Purple Lovin's highly sarcastic review pit
By
Armsman,
Posted on: 2009-05-12 09:04 in Mission Architect
I like your review style thus far and you actually seem to be delivering (unlike one of the other threads like this I contributed to), so I'll try and run one of your arcs tonight. I don't expect payment until I deliver, of course.
The arc I'm pimping is the one in my sig, Speeding Through Time. There's a feedback thread here, but I'm not exactly rolling in the posts there.
Arc ID: 51728
Speeding Through Time
Heroic
Story-based, in-continuity (as closely as possible anyway)
Contains Elite Bosses and Allies
4 missions containing 5th Column, Custom Mobs, and Arachnos
Length: You could probably run this in half an hour to forty five minutes if you're not out to defeat everything
As far as difficulty goes, there's an EB at the end that hasn't been a challenge for me on any character I've played through this on, but I haven't soloed it on my Warshade yet (who is also 50, though he is far from purpled out), so I can't say for sure if he'd be a problem or not. Every other EB/AV in it is either optional or you'll have allies along to make it super-easy.
Your Brute will have no trouble and I've soloed it with my Fire/Electric Blaster along with a ton of other characters, but I have had people complain about the last EB being hard(which you're warned about), so take that into account when you decide who to play it as.
He isn't a custom or anything though, so I think he's a bit of a pushover, but opinions vary and all that.
I'd like a review of this arc:
Arc ID: 111486
Arc Name: To Slay Sleeping Dragons
Contact: Malaketh
Missions: 3 short ones
Enemies: Longbow, custom group
Alignment Villainous!
Level range: 1-50
Description: Spring Azure Song from this mortal coil. DOES CONTAIN EB/AVs throughout.
Current Published Arcs
#1 "Too Drunk to be Alcoholic" Arc #48942
#2 "To Slay Sleeping Dragons" Arc #111486
#3 "Stop Calling Me"
I'm game. 
The arc I'd like reviewed is A Voyage Fantastic (ID: 81829).
I'll be running and commenting on the hero arc you have here, and perhaps one of the others later once I can bring my To Do list of MAs under some sort of control.
I have another arc, listed in my sig, but that one is definitely more challenging, is more story driven, and was originally tested on my main (purpled inv/em/em on Unyielding). Don't do that one unless you're prepared.
█ Players Guide to the Cities
Arc #1567: MacGuffin Delivery Service
I'm starting to get frustrated writing these reviews. I was hoping to vomit streams of acidic sarcasm upon poorly written arcs, sending their hapless creators crying back to Maple Story and Hello Kitty Online. Instead, I'm being handed a series of quality arcs with no opportunities for my scathing wit to, uh, scathe upon.
The contact for MacGuffin Delivery Service is 'your laptop'. I'm assuming that the story is being told in retrospect, as a diary entry or something. This is a unique method that works well here. However, the dialog is written for villains, and as a villain I'd be wary of having a diary, especially on a computer, since no level of encryption is safe in the Rogue Isles. It would have to be in some sort of code that only I knew. Maybe 'sending out for chinese' would be a code for stealing the Blood Ruby from the Tsoo, which would make anyone spying on it wonder why I ordered out 18 times in one week.
1) You rob a pawnshop, obtaining the 'emerald parakeet'. There is no one in the store when you enter, which makes sense. There are some unnecessary glowies as well, with text added so I don't feel like I'm wasting my life clicking them. You fight some Tsoo and leave.
2) You go speak to a contact, Amanita Infernia, which is obviously a plant/fire dom, possibly one of the author's. Plant/Fire is rather popular lately, which makes sense because Plant Control is awesome, but Thorny Assault, which would seem to go with it, is rather weak. I remember talking to one person who made a Plant/Fire named "Flaming Florist". I suggested his battlecry be "Who needs life insurance, anyway?"
The mobs inside are friendly, which goes along with the storyline, until the final room where you fight lots of Family. It must have taken a lot of tweaking to get that exactly right. You fight some Carnies to finish it off.
3) After some humorous exposition, you go into Oranbega to raid the Circle's library, which is a bit cliche, but oh well. You are reduced to level 40 for this, which is unusual, because CoT and Carnies both go to 50. Seven glowies to click, which a bit much, but they have funny text so it's ok.
4) Finally, into the MAGI vaults to get rid of the Black, er, Green Bird. This is perhaps the first time in CoX history that a villain has put something INTO their storage. The Every villain group in the game wants the Macguffin, and the PPD is there to stop them, which results in a wild free-for-all melee, with the Kitty coming up on top.
Overall, this is a well written, often funny arc. I was slightly disappointed by the lack of further Hitchcock or Maltese Falcon references. Of course, maybe there were some that slipped by, since I saw it a looooong time ago and don't remember it all that well, although the bit about 'having one in Constantinople' sticks with me for some reason...
Rating:
Arc #51728: Speeding Through Time
By now, I'm sure we have all heard the news that 3DRealms has kicked the bucket, leaving Duke Nukem Forever as vaporware. While I'm sure this came as a great shock to everyone (sarcasm), let's look back for a moment at the game that put 3DRealms on the map: Duke Nukem 3D.
DN3D came out in 1996, which was like a million years ago, as part of the first wave of Doom clones. It wasn't a huge leap forward in technology, but it had a protagonist with a cool personality, a healthy dollop of humor, and most of all, it was the first 3D shooter to actually ship with level editing tools. Withing months, hundreds of Duke levels spread to BBSs across the world, (yes, BBSs. Google it.) which soon became thousands and thousands available for download on the blossoming World Wide Web. Soon, there were sites devoted just to reviewing Duke Nukem levels.
By now, some of the smarter readers have figured out where I'm going with this. CoX has given content creation power to it's users, and in response, tens of thousands of user made arcs have been belched from the gut of the unwashed masses, dripping and pooling across the steaming morass that is the Mission Architect. Only us; the few, the proud, the reviewers; only we stand between millions of CoH players and the quivering mounds of awful mission arcs. Armed only with our keyboards and biting-sharp sarcasm, we live to protect you from yourselves.
Which brings us to Speeding Through Time. Once again, I look for a chance to bring my sarcasm to bear, and once again I am denied.
1) The contact, Red Blur, asks you to go back through time to talk to his past self. This isn't new- "Crisis on Infinite Girls" did it already, among others- but by now, everything has been done already. Red Blur is elec/kin, which is nice because he gives you Speed Boost without having to say 'SB plz' every two minutes.
2) Back in time again to a destroyed Atlas park. There's a cool custom group here, who have somehow captured Statesman. From him we learn about the huge holocaust that has destroyed half of America. (the good half!)
3) Now the fun part. Desperate to stop the catastrophe, Red Blur has gone back in time again, creating dozens of temporal duplicates of himself as well. I'm not kidding, there's like two dozen of this guy to be found. Followed by an army of identical elec/kins, you whoop Dr. Aeon several times. You get very little xp/inf, because they do most of the damage, but that's not what we're here for, right? Right?
4) You pummel the Dr. Aeon of the present. I won't spoil the Plot Twist that surrounds it, but it's worth reading.
Overall, Speeding Through Time is a huge disappointment. I was hoping for a poorly written, sloppily produced arc that I could skewer with red-hot jabs of pointy sarcasm, but instead got a well written arc that's very much worth playing. Please, people, send me some lousy ones!
Rating:
[ QUOTE ]
temporal duplicates
[/ QUOTE ]
Thanks for the kind words! And the book recommendation, because that sounds fantastic!
I'll try and get to one of yours tonight.
[ QUOTE ]
After some humorous exposition, you go into Oranbega to raid the Circle's library, which is a bit cliche, but oh well. You are reduced to level 40 for this, which is unusual, because CoT and Carnies both go to 50.
[/ QUOTE ]
Because the Tsoo only go to 40 and nobody likes an arc with crazy level ranges jumping up and down so I make everything fall into the same level range. After all, I'm the guy who will take off an entire star for unjustified level jumps.
[ QUOTE ]
#83920: Two Chicks at Once
Moderately challenging, for level 40+. Has two EBs, but you have allies for them. Dialog written for villains.
[/ QUOTE ]
In payment for reviewing my arc, here's your review.
I really, really liked this one. I have some minor nitpicks that I think could make it even better, but I threw you the 5 stars gladly.
The writing is funny, the idea is clever, and it was certainly easily soloed. On my almost 48 Dark/Shield Brute, this would have been a cakewalk even without the allies, but that isn't the case for everyone.
Minor nitpicks:
Mission 1 text: I would remove one of the uses of "stand." The same word (well stand and standing) in one sentence is awkward. Maybe change it to "surrounding you" or something like that.
Mission 2: This mission could be shorter. Fighting Crey in a lab isn't exactly exciting. Yeah, you can just run to the end if you want to, but I would personally make it as small a map as is possible for the number of objectives you have. I didn't count off for this, but others might (and God knows I've done plenty of arcs where every mission is like this instead of just one).
Mission 3: It's "Fortunata" and I got to Mantis before Ice Mistral. Not a big deal for me, but you may want to play around with their placement a bit.
Last Mission: It's MS. Liberty. MISS Liberty is Statesman's daughter and is apparently no longer an active superhero. I only know this from fact-checking my own arc.
Now, I'm sure some people would knock you down a peg or two because people didn't talk in their 100% accurate "voice," but since this is a humorous arc I thought they were close enough to work.
I would have been tempted to add a glowie full of vaseline and another one full of tissues, but that's just me taking the joke probably a tad bit too far.
Arc #111486: To Slay Sleeping Dragons
Here's a rather interesting one. The contact, a villain named Malaketh, asks you to slay a hero, Azure Song. Possibly these are some of the author's characters, which is sometimes a warning that the mission will consist of 10 pages of the author expounding on how t0TaLL1 4WES0me his characters are, but fortunately that's not the case here.
Malaketh proposes killing Azure Song in an interesting way, by splitting off the dragon that is sharing her soul. Points added for originality here, since I've never seen dragon removal used as a plot device before. Maybe this will spawn a whole genre of missions. Maybe even mainstream CoX will jump on the bandwagon as well, with Viridian hiring villains to slay the dragon in Crimson's soul, or the I15 TF helping Statesman prevent Dr. Aeon from creating a mass dragon-extraction device.
1) You go into a Longbow base to get a book, "Dragon Removal for Dummies". Azure Song is there, but fighting her is optional.
Here a problem is seen that continues for the rest of the arc. The text is, well, not great. There's a few spelling errors and a few grammatical errors, but mostly it's just blah. It's certainly not as bad as some I've seen, which were obviously written by a 6th grader listening to Megadeth while snorting Ritalin mixed with Pop Rocks. I just get the feeling that it was written once and never reread.
(seriously, I used to know a guy who snorted his Ritalin. gah.)
2) You go to 'force the dragon to the forefront', or something. In an interesting twist, there's another dragon-possessed guy there, and the two are hostile to each other, although they both don't like you either. You can make them fight if you get them together, although it's not easy to make them lose aggro on you as well. I suspect a Phase Shift power will come in handy here. Once one is down, you need to defeat the other yourself, which is a bit hard (the intro _did_ state there was EBs).
Oh, there's a custom group here, "dragon phantasms" or something. Pretty cool, although the Lts have grav powers, which are annoying en masse.
3) You go to the 'Oranbega with fog' map to slay Azure Song, with Malaketh joining you. She uses Illusions, which requires a steady diet of Break Frees, since most mez resist powers don't resist confusion and fear.
Overall, To Slay Sleeping Dragons is an ok arc, which gets half a FAIL for some spelling and grammar mistakes, and one MEH for general bla-ness of text. A quick pass through could remove both.
Rating: FAMEH
Arc #81829: A Voyage Fantastic
Here's another interesting arc. A Rikti ambassador has come down with some with some sort of illness, and since he's one of the 'good' Rikti, it's imperative that we cure him. The obvious way to do this, of course, is to shrink the hero down to molecular size and inject him into the Rikti. This was adopted from the 1966 movie, Fantastic Voyage, which went on to spawn two books by Isaac Asimov (not the other way around, as I thought), and then aped by that putrid abortion of a film, Innerspace.
1) You meet with the doctor, who injects you into the Rikti's gut. The sendoff dialog is quite funny, but there's no dialog inside the mission, which is fine because bacteria don't talk much. The germs are Protean and Hydra, which are in a custom group called 'Ritki Germs' or whatever, but they retain their original flavor text referencing the sewers. Maybe you can't change the flavor text of regular mobs injected into custom groups, I can't remember offhand.
Anyway, this mission makes one big mistake: it's a defeat all. Defeat alls are bad, mmmmkay? Especially ones on the Arachnid cave maps, because mobs can fall into the geometry, or at least they could. I fell out of the map once myself during one of Terence Dobbs' arcs, although that was years ago and they may have fixed it by now. But then again, warshades still haven't been given human-form mez protection, and that's a far more pressing problem then mobs falling off maps, right?
2) After more funny dialog, you are sent into the brain, which uses the Leviathan map and is NOT a defeat all. Storm Elementals are used as 'Corrupted Neurons', but their name and flavor text are unchanged. An itty-bitty Nemesis is the boss, (fortunately not an EB), which fits in well with the RWZ storyline.
Overall, A Voyage Fantastic is a short, funny arc that only FAILs by having one kill-all.
Rating: FAIL
Thanks for taking the time to write this all up after your playthrough last night Interface. The time you put into these is very much appreciated, and the style is diffferent.
To answer your question re: critter info - yeah. Can't change it. Hopefully that will work in our advantage later.
As for the defeat all, I thought it fit the "disinfection" concept as leaving any of them alive could be a risk for further spreading.
Defeat alls *do* suck, and I hate having to do them when I run arcs myself, but I opted to risk it here since 1) it made sense and 2) it was a relatively small map.
But yeah, that map is screwy... I had to remove the destructible objects as mandatory mission objectives since, apparently, they sometimes spawned outside the geometry, as you said.
Looking forward to plaing yours later today.
█ Players Guide to the Cities
Ha ha! I got a MEH! That's one more MEH than everyone else so far! Now I just need to learn how to spell and write without, putting, comma,s every,wh,ere,
Current Published Arcs
#1 "Too Drunk to be Alcoholic" Arc #48942
#2 "To Slay Sleeping Dragons" Arc #111486
#3 "Stop Calling Me"
Okay, I'll bite. Let's see what you do with my arc, 162898, "To Be Incarnate." Try not to leave too much blood in your wake. =P
"The acquisition of any knowledge is of use to the intellect, for nothing can be loved or hated until it is first known."
Leonardo da Vinci
Arc #162898: To Be Incarnate
First off, to everyone who is planning to do one of my arcs, please do #167567, "Curiouser and Curiouser". The other two have already been copiously lavished with praise, but this one has been played very little and only mentioned once. Don't worry about it being the sequel to "Two Chicks at Once", you don't need to have played that one to follow the plot. The AV/EBs are all optional, but it does present a bit of a challenge, mostly due to one mission containing Malta. Oh, and there is some mildly naughty subject material... nothing really dirty, but Sister Flame would come away with some awkward questions... 
Anyway, To Be Incarnate presents the same lack of sarcasm opportunities as the previous reviews. I may have to change the column to Purple Lovin's Polite And Friendly Review Patio.
The contact is named The Trader, and he's wearing a suit, which of course makes you NOT trust him. How many villains in the Rogue Isles wear suits? Well, a few do, but most find them incompatible with demon wings, crab arms, and cloven hooves. The Trader's dialog is copious and well written throughout the arc.
Anyway, our friend claims to know about some water from the Well of the Furies, and he offers to let us guzzle some, at no cost to us! Wow, what an opportunity! Since there's no option to call him a liar and kick him in the nuts, we agree to go along.
1) Into an Arachnos base to hack a computer. Very short and quick (the clue even comments on this). The only delay is that this map is the prison one, which makes the game freeze for 10-15 seconds when you approach that room, most likely loading the textures. Have a book ready.
2) Off to talk to a contact about the file. Of course, since this is CoX, 'talk to' means 'severely pummel'. There's a cool custom group here, complete with minion descriptions (!!!) The boss has a very funny description as well.
3) Back to the same base (the guy mentions this) to download another file. This means we get the loading hiccup again. Read a few chapters of 'Atlas Shrugged', or talk your girlfriend into a quickie.
(who am I kidding, if any of us had girlfriends, would we be sitting here reading this? didn't think so)
4) Into Ghost Widow's tower, to get the water and become a demigod... but OH NOES! The Trader has snuck in and drank the water himself!!!!1one!! Now, normally, I avoid giving away plot twists, but really, this was obvious from the start of the mission. You and Ghost Widow pummel the guy, who is an EB but not too hard to beat with her help.
To Be Incarnate has no FAILings, aside from the loading glitch, which of course isn't the author's fault, but mentionable because it forces us to dwell for 30 seconds on our barren, girlfriend-less lives. Still, the fact that the Plot Twist is so predictable warrants a MEH, but then the writing is quite well done, so 2/3 of a MEH.
Rating: ME
[ QUOTE ]
Still, the fact that the Plot Twist is so predictable warrants a MEH, but then the writing is quite well done, so 2/3 of a MEH.
[/ QUOTE ]
*sigh* This has been my issue all along. I mean, the first version of this tale tried to set up a red herring, but then those who played said, "We knew what was going on." So I took it out and had The Trader say, "You go and confirm the list is the real deal, and you can have the prize this time. Then I'll run off and get my own vial."
In fact, I was ready to throw in the towel on the whole thing, and even delved into Venture's phrasing of the "Idiot Ball." (Look at the "still busy" dialogue for the contact on the last mission.)
I have been complimented on the writing, which I'm starting to think is the only thing that saves the story. But until someone comes along with a suggestion on how to fix it, I'm kinda stuck.
I suppose the give-away is the story concept. "Incarnate" is not an origin option, and therefore makes the ultimate goal impossible. This was more of a "I want to write an entertaining tale" exercise. Alas, while the writing is excellent, (as per the opinions of others), maybe I need to free up an arc slot by putting this one away until we CAN become Incanates. 
Oh...The EB you mention should have been an AV if you were playing on a difficulty level higher than level 1. My immediate thought is that MA has decided to allow no one else to ever make an AV...or decided *I* can't make one.
"The acquisition of any knowledge is of use to the intellect, for nothing can be loved or hated until it is first known."
Leonardo da Vinci
Just a heads up Interface: My plans changed yesterday and today, so I'm having to delay posting a review of your arc.
I will get to it as soon as I can and post back here.
█ Players Guide to the Cities
Arc #172576: Eternal Legion Task Force #1
Given the lack of people offering their arcs as sacrificial lambs the past few days, I've ventured outside this thread in search of arcs to bestow my sarc^D^D^D^D infinite wisdom and benevolent guidance upon. When I saw a lone post asking First story good or bad?, I knew I'd found some fresh mea... er, a delightful arc to review.
Eternal Legion Task Force #1 looks like a vanity mission for the author's SG. Now, vanity missions aren't invariably bad- for example, Dollmistress' "Champion TF" is quite good- but in general, missions showing off how t0Ta11y 4WE$Ome your character is tend to suck harder than a ten buck ****** at 3pm on Friday afternoon. Even though a forum search for "Eternal Legion" came up bupkis, it had been played once and given five stars, which means there's at least one person in the SG besides the author's alts.
The arc's awfulness is apparent the moment you talk to the contact. The dialog sucks. Not just did-it-once-in-a-hurry sucks, I'm talking "6th grader snorting Ritalin" suckage. And not even a 6th grader from a good private or suburban school, I'm talking 6th grade in a school that rhymes with "warton boother sing". Misspellings, grammatical errors, run-on sentences, and capitalization errors abound. Most amusingly, not only are sentences not capitalized, but random words in the middle of sentences are.
1) A guy in a suit tells us that Eternal Legion sometimes takes on outside help, so it's up to me to clean up a breakout at the Zig. Well, I can see why they didn't want to do this themselves; it's a kill-all, using generic Prisoners. Those *@&$!#ers infested every corner of the map, inside and out, taking about 15 minutes to mop up. At least there's some minion chat: "ya fat chance pigs were not going back to pots and pans." Anyway, you have to find Dark Raven, who is the big villain, but for some reason is non-combatant. (although the dialog _does_ catch this).
2) Into a Rikti ship, to stop the "Sinister Swarm" from raiding it. They are custom mobs with fear-inducing names like "pale one" and "soul seeker", and generic minion text. At the end of a huge map is a glowie with no text or clue at all.
3) To the 'Oranbega with fog' map the stop the Sinister Swarm from opening a portal (?). The Contact says he'll send two of his best agents to help you, but I only found one, "Deadra Khaine" who is DB/something. Her flavor text says she deploys force fields on her allies, which is not the case. We destroy a glowie and get a nonsensical clue about how the portal opens anyway.
4) We need to go through the rift for some reason. It's a 'destroyed city' one, the map where the Psychic Clockwork King is found. It's filled with Spirits, who have been put in a custom group named 'rift dwellers' or something. I spent 10 minutes looking for a glowie, which is an Arachnos computer for some reason I won't even try to comprehend. This spawns Dark Raven, so I spent another 10 minutes looking. She is grav/something, with no description text, and dialog from the Generic Villain Phrasebook... "I may be defeated but my master is more powerful than you can imagine!"
Overall, Eternal Legion Task Force #1 is a great arc... if you're a reviewer who takes delight in others' shortcomings. Oh, and there's an Eternal Legion Task Force #2, but it hasn't been played at all. Guess the author didn't have enough DOs to bribe his SG mate into plowing through it.
Rating: FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL
didn't really work on the gramar cause i honestly am not that picky. Noticed the second part had a bunch of bugs with it since last patch so took it down to rewrite both from scratch. Honestly kinda disappointed in the lack of options for certain features in MA but hoping they add more in the next patch worth using..
As for your review like i said i accept all honest opinions so just wanted to say thanks for your time and when they come out with issue 15, I'll make a better one..
Maybe then i can write it in a better manner and you can try that one out..
Ran the Two Chicks at Once arc and the Curiouser and Curiouser arc back to back, for ultimate story continuity! Oh yeah!
The first was sent under the name @Crasical, so you can find it there, and the second I'll post here.
My first, second, twelveth, and nineteen sixty-ninth complaints are as thus: It is considered bad form to dictate the player's reactions for them. And this arc does that in SPADES. The Two Chicks at Once avoided it to some degree, only really coming to prominence at the very end of the story, but it comes back with a vengeance at the beginning of Curiouser and it keeps going strong to the very end. The arc dictates a huge range of stuff like the Character's favorite south park episode, or more egregiously making them EAT, for robots ect. . . It's slightly immersion breaking if you don't have the right kind of character for that action. I try my best to write for AFGNCAAP protagonists, making as few assumptions about the character as possible.
Now, on to the good side! I rather liked the 'tiered' difficulty in the Curiouser arc. I like EBs, but I know a lot of people don't. Making them bypassable is a nice workaround, and it worked beautifully in all but one case, with Nemesis spawning right next to the smashable server and forcing me to fight him. I was hoping for a bit more info or humor from the clues they dropped, but it was worth it anyway.
Arc I'd like reviewed:
The Secret Origin of Lil' Red Hood
180333
Also, this is the origin story of the character I did both of the mission with. So, for bonus amusement, consider the dialogue of her walking in with Frost Mistral and Silver Mantis under her arm when you see her in the last mission.
Arc #180333: The Secret Origin of Lil' Red Hood
First of all, thanks for the comments on my arcs. Yes, I realize that dictating the player's responses will rub some people the wrong way. However, my entire style of humor consists of projecting humorous personalities onto people, including the protagonist. I'm pretty sure that Ice Mistral doesn't _really_ like shrimp cocktails and frozen mudslides, hence teh funnay.
I'm hoping that we will be given branching dialog options in the future, such as...
You scour the database for Nemesis' world domination plans, but find nothing except a DVD-rip of South park episodes.
1. Oh well, let's move on.
2. Download it anyway, there might be hidden data encoded in them.
3. Wow, I'm mission the 'Death Camp of Tolerance' episode! Download away!
This would allow for humorous writing without projecting onto the player.
I fixed the spelling errors you pointed out, although Black Scorpion's text was actually misspelled on purpose, going for a tough guy way of speaking.
Anyway, over to The Secret Origin of Lil' Red Hood. The contact is the Pillar of Ice and Flame, except that we are actually talking to a consciousness _inside_ the pillar, which is working to oppose the Coming Storm, but in ways that oppose the Menders. I think that's it. Anyway, we need to go back in time to ensure that a villain named Little Red Hood is created, who is one of the author's characters.
1) Into a warehouse to find a Family guy and lead him out. Normally I decry 'lead hostage to exit' goals as a waste of time, but the map is small. When you do, he says he can't leave without his capo, 'Barking Mad'. So you get him and lead him to the exit, where he attacks you, although this also ends the mission so it doesn't matter.
This gives me a mission clue that Antonio (the guy you saved) is now marked for death by the Family because he didn't help Barking Mad attack the player. Maybe it was the two Cape Codders and pipe of salvia I had beforehand, but this doesn't gel. He is so loyal to BM that he won't leave without him, even tho BM's flavor text says what a backstabbing [censored] he is, then BM backstabs the player, who presumably feeds him a lead sandwich, but now Antonio will be killed because he didn't help backstab the guy who saved them, even though all the witnesses are dead? I don't get it.
2) Back in time again to ensure that a girl becomes Red Hood, by putting the Elixir of Ultimate Evil in her governess' allergy medicine. No, I'm not kidding. You fight some Hydra on the way in (it's a defeat all, but the map is tiny) and once you do the deed, you are stopped by a woman named 'Red Slime', who is in fact made of slime, and was sent by the Menders to stop you. Really.
3) To Oranbega, to ensure that the two people's souls are melded together, but not by using the Soul Cage. Or something.
4) Red Hood has now become a villain, so as my reward, we go to the present, or maybe the past but not too far into the past, to help her as she kills several Family leaders to consolidate her power base, which causes her to become ever grateful to the player. She is depicted as being about 12, so screenshots of her saying "Thank you, I'm forever in your debt!" will be serving as fap material for certain segments of the populace for years to come.
I'm having a hard time coming up with a rating for this. It has no technical FAILings... well, OK, a few. There are some spelling errors, and during mission 3, the nav text says "Destroy the last Soul Cage", even though there _was_ only one.
Which brings us to the plot. This may be a brilliant, multifaceted plot worthy of Hitchcock and Kurosawa, or it may be an indecipherable mess. I'm really not sure, so I'll give it a ME. In other words, either the plot is MEH, or it's ME who's too dense to follow it.
Rating: ME
Thanks for the unsolicited Review! I'll put one of yours on my queue.
You're the second or third person to mention the Kheldian problem. I guess this calls for a disclaimer somewhere.
"...his madness keeps him sane.": My Profile on VirtueVerse
Can You WIN the Internet? MA Arc #85544
Inhuman Resources - At Work with IE #298132
Task Force Mutternacht #349522 <-- 1st AE Challenge
Branching dialogue and dare we say it branching missions would be enough to make some mission designers explode in titillated delight. Projecting on the NPC's is really not that bad, it's fun watching them act in humorous, out of character ways, but a lot of folk get unhappy when you touch their characters in bad places to put words in their mouth, so giving them fun branching dialogue would help immensely and remove my main complaint about an otherwise stellar pair of arcs. Then again, I've had my sense of humor and ability to feel joy surgically removed, so what do I know about that.
What I DO know is that my characters are usually Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot mashups with convoluted backstories, and I'd been hoping that illustrating them with an Arc would be a perfect way to explain some of the weirder ones. So, keeping in mind that this is a REVIEW section instead of a help one, what would you recommend to de-twist some of this arc's confusion? More text? Less text? Simplify it? Replace the Elixir of Evil with some sort of psionic amplifier and explain it as mind control?
Mission 3 is the Scrappy level . I hate CoT, but I'm not really sure how to streamline the mission in any significant way.
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what would you recommend to de-twist some of this arc's confusion? More text? Less text? Simplify it? Replace the Elixir of Evil with some sort of psionic amplifier and explain it as mind control?
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I think the only real problem here is that the arc can't decide whether it's serious or funny. If the former, toss the Elixir (and the slime woman). If the latter... jokes!!! Add more! Pile them on!!
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Mission 3 is the Scrappy level . I hate CoT, but I'm not really sure how to streamline the mission in any significant way.
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Eh, I had no trouble there, even using a Warshade. As an aside, go to Xen Syndrome and scroll down... they use CoX as an example. 
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...missions showing off how t0Ta11y 4WE$Ome your character is tend to suck harder than a ten buck ****** at 3pm on Friday afternoon.
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The only thing that sucks harder than that is an eight dollar ******. Why? 'Cause she's gotta make change.
Anyway, here's what I can tell you about Two Girls At Once, which I ran a little spastically over the last two days 'cause my RL has been sapping my richly deserved need to stare at a computer screen for hours on end. Oh wait, I do that at work anyway.
In any case, as I commented after I finished it, I was cut/pasting dialogue from the early part of the arc into my VG chat & had two people demand to get in on the team to participate. So, this was a team effort for most of it: a 38 elec/rad corr (myself), a 41 ice/elec dom, and a 45 dark/regen brute (mal'd to 38) running the arc on diff 3.
It's a quick arc, I think we could have burned through it pretty freaking fast if we hadn't been so interested in RPing through the various clues. It helped that my character is a notorious womanizer, so this whole thing was right up his alley (which is the same alley you might find those hard-working folks mentioned above). I like short missions, particularly for a humor-based MA, TIMING where the most important thing about getting the comedy right is .
The customs were pretty well balanced, and I think the only thing I would have had difficulty handling solo was the Wardens in mish 5 (& possibly the final EB). I liked that everyone had flavor text placed in, and I really appreciated that the Ally text changed between the two missions that featured them, despite being the same people. Those are the little details that make a MA Arc quality. I loved Mistral as a cocktail swilling ne'er-do-well.
I noticed a few things that could use improvement:
* I liked the colored text for each of the Arachnos lieutenants in the mission breifings/debriefings. I think you should standardize it throughout the missions though. The first mission briefing could use it, and the fourth mission accept text (Black Scorpy's dialogue) should be changed to his color of text. In that latter case, I got confused why Lord Recluse suddenly was using a very different voice. The confusion wouldn't have occurred if it had gone back to the blue text you were using for Scorpy.
* I'd also recommend dropping the quotation marks from the normal dialogue from Recluse. They are cluttering up the text and were a little distracting. I know you want to separate narration of action from the dialogue, but you could use italics/bold or another color to separate the narration. Most of the mission briefing/debriefing text doesn't look expansive, so I think you have the character space to do such customization.
* I wasn't watching the grammar specifically, but I did notice that you mispelled "significant" in the 1st debriefing text. Otherwise, I didn't notice anything spectactular. There might have been some capitalization issues in the flavor text, but meh...
* Spawning issues: In the 4th mission - Ice Mistral spawned in the room behind Mantis, so you had to fight through all the groups to get the ally I assumed you needed to ...fight the groups. The brute and I duo'd this level without too much difficulty although the brute did die one or two times when I couldn't fire off my heals fast enough.
* Gameplay Issue: In the 5th mission, the allies you get are on some sort of PCP version of "aggressive" 'cause they were running all over the place barrelling into mobs of critters. Being the healzplz /kin I am, I kept them upright through the mission - but they might not have made it in solo with another AT. I know there's nothing you can really do to change that other than to maybe indicate that the allies will be quite bloodthirsty, which might bring aggro on the player.
Anyway, that's it. Great arc; I'm recommending it to my VGs/SGs. We might try the sequel, but I've got a few other arcs on my queue at the moment. Oh, also the souvenir was excellent.
RATING: On a scale of empty of win to full of win, you get a WIN!!
"...his madness keeps him sane.": My Profile on VirtueVerse
Can You WIN the Internet? MA Arc #85544
Inhuman Resources - At Work with IE #298132
Task Force Mutternacht #349522 <-- 1st AE Challenge
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), he's still doing it o.O
Supposedly in I15 we can control the level ranges directly, I'll fix it then.
City of Gyros. Right. I'm having flashbacks to Saul Rubenstein's Discount Task Force
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I know. This arc was up during beta, before Saul's. I did _suspect_ that he copied from mine, but... eh.
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Wait, why is Posi doing that weird monkey-walk thing? Is that something you did, or some bizarre Architect glitch? Odd... even though I logged out and came back (for nearly a day... I actually have a life right now, something that is taking some getting used to
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Hehe... during beta and early release, there was a bug with some contact holograms. After returning from the first mission, Posi would be on all fours, so I mentioned it in the text. Now, they 'fixed' it, by having him run in place. Sigh.
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Aaaaand level limited again. Kind of jarring.
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I know.
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The wand clues aren't even trying to be funny?
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Well one is :-)
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The arcs are short and clean- not too much extraneous faffing around (although some optional glowies with more jokes would be good)... but there wasn't a lot of substance to it. I guess my final word is "Needs more funny".
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I know. My original conception of the arc, planned way before beta even started, was a serious TF-ish series that taught newbies the basics of teaming and fighting large groups. However, that proved to be hard to implement, especially since teaming in MA is _still_ semi-bugged. So I stuck a few jokes in, an well, there it is. Maybe I'll ditch it to post the third installment in the 'Two Chicks at Once' series :-)