Grey Pilgrim

As I said elsewhere, unless they use the same devs to make CoH2, I wouldn't touch it. They threw all of Paragon Studios under the bus without any warning (and you can't tell me there wasn't... I24 has been at full steam in community and development work).

I was probably going to try Guild Wars 2, to be honest. Just to keep CoH fresh. But now? Not going to touch it in years, if ever. I don't care how good it is. I've been trying out The Old Republic Online a bit for the "free to 15" perk, and I may go there once CoH is gone. It's the only thing that feels as iconic to me, as STO and LOTRO just feel weird to me after playing them for free for a bit. And the other superhero games? Not even close to as good.

I actually thought last night that they should put in alternate animations for Beam Rifle and it would work great as an optical beam set. Yeah, yeah, it's called "Beam Rifle," but they could always rename it.

But who knows. Maybe they want and could come up with some better ideas for an actual Optic Blast set.

*added*

Completely random aside after seeing a bit of that Twitch video. Anyone ever tell Arbiter Hawk that he has a distinct Sabretooth vibe going on? Seriously.

Mental. You're letting the server down. What's wrong with you?

See you when you get back!

You know me, the guy who hints not so subtly about everything. Just a little encouragement to get a fiction competition going.

I admittedly don't have any ideas for this yet. I don't have the animal pack, so Swan and Bobcat are probably out, but something else should work.

Where are you looking, the sewers in Steel? The one night I know you were on when we were all chatting in VF, there was a ton of stuff going on at the same time. There were trials, TFs, and Summer Events running last night as well.

Ah, a witty name. I like it!

The better stories are timeless. And often many of the better comic book stories are tapping into those Campbellian parameters to be timeless. But there certainly things about comics that are more outdated or reflected the culture they were in to a negative extent.

But yes, they seem more keen on shooting down what comics/comic movies can (and can't) do. Good example of that was mentioning X-Men First Class and not tangling with the Civil Rights movement at that time. I haven't seen the movie, but I can only imagine doing the origin story plus building up to Cuban blockade and then adding in Civil Rights references (beyond normal mutant stuff) would have hopelessly cluttered the movie and made it stagnant. These two would have probably (rightly) complained that it was trying to do too much.

Like I said, these two don't seem to know what they want or what they are critiquing. It's a terrible article from that and a writing standpoint.

Hey now... technically, liberal arts majors should be more clear with expressing themselves than those in the sciences. I know I'm more prone to give the latter a little slack.

But really... writing clearly is something that any writer should be able to do, particularly for a prestigious newspaper like The New York times. A.O. Scott did sidetrack his review of Avengers to go off on comic book movies, though, so I guess it's par for the course with him.

It would be nice in any damage aura, I would think. Not sure I'd have room for it, since I have so many powers with KB that needs mitigating to KD (not all, I do like KB, it just doesn't mesh well with most powers or mechanics in game), but we'll see.

Yup, it was a good group. All three run throughs were fast and smooth, and we had a good group other than the usual random one person out of twelve who would not hit that green button (happened each time!).

It's kind of funny how they're saying comics won out over the cultural elite and are no longer "on the edge." They're pretty much co-opting that for themselves: "we're smug an priggish about the genre, but we're the ones being sidelined now." They didn't come out and say that first part, but it's just dripping in the article (and A.O. Scott's review of Avenger's, which was basically an article about how he didn't care for superhero movies) before they get into that over the top last line of the article. If the article didn't have that smug, arrogant tone all over it, its criticisms would be much more strong.

I do agree in part that there are some gender and racial issues with comic books and their movies, but their comments on those ignore what most movies have done recently (and I'm assuming comics, I don't read enough to know much beyond the using of Samuel L. Jackson for Nick Fury in comics as well). While most of the heroes are white and male, the better comic book movies out there make the most of their female characters and making them more than someone to save. Besides Nick Fury, Heimdall in Thor hardly had to be a black man, Hogun was more Asian than eastern European, etc.

Their pooh-poohing of Scarlett Johanssen in The Avengers is a good case in point. Yes, she's going to be good looking and have that going for her, but they miss how the movie focuses on her ability to outwit her opponents and how she's able to take on Hawkeye, a similarly "powered" male. They're pretty much victims of the same male pandering that the Russian general early in Avengers exemplified: she's just a pretty face.

In short, the genre has room to grow, but it has grown more than they're willing to acknowledge.

Random tangent, they seemed slightly annoyed that comics movies were trying to be serious at one point, then were bored with Avengers, which seemed to balance lighthearted and serious effectively. I'm not sure they know what they want or what they're critiquing.

I doubt it. Nature Affinity came on to beta well after Water Blast (same with Bio Armor), and I believe it's still being tweaked.

There's also the dev logic of wanting to spread out new sets more and not having a preview writeup like Water Blast got. I would figure Nature Affinity and Bio will go live before I24, especially since I24 isn't even in subscriber beta yet.