Tattered Page

Work’s been rather nuts.  Jenn & I are still playing City of Heroes.  Issue 10 still seems fresh to us (and only a few of our characters have been able to go through most of the content) but the Halloween event is soon upon us and Issue 11 has entered into closed beta.

Issue 11: A Stitch in Time adds time travel to the game. The community team did an awesome job leading up to the announcement: news stories in the Paragon times that tell of different outcomes to events very familiar to the players as well as cryptic clues in the player-run City Scoop! newspaper.

It also inspired my own Teaser Comic leading up to the event.  Time travel & Superheroes.  What did you expect?

I mean, really… WHY?

From the Cryptic Studios Blog:

What if life were a video game? I know I’d want some cheat codes. Here’s what other people at Cryptic said they would want:

It comes complete with an image of a whiteboard scrawled with ideas. Some of my favorites:

• Ctrl Alt Del
• Mario coin blocks (that’s gonna cause some nasty head injuries)
• Hookers restore health
• Double XP weekends
• Hot Coffee Mod
• Doughy 40-something guys can look like supermodels.

Me?  I can’t find a single thing to add…. as long as they make sure jiggle physics are still included.

Kill Ten Rats has a great writeup on the “myth” of the “unpredictable PvP foe.” It’s a good read, and echos something from way back in my military days.

See, the same is often true for real life military tactics. We had “Standard Operating Procedures” for virtually everything- how to react to an ambush, how to breach a building, how to secure an operations post. When the platoon leader was going on a recon, he left a “5 point contingency plan” to those left behind. 13 years later, I still remember it.

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Well, I got my prizes from the Comic Book Contest.  I figured that, with City of Heroes’ Issue 10 on the way, I’d give the new software a run doing a comic book based “guide” to the issue.

My goal was to mix a brief overview of the features with a little humor.  I hoped to make it target the casual City of Heroes player- no hard numbers or DPS stats- but also make it understandable to the curious outsider… maybe enough for them to want to give it a trial run.

Anyway, it’s currently available through hypercomics as well as .pdf here.  Let me know what you think.

If anyone’s more out-of-touch than I am, you might not have seen this yet.

1-18-08

Trailer launched with the Transformers premiere.  That’s not the movie title.  It’s codenamed “cloverfield.”  There’s a great deal of speculation.

Seems like a monster flick taken by an alternate perspective, but others aren’t certain. Is that roar’ a monster or just a skyscraper’s structural groaning resonating through the city after a quake.  Other… events… seem to make it clear that it IS a monster flick, though one with a different enough perspective that it warrants further attention (for me, at least).