Speak now or forever hold your piece

Just seen this video review and started giggling like a complete loon in the middle of the office… not cool.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/2757-DC-Universe-Online

Not seen much of DCU, though by rep it seems to be more of a 3rd person shooter style (http://hill-kleerup.org/blog/heroes/2011/02/because-occasionally-i-feel-like-i-should-post-something-other-than-tweets.html)

What with Champions Online having to hit the “free-play” button to get players, it looks like CoX is going to be last superhero MMO standing.

Some of the new CoH stuff is also rather top notch, I just recently picked up Going Rogue, and haven’t played a Preatorian yet, but managed to get Shadow Hood through his first Morality Mission (v good mish, and he is now a Vigilante) and started the arc to open up Ramblin Syd’s Alpha Slot (which somewhat surprisingly does not involve trips to Old Compton Street, or cruising Hampstead Heath at 3am in the morning….go figure).

BTW the Alpha Slot is the post-50 uber-god-mode stuff added in I19.

Also as all the Fitness Pool is now inherent, respeccing your old toons becomes rather fun, and (although I haven’t tried it yet) will get over the 14-20 slog to get Stamina.

Last night was a game of 2 halves (a bit like last nights CL final, only the half where ManU played well only lasted 10 mins ha-ha)

After some initial confusion, an impromptu pairing of Golden Boy and Psy Girl kicked off, and started a longish Devouring Earth mission.

The pairing gelled fairly well, as being Rad/Psy PG is fairly Tank friendly. Meaning that her green pulling all the mobs into one group makes her Greeny debuff much more effective, and helps a tanks damage output no end. As long as she’s fairly judicious in using TK Blast. A couple of wipes from unwanted aggro grabbing, but thats about it.

Anyway, just as they got to the end of the mission, a slightly confuse PJ wandered in pleading calendar amnesia. She swiftly transformed into Morgan and the trio set off on an interminably long CoT mission. This was one of those ones with a huge map, lots of bosses and too well hidden glowies. After finished it off, all 3 called it a night.

The cast

Morgan 34 Claws/Regen Scrapper
Golden Boy 30 (woot) Super Strength/Inv Tank
Psy Girl 33 Radiation/Psi Defender

Thats the players, not the team….

The A Team proved anything but last night, as the (fairly) awsome trio laid waste to some petty tough dudes…

These included a random selection of Malta and Nemesis, with the odd AV chucked in to move things along. MisAdventure, Ramblin Syd and Handshake proved equal to all before them.

A few faceplants, mostly lag related, but hey, when your 50 why sweat it.

After 3 missions, all three players bailed pleading work and such.

On the whole though, a good night

A rather disjointed nights play in COH land last night. For some reason the servers were down for an emergency patch for the start of the evening, probably something to do with the earlier announcement about AE Farms and banning exploits.

Anyway, as the Champions Online beta was open last night I hopped on there for a bit annnddd…..

yuck, OK I started the client in “lowered graphics” mode as I didn’t want to upgrade my drivers last night, but the graphics looked muddy and amateurish.

The character designer was plain confusing, but after muddling through I started the intro mish.

I found problems with the controls, the way that the right and left keys “strafed” sideways rather than turning (for which you have to use the mouse), and also I kept accidentally changing my camera position because I was using the mouse much more than in CoH.

This is probably as it is intended to run on an XBOX as well as a PC.

The UI was cludgy and cartoony – in a bad way, plus most of the screen widgets took up WAAY to much screen space and were rather intrusive.

On the plus side the launcher is good as it downloads and unpacks in parallel (CoH could really do with that), and the fact you can give feedback on the dev arc’s which would be good too.

Mind you this looks very much like work in progress, and I wouldn’t pay money for it (yet)

When you look at he CoH forums, all the p**d off PvPers or kidults who have just had their AE Farms nerfed by the devs seem to be holding out CO as some sort of nirvana. I think they may be sadly disappointed.

As soon as CoH came back online logged on with some relief, and too little used toons ran out Misunderstand (Mind/Emp Troller) and Baron Samedi (Dark/Dark Def).

They only managed one mission, and even then they didn’t finish it, Itt was CoT and Pumicities, which meant lots of Spectral Followers debuffing every thing in sight, and lots of face planting by our intrepid duo.

Eventually, they had got to to the end only to come across 2 bosses, at which point we gave up…and MisU logged off

Just as BS was finishing a mish to ding 12, Power Jenny popped up apologising for play Champions Online while waiting for CoH to come back online.

Oh well, not a bad evening.

The Shield Maidens had a night out on the town last night, as they painted the Steel Canyon red. Maiden’s US, Space, Shibuya and Afrique spend most of the evening being chased around by the boys, starting with a longish run in the Steel Canyon Safeguard mission.

They fended off the unwanted advances of the nobbly green young men (Trolls) for quite some time before getting bored and leaving for more excitement somewhere else.

This lead to the doors of the bright new Mission Architect club, where they met Saul Rubenstein and his Cut price task force. There our girls were pursued by literally hundred of men in uniform (and some in their underwear) while the picked up Sauls dry cleaning and collected his cereal. Mainly Council, with a mild smattering of Malta and Fifth Column.

The Girls
Maiden Afrique 18 (woot *2) Shield/Battle Axe Tank
Maiden US 18 (woot *2) Shield/Supe Strength Tank
Maiden Shibuya 18 (woot *2) Shield/Energy Manipulation Tank
Maiden Space 17 (woot *2) Broad Sword/Shield Scrapper

It looks like the community is growing around the MA stuff, as the Rating/Dev’s choice stuff is a bit pants to actually find a decent arc or turn upand flag an undiscovered diamond.

Here are a couple of MA review sites I found, I’m sure there are more out there.

BTW could Paragon Studios get Google to set up a MA search engine, just a thought.

http://www.masearch.somee.com/

http://cohmissionreview.com/

The former is an ASP thing and runs like a dog

I haven’t sent one of these I a couple of weeks, so here goes….

Starting with the most recent first, the Weather girls plus one ventured out into Faultline and preceded to pwn just about everything that they came across. This included Arachnos, Sky Raiders, Tsoo and others I may have forgotten about. Either way even without recognised damage dealers the girls (and token boy) were too tough to handle.

The Cast

Hurricane Tess 25 Storm/Elec Defender
Winters Light 26 (woot) Ice/Storm Controller
Golden Boy 29 (exemplared) Invul/Super Strength Tank

The week before had a rather paired down roster, as Swami was off pleading holidays or some such. Anyway the A Team rump of MisAdventure and and Ramblin Syd went all virtual and visited Architect Entertainment for some Dev Choiced User Created fun.

The first arc was reasonably short, had a lot of instanced out door maps and lizard type things and hunt the glowie missions. These were a much too easy to find, the combat was unchallenging and it all finished too quick. Rather unsatisfying really.

The second arc was much more challenging, and involved a LOT more face planting. Based on a 5th Column derivative, the mobs were TOUGH, especially the ones that spawned lots of robot pets and the ones with Stealth/Assassins Strike. The latter did for MisA on a number of occasions. We didn’t finish it, but I’d like to give that one another go with Handshake or Heart’s Desire on the team, as BYO green really didn’t work out that well.

In other news, I have started very slow progress on my own MA arc entitled “Murder on the Dancefloor”, I’ll let you know when it’s anywhere near playable.

The other arc I’d like to try is provisionally titled “The Ballard of Ramblin Syd”, but I’d like some practice on this other one first.

What with I14 being released yesterday, and Freedom suffering from some
indigestion as a result, this mean’t that the Magnus Boys over on the
Guardian server got to run out and kick a little butt.

The all villian mastermind team had quite a successful run, though only
completed 2 missions, as during the first one, which was mainly
Hellions, we were Map Servered just before the end, so we had to start
again from scratch.

The second mission was much more satisfying, being the Mercy Island
Mayhem mission, which we kept bouncing along quite happily, long after
we got our jet packs.

I must admit, I find playing Essex Boy rather frustrating, as his Thugs
seem to wander off for long periods and don’t really get stuck in as
much as Muder Muses zombies or Miso Boy’s ninjas. The NumPad controller
binds really help with this, as I can switch them to aggressive mode then
order them into melee range.

Still I suppose a little practice might help.

In Summary

Essex Boy Mastermind 11 Thugs/Poison
Miso Boy Mastermind 10 Ninja/??
Murder Muse Mastermind 11 Zombies/??

Last night was a B Team night, with Adam Blast, MisRespect and Dinah Magnetic making their first appearance in a while.

As usual, they showed the typical strengths and weaknesses of B Team life, when grouped together they mowed through all that were put before them, but when separated, or if one of their number goes down, then team wiping beckons….

Problem was they were mostly playing on the Circle of Thorns maps, which seem specificically designed to split the team up.

Living on the edge then, very much B Team style.

Head Kamikaze Carpet Eater was Adam Blast, though each of the team had their fair time in eating dirt.

The first couple couple of mishes where handled in a very efficient manner, but the last was a very loooong CoT map, with lots of hidden hostages to find. So well hidden that we gave up in disgust at the end, each begging the need for sleep, with 2 hostages left to find

Quite a frustrating ending to the night

In Summary

Adam Blast 36 (woot) Energy/Elect Blaster

Dinah Magnetic 35 Gravity/Kinetics Controller

MisRespect 35 Empathy/Energy Defender

The Weather Girls came out to play last night, and the attractive duo had a successful run through the end of the I13 Midnighter arc, and also a couple of the Faultline arc mishes, with all the chatty EB’s (which went down surprisingly easily)

Not without it’s moments of comedy, as at the end of the last midnighter mish, when there are about 3 simultaneous Boss ambushes, HT faceplanted, and WL ended up speeding round and round the cargo hold with all the Warriors following her until she could drop spare insp on HT

Hurricane Tess 25
Winters Light 25