For all that I occasionally ask, annoyedly, that the universe once in a while pretend that it exists for some reason other than to annoy Brad, it looks like the universe, or at least USA TV, is giving me two really sweet birthday presents this year. June 17th is the scheduled release date for Burn Notice season 1 on DVD; I'll be pre-ordering that one pretty soon, you bet. And Burn Notice season 2 starts the actual day before my birthday, July 10th. Sweet.So here's how it affects this blog: I'm thinking of an in-character writing project. My thought is that I'll be creating a Bane Spider and roleplaying him as the Arachnos equivalent of an old Soviet KGB "political officer," someone whose job is correcting the doctrinal errors of his fellow Arachnos troops, standing up for Arachnos political values, and of course spying on members of whatever unit he's assigned on for their superiors. The background I'm imagining is born in the Etoile Islands well after the 1964 Arachnos revolution, after high school one (long ago) tour of duty in the Wolf Spiders, BA and MA in History from Aeon University in New Haven, Cap au Diable, Ph.D. in Political Science from Aeon University, recalled to active duty as a Political Officer during the Battle of the Jade Spider in Siren's Call, Rhode Island, captured and incarcerated as a prisoner of war in Ziggursky Penitentiary, recently broken out by Arachnos as part of Project Destiny and returned to the Wolf Spiders as a Political Officer monitoring the so-called Destined Ones.
And, to the specific point here, I'm thinking of turning the blog over to him periodically, maybe once every week or two. Because the "good guy" politics in this game are so creepy and wrong, it's actually not all that hard for me to imagine defending a Doctor-Doom like supervillain dictatorial regime as the superior alternative, especially from the viewpoint of someone who grew up under that regime and who believes that superhero-dominated America is even worse than it actually is (although how it actually is is bad enough). Imagining playing this character, I'm finding that it's even more disturbingly easy for me to spout, or even write, Arachnos propaganda than it was for me to write the Cthulhu-universe political blog entries I was writing a while back. But I know that few, if any of you, will be interested, so out of courtesy, what I'll probably do is give those posts their own icon, the Arachnos logo, and LJ-cut them.
- Mood:
good
I predicted with tremendous confidence that most of you would be bored to know what the super-secret project was, and I suspect I'm about to be proven right. As two of you guessed, I was invited into the closed round of beta-testing on the next release of City of Heroes. For those of you who don't know what this means: about a year ago, City of Heroes changed their testing procedures. They had gone straight from closed, in-house testing to public testing. The catch was that public testing didn't even begin until after a total code freeze. It didn't matter how good the users' feedback was; other than typos, bugs that can crash the software, or bugs that can be used to grief other players or exploited for free experience points or loot, nothing we complained about during public beta test was going to get fixed until there was time to re-open the code on those issues. Heck, here it is issue 11, almost two years later, and they're just getting around to addressing the last of the bugs I reported on the first day of open beta testing on issue 5. Well, about a year ago they finally realized that yes, we do have useful input in the design phase, at least some of us do. But to get any good out of it, they have to keep the numbers small. Issue 11 is the third time they've tried this. The first two, the invite-only tester pool was kept deliberately very tiny; this time, they expanded the list to not quite 2000 of the game's 140,000 or so subscribers, myself included.
The closed beta test comes with a mandatory non-disclosure agreement. I think they're making a mistake there, but I can argue their side of it. They don't want naysayers jumping to conclusions and quitting the game because of decisions that may yet be reversed, and they don't want to have to listen to all 140,000 subscribers arguing about the facets of the design that are open to discussion. And I know that I actively hate being under NDA, period. I handle it poorly, I don't like the stress, and in general I can think of almost nothing, not even "national security," that is actually successfully enhanced by human efforts to keep secrets. Keeping secrets is expensive, it's a drag on your productivity, it impairs your ability to receive valuable feedback from people outside of your secrecy loop, and for what? It never works, anyway. Or almost never, anyway; hardly anybody is willing to do what it really takes to keep a secret. Some time look up what Ian Fleming actually did during World War II, look up what it actually cost the British to keep the secret that Alan Turing's crew had cracked the Enigma cypher. I doubt any of those people ever slept a nightmare-free night to the day of their deaths.
Anyway, my politics aside, if I feel this way about secrecy, why put myself through the stress of working 60-hour weeks, for free for a huge multinational corporation, under onerous conditions? Lots of reasons, all of them dull to most of you. For one thing, going all the way back to when I first started playing tabletop roleplaying games back in the late 1970s, I've been a "systems geek," a rules nerd. Probability and Statistics was my favorite class in college; one of my decades-long minor crusades has been an on-again, off-again crusade to persuade educators to replace Trig with Prob&Stat in the high school curriculum, since only a tiny handful of people still use Trig but everybody in the world gets deluged in statistics every single day now. I knew I could make a difference. I was right, too; I was able to persuade them to make a couple of pretty major changes in the design of the Willpower melee defensive superpower that will make a huge quality of life difference for players. For another, I've concluded that I'm pretty much attached to this game, if for no other reason than this: every other game I've looked at in the last year or more, I've known exactly what feature from City of Heroes I'd miss the most if I switched. For example, I'd love it if Tabula Rasa turned out to be the big blockbuster SF MMO success that everybody knows is going to happen to somebody some day, but I'm not willing to give up City of Heroes' costume creator, or flight, to play it. For another, that Willpower melee defense power set that I just mentioned is one that matters to me a lot, as someone who wants to play Stalkers but hates all of the existing Stalker melee defense power sets; I really, really felt motivated to help them make sure that this one didn't suck. See? Boring.
Although speaking of Tabula Rasa, something weird happened right after the NDA was lifted, and although nobody at NCsoft will admit it, I think it's specifically because of Tabula Rasa. See, originally City of Heroes was split across two companies. One game programming company, Cryptic Studios, developed it under contract to another game programming company, NCsoft, the Korean company most known (elsewhere) for the only MMO to come even close to World of Warcraft's numbers, the Asian fantasy game Lineage. NCsoft cut a bunch of deals with a bunch of companies that wanted to write multiplayer games, whereby NCsoft puts up some or all of the development money, and when the game goes live they collect the monthly fees, they operate the server farms, they provide the customer service, and they split the profits with the outside developers. It gave them a much faster way to diversify than developing a bunch of games themselves. One of them, Auto Assault, lasted mere months before going belly-up. Some of them, like the shareware Diablo parody Dungeon Runners, it's too early to tell. Two of them, the free to play pseudo-trading-card fantasy MMO Guild Wars and the superhero MMO City of Heroes, have been moderately successful. That's important to them, and they've known they needed it for a long time now. Their flagship product, Lineage, competes head to head with World of Warcraft, and it's been announced in the Korean business press lately that they're losing a steady 15% of their revenue per year lately, all of it to players defecting to WoW. Hence their urgency to branch out into games that fit into niches other than generic fantasy MMOs.
But they really bet the farm on one project: Tabula Rasa. They diverted at least half of the profits from Lineage to Richard Garriott, the guy who designed the original highly successful fantasy MMO, Ultima Online. They gave him a huge budget, gave him a very long lead time (and forgave several schedule slips on top of that), and gave him very nearly absolute creative control, and told him that they wanted him to seek out the Holy Grail. That is to say, they wanted him to develop the first wildly successful break-through hit science fiction MMO, the first genuinely mass marketable science fiction MMO, the game that would be to science fiction readers and movie-goers what World of Warcraft has been to fantasy and D&D fans. I'm sure they thought that this was a safe bet, when they made it. They even avoided the pitfall that sunk two of Sony's SF MMO ideas, letting him develop his own creative property rather than sinking far too much money into, and ceding too much control to the owners of, some licensed SF franchise.
But I think they're getting cold feet. The reviews have been only modestly favorable. Even after several schedule slips, the game shipped with at least one major system, one the game was balanced around, unfinished and temporarily completely removed. The pseudo-first-person-shooter user interface (which they share, knowingly or not, with Reakktor GMBH's Neocron series of SF MMOs) may not turn out to be the selling point that they think it is, they may have over-estimated the willingness of console gamers to play an MMO and the willingness of potential MMO customers to play a game with a console-game-like interface; the decision to use tab-selected targets and queued attacks that every other MMO designer out there has made may not have been arbitrary or unimportant. And I wouldn't be surprised if lately they're starting to suspect that Garriott, whose Ultima Online is still controversial at best among old-time MMO players, may turn out to be more liability than asset, a prima donna who drags his own drama behind him wherever he goes. Maybe. So maybe this is going to be a huge breakthrough hit. It could happen. Everybody in the MMO industry agrees that SF outsells fantasy in most other media, and will eventually outsell fantasy in the MMO market when somebody gets the breakthrough hit. Maybe this will be the one. But if it isn't, with Lineage slowly deflating they have to have a fall-back position, a back-up plan.
But in the meantime, they already did own part of a game with a distinctly science fiction-ish universe, one that the MMO industry press lumps in with EVE Online and other science fiction games. And while it went through a brief struggle about a year ago to retain customers, it's been modestly growing almost every month since it launched 3 and a half years ago. In talks with the programmers on that project, they clearly found out that those programmers were starting to hit certain built-in limiting factors, certain "walls" in the game code, that were going to cost real money to punch through. And that's money that the other part-owner of City of Heroes, had no interest in matching, because they've bet their company's future (I think stupidly) on a licensed superhero MMO, Marvel Universe Online. What's more, I know from watching their representatives complain bitterly about it time and again that both companies were sick of City of Heroes players blaming the conflict of interest within Cryptic Studios, with them being invested in two competing superhero MMOs, for everything that went wrong with the game. So both companies stood to benefit if Cryptic just sold City of Heroes, lock stock and barrel, including voluntary transfers of every single City of Heroes developer but one (already mostly retired from the project) designer emeritus, to NCsoft. NCsoft would be free to do what they've already announced that they're doing immediately, namely almost tripling the development budget for City of Heroes expansions and maintenance and upgrades and repairs, protecting their investment in one of the company's too-few games that's actually gaining in profitability. Cryptic gets rid of a nasty conflict of interest.
It could be very interesting. The consensus reaction among the players is to drool over the prospect of them tripling the development budget, with one caveat. We've known the game needed major funding soon for a while now. Too many of the features that people have known the game really wanted or needed for more than three years now have been languishing on a list: the list of suggestions that Cryptic had concluded couldn't be done affordably, because they'd require rewriting or redesigning too much of the game. There's only one thing that's got us worried. If Tabula Rasa tanks and the whole company ends up having to ride on City of Heroes (with some support from Guild Wars, if it continues to sell), will management back in Korea keep their promise to stay hands-off, to keep trusting that the original City of Heroes design team know what they're doing? They say they will ... but everybody knows what a verbal promise from a corporation is worth.
- Mood:
okay
It also brought up questions he'd previously been hand-waving related to "what am I teaching my kids?", like why it's okay to use super-powers to kill super-criminals, and how lame he's beginning to think his excuse was, and even bigger than that, why high level heroes in the game (like him) are willing to run or fly right past low-level crimes in progress on their way to a crime that's closer to their level. Several other parents chimed in, discussing their feelings about letting kids as young as 3 and as old as 10 play; age six was a common number for where even the most tolerant parents were unsure their kids should be playing this game. So, here's what I wrote:
They really need to make it clearer in-game what they've explained in the out-of-game materials, that all registered heroes carry around a pocket full of "arrest teleporters." They're tiny beacons that key into the emergency medical teleporter system, only instead of teleporting the person wearing it to the nearest hospital, the people wearing arrest teleporters get teleported to the medical wing of Ziggursky Penitentiary, where superhero doctors patch them back up to stand trial. This isn't even vaguely obvious, though, because not only is it not mentioned much in game, they skipped the animation where you stick the arrest teleporter onto someone and push the button, but the reason you need to kill someone or at least beat them into a coma is that if they can struggle at all, they can knock the beacon off of themselves. You don't have to invoke "invisible police;" just tell them that when the body disappears, that's them being teleported to the jail hospital, just like daddy gets teleported to the hero hospital when he falls down too hard.
As for the rest of the original poster's questions, I better explain my own skew perspective on this. My father had his own bone to pick with the world: he thought this whole "stages of mental development" thing was a crock. He believed that children were just human beings with lower vocabularies and less experience, and that's how he raised me. If I could demonstrate safety skills with something, I was allowed to use it or play with it. If I knew to ask for a book or a record or anything, I was allowed to read it or listen to it. (It must be mentioned here that computer gaming didn't come up, considering that the childhood in question was in the 1960s, but I'm 100% certain the same principle would have applied.) And most importantly to this discussion, it was a 100% flat rule in our household that unless there was an emergency in progress and seconds counted, we children were entitled to a straight answer to any question. ANY question. And frankly, I approve of the results of this policy, and wish more parents would follow it.
So if I had been the one whose 6 year old daughter wanted to know why people are villains in the real world, or why anybody would want to play a villain, I'd call that a fair question. If you don't have it thought out yourself, "I don't know. I'll think about it, ask some people some questions, and get back to you," is a fair answer, one I heard often growing up. (By about age 10, half the time I was getting instead, "Why don't you look it up yourself, the next time you're at the library?" "Why don't you type the question into Google?" would be an interesting way to answer, too, now.)
Having thought about it myself, not least of which because I do mostly play villains, here's what I would have told her if she'd asked me. I would have told her, "In real life, some people don't have a whole lot of choice, and get stuck being villains, either because they got stuck in a situation where there weren't any legal ways out or because they got mistaken for a villain and now everybody treats them like a villain. Some people become villains on purpose because they think that the heroes are even bigger villains, and they think that the bad things they do are the only choice they have if they're going to fight back against the bad so-called 'heroes' who are hurting people. In some kinds of fights, both sides think that they're the hero and the other people are the villains.
"So some people play villains because they don't like what the people who are called heroes are doing and wish they could fight back in real life; pretending to fight back in here lets them pretend to do so, get it out of their system where they won't get in trouble. Some people play villains because it's easier for them to imagine themselves as someone who got mistaken for a villain than to imagine themselves as someone everybody thinks is a hero. And don't forget, it's a game. If heroes are going to have real player characters to arrest, somebody needs to play the bad guys, just like teams in sports."
As for the question of why would you run past a bunch of Skulls who are vandalizing somebody's car, remember that in game terms, "cons gray" is short-hand for, "is less dangerous to the city than the villains who don't con gray." When you were a beginner superhero and the only good you could do was fighting Hellions and Skulls, that was important for you to do. But the city also needs people to fight the Banished Pantheon, who are going to do a lot more than set a few cars on fire if somebody doesn't stop them. Hopefully somebody else will save that lady from a purse-snatching or keep that person's car from blowing up. But if they don't, well, saving her purse wasn't going to do her a lot of good if you don't get to Talos Island and stop the Banished Pantheon from killing us all, her included.
I know a lot of parents who don't want to have discussions with their kids when they're little about whether or not the bad guys think that they're the good guys, and even more so don't want to have discussions with them about whether or not it's possible to get mistaken for a villain, and they really don't want to have to explain the concept of "triage" to a 6 year old. Except ... well, except that kids aren't stupid, (*expletive deleted*). By age 6, kids know from playing with other kids that the bad kids think that they're the good kids, that who's a good kid and a bad kid is something kids disagree about. By age 6, every kid has been mistaken for the kid who did something bad when they were actually innocent at least once. And I don't think that age 6 is too early for kids to understand the idea that sometimes even when everybody tries their best, it's not enough to keep bad things from happening, so it's important to concentrate on doing the important stuff first.
You don't want your daughter to lose sleep, and I understand that. You know what the next question would be: "Will I ever get mistaken for a bad guy and locked up, daddy? Will I ever need to be rescued and die because the good guys were too busy to get to me?" There is an answer for that. Well, there are two. The traditional answer to questions like that is to lie, "No, honey, that will never happen to you." Which is BS. The better answer is, "Honey, I will do everything up to and including laying down my own life if that's what it takes to keep those things from happening to you. So far, I've been able to keep them from happening to you, and I haven't let you down yet."
This might be a good time for you to go back and re-read, oh, for example, Andrew Lang's translations of the classic fairy tales, or a good translation of the Brothers Grimm's fairy tale collection. Parents used to all know that kids figure at least some of this out on their own by the time they're 6, that they're interested in these questions by then and want to see it dealt with in the stories they hear. And have no doubt at all about the fact that superheroes versus supervillains is the fairy tale literature of our age.
- Mood: good
This evening was another reminder that there is an entirely 100% reliable asshole detector for massively multiplayer online roleplaying games.Here's my most recent version, in the front, on your right, with the purple hair. Her supervillain combat name is Misery Chick, and she's the (self-proclaimed) student body president of Aeon University. (You may, for these purposes, ignore her necromantic army, waiting in the lobby of an "abandoned" warehouse in the Black Mariah neighborhood of St. Martial island, where they're waiting for her to give the orders to slaughter an obnoxious gang of cyberpunk tech thieves because they stand between her and an Associated Press reporter who printed Misery Chick's premature death notice.)
What makes her, like a lot of my characters in various MMOs over the years, an entirely reliable asshole detector is that she is costumed as a believable female character. In this case I was going for something of an exaggerated goth-punk college student look: faded black jeans, black Doc Martens, black biker jacket, Cthulhu t-shirt, a big butch-looking black leather belt, elbow-length white gloves, purple stringy hair with black roots still showing, way too much black eye makeup, and a faintly sour facial expression. What makes a character even this obviously a role-playing character, even this obviously exaggerated, an asshole detector is that your average player can see that she's costumed as neither a drag queen nor a slut nor a comic book super-heroine. That combined with the fact that I play her as in-character as I can (although Eris help me if a real goth-punk starts quizzing me on favorite bands, because I doubt I could name more than half a dozen darkwave artists and half of them aren't current), and I've gotten pretty convincing at playing a woman online fooling even most women when I try, left no meaningful doubt in their minds when they (wrongly) concluded that this particular character was being run by an actual woman their own age.
And that's why, like every other convincing female character I've played in any of these games, it is only when I am on this character that (a) nobody listens to my suggestions, (b) I'm called by blatantly condescending and/or insulting nicknames even before I make suggestions, and (c) when I complain about either of these things, citing facts to back myself up, I'm called a bitch. (Boggles my mind that it's the 21st century and guys still use that insult; do they actually think that there's any woman in the world who isn't used to it by now?) And there shouldn't have any business doubting that I had the facts on my side: the character was wearing a 21-month veteran badge, and I was citing numbers straight out of HeroStats. But nope, for defending my claim that I knew what I was talking about with facts, I was "up past my bedtime" and "a total bitch."
Out of 19 players across three teams last night, I ran into six of these. (Thanks to the invasion event, it's actually much easier to find big teams these days.) All of them easily identifiable as men under the age of 25, that is to say, as entirely sub-human. I strongly suspect that it's not a coincidence that all six of them were terrible players, too. It almost certainly wasn't improving their mood that a woman their own age was playing better than they were. But I might not have noticed anywhere near as quickly just how stupid they were if I'd been playing a character that they might have had some doubt about, if they were even vaguely considering the possibility might be played by another guy. It's proof that this is just pathological attitude, though, and not actual fear, that they treat my male characters or female character that look like a guy designed them more respectfully; after all, it's not as if I can crawl through the screen and punch them in the nose. On the contrary, the closest that any of my characters could come to hurting them any time in the last several days was the evening that I was playing this character ... that third team, the one that had 3 of the 6 assholes I met last night, invited me because they needed my character, something they complained bitterly about when I quit after the third mission with them. No, even when they needed her help, at an age that they are famously too interested in the opposite sex, they couldn't stop treating a female player like dirt.
- Mood: good
Actually, two things are worth saying about City of Heroes/City of Villains issue 10. The first is that Cryptic, the company that makes it, has finally committed themselves to do something that gamers have been asking for for a very long time, that (to the best of my knowledge) only The Matrix Online has even seriously attempted. Lots of games have promised to do this one thing, found out it was both technically challenging and expensive, and given up after a single attempt. And that one thing is: actually move the in-game storyline forward, visibly, several times a year. There's a new senior designer at Cryptic, and he decided that one of the players' top complaints was something that bugged him too. In the game's storyline, the war between Earth and aliens from an alternate dimension Earth called the Rikti has been "just last year" for over three years now. Well, guess what? Starting with issue 10, the game now at least tries to acknowledge that the Rikti War was three years ago ... and the second Rikti War, the one that most people thought was impossible, has begun.
Lots of games have moved the storyline forward once, or even once every couple of years. Cryptic, though, has coded the war so that it can be rolled out in phases, so that certain alien invasion tactics can be turned on or off, sped up or down, at the game masters' will. They are in fact tentatively planning on a major news event happening in only another two weeks (or so, at GM discretion) as the fact that players keep (presumably) winning will force the Rikti to change their tactics. And they flat out promise that in at most another 4 months or so, they will do the thing that every game company has concluded they can't afford to do in a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game: edit every single mission in the game that reflects in any way on the presence or absence of an interplanetary war so that they reflect the ongoing storyline. And that from now on, they'll be doing that again every four months or less. It's a hella ambitious project.
The second thing that is worth saying is that the game masters used those event-control switches to pull something seriously cool on us already. Those of us who had tested Issue 10 for them were pretty sure we knew how the war "worked." So when they shut the servers down Monday night at 4:00 am Central time and announced that issue 10 would be live approximately 10 am Central time Tuesday morning, lots of us logged in and found ... no war. Sure, the revamped zone was open, but for hours there were no alien attacks on either Paragon City or the Rogue Isles. And right about at the point where we concluded that it was a phased roll-out, that the actual invasion wouldn't begin until the reboot for server maintenance (if any) tomorrow morning, somebody somewhere behind the scenes threw a switch ... and the game did something it had never done on the test server. The aliens didn't attack a couple of zones at random. They attacked all 15 or more attackable zones at once, at least eight neighborhoods in Paragon City, Rhode Island and seven different cities in the Rogue Isles chain. All at once, without warning, just when we weren't expecting it ... exactly as, frankly, we would have hoped it would be cool enough to do if we'd thought Cryptic had the capability. Just as in an actual attack of its nature, the comm channels went berserk with people flooding them trying to figure out what was going on, people who'd planned for how they thought the invasion was going to go having to revise their plans on the fly, people like me doing improvised riffs on the St. Crispin's Day speech ... it was glorious.
( The mechanics, for those who care but not enough to go read the announcement or the patch notes: )
- Mood:
nerdy
City of Villains: "Trick Arrows for Masterminds." One of the things I got done early in the weekend was leveling a mastermind villain, thugs for minions and trick arrows for the secondary powers, up to 39, just high enough level to get a feel for all of the powers available. For a variety of reasons, hardly any masterminds have ever bothered to master the trick arrows skill tree. As a result, as I discovered, there is no good mastermind-specific description of these powers, how they work, and how well they integrate into the way a mastermind plays. (The same powers are also available to heroes, as a defender primary powerset and as a controller secondary. But defenders and controllers don't play like masterminds do.) Or at least, there wasn't a guide before this weekend. There is now, because documenting things is what I do. I'm sure it's of almost no interest to most of you.
World of Warcraft: "The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer." A fairly short time ago, when Julian Dibbell wrote his book on "real money trading" in massively multiplayer online games called Play Money, he reported that his experience inside that industry was that almost all of the serious money was being made, not by people running human-operated "gold farms" in China, but by people who were using hacks and cheats to steal the stuff, and only pretending they had "gold farmers" to explain where they were getting it. Back then, he reported that the only real gold farmers were people who, like him, believed that lie and tried to set up their own competing gold farming companies -- only to discover that even paying Chinese factory wages, you can't compete with "free." So I was surprised to see an article by him in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine in which he reports that in the interim, perhaps because the online gaming companies have cracked down on the most profitable cheats?, the actual gold farming companies have gotten competitive. He finally succeeded in getting one of them to let him show up, watch them work, and interview the workers, something he had tried very unsuccessfully to do when he was researching his book. Some of you may find it quite interesting, especially the detail that most of the people who play World of Warcraft for a living also play it for fun when they get off work, despite grueling 84 hour work weeks. Or that when you grief a gold farmer, you're taking money out of his pocket, not the company that hired him, because they don't have to pay him for the time that he spends getting resurrected and hiking back to the spawn point he was farming.
Multiple games: "Double Agents." This, on the other hand, is too darling for words. It's a slide show on the New York Times Magazine website, taken from an artist's project on the subject, juxtaposing pictures of people with pictures of their in-game avatars. You have got to see this, it is so cute. I especially like this one, from a City of Heroes player who's a journalist from France in his real life, next to his invulnerable tanker (or maybe scrapper, I can't tell).Not game related: "Can't Stop the Serenity." There's a charity event to benefit Joss Whedon's favorite charity "Equality Now" coming to St. Louis next Saturday night: a midnight showing at the Keller Plaza Ciné 8, of Serenity. Tickets are $12, there will be drawings for a few prizes, and of course it's for a good cause. And hey, it's the Firefly movie on the big screen. I've already got my tickets ordered. The buses don't even vaguely run that late, so if I'm on my own, I'll have to take a cab. But considering it is on the exact opposite side of town from me it'd be a lot cheaper for me to pay gas to pick me up and drop me off if anybody else is planning on going and willing to give me a ride. Anybody else interested?
- Mood:
sleepy
Some of you may remember that when I first noticed, a year ago last October, that there was a building in Cap au Diable called Aeon University, I thought it would be hysterically funny to start a villain group called the Aeon University Cheerleaders on the Virtue (unofficial roleplayers') server, creating the fiction that the campus athletic mascot is the Fighting Coralax. And everybody I've told this to agrees that it was a hysterically funny idea. And even at peak, I never got more than 6 people to agree to create cheerleader characters, and only me and one other played them regularly. Ironically, we played them enough to earn enough "prestige" to build a fully functional supervillain base ... for, in essence, one person, because everybody else left the game or went on to play other characters. Basically, lots of people wanted it to exist, but they found it too restrictive a roleplaying concept. So it occurred to me to use the "Coalition" features to build something rather less restrictive, but tie it to the cheerleaders' base, so that everybody in the coalition can use their telepads to get around the Isles, and can use their Personal Invention Salvage vault and their Hypothetical Framework workbench, until the various groups can afford their own. So far, I've created four groups, counting the original:
- Aeon University Faculty Club
- Aeon University Alumni Club
- Aeon University Student Union
- Aeon University Cheerleaders
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
thesigother came up with the Aeon University Student Loan Office, for example. And I don't have to pressure you to play any of those characters full time, because we've got this almost completely fully raid-capable base for the cheerleading squad that I can swap people in and out of as needed.If you've got one or more villains on the Virtue server who wants to be a campus villain, just contact me whenever I'm on at global address @InfamousBrad, and I'll switch to a character that can recruit you into whichever of those four groups. If you're not currently playing City of Villains and you'd like to try it out, I can spin off an endless number of 10-day free trial codes right now, and I get free game time if any of those sign up for the game. And if you know for a fact that you intend to subscribe to the game, know for a fact that you want to play a campus villain on the Virtue server, and all that's holding you back is not wanting to pay for the client software right now, I've got a one-time, first come first serve, "buddy" code I can send out that gives you a 10-day free trial that doesn't require a client software purchase if/when you sign up for regular billing with it.
- Mood:
silly
Here's the deal. You know that City of Heroes major free expansion that I'm testing? It's mostly going great, but there are three places in it that I had serious problems with their implementation of it. I've been running experiments and documenting my results and lobbying hard to get those three areas improved. One of them, some serious weirdness in the manufacturing costs of the level 10, 20, and 50 invention-origin enhancements, they're not budging on. The most important one, a "solution" they created to a new problem that arises out of the fact that it's now possible to have a stealth power that never turns off (but where the "solution" is worse than the problem, crippling thousands of characters), they're only starting to be willing to reconsider their position on, but after dragging their feet so hard the last week and a half, even that much movement is welcome. And today, to my vast relief, they almost entirely fixed the third one, some serious major weirdness in the sources of the raw materials of the new economy, the technological and magical super-powered "salvage" that gets refined into the new technomagical inventions.
However, to verify this, and to find the few mistakes that were remaining after the total revamp of that part of the system, took me about 9 hours. About three hours of that was spent traveling to every zone on the villain side of the game and half a dozen zones on the hero side to track down examples of as many enemy factions as possible. Then came the really hard part. Four of the factions are only ever seen inside instanced missions on the villain side. (Legacy Chain, Private Security, Spetsznaz Commandos, and Wyvern if you care.) I have only one character still able to be copied over to the test server that's in the right level range to get missions for three of those four, and that particular character is a weak soloist. Worse luck, I had to crunch through about a dozen missions, the equivalent of two to three evenings of game play, just to get to two particular missions I needed info from. Even with help from another player, it took me a good six hours. It's a good thing I did, though; that's where I found one of the three remaining mistakes.
It's going to have been worth it, though, when this expansion goes "live" and I don't have to spend the next several months working around this no-longer-crippling problem with the economy in the game. And if you want to see the current draft of my documentation of this subsystem and the few remaining problems with it (not that I can imagine why any but a few of you would), it's on the CoH official forums as "Guide: Invention Salvage and You! (version 2)."
- Mood: sleepy
Where from here? Well, now that character can fight other players in all zones with no fear of any penalty, not even the relatively minor penalty (before level 50) of leveling up a little more slowly for the next couple of hours after any defeat where NPCs helped. And when issue 9 comes out in a couple of weeks or so, I can continue fine-tuning his abilities using the newest techno-magical fusion, Inventions. Not to mention that I deliberately held off on almost all of the end-game story arcs, for a variety of reasons, so I've still got probably close to 100 missions left to run just for the fun and the rewards. Plus five strike forces I've never participated in, and two more respec trials. Plus the ultimate challenge in any of these games, organizing and leading a successful supergroup -- or in my quixotic case, my latest goofy idea, a whole villain roleplaying coalition. (More on that later, when I'm closer to ready.)
And, of course, there are other characters I want to level up, so I can play them when I'm bored with this one. Although I'll keep coming back to this one. This is exactly the character that I originally planned to play, that I wanted to play, when they first announced City of Villains. That is, after all, why this is the only character I put my own name on. It was just a happy coincidence that bots/FF is the closest thing to "god mode" in the whole PvE game.
( Level 50 character details: )
P.S. I forgot to mention, and it may amuse some of you: the Battle Drones are named YAK-0, WAK-0, and D0-T. The Protector Bots are named R1-TA and RUN-T. And the gigantic Assault Bot is named CHKN-BU.
- Mood: good
Sadly, what I'm talking about is City of Heroes.
Here's the deal: Wednesday this week, the next big release of City of Heroes opened up to general testing. Most players, of course, are continuing to play their regular characters on their regular servers. But there's a crowd of maybe a couple of hundred nomads with a mix of motives who have mostly or entirely dropped playing on the regular servers, copied some of their characters (one way copy) onto the test server, and are playing the next version of the game. Some are driven by the need to see the cool stuff first. Some are looking for an information edge over the other players, information they'll be able to use to improve their position in the game relative to other players who haven't done the research. Some are attracted by the mostly convivial, intensely cooperative, and moderately silly environment that is a high-stakes test server environment. But we are united in our understand of one important fact, and that is this: something very much like the software we are using on the test server will be rolled out to everybody in the game. It might take the company as much as another 3 weeks. But we know that what they want is to get it done in less than two weeks, perhaps as early as next Thursday. And once that version is cast in concrete, we are stuck playing the game by those rules for however many weeks or months it might take the company to admit that they made one or more mistakes and change them.
There's already inertia. The software's been through two phases of test, one internal and one invitation-only and small. The company doesn't view what we're doing as a real test, not in the sense I think of it, but just as a stress test, a test to find out if the cumulative changes through the end of the closed beta test can withstand the traffic of hundreds of people per server. But we do know that if we find something small that really matters, and can make our case, we can still get changes made. But we may have no longer than a couple of more days to do it.
And the main reason that I care is that what they're doing to the game is huge. On the surface, you might not notice: same heroes, same villains, same superpowers, same cities, same islands, and only a few new "missions" to extend the ongoing storyline. But what they've done is changed almost everything about the in-game economy. They left the old economy, the way that characters accumulate the reputation of being such a good guy that inventors and occultists all over town help them enhance their powers, the way that characters accumulate the reputation of being such unstoppable bad-asses that inventors and occultists all over town give them whatever it is that they ask for to enhance their powers, pretty much intact. But there's now a new parallel economy that runs on top of, or if the metaphor works better for you that way, underneath it. If you don't want to learn the new system, all you'll notice is that you're getting new loot that can be dumped at the same vendors you dumped the old loot at, that you got a small raise. But for anybody with the heart of a crafter, a head for attention to detail, and a determination to make cool stuff, that loot can be used to create whole new classes of things that are subtly bug measurably cooler than the old stuff ...
... but only if it works. This is an economy, a whole free-market economy. It would be a slight exaggeration to say that it's being created from scratch, because parts of it are being modeled after successful economic systems in other MMOs. (For example, there are now rare matching-set bits of crafted loot that add cumulative bonuses, like matching weapon/armor sets in Diablo II or World of Warcraft.) But it's only a slight exaggeration. For example, one of the main types of raw material ("invention salvage," representing samples from or broken bits off of various super hero and super villain power objects) comes in 108 types; I spent an entire evening Wednesday working through the distribution system for that raw material both to document it and, more importantly, because it's one of the inputs I needed in my economic modeling of how the game will work. I spent much of today gathering information on how various fixed-price "cash sinks," fixed expenses that take money out of the economy when the new stuff is created, are calculated. And I've already spotted some disturbing anomalies in their price model, including a couple of really big stumbling blocks right at the worst place for them, at the point somewhere between level 7 and level 12 where the new player will first encounter these systems.
So while I was reading the news tonight, and skimming blogs, and looking over my list of subjects I promised to write about sooner or later, my brain kept pulling me away to work on the much harder and much more interesting problem that is: if my hypotheses about the pricing anomalies are correct, what experiments would I need to construct to prove or disprove my hypothesis? And how can I get that done in the couple of days remaining to me? And how will I write up my findings to make the persuasive to someone who is, as the developer of the formulae that produced these numbers, understandably proud of and emotionally invested in his work? It's wrecking my ability to concentrate on anything else. So barring something huge happening in the news (over Easter weekend? in an election off-year? with Congress out of session and the President in Crawford? as if), I think I'm going to take a couple of days to focus intensely on this.
But don't feel bad for me, don't feel like I'm working hard at some under-appreciated volunteer job and having to pay for the privilege. Oh, no. Economics was my favorite class in high school, and Probability and Statistics my favorite class in college. I am the Parson "Lord Hamster" Gotti of economic simulation games. One of the reasons why my brain can keep pulling me back to this project is that I would rather do this kind of thing than almost anything, including even eating and sleeping.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a quick research proposal to be posted to the training center discussion forums that I need to start on.
- Mood: exhausted
- Mood: exhausted
The Casablanca of computer games, the game that everybody knows every line of dialog from, is Blizzard's 1998 science fiction real time strategy game StarCraft. Like everybody else, I loved it, and still think it's probably the best designed, best-written computer game ever. And it was one of the first games to include, in the package price, unlimited play against other players over the Internet, through Blizzard's now-infamous (for out of control cheating) Battle.Net. But as much as I loved the game, I pretty much had to give up playing against other players after a couple of tries. Nobody would ever finish a game against me.
See, here's the deal: a real time strategy game is (normally) one where you start out with a tiny, almost completely defenseless force and a chunk of land with some resources; the other players start out with the same or the equivalent somewhere on the other side of the map. Your objective is to build up your economy, and your technology, to the point where you can sustain the army that goes over there and kicks their backside, while they race to do the same thing to you. There's a theoretical upper limit to the size of the armada you can produce, but there's a lot of variation within that, in the mix of units. But when most people play against each other, it never gets anywhere near that limit. Instead, what they do is what's called the "grunt rush," or specific to StarCraft, the "zergling rush." How that works is that you race to produce a single squad of maybe half a dozen or 8 of the weakest combat units in the game, completely un-upgraded in technology, and race them towards the other guy's resource gatherers. If you get there before he gets his 6 to 8 guys done and wreck his camp, the game is over. Usually one side successfully grunt rushes the other in about 20 minutes to half an hour.
I think that's no fun. And ironically, it also turns out not to be an inevitable feature of the game. In the same time that it takes to build a grunt rush, I can usually build, say, 3 guys and a couple of hardened passive defenses around my town. They won't do anything to him, but they run a pretty good chance of slaughtering his grunt rush. That leaves me having spent fewer resources up front, and having concentrated more on advancing the tech tree and the economy, which gives me a slight edge in the race from there to a full-sized armada. And what I discovered was that without a single exception any time that I tried, if I survived the grunt rush, the other player would deliberately crash the game, force the software client on his end to quit or disconnect, forcing a draw. I managed to find enough of them in online chat later to ask what that was all about, and it wasn't about their fear that I might win. It was because to play the game that I wanted to play it might take 2 or 3 hours. And by restricting the game to just grunt rushes, they could play 6 matches in that amount of time.
Yeah, but what they would never get to see doing that was what I thought was the most beautiful thing in the whole game: two fleets of 12 fully-upgraded Terran Battlecruisers, each followed by a 6-fighter squad of fully upgraded Wraith stealth interceptor escorts and with its own up-armored Science Vessel in low orbit overhead to provide long-range scanners. That was one of the configurations possible within the limit, with enough units left behind to provide basic defense around my base. And what was so beautiful about that was that it was slow, stately, and utterly relentless. There were only a few enemy configurations that could challenge it. It might take me 3 hours to get that fleet assembled, but once I did, I could just slowly and steadily advance it across the map, watching everything try fruitlessly to dent even one or two of those immense battlecruisers before getting completely demolished. If you knew it was going to be coming, there were configurations of units you could build that could swat it from the sky. But otherwise, it was a dauntless, dread-nought, unstoppable steamroller of remorseless mechanical beauty, every bit worth the wait.
And I thought of that a week or two ago when I realized why I keep going back to my (currently almost level 46) namesake character, the Infamous Brad, a roboticist mastermind with force fields, invisibility, and flight on the Virtue (unofficial roleplaying) server. Other people hate teaming with guys like me. We clutter up the fight with metric tons of clanking steel. And worse, it takes me about 90 seconds of setup time at the beginning of every mission before I can take one step or fire one shot, which is long even by mastermind standards. But once I get all six droids unpacked (3 monkey-sized battle drones with pulse laser fists, 2 protector bots that cast their own shields and repair other droids and throw stun grenades, and 1 immense plasma-cannon and flame-thrower equipped and multi-rocket launcher wearing assault bot), then reinforce them with two upgrades and three additional layers of force fields each, then protect myself with stealth and another layer of force field? I am, for the next five minutes, an almost completely unstoppable force of nature. Almost nothing heroic or villainous that is within 5 levels of me can do more than barely scratch one of the weakest drones. And the droids lay down so many overlapping fields of fire that everything in their way just withers. Then, 5 minutes later, I have to come to a complete stop and take another 20 or so seconds to recharge all of their force fields, while my whole team gets annoyed and (usually) goes ahead without me ... only to find out how much slower less safely things are going without that steamroller backing them up, until I catch up.
There are other archetypes and power combinations in City of Villains, each with its own "feel" to it, from the strategic planning followed by intense bursts of action you get from playing most stalker configurations, to the jump right in and whale on things all day feel of playing most brute designs, especially ones with the "invulnerability" defense, to the semi-suicidal do-or-die attitude of most successful dominators, to the constant ebb and flow of offense versus defense in many of the corrupter configurations and quite a few of the mastermind ones. But nothing I've tried yet, on either the hero side or the villain side, recaptures that glorious feeling of guiding stately fleets of battlecruisers in a slow moving dance of relentless destruction like my 'bots with their force fields do. (And when I'm up against an NPC faction that uses their own giant robots or battle mechs, like the police or the Council or the Malta Group, I've been known to yell as I tell my droids to initiate combat, "Oh, yeah! Red hot droid-on-droid action!" Giant mech battles for the win.)
I do wish I had more friends who played, even if only to chat online with while playing. And for those of you who do play, my global chat handle is still @InfamousBrad.
- Mood: sleepy
It's interesting to me not just because JMS, the guy who wrote Babylon 5, is one of the guest writers for one of the series. It's interesting to me because they're tackling, head on, one of the most interesting questions to me about the whole "tights and fights" superhero trope: the legality of what guys like Spiderman and Superman do for a living. And to my taste, judging by the synopses, they're screwing it up. So (out of courtesy to a friend of mine who insists on having them all bought and stacked up before he reads the first one and who goes into psychological anaphylactic shock over spoilers), let's say no more than this, from the first few pages of the very first issue: the story begins when a superhero versus supervillain fight generates so much collateral damage that there is a widespread public hue and cry to outlaw superheros altogether. The compromise proposal is to get rid of secret identities altogether. The story relates the all out war between the pro-registration superheroes (and the government) versus the super-heroes who refuse to register. In this fight, Marvel is clearly and unambiguously taking the position that, as New Frontiersman magazine said in Watchmen, "Honor is like the hawk; sometimes it must go hooded." By June or July they had already made it clear that the pro-registration side are evil pure and simple, and all that remained to be seen was which of them was actually deliberately evil and which ones were merely stupid.
Now, in a world that had never seen superheroes and supervillains before, say the Marvel Universe of the 1940s, I can see why it'd be reasonable for us to assume that there's no clear law addressing the question of whether it's legal for a solo vigilante or a small vigilante team to dress up in brightly colored spandex with a face obscuring mask to stop whatever crimes offend them personally or that they happen to find while out personally looking for them and to use superhuman force to bring those villains to justice. Reasonable, but wrong. Because people putting on masks to defend their community from evils that the cops can't or won't deal with is not a new idea in America. The Committees of Vigilance, from whom we get the word vigilante. The Bald Knobbers. The Klan. And those are just a few that come to mind that pre-date the comic book superhero fad. And there's a reason why masked vigilantes have a bad name, why the word vigilante is an indictment.
Vigilantes are anonymous, and therefore unaccountable. If a cop goes rogue or even just makes a horrific mistake, he's accountable. But if Spiderman, in his rush to catch Doctor Octopus, were to negligently distract a bus driver and thereby cause the bus to run off the road and kill 50 handicapped orphans and 3 kind elderly nuns, who gets sued? If Doctor Octopus were to actually be arrested for a felony under conditions where his conviction would be upheld on appeal (something that Spiderman is almost certainly not going to get right), he could be further charged with murder for those orphans' deaths because any death resulting from the commission of any felony is murder. But Spiderman himself could, and should, be sued for his own contributory negligence, and who are they going to serve the subpoena for that on? So frankly, legislation requiring everybody to be clearly identifiable before they engage in the potentially wanton use of insanely deadly amounts of force on their own recognizance is, in fact, the bare minimum that's reasonable.
And honestly, how often is superheroic force legal, anyway? Do any of them even know the laws regarding the circumstances under which they are allowed to use force against another person and not have it meet the legal definition of assault? Do you? It's actually quite simple. You are allowed to use force against another person only if doing so is the only way possible to stop that person from committing imminent murder or imminent grievous bodily harm, and you are only allowed to use the minimum possible force in order to prevent that crime. Anything more than that, or under any circumstance than that, is assault. Doing so with superheroic force, even against an opponent you reasonably think can survive that amount of force, is felony assault with a deadly weapon. It's also reckless use of deadly force within city limits, almost certainly. Marvel has set him up as a dangerous buffoon, but J. Jonah Jameson is actually right: it set a terrible precedent that Spiderman wasn't arrested and brought to justice after the very first crime he intervened in.
God bless the Batman; he (and most of the writers who've written him) understands this. But then, Batman narrowly qualifies as a hero only in one regard. Gotham City, at the time of the beginning of his career, was a true Nightmare Town, a place where the fix was "in" so thoroughly that the entire political system, every judge and every elected official, was on the side of the criminals. (Except for one deputy DA, and look how long he lasted.) As were all of the cops who were enthusiastically engaged in protecting the criminals themselves, all but one who (as Frank Miller wrote into his now famous retcon Batman: Year One) was transferred there from another nightmare town specifically to be murdered. But it doesn't explain how Batman was able to keep operating once the era of Mafia rule in America's major cities was over, once marked-man honest cop Jim Gordon became the police commissioner. Unlike most superheroes, Batman actually remembers that the breaking and entering he does in order to collect evidence is illegal. (Again, Frank Miller, in The Dark Knight Returns: "Of course we're criminals. We've always been criminals.") And taints cases making them unprosecutable. And he doesn't care, because he gave up on trusting the legal system a long time ago.
People tolerate Batman for the same reason that they tolerate the Statesman and the superheroes he represents in City of Heroes, for the same reason that a grateful public tolerates Spiderman most of the time: because the Batman and the Statesman and Spiderman have saved their bacon before, and they're grateful. Why do we tolerate this fantasy? Because deep down, we trust the Good People with access to unlimited power to intervene and defend us from the Bad People. And that's a scary fantasy. It's the fantasy that gave us the PATRIOT Acts and a war in Iraq.
So you tell me what's wrong with a line that's come up in comic book history over and over again? "If you want to fight crime, put on a police uniform and join the police." The Marvel Universe has even toyed with that idea at one time or another. The US government did set up a system of voluntary registration, in which the government would assume limited liability for superhero negligence or misconduct if they registered and agreed to mostly-nominal supervision. It's called the Avengers, and something like, what, a quarter of the American superheroes in the Marvel Universe are already defacto, de jure, or reserve members of it already. What's wrong with requiring every superhero to at least join the Avengers, if not actually enroll in the local police and submit to police supervision?
- Mood: nerdy
- Mood: good
- Music:Jon Hopkins - Lost In Thought (D I G I T A L L Y - I M P O R
So yeah, I could stand to tap three mana and play a change-of-subject card, because I don't feel like working up some elaborate but gentle segue from all politics and current events to the break from it that I'm going to take for a while. I really do like to write about other subjects, especially during the off-season. So odds are, I'll be content for a while to let both parties enjoy the current circular firing squad that they both have going on, roll my eyes, and talk about something else for a while. Probably several something elses.
Right now I need to crash if I'm going to get up in time to grab a bus to the Polymunch, so I'll just throw in a quick note: I gave up on Auto Assault. From about level 1 to 38 or so, it's the best damned online roleplaying game I've ever played. From about level 38 to about level 65 or so, it was still kind of fun. But from level 65 on, the quality of the game drops like a brick. Nor does it help that my preferred character class, the summoner classes, collapse altogether in both usefulness and survivability and become total charity cases after about level 70. I got a mutant Archon to level 78 ... and gave up in disgust. I stuck around for a while, because there was a big patch coming, Update 3. But then they published the preliminary patch notes to Update 3 and the tentative design notes to Update 4. None of them addressed any of my concerns with the game. Which means that, with NCsoft no longer funding any more new development than the existing subscriber base can pay for, it was going to remain one long and unpleasant slog for me for at least another six months. And that's more abuse than I'll take for a roleplaying character that I'm paying for. What it really came down to is my unshakable suspicion that they're moving in the wrong direction.
And oddly enough, right around the same time, Cryptic published the preliminary patch notes for the next big update to City of Heroes, and dropped some hints about the next two big updates, basically the next six months' worth of development to that game. And looking over those design notes, I came to the exactly opposite conclusion, at least from looking at the hero side of the game. This is a game that is, whatever its current frustrations, moving in the right direction. (On the hero side only. For all that the villain powers are more fun to play with, I still think they have their heads up their backsides on the overall design of the villain game.) So right now I'm noodling around with some low level villains on the Virtue (roleplaying) server just to keep my hand in. Once Issue 8: To Protect and Serve hits the live servers, I'll be playing heroes on the Freedom (mega) server. I've got a host of Santarchy-themed heroes, but it looks like my new main will be an Illusion/Kinetics controller there called the Forbidden Loremaster. My global chat name is still @InfamousBrad. If you had me gfriended, you need to un-gfriend and re-gfriend me, because some kind of global server glitch wiped my global character name while I was unsubscribed and broke all the links between us.
- Mood: good
"Fear and Loathing in Paragon City." Only people who know both their gonzo journalism and hipster poetry and the City of Heroes and the City of Villains will get the references in this. But a group of players with time on their hands (waiting for today's Halloween annual event to begin, or waiting for the next update to get off of the test server probably) starting going through Hunter S. Thompson's classic, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. When they ran out of inspiration on that (ran out of Inspirations during that?), someone else started in on Alan Ginsberg's "Howl." For example:
We had two Emp Defenders, seventy-five Prestige, five Presents left over from the last Christmas event, a Jump Pack half-full of Time Remaining, and a whole multi-colored collection of Lucks, Sturdies, Insights, Ranges... Also, a Ribosome, a Microfilament, a Nucleolus, a L52 Endoplasm, and two dozen Lysosomes. Not that we needed all that for the Quarterfield TF, but once you get into a serious powergaming SG, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the AR Blaster. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of a Trip Mine binge, and I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.and:
I saw the best archetypes of my generation destroyed by the nerf-bat, looking for respecs,Paper Moai, Paper Moai, Sitting on the Dashboard of My Car: I had the weird urge to google "papercraft tiki" a while back, and found something of a jackpot if you've got a color printer that can handle card stock, an x-acto knife, a glue pen, and the patience. Not only does Canon give away print-your-own-and-assemble kits of the famous Easter Island statues, but just an amazingly long list of artistic and architectural models, from Mont-Saint-Michel to a Dutch windmill, from the Trojan Horse to the Taj Majal, from a Viking longboat to the Great Buddha of Todaiji. Check it out!
dragging themselves through bump-mapped streets looking for mobs,
horn-headed hipsters with forked tails and shoulder-cats, burning with auras that cause fear not aggro,
who tired and debt-ridden climbed the tops of Kings Row tenements contemplating powerleveling ...