Mr_Squid

It wont be supported well enough until I get a tentacle monster costume set. AND I WILL PUT IT ON ALL MY CHARACTERS

Also, a minigun weapon. I don't even have to shoot it, I just wanna beat people to death with it.

Wait, most of you guys are cool with this? You're on the internet! You're supposed to be decrying everything as literally the end of human civilization and somehow end up tying it to either George Lucas or Michael Bay!

In all seriousness though, looks dumb but fun, exactly what classic stooges was too.

I've actually run into this same problem when I was trying to create a custom class for a D&D setting. The class since got abandoned, but I kept a lot of the principles in mind.

See the thing about combat in this game, or in most RPG's for that matter, is that 80% of the damage in any given encounter is going to be focused in an area around the tank. It's an area I like to refer to as the "killball", the area in which most attacks in any given game are going to be focused. Generally, the squishier you are, the farther from the killball you want to be. That's the principle under which blasters operate. They can deal a ton of damage without having to directly expose themselves to the killbal around the tank. Scrappers, stalkers, and tanks need the protection because in order to deal damage, they need to fight inside of the killball.

Now once you start giving the melee classes ranged attacks, one of two things happen though. Either A: They run into melee and used the ranged attacks point blank, in which case why bother giving them ranged attacks in the first place. Or B: They hang back and use their ranged attacks at range, thus drawing fire, but weathering most of it due to their defenses and never entering into the killball. So is it possible to make a tough character that still heavily relies on ranged attacks at all?

I think it is, but I don't think it would work in this game, just because of how combat operates. What I think you would need to do is create a set of abilities that would still encourage players to stay near them, even though they are doing most of their fighting at arm's length. Now I'm not necessarily sure this sort of approach would lend itself to speedy ranged characters. I don't think it's possible to balance a character that's fast, tough, and able to fight at range, but you could make it work with big slow lugs. For example, in my D&D game, I tried to balance the character around the weapon they would be using, a minigun (yes, my D&D setting has technomagical miniguns. It also has Jet Dragons and Star-God mecha, pretty much a 12 year old's imagination on overdrive).

Now the minigun did a lot of damage, and had a built in knockback effect allowing them to keep foes pushed back, but the problem was this meant the other players never needed to expose themselves to danger. Yes, there was a "killball" forming around the tank, but they never needed to enter into it, because the enemies weren't in there. So the solution I tried was to grant buffs to players who stood around the tank, thus keeping them in the line of fire. You could easily conceptualize this as the "big guy" wading down a corridor, minigun blasting, soaking up shots, as everyone else leans out from behind him and takes potshots. But even then, the tank by himself was too powerful. Most enemies dealt their damage in melee, and since he had high defenses and the ability to keep foes in ranged, he never got hit. So I tried to rectify this by giving the tank lower defenses than usual, unless he had allies huddled around him.

That way, the killball was still centered on him, players were still encouraged to enter it, and ranged types could still hang back. Now like I said before, I don't think this would work in City of Heroes. Yeah, you could build a powerset around it, but it's such a radically different style of play that I don't really think it would have any place in the game, unless the entire game was rewritten around it.

Let me play devil's advocate for a moment here.

It might just be me, but I personally don't see such a big problem with removing the Japanese cultural perspective of the original and applying an American perspective. I mean yes, there's respect for the source material and all, I get that, but the original Akira was so deeply seeped in a Japanese perspective that a lot of the points it was trying to make would be lost on an American audience (hell, they were lost on me the first time I watched it). The original Akira was all about how fragile Japanese civilization really is, and how easily it could all fall apart, and America is kind of finding itself in a similar position right now. If the remake just tried to stay 100% faithful to the original then a lot of that message would be lost, but by moving everything to America I think this has the potential to be a much more poignant film.

And hell, aside from the change in location it sounds like they got the basic framework of the plot spot on. Call me cautiously optimistic.

Uh...guys? You do know that Transformers: Prime is still going on right? This isn't replacing it, it's running alongside it.

...and please don't tell me that you guys, much like everyone else I've tried to tell about Transformers Prime, haven't watched it. Seriously, this might just be the best Transformers series ever and nobody is watching it!

1700 words a day might be a bit much for me, seeing as this will be my first attempt. That amounts to about five pages by my count and while I will probably hit that amount on some days I'm more likely going to top out at around two pages per day. Baby steps after all.

I'm actually going to be expanding a short story of mine into a full fledged novella. It's about what happens when a carcass of some continent sized alien THING shows up in earth's orbit, and how the people on the ground react.

Okay, you got me interested. I always thought Maul was way too cool of a character to bump off that easily so it's neat to see they're feeling the same way.

And yeah, I kind of swore off Star Wars a while back, but hey, as long as I avoid all the legions of internet pundits telling me what I should hate and how much I should hate it I should be able to enjoy myself.

I'm probably going to take some flack for this but the OP did ask for well developed young female characters so...um...

How am I supposed to put on my robe and wizard hat when this pack includes only robes, no wizard hats!

Just give us the costume pieces. Yeah, they might cause clipping, but we have an entire costume editor, if something clips we can change it.

So part 2 just aired a while back. Once again, I don't want to spoil much, but the final shot of this episode is the only time anything Transformers related has managed to scare the crap out of me. Like, "jump back in my chair and yelp" scary.

This is one of those rare kids show's with an utterly TITANIC pair of balls.

Thought I would dish the dirt, after being more or less a highly conspicuous lurker for seven years.



Hey there! My name is Max. I'm 21, and currently a game design major at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

I'm also a big brother;



and a son!



Game design can be pretty tough work though, and we've all got really weird sleep patterns, as evidenced by the fact that I'm posting this at 5AM.



But I still manage to get out and have some fun occasionally;







I'm also a huge world traveler;







and a pretty ridiculous Transformers fanboy;





But all in all, I'm still a kid at heart

At this point my favorite review systems are three or even two point ones. The score is supposed to complement the review, not overshadow it, I can figure out what you liked about the game/movie/whatever by reading the review text. We all know ten point systems put a 7 at about average and five point systems fall into the 3/5 is above average trap that was already mentioned, but a three point system works great for "Yes, Meh, No" and a two point is by far the best solution for community rated works (like youtube).

They did some really ballsy stuff in this episode. I don't want to spoil anything, but some of the stuff implied here is downright scary, especially for a kid's show.

Oh, and when *WHATSHISFACE* finally shows up, it's just as awesome as you would hope

This is either the best thing ever, or the worst. I'm not sure which.

Never read comics.

Though I was considering jumping on with this relaunch, since it seemed like a good place to start. But seeing as how there's a metric crapton of titles, a bunch of continuity that still managed to worm its way in despite being a new universe, and an utterly dumb digital download plan, I'm gonna pass.

I'm not a comics fan so I have no idea how the buisness works, but wouldn't it make more sense to stop selling individual paper issues altogether, release them all as PDFs, and only turn the trade paperbacks into actual books?

But how can I put on my robe and wizard hat when we don't HAVE any wizard hats!? D:

My friend reccomended this to me yesterday. Bought on sight.

My main, Kronaros, is literally a story told by an omnicient diety that comprises the entirety of human creativity and history given humanoid form and granted powers that, in my mind, make him tougher than most Archvillains. And while he CAN solo AV's, he can still get knocked out by a rock to the back of the head.

Granted, this isn't really the game's fault, it's my fault for coming up with bugnuts crazy character concepts.