Ironik

Except theirs apparently isn't. Going by various anecdotal sources, such as Steam, Xfire and Raptr play records, both CO and DCUO are bleeding players. DCUO is the most dramatic because it's newer, but they both have candles that are guttering.

It's the mash-ups that will be the most hilarious, I think. A "bum with a f.ag" is going to conjure up a bizarre mental image for most Brits.

It took me a couple years to realize why my British coworkers would titter uncontrollably every time someone mentioned how great these new-fangled things called "fanny packs" were.

This is a case of "They started it." The Champions crew were really, incredibly douchey about their trash talk toward CoH... and all of it was nothing *but* trash talk. Plus they did scummy things like contact SG leaders here on the boards and offer them free stuff in order to entice them to come over to CO. Their rationale was that SG leaders would then convince their "minions" to follow. That's insulting on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin. The CO guys definitely didn't expect that to blow up in their faces once players here outed them for that EULA-breaking and morally reprehensible behavior.

For some inexplicable reason, Cryptic hired Bill Roper, a functionary from Blizzard who was apparently basking in reflected glory from that company's success to launch Flagship Studios which released a single game that bankrupted that company. He then did a lot of trash talk of his own about CoH and then, bizarrely, repeated the exact same business mistakes that killed Flagship. And Cryptic let him.

Why do we run them down? Because they've got it coming.

I just feel bad that Paragon Studios let BaBs go and he now works at Cryptic. I hope he finds a better job before Cryptic goes under.

I *will* unplug you, mister. Don't think I won't.

If that's what they're doing, it ought to be mentioned or at least hinted at in the film. Kind of sounds like it's not. Being forced to make stuff up in order to justify a plot isn't good entertainment value in my book.

A really good indie (low budget) alien invasion movie is the 2010 film called Monsters. This isn't going to satisfy everyone's desire to see a widescreen action movie, because it's extremely low budget and is about two people just trying to get back to the US. It has a loose, improvisational feel to it because the actors were encouraged to wing it and the camerawork has a documentary feel to it. It's like a far superior Cloverfield, but it cost less than the catering did on that flick. The invasion in this instance is basically that of invasive species. There's no intelligent intent behind it -- the creatures are just things that grew from a contaminated space probe which crash-landed in Mexico. The special effects are competent and effective but few and far between. (SyFy could learn a lot from this movie, honestly.)

As I was watching it, I was thinking, "This is not too bad for such a micro-budget flick with modest ambitions." Then very near the end there is a hummed tune that lasts less than a second (I timed it) which utterly changes the entire movie and made it suddenly more awesome. It's akin to the split-second shot in Memento which completely changes everything you've seen, and if you aren't paying attention, you'll miss it. After I heard that brief snippet of a song, I went, "No way!" and watched the film's beginning again. Wow.

For all its bombast and money spent, it sounds like Battle: Los Angeles doesn't have that same impact. Loud and pretty can be cool, but clever is far more cool. For me, anyway.

This is a psychological quirk of human nature that most people are geared toward intermittent rewards more than any other type of reward or achievement strategy. Incremental rewards, a.k.a. working steadily toward something, holds very little interest for people.

The human race's preference for intermittent rewards can be seen in such disparate things as raids in MMOs (maybe you'll get something, maybe that something will useful or valuable), slot machines/gambling/playing the lottery and spousal abuse. I am not making light of the last one. The intermittent reward in this case is being told that you are valued, loved, appreciated and sometimes an apology is given for the behavior. Just as MMO grinds and slot machines are addictive, so is this behavior on the part of the abuser. It's one of the two main reasons the abused stay with their abuser. (The other main one is fear of being hurt or killed.) So as you can see, intermittent rewards are incredibly powerful.

Define "top contender." During the first year of the game, CoH had 250-275k players. That was without PvP or endgame content. It's had between 50k and 100k for most of its life span. Even at the current rate of 75k+/- subscribers, the game is pulling in a million bucks a month. Since they've amortized the cost of most of the assets, that's pretty decent money. Plus, they registered "CoH2" last year, so that's likely on the way.

Compared to the 3 or 4 most popular subscription-based MMOs out there, CoH doesn't compare. But if you look at those games, they share some key elements: Fantasy themed, focus on raids (intermittent rewards) and grindy (intermittent rewards). That said, CoH is generally in the top 5 of paid MMOs (as opposed to F2P games).

Comparing apples to apples, CoH has handily withstood the challenges of its much-anticipated superhero-themed rivals: Champions Online is now widely considered a failure (even within Cryptic apparently) and has gone F2P, while DCUO is rapidly plummeting in popularity.

He also said the mutant pack would be animal parts. Things change.

I completely agree. They really need to rethink the capes thing, because it is, frankly, stupid. So capes weren't in the game at launch because of technical hurdles. Big whoop. I argued back then and I'll reiterate now: just add them at level 1 and pretend they were there all along. Unfortunately, it turns out capes were indicative of how the Devs would treat adding things to the game: namely, that they feel compelled for some bizarre only-god-knows-why reason to explain game mechanic changes and engine upgrades in the game's lore. Capes and Power Proliferation are the worst offenders of this, but AE is just as terribad. I'm actually a little surprised they didn't come up with some half-***** explanation for the improved graphics, like Sister Psyche suddenly defeating a bad guy and "lifting the veil from our third eye" so we can all see better.

At the very least, the minimum level for capes and auras should be lowered dramatically. Let us do the cape mission at 5 and aura at 10. It's ridiculous that we have to wait so long to get these things.

From your keyboard to the Dev's monitors.

While I agree that a show should be left on the air in a specific time slot in order to attract an audience, it's actually not true that all shows in the past were given a full season. There are dozens of examples of series which were pulled after just a few episodes, some of them suffering the same schedule-skipping fate that befell Firefly.

Of course, the most famous counter-example of dumping a show immediately is Cheers, which placed dead last in its first season. Two things saved it: NBC had nothing else to air and the show had a champion at the network in Brandon Tartikoff. It took three years, but it eventually became a Top 5 show, finishing one season as the number one series of the year. If that show had been canceled, the TV and movie landscape would look very different today because all of the people associated with it went on to become quite influential in the entertainment industry.

If you want to soften up an enemy, you drop artillery on them. If you have the high ground -- or in this case, the highest ground of space -- you drop rocks on them. A couple asteroids and our civilization is toast. Wait a couple years for the dust to settle and move in.

It sounds a lot like Aliens meets Signs. I happen to have saved a quote from Arcanaville about the latter film:

“Aliens travelling across the galaxy for our water is comparable to a bunch of Florida residents riding bicycles across the country to steal a bucket full of sand from Los Angeles.”
-- Arcanaville, City of Heroes forums, about the movie Signs, 11-11-09


Except that iridium is one of the clues to the giant asteroid impact 65 million years ago, which would indicate the asteroid belt is lousy with it. Granted, it's more conveniently concentrated in a planet, but why pick the one planet in our solar system that can shoot back? That's retarded.

These kinds of movies are basically just analogues for our current fears about terrorism: enemies we don't understand attacking us out of the blue. Just as the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a metaphor about the fear of Communist infiltrators in America or District 9 is a about Apartheid or the original Godzilla is about the fears of nuclear war, Battle: Los Angeles is about 9/11. It's just a shame these modern metaphors can't also be good movies.

Stop, you're giving me a haddock.

True, but the vast majority of those people will be 15-year-old boys.

I do not have a single real life friend who liked either Daredevil or Transformers. No, I'm not a hermit.

I'd disagree about this one. My namesake toon is MA/Regen and I have a couple others, like Claws/Regen and Spines/Regen, and I've found Regen is an either/or proposition: you're fine and then you're dead. "I'm killing, I'm killing, I'm killing, I'm killed."

I don't know, 3 of my 4 50s are Blasters (the other's a Brute). Fire/Fire Blasters are easily the most powerful in terms of damage output. I felt like I had a tiger by the tail compared to the AR/Dev and NRG/NRG Blasters I played first.