Tag: character

Last Sons

Reviews

I hate Lobo. In the DC Universe, which is my preferred major comic universe (Marvel and their Million Mutant March with Wolverine on every team can go su… I won’t get into it right now), there is no character that I loathe more than Lobo. He is a childish excuse for an anti-hero. See, the idea of an anti-hero is that while they may be a bad guy the story you are reading places them in a situation where you feel for them and begin to root for them to overcome the larger evil even though you understand that the “good guy” here is actually evil himself. Contextual goodness. Lobo, on the other hand, is a guy who likes to blow stuff up unnecessarily, smoke, drink, womanize, etc… basically every bad quality you can imagine in a person. His one redeeming quality is that he is a bounty hunter who hunts down bad guys, but his good quality is overshadowed by the fact that he will wantonly kill hundreds of innocents to do his job. That combined with the dick and fart joke mentality of his character makes him an absolute bore to read.

Despite this, I actually enjoyed Last Sons, but I’m fairly certain its because Alan Grant is a great story teller. The story is this… Lobo is sent to arrest J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter, for some unnamed crime. So he does, and J’onn, being the good guy that he is, goes along because it is a valid warrant even though he can’t remember doing anything wrong. Superman is suspicious, and he hates Lobo, so he decides to go look into this whole thing. In case you missed it… Lobo is the last Czarnian, J’onn is the last Martian, and Superman is the last Kryptonian… Last Sons. So, Lobo takes J’onn and heads to Vrk, and Superman heads off to get more info on the warrant. Vrk is a little backwater planet in a system that hasn’t invented space travel yet. Its people, if they can be called that, are a barely sentient race of beings who excel at digging in the rocky surface of their planet, completely subterranian. But an artificial intelligence calling itself the Alpha has come and taken over their minds and is using them to turn them in to an army with which it will destroy all life in the universe. Much genocide, violence, and sleuthing ensues.

It was a good book, and as much as I hate Lobo, his introduction to the story lead to one of the more interesting facets of the story: Bounty Hunters double-triple-quadruple crossing each other for money. In the beginning of the book, Lobo is on an assignment to capture a gang headed by a guy named Xemtec or something like that. During the fight with the gang, his space bike, a Spazz-Frag, is damaged and the semisentient computer system (SSCS) is broken So Lobo cuts out Xemtec’s brain and installs it in his bike (one of the things I hate about Lobo, aside from being an unkillable monsterous lout, he’s also a technological genius… *sigh*). For the rest of the book, the arguments with the bike and the plotting of the bike to meet back up with the remnants of his gang and double cross Lobo for the reward, first on J’onn and later on the Alpha, makes for entertaining stuff.

All in all, I think Grant has written a solid story that despite the crapfest that is the character of Lobo manages to rise above it and be fun and enjoyable. Yeah, I’d recommend it.

Combat Skills

Gaming

One thing I feel is really lacking in pretty much all MMORPGs is actual player skill. With their simplistic auto-attack or even button/click feat based scenarios there is very little room for the player to really control how good their character is at fighting. Even in games like City of Heroes where there isn’t really an auto-attack, your skill is hamstrung by the limitations of the game mechanics, which in CoH is the recharge time and choice/placement of expansion slots.

FPS games are all about skill. Well, except when the game allows scripting/macroing. People who used the rocket-jump scripts in Quake were cheaters in my book, people who did it without a script were talented. But that aside, every player runs the same speed and has access to the same weapons, and what separates the players is how well they use the guns and know the maps.

However, in making combat more skill based, I don’t want to lose the players who actually prefer auto-attack. So consider this…

The default configuration is auto-attack. You equip a sword and run up to the monster and hit attack. Your weapon will do average damage, perhaps with a random chance to score a critical hit and do double damage. This model is enough to play the game. You won’t be the best in the world, but you will do alright. Then, on an option screen, you are able to select several levels of skill based control. For example, you can choose the “fighting style” method which presents your character with a list of pre-set sword grip and fighting styles. Each style has advantages and disadvantages, base-lined on the auto-attack, and you select them and use them. Then on the furthest end of the scale is “complete control” where your joystick controls your sword arm and your keyboard moves your feet, you gain the ability to move the sword in whatever way you choose to hamstring opponents or stab at the eyes, but you also have your damage affected by your movement because “strafing” around a target you’ll have much less power than if you plant your feet and put your whole body into the swing.

It would obviously take alot of effort to work out all the details, but the gist is that you allow the player to decide how much skill they want to use in the game. The less skill they use, the move “average” their character is; the more skill, the more chances for heroics.

Reign of the Dead

Reviews

Mmm… more zombies. Another Christmas gift this year was Len Barnhart’s Reign of the Dead. First, let me express my disappointment that this is an iUniverse published book. iUniverse is another POD publisher, though its not as bad as PublishAmerica since they are backed by Barnes & Noble it is still paying to be published and it still keeps your book out of most bookstores. That aside, this is actually a pretty good book. As usual for the genre, the dead come back to life and kill people. In this case, any dead person with an intact brain will get back up, but just the bitten. The author skips the gory details of the world being overrun and the first days of the walking dead by starting with a character who has been living in a secluded cabin for the past three weeks. After that it follows what is a fairly typical formula of survivors finding each other and banding together. He throws into the mix a government installation run by a mildly insane dictator type who actually becomes commander-in-chief after the fall of NORAD and all the major political players, at which point he decides that nuking all the cities is the answer. He doesn’t, because if he did it would be a really short story. Instead, there is a mini civil war, and dead soldiers becomes zombies, and only one scientist gets out. After a bunch of other stuff, the book actually ends happy. The zombies are gone and the remnants of humanity start putting the pieces back together.

I had one issue with the book. The first character, Jim, is described as a business man who has retreated to the wilderness to get some much needed rest. He is depicted as an avid hunter, but somewhere during the first few chapters he just sort of becomes this hardened military type that garners respect from the other characters. The thing missing is for him to have actually done something to earn that respect. Sure, in times of crisis, people often will latch on to any leader type, but Jim stumbles in with a group that already had a leader type and the trust he gets just doesn’t feel earned.

On a good note, I did very much enjoy the book’s use of a prison. To me, it has always been something that just logically made sense. A prison is like a ready made castle, and a perfect place to hunker down and try to survive a rising of zombies. Now, its true you could get trapped there, surrounded, but with the proper supplies for planting gardens and whatnot, you could easily survive there for years behind the fences and stone walls while trying to solve the being surrounded problem. So, I liked that they used a prison, especially dealing with the prisoners, guards and what happened after the zombies started prowling around.

Overall, this was a decent book. Definately worth the read. Happier, but not as well written as Brian Keene’s The Rising and City of the Dead (which I reviewed previously).

Intrepid Reporter, Calvin Meeks…

Gaming

I started a little project for myself. For one, to get into City of Heroes a bit more. Two, to get to know the community a bit. And three, to do some writing.

Its called the Front Page.

I created a character named Calvin Meeks, who is not a hero at all, but one of those reporters who always gets mixed up in trouble.

So far so good. I’ve met a few folks, and even had a couple of offers for doing stories (tagging along for exp and such, while taking notes and photos).

I’m really enjoying it.

Superman on TV again.

Reviews

Well, I’m late with this. Its a character flaw.

But last week was the premiere of the new Superman TV show Smallville. And boy was it good.

The last show, live action show that is, Lois & Clark was pretty good when it started. Sure they did some lovey-dovey romance stuff, but they focused mostly on the superhero stuff that we all really want to see. That lasted a season or two, then they did the wedding (the absolute worst TV show in the history of TV shows) and it really started sucking even more after that.

I’m hoping that Smallville doesn’t fall into that trap and keeps a healthy level of action with its drama.

In this incarnation, we are taken back (although they did update it to the present day) to the beginning. Clark Kent is a teenager, a freshman in high school. He knows he’s different, and he hides his super powers. In the first episode, they introduce the Kents, Lana Lang, Lex Luthor, and Kryptonite (which I felt they did in a very cool way). The series looks to focus on Clark coming to grips with his true nature, using his powers for good, all the while just trying to fit in and be like everyone else. Teen angst with super villians.

Rock on.

Smallville comes on the WB network at 9pm on Tuesdays. I strongly recommend checking it out. I give it a 9 out of 10.