rockets at a robot cowboy and then bash it over the head with a snowmobile. Sold.

What Space Horror Movie Am I Watching?

1. The primary spacecraft featured in this film is
A. Long and skinny with a big thingy at one end.
B. Long and skinny with a big thingy at both ends.

2. The spacecraft in question appears to have been designed by
A. NASA
B. H.R. Geiger

3. The ship is crewed by 8 multicultural astronauts, including
A. Asian people
B. Black people

4. In the cryptic message left by the previous mission's commander, the viewer is left staring into the insane man's
A. Eyes
B. Eye sockets

5. There is an airlock explosion. The crew attempts a rescue in the vacuum of space with
A. One guy in a spacesuit and two guys without
B. One guy in a spacesuit and one guy without

6. The death toll from this rescue is
A. 1
B. 0

7. The naked psychotic villain that kills everyone is convinced he is communing with
A. God
B. Satan

8. His body is disfigured by horrible
A. Burns
B. Scars

9. He kills people primarily using
A. One knife
B. Some crazy assortment of knives

10. In the end, the ship's big science machine is activated. This is a
A. Good thing
B. Bad thing

If you answered A to all or most of these questions, you are watching Sunshine. If you answered B, you are watching Event Horizon. There is a slim, non-zero chance that you may be watching 2001: A Space Odyssey and just not paying very close attention.

SG- Done

I meant to post this back when it was not embarrassingly out of date (my obsessive geek cred is down the drain), but here it is now anyway.

Stargate: SG-1 Speed Synopsis

Thor: Hey humanity, we're dying. You want all our stuff?

SG-1: What?

Asgard: *boom*

*A series of improbable events, in which SG-1 becomes trapped in a plot bubble and isolated from the rest of the cast.*

Sam: We're screwed

Everyone: Crap.

*Time passes in montage form.*

Vala: Do I make you horny?

Daniel: No.

Vala: *cries*

Daniel: Yes. Totally. Let's do it.

*Twenty years pass, during which they either have a lot of fruitless unprotected sex, or replicate a constant supply of contraception options in order to avoid a potentially tricky moral equation involving time distortion and the rights of sentient life at the end of the show.*

Beau Bridges: Sam, don't lose hope. You've been like a daughter to me.

Sam: And you're like the father I never had - the one that didn't become host to a hyper-intelligent space lungfish.

Beau Bridges: *dies*

*Thirty years pass, during which the cast members are shown (via montage) to have chemistry.*

Sam: I figured out a way out, but someone has to stay old while the rest of us regain our youthful good looks and remain viable characters.

Teal'c: I'll do it. I'm like a Vulcan. *pushes reset button*

Everyone: Yay. *exchanges poorly-written half self-aware wrap-up dialogue*

Review: I know they're setting up for the movie, and I know that SciFi canceled them essentially mid story arc. But seriously guys, that was lame. I could see this as a one-shot throwaway episode, but as the SERIES FINALE? WTF? They should have gone out on Wormhole X-Treme!.

Stargate: Atlantis Speed Synopsis

Military Guy: I'm going to do something stupid.

Everybody: No way, dude.

Military Guy: Yes way, and you're going to help. So there.

*They do something stupid.*

Dr. Annoying: We're so doomed, Now I have to start the doom clock. We have 36 hours to live.

Dr. Annoying: Now we have 28 hours.

Dr. Annoying: 16 hours

Dr. Annoying: 4 hours

Dr. Annoying: 10 hours again.

Dr. Annoying: 2 weeks!

Weir: I quit. Samantha can take my place. *boom*

Samantha: Sweet! Employment!

Dr. Annoying: Ok, 1 hour to live again. Sorry, my bad.

Review: Why do they keep Rodney around? He does the job of like 20 different scientists and engineers and he gets half of what he calculates dead wrong in every damn episode. Replace him with a bunch of bored MIT grad students and they'd have the replicators building giant bongs in Kendall Square and terraforming Mars by now.

Notes: Nightwish

In honor of Lordi's triumphant victory at Eurovision, let us delve for a moment into the world of Scandinavian Metal.

Hells yeah.

Now, I know some of you are familiar with the entertaining stylings of Therion. With their symphonic thunder, they had such promise, yet left so much unrocked. Don't get me wrong, I love Vovin, Secret of the Runes and that one song, Thor the Powerhead. But Therion is usually a mixed bag. You have to choose carefully.

Enter Nightwish. If you're looking to get your Epic Raging Gothic Metal Fix, look no further. Find me another band that has Val Hallen, Viking God of Rock on bass.

I just picked up their 2004 album, Once, along with a few singles from iTunes. Fronted by opera singer Tarja Turunen (who has sadly since left the band), Nightwish presents a gigantic soul-shattering sound. Imagine a full symphony orchestra dominated by a brushed chrome bass and an unholy elven chorus with assists from a burning harpsichord. It is a sound to get lost in. I've read some reviews that compare the band favorably to Evanesence. I can understand that - the female leads are similar, Nightwish also has some distinct Christian overtones, and the styles occassionally brush lightly against each other.

Dark Chest Of Wonders and Planet Hell are good hard rock monsters to get you started, with rampaging bass work backed up by flowing orchestral themes trying desperately to keep up. Relax for a while with the sweet and ghostly Kuolema Tekee Taiteilijan, an easy competitor for inclusion on any Lord of the Rings soundtrack. The Siren, Dead Gardens, and Nemo are all good secondary tracks, although somewhere in there is the single longest headbanging bass solo with hellscream in the history of music. I'm not saying it's good, I'm just pointing out that it's there.

The gem of the album is of course the ten minute Ghost Love Score, which in my opinion is worth the price of the album (apparently iTunes agrees). As if someone had soulforged Danny Elfman, James Newton Howard and Jim Morrison into a living wall of theatric sound, the piece is an epic cascade of strings, guitar rifs, chorals, and saintly vocals. Listen to it. It is nothing short of legendary.

Highly recommended.

Notes: Iron Sunrise

The work of Charles Stross fell into my lap unexpectedly last year. Jason gave me a blind recommendation of Singularity Sky over the phone while I was searching the local Borders for a book to read on a plane. Happily, that exchange also netted a copy of Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. Both excellent reads - really the sort of Slipstream meets New Weird births Infernokrusher eats your head kind of stories I had been looking for. Unfortunately, the shine has come off the further works of these two authors - they seem to fall a little flat.

I could do a whole post on Vinge's crap-out in Deepness in the Sky but the only thing worthy of note here is that the flaws in that book closely echo those of Iron Sunrise. Stross and Vinge were drinking buddies, so I guess that makes sense.

The key problem with Iron Sunrise is that it reads like a studio-scripted sequel. It has all the style and flavor of the first book, but no strong plot of it's own. Stross falls back on what were once delicious details of the bizarre post-singularity universe but are now stale reiterations. Recurring characters are static and uninteresting, prone to moments of "my God, we're doomed" realizations and long dramatic pauses. The villains are comically villainous and pointlessly perverse. The new characters are inconsistent in their personalities and rarely distinct from the "fuck everything, I'm a good guy everywoman action hero" attitude that pervades the book's dialogue.

The story is your basic save the universe tale, complete with Nazis. There's a bit of spaceship blueprint porn, some explosions, some sex, some Warren Ellis style shock perversity, and various explorations of the essence of the Singularity trope. Characters explain how the sciencey things work and snub their futuristic populist noses at the rich and ignorant. Then cap the whole thing off with a terribly amateur cliffhanger ending - equivalent to one where the seemingly dead villain jerks back to life long enough to take a potshot at the hero - and you're done.

This is the most phoned-in book I've ever read. Not only that, it was phoned in to the editor's angry spiteful messaging service. I may still pick up Accelerando, in the hopes that Stross zipped past this one to get to the book he REALLY wanted to write, but this outing leaves a lot to be desired.

Notes: Battlefield 2

Travel the world, meet interesting people and shoot them.

Within my circle of friends, I seem to be the only person with a lasting interest in the "shoot real people with virtual guns" form of video games. Many have dabbled here and there, tossing a grenade or shotgun blast in my general direction before moving on. Ah, harken back to the glory days of my cracked copy of Quake! (This one time, I totally owned this guy in CTF by hooking him with the grappling hook and zooming up to him, switching to grenade launcher and... hey, come back!)

I myself have skipped over a generation of FPS here and there, unwilling or unable to meet the preposterous computing or network demands of today's modern twitch monsters. But like a brainwashed illuminati operative unaware of his compulsive tendency to hoard shiny objects, I scurry back every so often to the genre and indulge in it's dark dissociative mechanics.

Enter Battlefield 2. I will spare you the detailed content rundown, as you can get that in myriad places. There are squad tools, multi-person land sea and air vehicles, a command communication system, huge maps, up to 64 player slots, a friendly rank and award system, built-in VOIP, well-balanced weapon kits, all that good stuff. And you can play it comfortably on a variety of systems without blowing out your processor. All that is great, but what really impresses me is the overall effect this detail has on the play experience.

Stopping to take pictures is ill-advised (I died here)

BF2 has really hit home as an immersion game. Playing counter-strike, there were always moments of forced tension - times when the counter-terror squad would slowly creep down the hall, sweeping for enemies, guns clutched loosely in sweating palms - but those were usually contrived elements. When it got right down to it, CS was a Doom deathmatch with more crouching. You don't actually have to stop, put your back against the wall, and peer around the door frame when you're advancing. It may look cool in the movies but the game is far more condusive to running around the corner hopping up and down and shooting wildly.

When an army is really functioning as a team, BF2 is not like that. As much as you hear about it in war stories, I've never actually been "pinned down" in a combat game. Pinned down means you're on your belly in the dirt behind a wall of low rubble watching tracer bullets fly overhead and hoping to God a ricochet doesn't make it through and take off a piece of your ass. It means not being able to move or stand without being shot. That happens here.

When you see an enemy down the road, and he sees you, you both have a split second to react. Do you run? Dive for cover? Unload your clip in his direction? Or do you drop to the deck, switch to single-fire and try to nail him somewhere soft before he can get a good shot? I suck at shoot-offs, but in guerilla combat I understand that they are fairly common.

In Dragon Valley, I often take the Spec Ops route, parachute onto a ridge at the edge of enemy territory, sneak through dense forest and plant C4 on their artillery stations.

The other day I was riding in a blackhawk when we were hit by anti-aircraft fire. The guy next to me was shot right out of the cab - the rest of us bailed to safety as the pilot brought the craft down in a smoking heap.

On Monday our squad got caught in a bloody line battle across a sun-parched beachhead. I peeked my head over an embankment to see a stretch of sand strewn with fallen soldiers. Bullets and anti-tank rockets flew everywhere.

Although the immersion factor is as much a function of smart teamwork as anything else, and there are lots of video game caveats (shock paddles can be used to instantly treat any kind of life-threatening injury), BF2 really does come remarkably close to war movie battle tactics without losing the central element of casual play.

Oh, they also have the F-35. Which is awesome.

Postscript:
In the interest of fairness, here are the cons:

• There are bugs and glitches that are still being tested and fixed, par for the course with modern gaming.


• The flying vehicles handle like crap and can't go very far outside the very small mission maps before they are shot down.


• The rank system is friendly at first, but becomes brutal once you get to Lance Corporal. They expect you to play about 250 hours before you get any further rewards beyond the initial cookies.


• Most people on public ranked servers are unreliable cheeseheads.


• I die a lot. Clearly this is a major flaw in the game design.

Notes: In Your Honor

Foo Fighters

Normally I don't give in to impulse buying, but I spotted this dual-disc album at the Border's checkout while I was getting my Lewis Black fix last week. Whenever a band releases a two-disc album for the price of a regular it signals one of two things: 1) We're so big now we can do these huge experimental projects and be kind to our fans, or 2) We're on the long slow spiral to obscurity and need a hit something bad. In Your Honor splits the difference between these two options.

First off, the title track sucks. I mean seriously, it's dreary, pointless, and thankfully short. There's lots of droning and whining and feedback, which I guess fits in with Dave Grohl's new "I need a shave and a lozenge" neo grunge look. They may be shooting for some sort of Dark Side of the Moon or Quadrophenia style storytelling setup with the first track, but I'm just not hearing it materialize.

Fortunately, whatever they were going for in terms of continuity evaporates and they drop into some good old Foo Fighters high speed rock and roll, starting with No Way Back and their current hit single Best of You, both of which sound great while hitting the accelerator on I-95. The rest of the first disc is nothing but hard core driving rock reminiscent of the best elements of There is Nothing Left to Lose and The Colour and Shape. DOA and The Deepest Blues are Black are particularly good if you enjoy high-energy sound juxtaposed against dark, bitter, mournful lyrics (which I do).

They do something a little strange with the arrangement of the two discs; the first is, as I said, all hard rock. The second is all ballads, epics, and torch songs. The shift in Grohl's voice from grunge pop scream to resonant crooner is absolute. The guitar work on Over and Out and On the Mend are particularly good. However, I'll pass on Virginia Moon's bossanova lounge duet.

The hard/soft split of the album makes the second disc a bit of a sleeper and breaks up what could have been an excellent narrative flow for the album. It's as if you arranged the books of Lord of the Rings alphabetically. You can hear some tracks on the second disc that would resonate beautifully with some of the hard rock tracks if they were mixed together in sequence. In Your Honor as a whole could definitely benefit from the guiding hand of a fan's personal playlist, mixing the two discs into a seamless, well-paced storyline.

Which brings us to the chief complaint, the grand offense: the album has an aggressive copy protection scheme (the Suncomm stuff, I think). There are ways to bypass this, of course, but not being able to PLAY the thing on a computer unless you install their piece of crap media manager software is insulting. This is the first CD I've ever bought that I would rather rip whole cloth onto a drive and never play the disc itself again, purely because of the bullshit copy protect. What's so frustrating is that anyone serious about ripping and burning copies illegally will have absolutely no problem with the disc's defenses, but average users will be frustrated that they can't play music that they paid for in the method of their choice. Why the hell wouldn't you download tracks if this is the crap they put you through for doing the right thing?

Anyway, music industry rant aside, this is a pretty good album with twenty full tracks and a lot of variety.

Notes: The Sims 2

Welcome to the Swamp

You want to play God. Go ahead, admit it. There's nothing to be ashamed about - everybody wants to command the very forces of creation itself. It's built into us from very early on that we must enact our will upon our surroundings. Handy then, that Will Wright and co. have given us so many options for living out our deepest and shallowest fantasies in the forms of video games.

I realize I'm about a year behind the curve on this one, but a few weeks ago I picked up a discount copy of The Sims 2. Of course the first thing I did to familiarize myself with the game was to build my college apartment and put digital copies of my roommates in it. I've been told that for most people, dropping your friends into the Sims is your personal end game. For me, it's just a good place to get started. I mean, come on, look at how happy Eric looks playing Jedi Knight! I'm not sure he actually owns pajamas like that but I like to think he does.

The sequel to the The Sims (original title - Sims: Devourer of Time) has most of the familiar elements of the first game. You build a home, put people in it, monitor their various needs and play out complex social dramas involving leveling up your cooking skill, throwing parties and buying expansion packs. Unfortunately it also has many of the same design faults, i.e., I'm really not interested in spending a lot of time organizing the collective bowel movements of a four-person family. I don't care what they say about the smart new AI, you still have to micromanage the use of the toilet if you want a happy Sim.

Flaws aside, the new game engine is remarkable. It pushes the limits of my top end machine, looks great, and is amazingly customizable. The home-building controls are extremely detailed and now include basements, patios, decks, bi-level floors and hundreds of new design elements. I could spend hours working on architecture alone.

Not exactly right, but eerily familiar

The character animations have also been brought up to match the complexity of the new meshes. They're simply gorgeous, and fun to watch, ranging from the flamboyant (one of the hugs is a leap into the arms, a la Shaggy and Scooby) to the subtle (simple body language will tell you how a conversation is going before the relationship numbers change). Still, a lot of the actual activity seems pretty banal. Here's us eating the toasted ham sandwiches Eric made with his new George Foreman Grill:

Ben and I look skeptical, and I think Jason is suggesting Cocoa Beef as an alternative, but we shall not speak of this.

I could go on and on about the other denizens I've been working on - the multi-child Frazzle family, the college kids hunting aliens, the country farmer couple with the comely daughter, or the mysterious goings on behind the steel walls of The Institute, but you get the idea. You can be a lot more creative right out of the box with this monster than with the original. It's tasty brain candy. The only real problems I've had so far is that sometimes a piece of furniture will get bugged, forcing you to tear down the whole damn house to fix it, and some of the behaviours are hard to predict based solely on the personality profiles. For example, I think I made Jason too lazy, because he routinely forgets to wear pants.

Now, if playing with virtual dolls isn't your thing (they're action figures, I swear!), you can look forward to Will Wright's next project, which apparently will render his entire life's work to date obsolete. That's ballsy.

Notes: American Gods

Neil Gaiman's prose is like candy for liberal arts majors. On the surface, it's a wonderfully-composed chocolate adventure shell, interesting in itself and contemporary enough to still be warm and gooey. Inside each chapter, you find a random tasty filling. Sometimes its an old favorite - like mythic Celtic fudge or sweet vanilla Valhalla. And sometimes it's something new and exotic, like deep African spider raspberries, mint Russian house elves or Aztec stone coffee heads. The best part is, it's not bad for you at all. But in the end, you can only eat so much candy in one sitting.

As you can see, I've just finished American Gods. It was entertaining, but it never became more than a laundry day book for me, even when I was salivating over the latest obscure reference or clever twist. I think it's because it frayed very easily at the edges, story-wise. Gaiman lays down some serious world-building rules in the first half of the book that he ultimately violates or ignores by the second half.

The story centers around Shadow, a sort of lost spiritual everyman, fresh out of prison, as he is thrust into a deeply chaotic battle between the old gods of centuries past (Odin, Horus, Coyote, etc.) and the new gods of the modern age (Media, Town, Stone, err... World... fat Internet kid.... huh?). The problem with the set up is that he seems to set some very firm guidelines for how the old gods behave in the modern age, but he takes a mulligan on the actual modern gods. Some are distinct, some are vague, some have minions, some don't. It's very hard to pin down exactly what they represent or why they exist. And Gaiman really dodges the whole Christ thing. One passing reference to how easy that kid had it and a handful of swears and that's about it. No recognizable Buddhism either.

So the story flies apart near the end in a very unsatisfying way. Certain revelations about the nature of the plot and universe are easily anticipated, and therefore less interesting, while others are tangental to the plot and therefore confusing. Ultimately we end on an awkward rising action that reveals more and more fantastic things until they stop being fantastic and become boring. I wish Gaiman had stopped writing around page 484. You know, when the main character SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER dies. There are 104 pages after that and they really don't add much. Kinda like the last fifteen minutes of the Hulk when Bruce Banner fights the lake.

Wow, I just remembered that Shadow actually has a scene like that in the last chapter. Weird.

The worst part is, the book made me think about death in a very personal, philosophical way, and now I can't stop contmplating the great beyond. It's not fun. Damn your thoughtful esoteric heart, Neil Gaiman!

So anyway. Tasty treat if you like that sort of thing. Good sugar rush. Lots of brushing and excercise required afterwards.

Notes: World of Warcraft

What is it good for? Absolutely NUTHIN'... say it again!

Huh. I'm dropping World of Warcraft. After only two months. I hate to do it to such an obviously superior piece of software, but after five days of not logging in I realize that I don't miss it. The account expires sometime mid-April so maybe I'll jump back in for a few laughs before time runs out.

That I would drop an expensive MMO that provides pretty much everything I look for in an online game should tell me something about my own tastes. WoW has an engaging overall plot, enjoyable mechanics, a robust crafting system, rewarding solo play, and excellent team dynamics. The new patch even added a better user interface and a chat system more in line with SWG, which was top notch. But still, it's just another grind. I discovered in the past weeks I had three choices - I could level up by smashing gorillas in a jungle, bashing yetis in the mountains, or bonking lizards in the desert. For about 6 levels or so. Then I'd be able to move on to other forests, other mountians and other plains in which to hit things. Not really appealing anymore.

I suppose if I had a decent group to play with regularly I'd stick with it, but that never materialized. Hell, I stayed with Star Wars, a game I came to loathe, for almost two years just so I could stay in the guild there. Socialization makes the whole thing work. It's difficult to find that magical union of game environment and community where the impetus to play enhances the social aspect and the friendships reinforce the desire to play. Two base hit with WoW, but no run scored.

So farewell, Azeroth, I hardly knew ye. Hmmm... I wonder if Paragon City needs an extra hero next month?