GlaziusF

Well, it was supposed to be the last day of Halloween, but instead when the servers came back I played some Signal:Noise (341194). Verdict - ****. Review in MA Forums Thread.

@GlaziusF

Running this on... man, my lowbies all like negative or psi damage. Let's pull the 50 fire/elec blaster out of hibernation and burn some zombies. Bosses and no AVs, 2 heroes at +0.

---

Uh, you can only get three wrong answers on Family Feud before control passes over to the other team.

Maybe that wasn't what you were going for there.

A mysterious communication device in Dark Astoria sends me looking for somebody's family in an abandoned building? Hey, aren't you just ripping off that new Dev Choice arc?

On passing by a sculpture I get a couple of silent transparent followers named "Regret" and "Memory". Ally destructible with ally guards? Nice effect.

After I frob an empty trash can on the ground floor I search higher, and find a desk. There's a half-finished email about absentees there... and my allies decide that this is the perfect time to betray me.

Oh, I see. They were just normal allies - there's another one, Loss, hanging out in the final room. I poked around after the mission was over, finding some older files.

Sadly, I cannot destroy the terrible sculpture.

Oh. Some clever electronic wizardry was at work here. Automated distress beacon, of a sort.

---

Hmm. The "boxes" are getting redder. And unchecked.

Anyway, going inside to find...

...homicidal mannequins. Yay? They're clustered around another mannequin with a mask, taking pictures.

The mannequin says the same thing as the automated message.

The supposedly homicidal ones start pursuing me, but on the off chance this is actually a family and I'm insane I'm leaving them be.

I head upstairs and find another computer. Hmm. A mysterious prank, and another unfinished mail.

Upstairs are more mannequins, standing around in crazy poses.

There's a schedule on the wall. ...man, I know they're going to come to life and try to wreck me when I click this thing.

But I'm clickin' it anyway, because that's just how I roll.

The schedule doesn't have any system text associated with it, but it seems to be "normal". Usual operations, more mysterious absences and "illnesses".

The mannequins on the last floor are all toting around assault rifles.

Hmm. There's a computer up here, but it won't turn on.

Okay, looks like I have to go kill a family. I mean some homicidal mannequins.

Okay, looks like I'm just going to be going back to that (presumably now active) console and disabling the whole affair so people don't waste their time searching an abandoned building.

...there's a tall man out front. And some new mannequins seem to have showed up now, posing like they're holding rifles.

Oh, and the lower floor now has some mannequins I'm definitely wondering about.

...a TV remote. Huh. But no sign of whatever it was on camera.

---

A face in the static. And I go off looking into what it might be.

Oh wow! They released the Baphomet lab into MA.

Man, now that the BaniPan have their own drum section they can really liven up a mission.

I find some old recordings that suggest that Dark Astoria has always been full of other **** that be freaky.

...and I wonder why there are still doors that open and close in this map and Baphoclone didn't just claw his way through them.

So, uh, all I'll say about the bottom floor is that this is something they never expected would be a bad thing when they put your allies on the minimap.

Also his release "dialogue" says he is "either unaware of your".

...and when the mission's over he turns hostile.

Oh, this is tempting... eh, why not. BURNINATING THE ZOMBIE MAN.

The wandering patrols of memories and suchlike help a bit there.

...and good lord he looks freaky as HELL with the lights turned out.

So the boss who regretted his lack of salvation and then looped a warning to leave it be... is that another sort of recording, I wonder?

---

Opening dialogue for the next mission: "A town where, because the people stopped caring for it, it stopped caring for them, and one by one they left; the town was no longer their home."

I think you need to break that up a bit.

"A town where, because the people stopped caring for it, it stopped caring for them. One by one they left; the town was no longer their home."

Or if you want to creep it up a bit: "The town was no longer their home. One by one they... left."

Okay. Image in the television telling me to come fight the monsters. Also it's really freaking tall, just like the guy who left the remote in the first place.

Gee, I suppose I should trust it blindly!

Oh, Johnny's personal hell. Nice choice.

The crazy man with a gun in here apparently cons Rogue, which means he starts by trying to wreck his own boss group and works down from there. I try to give him a chance to bolt, but he's there shooting at me right up to the end.

I do get to see him beg the Pantheon not to leave him, which is darkly amusing.

---

And now, it's time for an ambush.

Or not. I have a feeling these guys are just here to try and keep the TV contained... or something.

Apparently I do actually have to wreck all of them, not just the vocal ones, to unlock this coffin I found in the ditch.

And apparently there are ancient cannibal gods even the ancient cannibal gods are afraid of. Well, I imagine you'd get hungry, sealed outside eternity for eternity.

Hmm. One boss group to go and suddenly the red text wants me to reflect on my isolation... and the place is full of mannequins.

...alright. Let's see what's in this coffin. It's glowing now.

Yet another mannequin. Keen.

The last Banished Pantheon I had to eliminate was a zombie who went walkabout from my rain of fire. I wonder if I was supposed to open the coffin only after I'd wiped everything out and the chaining worked oddly for some reason.

Regardless, final image: graveyard filled with immobile mannequins in poses like they're carrying something... frozen in time, perhaps.

Oh. Now that's an interesting effect. Good thing I didn't tweak my default font scaling or anything. It looks like... a cave and a tree? Or maybe just some sort of deformed rabbit.

Checking the souvenir... ah. Never assume that what you see and feel is real.

For some reason I feel like I just did the B-Side of Video Killed The Radio $name.

---

Storyline - ****. It starts out promising... or rather, I don't expect it to make any particular sense and just enjoy the atmosphere. Am I supposed to be watching the tape "still inside Astoria" at the end, and just seeing myself walk in, stare at static, and then walk out under the influence of some unknown force? That at least might explain the weird dichotomy of the guy who inspired the mannequin being somehow both an insane immortal radio host and a desk jockey at a modern-day electronics store.

The memories alternately flip out at me when I poke at their office building too much and help to contain Adamastor when he goes crazy in the Baphoclone lab. I never see them and the mannequins in the same mission, but that in itself may not mean anything. For some reason the mannequins strike me a bit as being "footsteps of Mot", and they're certainly great effects, but what am I to make of how it all ends? Especially since it all seems to have been a hallucination within a hallucination within a who the hell knows.

I thought there might be something going on here with the idea of recordings, and the Banished Pantheon troops that I fought all being, somehow, recordings-in-flesh, and the memories are holograms and the mannequins are photographs, and in the weird un-world un-time of Dark Astoria they're all jumbled together. But the immortal radio host just took ad 30-06 to that idea.

I had a weird idea for the closing and souvenir, which I thought I'd share. Basically the closing is you getting snapped out of some reverie at an electronics store - the TV static was, for some reason, fascinating . And the souvenir is some kind of... student film? that shows up at your hideout in a plain brown wrapper, which starts with you taking notice of that weird burst of static in Dark Astoria that turned out to be a shaman's lightning hitting a junction box, except in the film you go off on this grand adventure, though wrecked offices and a melted radio station and a cave of flesh, and the last shot is you staring down at the mannequin in the coffin as the camera angle shifts higher and higher and higher and then you're lost in the fog. For some reason it's really unnerving, but you file it away as a curiosity and get on with the immediate threats.

Design - ****. The surroundings are great, but as I said I really didn't get how the "memories" were used, and the rescue in mission 2 seems a bit silly, especially when the mannequins sprout rock socks for no reason I can work out. Just start out the mission with the security console active and put the masked mannequin in as an ally boss or something. (Or some kind of enemy captive with ally spawns, though I think if it's a contact you still can't harm it. I've seen the technique used much earlier on to create friendly reporters interviewing cops and suchlike.) The description can talk about how you can deactivate this sick joke while you're at the security console.

Gameplay - ****. There's a little hiccup with this arc being truly solo friendly, and that's the over a dozen mandatory bosses in the final mission. The masks might not be too bad, but those Totems hit like a truck. I don't know exactly what you can do about this - maybe some of the bosses are just optional and the vocal ones are the important kills? Maybe either paint the Pantheon grey or call out the silent ones as weird mannequins in their own right?

Detail - *****. Oh sweet lord yes. The first two missions were the most fun I ever had getting no XP, and I actually jumped in the lab map when I opened a door and saw a totem pacing around. This arc sets a mood very, very powerfully. The mannequins are extremely potent as suspense, if nothing else.

Overall - ****. An interesting ride that hops the rails a bit in mission 4 and just kind of coasts to an unexplained stop in the middle of nowhere. Tremendous, tremendous atmosphere, though.

@GlaziusF

Reviewed as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

Mallets. I've only got one character with mallets, so I'm pulling the mid-20s stone/stone brute out of mothballs and going nuts.

Well, modestly nuts. All bosses no AVs 2 villains at +0.

---

Ooh, 5-minute sprint. This should be fun.

...rather sinister barker on the bug text.

Anyway, humorous costumes, generally... the only problems are that the lighting in here is pretty harsh and the moles are rather small, especially since I've got a max-height character, so most of the time I can't see them.

---

And now a 10-minute fight! Lots of running back and forth in the dam looking for where these guys popped up. Kinda fun.

But, uh... they've apparently got hard war mace and hard stone melee, making them The Men With Two Build Ups.

And a lot of times the AI would pop both of them in a row.

That's some ludicrous burst damage.

Especially punishing on an elite boss. I'm glad I slotted for knockback.

Aw! Not even a mole-bashin' badge for a souvenir?

---

Storyline - ***. Not even a mole-bashin' badge for a souvenir. I mean, okay, I'm not exactly expecting Proust here. But there's this little hint of a rather sardonic proprietor who has this mole problem that needs taken care of, and can either pay exterminators tons of money or metahumans little slips of paper with AE stamped on them. Just play it a little goofy.

Design - ***. Five minutes is just a wee bit too long to look at the mole costumes and chip down their HP. Maybe make one or two more moles lieutenants. And the costumed moles are dinky, where the ones in the second mission who all have the same costume are huge. Seems like those should be reversed.

Gameplay - ***. One Build Up is iffy. Two Build Ups are right out. The boss moles need either a standard-diff second powerset or one that doesn't have Build Up as an option. It's just possible to get very unlucky and get one-shot.

Detail - *****. But what is there is good for a chuckle, which was the original intent.

Overall - ****. Pretty good execution of the concept, but it needs just a little more tuning to work just right.

Another review: Talos Vice (338380). Verdict - *****. Review on MA Forums Thread.

@GlaziusF

Done as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

Running this one on my mid-teens Peacebringer, who fights bosses but is otherwise Old Diff 1.

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Well! I don't know what I was expecting but I certainly wasn't expecting this sort of briefing. I'm ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille.

Given how things turned out, the bodybags were in the back of the mission and the Superadine crates up front. If this fits your experience, you should probably reorder the clues to go Stevens -> Dyne -> bodies.

Ah, the 80s, a time before "lawyer" was a dirty word. Public defender? I imagine the usual mob lawyer wouldn't have been so approving of ratting out the leadership.

---

Too many... pastels... on villains... eyeballs... strangling neck...

Oh hey, that's how you're doing it. Hellion arsonists exist up to 20! I'll have to keep that in mind.

Makes me wonder why none of the neighborhoods seem to have a bad side, outside of a couple neon signs in Kings Row.

I'm ashamed to admit I didn't get the club name until I saw the first entertainer.

Also, the "Stunner Chief" in the giant mashup custom group should probably be called "Freak Stunner" or something, to fit with the theme of the rest of the Perps.

Nice that you can strip out "standard" abilities from your allies, isn't it? Helps with certain concepts.

Well. The mole certainly popped up quick.

Huh. Awfully long pauses in the final briefing. I wonder what Croquette is thinking about.

---

Ah, that's what he's thinking about. I hope I don't get a pistol to the skull in the next mission, having your brain scrambled often offends.

Huh. Marcones.

With standard Marcone descriptions, oddly enough. This should before the Mook vs. Marcone civil war, yes?

Aw. I was kinda expecting a sudden cut to the drug lord seeing the Dyne go up and rushing out of his hideout onto the streets.

Interesting fight. Nice scene for it, even if thanks to knockback and pursuit AI Croquette and Cavlieri ended up pointing their guns directly at each other's skull at the end there.

With Croquette's backup and some inspirations that was a pretty reasonable end boss fight.

The clue for Cavalieri's defeat should definitely come after the one about the Dyne going up, though.

And the game decides to be appropriate and have the sun rise just as he's going down, with me and Croquette looking out to sea.

Aw. The souvy isn't in script style? I don't think it'd be hard - my character reminiscing about the case to wrap up the episode, and the Armani jacket in "$name's trophy room" or similar.

---

Storyline - *****. Pretty solid structure. Three little acts, commercial breaks in between. It doesn't END, but these shows never really did, did they? This was just one episode. And the narrative conceit, well, it has to be seen. I'd like to see some of the other "zone cop shows" done up in this style too.

Design - *****. Only a handful of customs, but they make sense and work well. The partying members of the lower gangs are also done up in great style, and the maps are fairly small but generally fitting.

Gameplay - *****. The final boss fight was an interesting wrinkle but not too difficult, and overall there was very little time spend roaming around blind.

Detail - ****. Not for a lack of scripted souvenir. More for... well. I'm not sure what that just was. Was it actually a look into the early days of Talos, when there wasn't a war wall north of Scylla Island? Or is it a story that happens in the modern day but with the conceits of Croquette and Basinns' "show"? Mynx was a Crey production, and I know they weren't being evil in the 80s, and the Mook/Marcone civil war is also of recent vintage. I realize expecting historical accuracy from a cop show is just a little on the insanely anorakish side, but these things bug me.

Overall - *****. They don't bug me that much, though, and between the storytelling conceit and the generally good time I had there's no reason to hold back here.

@GlaziusF

Hmm. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the custom AE powersets can be mildly unforgiving. Since this is a two-parter I'll test the waters with my level 50 spine/regen solo monster (all bosses no AVs 2 heroes at +0) and if everything looks lowbie okay I'll bring out a lowbie next time around.

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If you're trying to establish a narration outside the contact here it would help to have either the narration or the contact speak in a different font color and/or font face (bold, italic, etc).

That said, this is a 10-mission arc and you can't spare a mission about fighting crazy haywire electronics? Then again if it's really supposed to be 1-50 there aren't too many canonical things you could use that go 1-50.

Hmm. You should be aware that anybody in a team of or set for 2 heroes is going to encounter custom bosses. So the navbar objective should be more specific - maybe a name.

Also, I'm seeing elec blast/melee, aim, and a psiblaster with buildup, so I'm glad I brought the 50 in to clean house, these are not lowbie-gentle powersets.

Generally Clockwork bosses are Huge model, rather than Male model. I don't know if you're playing up the "converted clockwork" or the "reassembled Clockwork" mode, but if these are supposed to be barely altered Clockwork you should keep it in mind.

Bad lighting in here so I can't pick out exact details on these guys, but the reflection flight on the support class seems rather out of place, given that it's supposed to be like otherworldly.

"Ownage Class" just gives me the image of Freakwork, which may turn out to be true, but there's nothing wrong with "Ohm Class".

The boss trips early for some reason I don't quite understand, so I get his greeting and "something defeated" speech long before I actually get there, and he's tucked into this little side room so it doesn't seem like much of a discovery. Maybe use the same size map with a different end room to it.

He's a boss like the other four I fought to get here, nothing special, not even a name to him.

---

Mr. Lonelypants gives me the line "You must defend the Comm Node" which seems odd as he hasn't generally used pronouns. "Defense of Comm Node imperative" would be better.

I mean, unless he's breaking from the collective consciousness to talk differently for one sentence now and again. Which, if true, is a rather understated effect since it just merges with the rest of his dialogue.

A destructible and a runner, in this tiny little warehouse map? Dang, that's a lot to worry about. Especially because the boss has a couple AoE attacks that can take out the node if you're trying to grab aggro nearby.

---

So, now to hunt someone down in an outdoor map.

...you know, I really wish they'd put back the giant column of psychic energy into that captive animation. It'd save me wasting 30 minutes clearing out this outdoor map when Penny was right behind the building I started next to.

Eesh.

It's totally unpredictable where an objective shows up on this map, and the spawn difficulty setting puts giant mobs of green Ampwork everywhere.

Also you have the ambush triggering on the wrong objective - if you want them to hound a player escorting Penny the 50 feet to the truck door, they need to spawn on rescue.

I get my first good look at the customs in daycycle. They have kind of a black-and-gold or black-and-rust color scheme, which is kind of unfortunate since most of 'em have roboclaw arms or legs, and those have untintable silvery parts to 'em.

Penny says the King has gone crazy when I complete the rescue. ...it'd be nice to get a little detail there.

---

Okay, so I've got possibly four different narrative perspectives here in the next mission briefing: my internal narration, Penny, Clocky, and The Loneliest Clockwork. I have no idea who's telling me what.

I'm just going to listen to the meta stuff in red text that tells me I have to cave the Clockwork King's braincase in.

It's kind of weird to hear a sprocket telling me to turn the King's lights out, but let's go with that.

I engage Clocky, have some cops join the party, go to pull a little clock off some cops so I can get some support fire damage... and it turns out that Clocky, who was about a hundred yards away from the exit, decided to do a runner.

And I was supposed to stop him from escaping. This is the second time you've sprung that surprise, the first time being the Ohm-class in the second mission.

That's not a good surprise to spring. Especially when it's an elite boss, who can't be easily knocked down or immobilized. Especially when he doesn't say anything that's remotely parsable as "I'm outta here!"

Get out, stop tormenting me, all is chaos - that's not "I'm going to bolt now" talk.

---

Hey, congratulations, this is the first I've seen an outdoor factory map in MA.

The problem with this outdoor factory map is that, while there's a nice intricate catwalk structure full of dudes, the actual action almost always happens around the periphery, which is kind of a gyp.

...Nemesis. Oh, sweet brass monkey Jesus, what's HE doing in the nav bar?

He's using an alien mind control device to mess around with the Clockwork King. Because... he can?

I mean, that's why DRECK would use an alien mind control device to mess around with the Clockwork King. But Nemesis's plan is never what he tells you it is.

The soldiers around the device are talking all funny, like they're supposed to be automatons. But Nemesis soldiers are actual people - there's a separate group of automatons.

Huh. Exit popups are scrollable. Who knew?

---

Storyline - **. Go here do this. Go here do this. Go here do this. Go here do this - oh wait you can't. Go here IT WAS ALL A NEMESIS PLOT. I take my own offscreen initiative to find this weird Clockwork outlier in the midst of a bunch of chaos I never see, and once I hit enough robots in the face to get Penny she takes care of producing leads. I am a very destructive Inspector Gadget, full of sound and fury, deducing nothing. I would like to see a/some mission(s) about coming to grips with the chaos and meeting the loneliest sprocket. You could probably fold missions 1 and 2 together and use that amalgam to introduce it, and... well, mission 4 functioned as basically a minimally interactive cutscene about the Clockwork King coming in and going crazy, so that might be replaceble with a TV broadcast in an opening clue or somesuch.

Also I'm not quite sure about this whole "the Clockwork King managed to get a piece of his mind into this little robot" thing. The Clockwork King doesn't have a robot army. He has a bunch of scrap that he's animated with his considerable psychic powers. It acts like a robot army because he expects it to - when he manages to unlock his power, usually in other dimensions, he can float around with hundreds of brass fin funnels and rain screaming psionic doom on the landscape. Clockwork can't take genuinely independent action - they don't even function outside of Paragon City. (Why, yes, there ARE Clockwork in Cap au Diable, now that you mention it. Whatever could be animating THEM? Bzzzt-zzzzl.) So, of course part of his mind is in that little robot. It's in every little robot. The new Clockwork are presumably the parts of his mind that the alien mind control device has... driven insane or put under the control of an alternate personality or something we'll never find out about because it's all in pieces now.

And Nemesis -- well, okay. I can buy this being a part of a Nemesis plot. Just a giant distraction for... some other thing. But why's he on-site supervising this whole thing? Is he more eager to rumble with heroes since he's a clone now, and there are always two or three of him hanging around? And why is he using an alien mind-control device instead of having built his own (and perhaps putting it in the back of a truck or similar)? I'll say it again - "use alien mind control device to tweak with Clockwork King, cause chaos, hang out to rumble with heroes" is a much better Freakshow plot.

Design - *. So I remember there being a small minion with melee, a big minion at range, a lieutenant with reflection-flight and energy blast with aim, and a boss with mace and buildup and psionic blasts of some type. Was that all there was? I don't know. And that's kind of a bad thing. Because the intro missions with the customs were coded to "ramp up" or something similar, I spent most of my time fighting giant hordes of them and never got a chance to get an individual picture, and it doesn't help that they all seem to be basically the same model at different scales.

Also, enemy scaling does not work how think it does. Or maybe it does not work how I think it does. But here's how I think it works, and how it worked when it was originally introduced: enemies less than the player level spawn at their maximum level. Enemies higher than the player level spawn at their minimum level. In no case are enemies outside the player level brought down, or up, to the player level. So, while all your missions are set at 1-50, someone less than 30 will fight level 30 Nemesis and (I think) level 40 AV Nemesis, and see level 40 Psychic Clockwork running around. These are not reasonable obejctives for someone who's, say, level 10 to accomplish, at least not as a level 10. But since the missions are set for 1-50, that level 10 will stay level 10. Based on the range of the reasonable opposition, the arc should probably run from 40-50.

Finally, if I'm supposed to stop something from running away, give me some clue before I even engage it that it's going to try to escape, make its own dialogue clear that it's escaping, and most importantly, give me a reasonable chance of stopping it. Admittedly that last isn't always possible on an outdoor map right now, as I doubt you expected Clocky to park himself 100 yards from the exit to start with.

Gameplay - **. Aim and Build Up mean lots and lots of burst damage, and coupled with a boss's high-tier melee powers are lethal. Not a big problem for a high-level character, but still irritating. And the third and fifth missions are hunts for something, somewhere, on an outdoor map. Since you can find yourself getting shelled by snipers in map 5 and escorting someone over map 3, there's more impetus to clear things out, which can mean a lot of time spent fruitlessly beating things down. And failing missions in ways you didn't even know were possible is also a good bit of frustrating.

Detail - **. It doesn't help my perception of being Inspector Gadget, running around while somebody else did the work, that there were multiple, effectively undistinguished, perspectives in every briefing. Lonelypants spoke half the time in objective terms with no pronouns and half the time in somewhat normal conversation, and while he may have been set off by quotation marks that's no distinction at all with as small as the briefing text is. So I just gave up trying to sort out what "I" was thinking and what was being told to me and by who, and did what the omnipresent red warning text/accept text told me to. Give everybody a different font color if you can, but please bold, italicize, or otherwise offset "my internal narration".

Overall - **. The good news is that most of this is fairly easy to fix. Set everything to a workable level range, give the custom enemy group some distinguishing feature besides size, do something in the briefings to make my narration more distinct from anybody talking to me. The storyline I think would benefit more from including the things I do on my own initiative (battling the electronic chaos, finding the little robot) and it ends kind of anticlimactically. I mean, okay, it's a Nemesis plot and we take out Nemesis clone 528, but Nemesis is just lousy with plots and there's no indication this one's even anything special, although we've spent five entire missions trying to stop it.

Been a couple days. Work's been a bit demanding so home has been a rather dinner-chores-sleep affair.

So here's a two-day-old review that's been marinating in my brain for a while: A Spanner In The Works, Part I (336662). Verdict - **. Review lower in this thread.

It seems like the longstanding target lock of allies on Oranbega crystals has been broken.

I ran an arc last night and had no problems leading an ally past beneficial and baneful crystals.

...though I was running Maneuvers and Tactics at the time. It may have been something in one of them and not a global fix.

And after a weekend spent in hibernation, I emerge to bring you:

Captain Skylark Shadowfancy and the Tomorrownauts of Today! (337333) Verdict - ****. Review in MA Forums thread.

@GlaziusF

Done as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

Alright. If this arc is really squishy friendly, let's see how it holds up to my slightly sub-30 mind/kin controller, Bosses on but otherwise the old diff 1.

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Captain Skylark Shadowfancy and the Limits of the Contact Name field!

Actually I forget how much you can fit in there.

Anyway!

I'm gettin' a Roger Ramjet vibe from this guy. Or, y'know, any given Anderson/Ward co-production.

Huh. I was expecting more of a tech lab, but I guess this is an alright moon base.

Good lord these guys look goofy. I think it's the blue masks low-contrast with their skin. You might be able to do a better job with white-on-blue (and white-on-red)...

Assuming you want to do a better job. These guys look less like Longbow recolors and more like Longbow dipped in paint or something.

Very amusing retrofuturism going on here, all told. Vacuum tubes! Punch-cards! And I'd bet there's even one of those new-fangled dot-matrix printers lying around too!

Of course, we seem to be short one doomsday device.

Also I think I picked probably the worst possible hero to go through this, since these guys have like 75% psionic resist.

...having my leadership toggles both flip on when I got back into reality made for a hilariously appropriate fanfare. For a moment I wondered what you'd done.

---

Giant eyeball status: still watching.

So me and the cap'n go take down the bad guy from last episode again, and...

OH BOY IT'S VOID HUNTERS! They actually have minds I can tear apart! Damage time for pinky!

...also I seem to be in the middle of a cautionary sci-fi tale about the dangers of the vacuum tube. I am legally obligated to share this CAVEMAN SCIENCE FICTION.

Strangely enough these guys appear to be actual Nictus and actual Void Hunters with standard descriptions. What are they doing in the middle of this retro campathon?

---

Huh. You can get Arachnoids pretty not-pale. Shame about the back appendages.

Aw gad. I jump down to get a better angle on some spiders and it turns out there's a boss and two patrols caught under the overhang.

Hmm. Okay, clicking the glowie, the new objective in my navbar is hella messed up. I imagine that's deliberate, but if I don't realize what PUT it there it seems off.

Anyway, he's got an ambush of robots, but they're all soon much too busy smacking each other around to worry me.

---

You know, I won't lie here. I was waiting for the worm to turn.

But uh... okay. It seems like the noble Captain has been corrupted by the Nictus. Does this mean Baron Doomsday has won? Could this be the END of our valiant TOMORROWNAUTS?

Huh. I was expecting more of a Johnny Sonata's Personal Hell thing here, but I guess there's not enough space to stretch out.

I confuse the first boss into annihilating his own summons, which is fun.

Hmm. Looks like the hostage here has her default description, unless that's deliberate too.

Gaw. Adamastor. At least I have some actual muscle.

...up until 25% health, anyway. Fortunately she flipped just as she was closing to melee and got footstomped into oblivion.

I was wondering where the Watchers were in all this. And... Doomsday has come back? Unheralded?

Man. Looks like Big W spawned in one of those dinky little side-chambers just out of view of the doorway. Not a pleasant experience for a squishy.

Anyway, Doomsday is back at the entrance -- really seems like that should be reversed, so you can just slip past him on your way to the truth. He may have made to run away there? Hard to tell with a controller. But he went down and said the same thing as always.

Big W drops as well. And I finally understand what the giant meatpile was saying - he wasn't cursing the Watchers because they brought me, he was cursing at me because I brought the Watchers. I kinda interpreted it the other way.

Why is the Watcher so eager to wax me, anyway? You'd think his eyes back at base would have picked up on the captain going cuckoo for Soul Puffs, the sugar cereal with bits of real innocent soul!

---

So, final boss. Wonder what the arena is here... oh, the Center's command center? So this is what it looks like. Ritzy.

Unfortunately Doomsday is some kind of DBlast/DA shadowtank, and he completely shreds the converted robots I shepherded into the fight.

Fortunately, I have a spare green jello alien to drop on him.

Hmm. Okay, I think I finally get what you're using the Void Hunters for -- Nictus taking human form -- but given the standard description and name it falls a bit short. You couldn't bring the Galaxys in? They're certainly dressed for the part.

---

Storyline - ****. You know, when I think "flesh palace" in the context of a hokey 50's serial, I think green-skinned DB/MC temple girls. Not skindancers and meatpuppets. Bit of a tone shift there. Not that it in itself is a bad thing, as "50's serial gone wrong" is pretty much Fallout. But I was expecting a bleaker final mission, where the Nictus were too much for humanity and I was trying to shut down the UNIVAC over the vigorous objections of a mad Captain, maybe with Baron Doomsday as backup, because he can't conquer the galaxy if it's consumed by darkness. Nope, back to the serial for the final battle. Tone whiplash! I can buy going dark if you stay dark through to the end, but just dipping into it makes the whole thing seem out of place, and not in a good way.

Design - *****. Pretty great work with the recolors, aside from the Tomorrownaut Longbow which could use another look. The Captain is the part right down to his product-assisted haircut, and regardless of what I think of the appropriateness of some of the customs, they're all very evocative. maps are used pretty consistently and well, too.

Gameplay - ***. Council robots? Squishy friendly. EB/DA custom boss? Squishy friendly. Voids and Nictus? As long as you're not bringing a Kheldian, squishy friendly. Super Arachnoid? Too much regen to be squishy friendly. Necro/claws boss? Dude was popping eviscerate, probably not squishy friendly. Adamastor? Not squishy friendly, even if I only have to whittle down 25% of his HP on my own. DBlast/DA final boss? Takes out all the help I'm supposed to have along with his opening salvos, to pretty much no net HP change thanks to Dark Regeneration. This is probably an artificially low rating -- if I were playing with a stouter character I'd probably have fared better and been less frustrated.

Detail - ****. The Void Hunters (and the dark nova in mission 2) retain their original descriptions, which don't make much sense in the context of the serial. If they're supposed to be Nictus-controlled humans, the standard description doesn't parse that way. The Big Boss Watcher also had a more conventional Rularuu escort, rather than the tweaked eyeballs I was accustomed to seeing.

Overall - ****. Generally enjoyable schlocky sci-fi, but mission 4 strikes a bit of a wrong note, the Void Hunters need to be either replaced or re-explained, and the arc isn't quite as squishy friendly as advertised, at least not if you have bosses turned on.

@GlaziusF

Playing this on a high 40s DB/Fire brute, all bosses no AVs 2 villains at +1.

---

Ah, Shadow Spider. She's like a villainous Indigo except she and Viridian actually possess the mysterious "cellphone" technology.

Mr. Homeless is still running with these people. You might want to have that looked at.

...oh joy. Liberty Belt Miss Liberty. It takes a Shivan to beat her natural regen, and she pops Unstoppable.

Three Shivans and an equal number of ignoble deaths later, she's finally down.

And the end clue says to expect more of the same. Hoo boy. Time to restock and rearm.

---

So, taking out the heroines of Paragon City will get the lady in charge riled up. Because those crazy wimmins, they're a HIVE MIND.

That's really the angle you're going for here?

...it's spelled "Numina". With two Ns. The entry popup and navbar both get it wrong.

And so does her actual name. Eeka topeka.

So okay, this is kind of funny. A couple of Surviving Eight stepping into Ms. Liberty's shoes tending to the newbs and being completely exasperated about it.

But run with that, man. Color some low-level mobs and make up some patrols of gray "newbie" heroes. Have Numina and Psyche talk about people wondering where to mine for fish or where the sewers are or something.

As it is Numina's largely silent and Miss Sis Psyche is going on a Hopkin-green-frog level obsessed rant about some fanfic she found on the Internet. it's kind of creepy, honestly. It seems somehow personal.

Besides, you can't hook your brain into the Internet, it'd turn you into some kind of freakazoid.

---

Look, man, I feel for you, really. Not all of the canon missions are masterpieces, but it feels like you're using the MA as a platform to riff on that, and that's just kinda bad form.

"Defeat all enemies in end room!" is the standard text for the defeat all. You might want to get more specific about it. Call it Ghost Widow's lair or something.

So, there's Fusionette who is diagetically useless, and on the top floor a DBlast/DA AV... who is missing one of the standard powers for one of the sets, and is therefore worth no XP at all.

Even though, thanks to Dark Embrace, I have to beat her twice.

Fun.

Ah, and Ghost Widow, who is getting her strength back after soulstorming the Vindicator ladies into next incarnation.

---

So, last boss.

While it's hilarious to see a kineticist bolt, Swan's kinda got the universe against her here. It feels... well, again, somehow personal.

Mynx is a bit more of a threat, hard-hitting quick-firing melee damage and all.

Good lord. Four lucks do nothing.

Sigh. Maybe you wanted to put something about Club Caprice in her death scream but there wasn't room.

I mean... this arc is supposed to be about a serious threat to the Rogue Isles, and while I appreciate a little incidental humor I would at least like to see things in the main base being relatively serious.

So I click on a bookcase in the last room.

...right. The end boss is a painted Jezebel. As were they all! Thank you for your many contributions to popular culture, Frank Miller.

---

Storyline - ***. Pretty basic here: somebody's being a thorn in Arachnos's side, so look into them, draw them out, put out a local fire, and take them down. What I don't get is the "draw them out" part. Given how savvy this hero group is perceived to be and how much information they have, it doesn't seem likely that they'll rise to take the bait. In fact, making a move against Arachnos isn't unwise on the face of it, and I don't even get to draw out the necessary information - Ghost Widow takes care of that on her own.

Design - **. The same problems with the custom enemy group as last time. The new second is a black blob with wings and glowing eyes, which is about all you can usually expect from DA, but the lack of XP for dropping her is a bit of a problem. The hardest fight in this arc was Ms. Liberty in the first mission - and it didn't even seem necessary as I picked up the computer on the first floor and fought Liberty on the second. The end boss gave me the least trouble - she was a toned-down Sonic Warden (no Liquefy I could see, or Dreadful Wail) with a handful more hit points. That seems about the opposite way things should go.

Gameplay - ***. Wow, that Ms. Liberty fight was a giant pain. I got all stocked up for the devastation to come and everything else was actually pretty easy. The giant unavoidable stun on Soul Transfer was another, smaller pain, but more manageable.

Detail - *. There are a lot of lines from the contact and the various NPCs that must have been very personally funny, but absent the context all they seem like to me is bizarre nonsense.

Overall - **. Another arc with a decent premise that needs to spend a little more time making it plausible and a little less time kicking the canon when it's down. It could stand to do with a shuffling of the canon heroines so the tougher ones show up later on in the arc, a bit of a tougher final fight, and actual XP from the new EB.

Tonight's arc is Heroine Hit List: Shadow Spider's Strike Force (337900). Verdict - **. Review below in this thread.

@GlaziusF

Continuing the saga with the low-40s ice/axe tank, all bosses no AVs 2 heroes at +0.

---

The first mission is simply titled X. I'm guessing there's a problem there.

We... need a carnival mask from Vanessa DeVore. Like, her master mask? Because the rest are just kinda receivers for the giant mass of Italian noble psyches. We can't just take Sister Psyche's mental monocle and go scanning?

Man, either there's an unannounced boss fight here or I just had some bad luck with spawning - a Dark Ring Mistress and four other Carnies along with, including two lieutenants.

So okay. Vanessa goes down, chains to a boss fight with Giovanna Scaldi, who has been able to come out of the mask all this time, which leads to a navbar objective that's "1 Shadow Mask", which I can only assume is a collectible of some sort.

On an outdoor map.

Yep, after I run around for another 20 minutes I find it. It doesn't have any interaction text at all, or system text on completion.

Wait, seriously? It actually is the master mask of the Carnies?

I didn't notice Giovanni or Vanessa actually saying anything about the Shadow Dragon. I mean, they probably read my mind but it'd be

...and the return text is just another x.

---

So the briefing for Mission 2 here is basically "we must act now, before it's too late!"

Which doesn't tell me about what I'm actually doing here.

Okay. I'm putting the carnie mask on my face. This is gonna get trippy.

Huh. Actually kind of interesting. The last boss from the last arc was sacrificed to a demon and I'm in her brain to let her out.

The demon mangles Shub-Niggurath and Yog-Sothoth before going down...

And now I have to fight the boss from last arc.

Again.

For... some reason.

She spouts some stuff about killing her, not killing her, killing the Shadow Dragon... all I know is I'm not getting the mission complete fanfare until she goes down.

Oh. Not just her. Some other dude too. Her old master, apparently.

He's dark blast/DA and less of a threat than his protege, though if that Blackstar had hit it would have hurt.

But man, soul transfer is annoying. It's got a giant range and an unresistable stun.

---

So, hang on a second. I have three essential parts of the ritual from the last arc. I've gone into the brain of the focus for the ritual and kicked out all the aggression and probably broken a demon's hold on her.

Also I know where she is and what the cult is doing. Somehow. It'd be nice to get a clue about that.

But how can they still perform the ritual at all? I have the important bits, and their focus isn't working anymore.

...the bug text for the third mission is just "Z".

Okay, so I actually did get myself an elite boss ally with that last mission. Keen.

Not so keen: her damage aura gets the minions around her vocalizing right when I spawn in.

Definitely not so keen - because of the difficulty setting for the map, she's a -2 elite boss. Ay yi yi.

Also, absolutely none of the custom enemies in the main group have a description. They're all using the default enemy rank description.

Oh gragh. The bosses have Rage. Rage is absolutely terrible to fight against because it's double damage and guaranteed hits basically forever, as opposed to Build Up which only lasts a little while.

Fortunately the ally snaps to the proper level range once she's following me.

Unfortunately allies will stare at Oranbega crystals forever and can only be pulled free with multiple partings and rejoins.

Fortunately the extra damage from the ally makes up for the extra healing on the dark armor EB.

She goes to Whiff City against the DB/Nin EB, but that's to be expected.

And after the entirety of the first arc proves to have been completely fruitless, the boss. DM/DA. He rezzes, of course.

But the mission isn't over, of course. It's a defeat all. Which means that the universe isn't really saved until I track back to the big hands pool room and take out a minion who's treading water.

---

Storyline - **. Based on everything I'm seeing here, the previous part of this arc doesn't really matter. I get what my contact tells me are vital elements for performing the ritual, and not only do the antagonists perform the ritual anyway, they actually get it done before I get there. That aside, there's this big noise made about how it's about the stupidest thing in the world to put the master Carnie mask on my face, and nothing ever comes of that. I mean, how do Vanny V and Jovie S know what's going on, and why do they care? Their giant army of puppet harlequins backed off the last interdimensional invasion, but this one is apparently a big enough threat to put the linchpin of the entire Carnival of Shadows in the custody of a hero.

Design - ***. The maps definitely help set the atmosphere for what's going on here, but here's the thing. On the run-up to the final boss I put down Vanessa, Giovanni, Baphomet, an extreme DBlade/extreme DA AV, an extreme DBlast/extreme DA AV (twice), and an extreme DB/hard Ninj EB. That's not a problem in itself, but it kinda robs an extreme DM/extreme DA AV of most of his bite, since I've fought extreme dark armor three times already. It feels like an identical shadow wall instead of a unique threat. And I can understand why I have to wipe every demon out of my later ally's mind, but once I've destroyed the thing they were trying to summon, do the remaining cultist peons really matter? Especially because of the many places they can hide in Oranbega geometry, it's just a hassle to go back and sweep for them.

Gameplay - **. Aim and Build Up on minions and lieutenants, Rage on bosses, and the auto-stun fight-it-again of Extreme DA are all downers to various degrees. They just add to the hassle of sweeping out the last two maps. And hunting around for the activated reliquary on the Steel Canyon Carnie map is just a nightmare. So many little blind corners. If Giovanna is going to give you the mask, why not just have it be a clue and be done with it? I mean, unless she's just bein' a jerk.

Detail - *. No background info window for any of the rank-and-file dragon cultists. Missing interaction text in the first mission, and missing contact dialogue or other parameters in other places. This just feels half-done, and it doesn't help my feeling that there's something going on (with the ritual, with the Carnies, take your pick) that's just happening for the hell of it, that I can't affect or understand.

Overall - **. Needs the text holes filled in, the customs generally toned back so the boss has more impact, and the map objectives rebalanced so they don't need quite so much hunting around into blind corners to get things done. Fighting is generally fun, but sproinging around over empty terrain and pounding tab for enemies/listening for glowies is just janitorial work to get to the next mission.

Possible disadvantage to voting everything 5: now that my work in CoH is done, the adrenaline rush fades and I have a lie-down in the middle of writing up the last part of a review.

So here's last night's arc, Shadow of the Dragoness, Part II (319167). Verdict - **. Review lower in this thread.