Samuel_Tow

"MOBA" stands for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, so TF2 is, technically, a MOBA game. It's a very broad term, but it implies lack of a persistent world, lack of connection between separate battles and a purely PvP environment.

I haven't actually touched Infinite Aion, myself. As with most MMOs that aren't City of Heroes, my information is second-hand, from a friend of mine who plays all manner of **** if it has grind in it. Lineage II, Aion, WoW, 9Dragons, etc. He pretty much gave up on Aion altogether when the F2P official version proved to have far too slow a progress rate and Infinite Aion proved bugged up the ***, with constant crashes and non-working missions. I'm not surprised to see it go, but I don't think it's going down due to a C&D order... Is it?

My personal opinion on the matter is: Big deal. Sell the bloody things at the vendors and get rid of the whole loot grind far as I'm concerned. Being able to actually get Inventions might remove a lot of my animosity for the entire system.

Heavy Weapons are probably the coolest set in Champions on a purely visual level. They're all one-handed as far as I can tell, but the animations are VERY good for all of them, in stark contrast to... Practically all the other animations across the whole of the game. The weapons FEEL heavy and cumbersome and really really powerful, especially on the auto-attack, bizarrely enough.

Overall, I think presentation is what's killing Champions for me. The game plays well enough, but nearly everything in it just looks stiff and stilted, from running to jumping to attacking with all but a select few skills. I could barely play City of Heroes with a weapon I didn't like or a powerset with crappy animations (Dark Melee, I mean you!), but Champions is seemingly a WHOLE GAME of this.

I don't know, maybe I just haven't found the good ones.

It IS bad for my own health. I found that out first-hand. And I have only myself to blame. I knew it was bad from the very beginning, but I was convinced my impressions were wrong and I should give the show a chance. Actually, no - I blame the creators. They are... Or were better than this. I watched this thing purely on my faith in them, even though I KNEW it wasn't going to turn out go. That's up until mid way. After that, I watched because I could not believe the train wreck I was seeing, hoping against all hope that SOMETHING would happen to pay off for all of this. It didn't.

Yes, it was stupid. I know that NOW. And it's why I'm not going to give more than a courtesy glance at stuff that looks like I won't like it unless I have DAMN good reason to. I would never have given Star Trek a glance were it not for finding out I didn't have to play one of the established races, and it turns out it's an awesome game. So I'd have missed that, sure. But then, I that lesson learned also saved me from the Jagged Alliance remake. I still spent more time than I should have with this game, just purely based on the hype people were giving the original, but I quit while I was ahead and before the game wasted my time or pissed me off.

The trouble is, I can't help critiquing what I'm seeing. I fancy myself a writer, so I'm always looking for new ideas. What this means is I can't just go "I like this!" If I like it, I want to use it. To use it, I need to know exactly what it is that works and why it works. If I hate it, I want to avoid it, so I need to know what fails and why it sucks. I lost my taste for idle idle entertainment years ago, unfortunately.

You're arguing for going out of my comfort zone, and that simply isn't going to happen. Tastes change, but my understanding of those tastes has only gotten stronger over the years. I can tell, at a glance, whether I'll like something or hate it and be pretty much on the money 99% of the time.

Consider the Avatar: The Legend of Korra. From the very first episode I saw, something bugged me about it. I didn't like the show, but I LOOOVED The Last Airbender cartoon, so I kept watching. That was a mistake, and has earned the Legend of Korra the place as the worst god damn cartoon I've ever seen in my life and the only one that has caused me to get off my *** and punch inanimate objects. Ever. No piece of entertainment has ever actually made me punch things. Made me want to, sure - we all have those, but we're usually smarter than that. This one caused me to hurt my arm.

And the real fun of it is I KNEW it would be crap from the very intro sequence. I suspected, but I couldn't believe the creators of such great cartoons could produce anything bad. I refused to trust my judgement, and I paid the price. I walked around sick to my stomach and with a pounding headache for three whole days after finishing the season. And I know you think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. Ask anyone who knows me in person and they'll tell you what state that left me in. My mother thought I was ill.

I'm not going to go out of my comfort zone for more than an idle look again. Why would I?

No. "Believability" is what makes me enjoy the stories I tell, and that enjoyment is what gives me the strength to like them. I don't mind starting with a ridiculous goofy basis, such as my Slime Girl. But if I can't spin that into a serious story, then I have no interest in writing it. That's like saying "Finish what you're doing, then pull all of your fingernails out of your fingers with rusty pliers." Sure, I have a pair of rusty pliers and my fingernails are quite long at the moment so it should be pretty easy. But I'm not going to do it because I don't want to go through that kind of pain.

I take my entertainment seriously because if I can't take it seriously, then it's not entertaining.

That's not anime. Not even close, as a point of fact. While the connotation of anime as "Japanese animation" hasn't been true for ages when a large number of nations started producing works in that style, Korean animation really never fit the "anime" mould very well. That doesn't make it better or worse, it just makes it as much anime as the JLA or Teen Titans Cartoons.

Also, I seem to have missed a few comments from way back when:

Fair enough, and a good description. I think a better word to use for my writing is "melodramatic," as I try to inject weight and backstory into everything I touch. You said it quite well that City of Heroes allowed me to project a variety of feelings. Champions just doesn't seem as accommodating. The people are accommodating, I should say, but the game's fictional universe just isn't. It's best suited to campy hero who doesn't take himself too seriously, and "take himself too seriously" describes 2/3 of my character roster. Well, "him" or "her." Or "it."

Not many people play City of Heroes so it being closed down isn't as big a deal as people are making it, as I read it.

That was my impression, as well. I didn't really know this was a reference to something, I just thought it was someone's aborted attempt at a comedy. Turns out it's an aborted effort to rip off a Will Farrell comedy... That makes me even more depressed. See, this is why I hate references - they make no sense to someone who hasn't seen the movie and they aren't funny either way. It feels like watching To Boldly Flee, at times.

The whole game feels like someone poking me in the ribs and going "Laugh! Laugh! It's funny! Laugh!" And it's not funny. It's just grating.

You don't need to surround yourself with emos, you need to surround yourself with people who aren't ********. That's what City of Heroes and the community have been for me over the years. This was a game that took me seriously and a community which pretty much always treated me with respect, even when I was honestly being a big baby. I've always felt that, despite some rough edges, people here have been incredibly supportive, and this has inspired me to open up much more so than I normally would.

The game itself always treated my characters with respect and seriousness. OK, ALMOST always. But at the end of the day, I always felt that City of Heroes took me seriously, because it took itself seriously. It's always felt like home, because I've never felt unwelcome.

If what you're describing is your impression of people, I think you need new friends. And I don't mean that as a disparaging comment, I've been there. I've lost contact with pretty much all my old friends from school and university just because I got sick and tired of having to put up a face lest I be ridiculed for playing games or enjoying weirder stories. I've ended up without too many real life friends at this point, but the ones who remain are the kind of people I know I can trust. I can tell them about my Tale of Two Hearts, I can tell them about my sexy succubus demon, I can tell them about Sam Tow (the character) and his frankly emo backstory and know for a fact that they'll take me seriously and be supportive.

That's what it comes down to. City of Heroes was a supportive game. Champions is a heckling game. My fragile psyche and wounded heart works much better in the former.

Yeah, that's kind of Champions' attitude, and it's more than a little off-putting. For as goofy as City of Heroes could be, one of its strongest aspects was the ability to take normally preposterous ideas entirely seriously, because the fictional universe took itself seriously. When you exist in a grounded reality, even your goofier ideas become more grounded just by virtue of environment. Not if you actively aim for a joke character, obviously, but if you want to take a purple bunny girl seriously, City of Heroes will provide.

I've always found that how a character comes off depends less on how the character is written and more on the reactions of those around him. If the fictional world takes me seriously, I feel confident to try more unusual story. If the fictional world treats everything as a joke, it makes me not even want to try.

Consider this example: It's like trying to explain your City of Heroes character backstories to someone who thinks video games are for kids. Yeah, he might be polite enough to listen to you without interrupting, but at the end of the day, are you really going to want to come back and tell this person stories time and time again?

No need to apologise, Tenzhi

A lot of the stories I write are quite emo - it's a fact I've been coming to terms with over the last few years. Samuel Tow's own story is probably the worst of them in this regard in how overboard I went to give him a "tortured" personality. It helps to be aware of the genre, because there could be good stories told with it. My Tale of Two Hearts received largely positive responses, and it's basically the story of two characters facing the hollowness of the lives they believed they were supposed to lead, finding true (if awkward) love and eventually accepting themselves for who they are. It's a fairly basic concept that I managed to drag on over quite a fat story, but I've always felt that execution matters much more than basis or plot.

But, yeah, my tendency to write "emo" characters makes most of my roster incompatible with a "goofy" game. Part of being emo is taking yourself and your pain too seriously, and this doesn't work in an environment where others refuse to take you as seriously. It turns what could have been deep in a serious work into something that's frankly just pathetic in a more pragmatic environment. My only real approach in such a situation is to go all-the-way morbid reconstruct the self-referential humour, which just makes into the kind of pretentious git I tend to dislike.

Basically, I need a fictional universe where things matter and where it seems like characters have something to care about. It is as Spoony says about Rick Flair: "Because that guy cares! And when he cares, you care!" Actually, Dragon Ball Z is a good example, cheesy as the show may be. I myself have said how all their powers basically look the same - giant explosions - making it impossible to tell which fireball is how powerful, but the show is pretty clever about finding other ways to show us, and it's through the characters. When you see a giant explosion but the bad guy is smiling an evil grin, you know it wasn't that impressive. When even the completely invulnerable badass bad guy gets a shocked expression on his face, however, you know things just got real. It's what makes the "Over 9000!" meme work as an actual plot element - because up to this point, Vegeta had been completely unamused, but all of a sudden, he's shocked. That matters.

Star Trek does a pretty good job of making me feel like the world cares about my sob story. Champions does a pretty good job of making me keep it to myself lest I get laughed at. And not by the actual players, but by the game's fictional universe itself.

Didn't you already ask me that, like, a week ago?

Right now, Star Trek Online, if I haven't gushed about it enough in other threads. It's not City of Heroes, certainly, but it's a high-quality game with actually a much more interesting backstory than I ever gave Star Trek credit for. I've never been a "trekkie" so I know pretty much nothing aside from Internet memes and what I saw from the scant few episodes of Next Generation that local TV showed, which I remember being creative, plus the V'ger movie, I forget which one it is.

Again, it's not City of Heroes, but it gives me a similar sense of creation and exploration, but made even more "personal" by having an entire crew to manage. Sure, my bridge officers are from the established races, but I can fully customize them in therms of appearance and even write a full story for each one. Just as an example:

Tala, my XO and tactical officer, was my first acquisition from the tutorial, who chose to join me from another ship I rescued. She has a skill that fires a salvo of proton torpedos that deal HIDEOUS damage, and it's so good I've grown to rely on that attack and, by extension, on Tala herself. She's the "aggressor" on my ship and the one who's the first to jump in combat, and the only one who chose to come with me, rather than being assigned to me. I'm in the process of finalising a story for her, of how she rose through the ranks on her fierce combat abilities and fiery personality. I even redid her appearance (within the confines of her race) to make her stand out from my other Andarian, the ship's sole engineer for a long time.

It reminds me of Mass Effect, to some extent, actually, and brings me back to my childhood of playing Icewind Dale and Dungeon Siege, when I could manage an entire party of mutually-complementing characters, instead of lone wolf heroes. I haven't had the chance to explore an inter-personal team dynamic in years because most games ask me to play only a single character, and I have a rule of never making my play time "dependent" on other people. But if I could have a whole team under my command, then I WILL make specialists with crippling holes in their abilities, such that they cover each other, because I'll know they'll always be available to play.

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Also, X-COM: Enemy Unknown. I put off buying that game because it costs an arm and a leg, but I always knew I couldn't escape it. I own the game on Steam right now and I'm looking forward to October 11th. Firaxis released a small and very crap demo that's basically the tutorial where you're restricted to moving characters in the order the game tells you and having them do what the game needs them to do, with only half of one mission being open for ME to play as I want... And it's GLORIOUS! I love it.

I played UFO: Enemy Unknown, I played X-COM: Terror from the Deep, I played UFO: Aftermath and Aftershock... I loved those games at the time, I really did. UFO is one of my fondest childhood memories, even though I didn't really speak English at the time (oops!). The remake blows them out of the water! Sure, it's not an exact remake of the original, but then neither were Aftershock/Aftermath, but so what? It's a BETTER game. Like with the Phoenix City initiative over on the Titan Network, getting a shot at a brand new game in the spirit of the old one intrigues me.

Because let's face it - the X-COM/UFO games of the past were great, but they were FILLED with annoying ****. The time unit mental math bugged the hell out of me. Can I go there AND turn around AND shoot? OK, if I make another step, will I be able to look around the corner? Cover? Pfft! Why would I take cover? If my soldier is hiding around a corner, he can't fire, and he's blocking line of sight of the others, and an alien will always cut the corner anyway. Oh, I got a new ship that can carry 26 people? Now my turns will take 15 minutes each. For ****'s sake! The remake's demo is horrible, and even then I had more fun in that half of one mission than I've had in YEARS in any tactical game. The last one I remember entertaining me this much was Fallout Tactics, and even that wasn't very good, plus it turned into a tactless shooter from about where the robots show up.

Oh, and I also played Apocalypse and Interceptor, but I try to pretend I never did. I never played Enforcer or the previous more recent FPS remake, and I'm not sorry. I never got to play Afterlight - by the time I learned it existed, my video card was TOO GOOD for the game, and it rendered garbage artefact textures.

I did play and enjoy UFO: Extraterrestrials, but that's basically a point-for-point copy of X-COM with the names switched around, and it showed me a very basic fact of gaming history - just because a game is good, it doesn't mean it should be copied exactly. For all the fun times I had in Extraterrestrials, it simply served to remind me of all the annoying busywork **** that served only to sour my experience with the originals. The zillions of people I have to stream out of a transport one by one, the horrible cover system, the heedless micromanagement and so forth. It's still a good game, but it's a game that belongs in the 90s, not the 00s. It even looks like a 90s.

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Honourable mention goes to a very old game: Aquaria. My WinAMP decided to remind me of this as I was posting the above by playing Lost to the Waves. Aquaria is easily one of my favourite games of all time, and it's an indie title basically made by all of two people. It's a game of exploration, immersion and atmosphere, with an inspired plot and about decent visuals. Aquaria is basically MADE for me... Or rather, my tastes were shaped around Aquaria. The game has had this much of an impact in what I like as fiction, from my fascination with small character rosters, contemplative narrative and deeper themes underlying a fairly simple exterior. Almost every design I've made since... God, 2007? Every one can trace at least an aspect or two back to Aquaria.

If you want games I like, play Aquaria. I encourage everyone to give it a try. It's very cheap on Steam, and it's worth every penny for the artistry and emotion alone. I have NEVER played another game that made me care so much about the environment, and it's a strong contestant for by far the BEST musical score of any game I've played. The creators moved on to other things, but last I saw, Alec Holowka - the composer and I believe programmer - on Aquaria was still hanging around the forums. He was a pretty cool guy as I remember, and I respect him for his work. Frankly, it's a cryin' shame Aquaria is not more popular than it is. It's a great game.

That's enough games for now.

Ah, and that. Heroes of Might and Magic is one of my favourite long-running series, believe it or not. I never played the original - it was before my time - but I played all the games from HOMM 2 onward. The second game was great, but HOMM 3 was much better. CONSIDERABLY better artwork with much the same very solid system. HOMM 4 was complete garbage and I plead with anyone who will listen - do not buy that game! HOMM 5, especially Tribes of the East, is by FAR my favourite. It looks gorgeous even now, and has what I consider to be the series' best art design, with even a couple of designs I've actually tried to emulate intermittently.

The only trouble with HOMM5 is I'm not very good at the actual game and get bored easily when I start losing. Not good at splitting my forces between multiple heroes and chasing other heroes around the map. I mostly tend to play it in Hot Seat with a friend of mine (same one who owns Guild Wars 2), but he comes over very rarely and we both tire pretty quickly. Plus, running HOMM 5 in non-stretch aspect ratio on my 16x9 is a pain in the ***. The game DOES offer 16x9 resolutions, but it simply stretches its graphics and looks horrible. I had to mess with its CFG files to force it to play in a window, which would retain its own dimensions, with I think the highest I could run being 1440x1050, which fits on a 1920x1080 monitor.

HOMM 6, on the other hand, I just didn't like. I don't remember what it was about the gameplay that turned me off, but it just looks bad, to be perfectly honest. Maybe they've added this since then, but when I played, it didn't have ANY close-up city view, which is... What, 3/4 of the reason I play anyway? That, and I just hated the character designs. They're drawn up in HD, sure, but their actual designs just don't click with me. And if I can't stand to look at a game, I can't play it regardless of its gameplay, which really was never why I came to HOMM for, anyway. To me, HOMM 6 is basically the HOMM 4 of the new age - a game with decent graphics draped over really bad art design and bad gameplay all around. Personally, I stick to Tribes of the East. Even with lower graphics, it still looks better and inspires more.

*edit*
I hope that disputes the "Sam hates everything!" rumours I've been hearing