Bindweed

The AVs crawling all over Ourobouros came as a disconcerting surprise at first - you turn up, see them, and shriek with curses at Devs who promised that there's no part of the game that any AT can't solo... then you realise what you can do and it's PAYBACK!! MUA-HA-HA-HA!!!

Sadly, I forgot to take screenies

As for the rest, I only got as far as the Honoree with my Mind/Psi Dominator - after squishing Holtz, the "Weakened" Honoree shrugged off all my holds and clubbed my poor Dom into the mud three times before I called it a day. At least that's further than my scrapper got. While she was still swapping blows with Trapdoor and he was self-healing neither of them were gettig anywhere so I left 'em to it and logged off. So any screenies of what I'm missing might tempt me to try again..

If you have the Mutant booster pack (I think it's that one - best check to be sure) you might want to look at Organic Armor - it can look a little like shards of ice, I guess.



That's a pretty chilly jockstrap, mind you...

Thanks, V!

I get flashy AND sparkly!

It's been a while since I inflicted anything on folks 'round here, because there's been some pesky Real Life shenanigans that had us all a little anxious for a while and had me running around like a headless chicken, and with as much productive effort as such a thing. Anyway, I've finally dropped something into DA again. I wasn't going to post this particular piece, since it was originally an abandoned commission. But I want to improve my Photoshop "skills" (I try not to laugh when I use those words together), and so this is going to be the starting point for a series of WIP pieces that may help solicit helpful advice as I go along, or may just end up such a mess that Adobe will have to hire ninjas to stop me. Anyway, here's the thing:



EDIT: D'oh! This is what you get for trying to do these things with abandoned pieces - you forget to finish them completely! I've just realised I haven't finished adding some bits and pieces - mainly the big, billowing cape that was there inone of the pencil versions...

Hmm. The description for Going Rogue at the NCSoft site describes the costume pieces and emotes etc as being included. I thought I didn't have them because either I had an EU account or pre-purchased it. So the description at the store is incorrect and I have to pay for them separately - because we didn't get a box, was it?

Is there a way to acquire the peripheral bits and bobs from the NA GR pack that didn't come delivered with the EU download? I don't have any of the emotes or costume pieces which I believe were bundled with the NA version. Seems peciliar that they don't come with the EU version. I've been hunting around for some answer to this on the servers but haven't found anything. Am I going mad? Or maybe I'm just imagining the whole thing and will wake up soon to find Bryan Adams is STILL number one and I'm still playing Monkey Island on the Amiga...

I guess we won't even see or hear anything from anyone with a redname until early evening, let alone a fix, since California time is a very long way from Brighton time.

How I miss Rockjaw and the Brighton office...

Oh...

I got quite interested until I read the details. It reads at first ("resident artists") as if we're being invited to draw or paint something, but it seems to be just screenshot based.

That and, for some reason, if you live outside the US you can't join in. Why is that?

In as much as cartoons have anything to do with leading kids to or from comic-books, perhaps the means of delivery and consumption of animation for kids is something to do with it. I know that when I was a nipper the cartoons on TV were almost entirely imported from the US. There were the Hanna-Barbera and Terrytoon comedies, of course, but there were also an awful lot of stuff that was comparable to the adventure stories I read in comics, and the art styles weren't dissimilar either. No surprise, given that the budgets and schedules for Spider-Man, or Rocket Robin Hood, or any of the Filmation stuff, were as murderously short and tight as they were for anything churned out by DC or Marvel in those days.

These days there's very, very little like that anywhere for kids. Right now, the only American cartoons I can think of that might approach the traditional adventure and action of those earlier American cartoons are Ben 10 (and I'm quite prepared to accept that Cartoon Network farm out the animation to Korea just like a ot of other companies) and Star Wars: The Clone Wars, whose style is way different from traditional comic book and closer, I'd suggest, to something like those paintings of heroes on Ancient Greek vases.

Cartoons these days - at least here in the UK - tend to be of the comedy kind, like Chowder or Johnny Test. Some of those demonstrate relatively experimental visual styles and a lot are very funny and really pretty good. Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Dexter's Laboratory and, yes, The Powerpuff Girls, were all pretty groundbreaking in their day, well written, and each had a decent visual style. I think, though, that their styles all lend themselves to comedy, rather than the action/adventure of earlier times.

In as much as animation has any influence at all on widespread reading trends, maybe it's not anime that's driving kids to pursuits other than reading comics, but the absence of traditional action/adventure cartoons, which means they have one thing less that might lead them to seek out that action/adventure in comic-book form.

But the very real bee in my bonnet about all this is that kids aren't reading comic-books because comic-books are just not suitable for kids anymore. Have you been to a comic-book store recently and shopped with any confidence for material you'd be happy to give to an 8 year-old? 10 year-old? My kid does indeed read comic books, but he reads a tpb with Lee & Kirby's old work in it and get the same sense of wonder and excitement that kids got from it way back when. I don't think it's anime that has ruined comic-books. I think the industry did that itself, and shows no real sign of changing.

Of course. This isn't a fantasy MMO...

/e runs

Union can't handle the numbers and is straining under some dreadful lag and rubberbanding. I had to log off and am about to go watch TV. It reminds me if The Hollows in March 2005!


And... more recently... Tortage during AoC's launch week...

Germany did indeed look pretty good - but the Australians helped an awful lot. I can't imagine the Ghanaians and Serbians giving them that much space and time. I may be quite mad, but I fancy Ghana to settle down after that win and to win the Group. England will still win their group on goal difference, and thus satisy the Keepers of Sod's Law, setting themselves up to go out to Germany on penalties in the second round.

Wow.

Let's not forget all those good US TV shows we get over here!

It wouldn't take long to just type a short "All the servers are being taken down at X o'clock for something. They should be back up by about Y o'clock. Give us a moment to approve a form of words and we'll describe what the reason is."

It doesn't have to be a biggie, but a little courtesy toward the paying customers wouldn't go amiss.

Heh-heh. Gotcha. Makes perfect sense, now

I didn't mean to get hung up on this stuff, but bearing in mind I went out by d/q thanks to my brainless failure to understand the rules in April, I had to ask the silly question.

I'm not exactly blessed with the best brain when it comes to securing all the gobbets and strands of game canon and lore. If a numbskull like me were to get the base canon wrong, how serious would that be? I mean, if I drew a picture of Recluse reading the newspaper while Swan vacuums the carpet around his feet, and suggested there was a future where they had been thrown together by the waves of war, finding companionship and love in a world otherwise without pity and warmth, learning to ignore the mockery of Manticore and Mako and live together happily ever after in a fond fifties sitcom... could I be disqualified for not reading the bit of canon that says Recluse was skiing in France during the Rikti invasion and so it could never have happened?

Florid and ridiculous examples, perhaps, but does the question make sense?

Firstly - I have a feeling this is in the wrong place; I'm sure that there used to be a specific spot on the forums for player requests/suggestions, but can't find it anymore. So, in here it goes:

Now, things change. Circumstances change. People move on. SGs carry names forward that can become simply inappropriate to their members. So PLEASE can someone on the Development team say that there are moves afoot to anable us to rename our SG/VG ? It would be a small step to take, surely, but one of enormous value to the playerbase. It takes a long, long time to build a base when there's only a few, or even one, active member. We shouldn't have to abandon the old SG and its base just to gain a name change: we never get all that prestige back, or the stored goodies on the cluttered shelves.

How about it? I've seen the new GR video where everyone bangs on about how the devs love up to us cash-monkeys... I mean, actively listen and respond to the playerbase... Well, I'm a player, and I have a base. Can I change the name of the SG it belongs to?

Please?

Interestiing question.

I suppose crashing your Kryptonian spacepram into a Kansas cornfield counts as illegal entry to the country, but I guess he got away with it by being a minor...