One A Day

So even though the contest is over, I didn't get to run all of the entry arcs I wanted to because these past two weeks have been extremely busy for me in my life away from the game.

Tonight I decided to try "A Penny for your Thoughts" by Tangler.

I'd read some good things about it and unfortunately, despite my desire not to have a bunch of foreknowledge about the the things I experience beforehand, with this arc, I sort of knew what was coming in advance.

The dreamscape story is actually a lot older than people tend to realize. There were several ancient cultures that utilized the dreamscape to reveal societal truths that were uncomfortable for the ruling class of the society to hear. Telling these truths in dreamscape form allowed the writer not only to reveal them, but also to stay alive to tell more stories in the future.

The dreamscape stories, hence, tended to fulfill the same function that jesters were later to fulfill in medieval societies.

In the modern day, you still find examples of the dreamscape narrative, probably most famously in Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic book and movies like The Cell. The narrative that Tangler tells actually reminds me more of The Cell than anything else. Probably because of the 'entering the mind of a criminal' aspect of it than anything else.

Mission Architect is sort of a hard medium to use to tell the surreal type of story that the dreamscape narrative demands, but the author uses it effectively for this one.

It is also interesting to note that two authors in the competition utilized the Clockwork King/Penelope Yin dynamic as the foundation for their pieces... and each took a completely different narrative viewpoint on their relationship.

Within the context of this story, the Clockwork King is portrayed less as a master villain and more as a tragic figure, which is an angle I can certainly accept. I think as time goes by, there are a lot of players who have adopted the 'sympathetic villain' take on the Clockwork King... certainly more so than many other CoH/V villains at any rate.

The problem the hero faces is essentially that the King has trapped himself in his own mind. His past is horrible enough that a dreamworld seems more desirable to him and he possesses the psychic ability to escape from the past if that is what you, the hero, allow to happen. In time, the biological component of the villain would inevitable waste away and he would presumably die happy and content.

I think the very element of making the King sympathetic through the arc weakens that particular angle though. The player needs to be reminded that even though he is being presented almost as a victim in this arc, the King is dangerous and capable of great evil at times. Perhaps a 'prelude' mission of sorts since your arc is only 4 missions long, where we are reminded of that before the Clockwork go inert?

At any rate, even if that particular angle is ignored... the choice offered the hero remains compelling simply on the basis of 'is it better to allow a man to wither away and die if he is happy or to force him back into living a life that essentially sucks?'

On a certain level, this arc questions the value of life if that life doesn't have other intrinsically valuable things to offer.

I enjoyed the arc. It's probably one of the best I've played to this point.

My thoughts:

- Penelope's dialogue could use a workover. She comes across as more 'valley' and less 'young.' I never got the impression in any of the storylines that have featured her that she is an airhead and she comes across that way in this arc at times.

- I am not sure about the canon ramifications of all of this... whether this particular take on the story can be reconciled with what has been written in the canon stories. I like your take on it... I'm just not sure whether this is the story the developers would choose for the King's past.

- The mission 2/5 map is personally annoying to me, especially with a time limit in mission five, but there are certainly much, much worse outdoor maps to use, so if you want an outdoor setting for it, that map is probably better than most.

- On that note, though, the choice offered in mission five almost became no choice at all for me because I came close to timing out of the mission when I almost ran out of time before finding the second iteration of the King. (Probably not a problem for most... I just hate trying to find single objectives on an outdoor map)

- Ran it with Ariadne (my Widow) at 1/+2/Boss/No AV and there were no issues. I probably could have run it at 2/+2/Boss/No Av, but Clocks have a tendency to drain end, which is iffy even for a widow at that level.

Overall, this is a superior story that suffers from very little. My critiques here are meant to be fairly mild ones and should be taken as more or less suggestions than anything I found particularly wrong with it.

- S12

Hi, thanks for the review! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sister_Twelve I think the very element of making the King sympathetic through the arc weakens that particular angle though. The player needs to be reminded that even though he is being presented almost as a victim in this arc, the King is dangerous and capable of great evil at times. Perhaps a 'prelude' mission of sorts since your arc is only 4 missions long, where we are reminded of that before the Clockwork go inert?

I think a lot of players are already aware of the villainy of CK given current content, especially the vileness that is the Synapse TF. In one of his memories, Blue Steel does reference the point where his Clockworks had killed an officer, making them much less than harmless thieves.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sister_Twelve At any rate, even if that particular angle is ignored... the choice offered the hero remains compelling simply on the basis of 'is it better to allow a man to wither away and die if he is happy or to force him back into living a life that essentially sucks?' On a certain level, this arc questions the value of life if that life doesn't have other intrinsically valuable things to offer.

I'm glad you appreciated it. That was the core idea of the arc, and how I tackled the idea of 'doing evil for the greater good'. I think a few people have mentioned that it felt more like just 'doing evil for good', or even not doing any evil at all. In the end I think this arc may come down more to personal values as to how the player perceives it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sister_Twelve - Penelope's dialogue could use a workover. She comes across as more 'valley' and less 'young.' I never got the impression in any of the storylines that have featured her that she is an airhead and she comes across that way in this arc at times.

I could have another look once the comp is all over.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sister_Twelve - I am not sure about the canon ramifications of all of this... whether this particular take on the story can be reconciled with what has been written in the canon stories. I like your take on it... I'm just not sure whether this is the story the developers would choose for the King's past.

A few people have mentioned this. I don't claim this arc to be the-super-secert-origin-that-you-never-knew(!) of CK, rather that it's an arc with one interpretation of his character in the style of What If/Elseworlds. I've tagged the arc as non-canon and noted that this arc is speculative in the description, to try and convey that notion.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sister_Twelve - On that note, though, the choice offered in mission five almost became no choice at all for me because I came close to timing out of the mission when I almost ran out of time before finding the second iteration of the King. (Probably not a problem for most... I just hate trying to find single objectives on an outdoor map)

I'm all to aware of the random evils of the outdoor map, I have cleared some outdoor missions in less than a minute when the objective have spawned right in front of me, while others I may have spent a hour searching every crevice for that last objective. Originally that map was on a much more generous 45 mins, but those who wanted to fail the mish said it was far too long to wait it out, and that you could complete this far more quickly meant the completion lacked any urgency as well.

So tonight, I played "The Seeds of Chaos" by Ashcraft.

Writing good villainous arcs, I think, tends to be a little bit tougher than writing good heroic arcs because villains, by and large, tend to be more proactive in their activities than heroes do. Heroism, by its very nature, is a reactive type of thing. There is a threat. You do your best to stop the threat.

Villains, on the other hand, like to feel like they're in control of their own activities. Unless a player really likes to play the 'thug' or 'flunky' type of villain, if confronted with someone who immediately assumes an air of superiority and begins to deliver orders in a peremptory tone that defies you to disobey their sublime commands, the villain player is more likely to extend the person the finger and go about his business unless one of two factors is in play:

1.) They really think they're going to get something good out of going along with this guy.

or

2.) This guy really can kick the snot out of you in a heartbeat and for that reason, it is best to humor him.

This arc runs into this problem from the very beginning. The contact of the arc is Requiem of the Fifth Column. I don't know about you guys, but of all the villains in CoH lore, Requiem does not top the list of villains that intimidate any of my characters. I've beaten him rather handily on several occasions with a variety of characters and never had much trouble doing so.

So that leaves me with the conundrum... why would I go along with his orders? There is an implied reward, but Requiem never bothers to tell the player what that reward might be and, in return, you are to 'assist him with bringing forth a dark god' that presumably will rain havoc down on the world and destroy a good portion of it in the process.

Now, if your villain is certifiably crazy and thinks this would be a good thing in and of itself, I suppose doing so would be its own reward. But if your villain is someone who is essentially out to make his/her life easier/better/more enjoyable, having no world in which to bask in your ill-gotten gains is probably a pretty self-defeating action.

So I guess the first thing the author needs to address is to somehow make the player want to do this.

The second thing that immediately struck me was the outro of the whole thing, which was confusing to say the least. The arc claims to be written for villains, but Requiem's final lines assume that the character is playing a hero. At least that's what I got out of them.

So I guess the second this for the author is to decide who you intend to be playing this arc.

My thoughts:

1.) The intro/outro dialogue is so sparse and so non-specific that the only thing that defines this individual as Requiem is the reference to the Nictus in the early parts. This could be generic Master Villain A hatching this plot and it would be no different.

Flesh it out and make it Requiem-specific.

2.) I am not entirely sure why there are Circle of Thorns surrounding Naylor in mission two rather than Arachnos other than it takes place in Nerva.

3.) The Regulators are pretty bland and seem to only come in about three varieties. The group could probably be expanded out some if you have the room.

4.) Frankly, I am not sure why my character doesn't just turn around and leave when Requiem does the 'ha, ha, ha, I outwitted you... you were my target all along' thing in mission 4. There is nothing really stopping the player from doing that other than the ephemeral desire to finish the arc. In the flow of the narrative, it makes no sense. And more importantly, if my villain has the opportunity to leave and has absolutely nothing to gain by staying, why would the villain stick around to stop all of this?

Especially if the villain has already displayed a lack of any real concern about the consequences of any of this by going through with parts 1,2, and 3 of the plan?

5.) Played on my Widow at 2/+2/Bosses/No AVs. Lots of customs, which means that occasionally they hit pretty hard, though the Fifth Column in this seemed to be hitting harder than the customs for the most part. Maybe they were hard ambushes. At any rate, I made it through without any deaths and without feeling any real moments of desperation.

- Mission 1 is fairly monotonous for what you actually have to do. You could probably do with a smaller map to make the feeling that Requiem is using you as his flunky seem a little less tedious to go along with the condescension. The player character is probably at least close to level 50 at this point and has probably smacked Requiem upside the head more than once. Being reduced to Requiem's errand boy is probably not a good way to start the working relationship, especially after he starts off the whole thing with his spiel about 'respect' and having 'watched you all this time.'
- Mission 2 can be done as slowly or as quickly as you want it to.
- Mission 3 I'm fairly sure has a mention in the intro that the boss is inside the building. I'd make that stand out a little bit more because I forgot for a bit that you can actually enter the building on the Warburg map. Brutal Justice seemed fairly balanced for an EB type.
- Mission 4, ther than the whole "why am I staying here" thing seemed fairly balanced and presented no real difficulties.

Overall, this was a pretty vanilla arc. There is perhaps a decent story lurking there somewhere if a lot more time and energy are devoted to making Requiem unique, giving the character some reason to want to involve himself or herself in all of this, and eliminating some of the internally contradictory things that happen.

- S12

Some very good feedback there. Just what I needed.

Tonight's arc was "The Christmas We Get" by Venture.

Essentially, this arc is about the importance of recognizable symbols and how different types of rulers, (or would-be rulers), attempt to manipulate those recognizable symbols in different ways. The author indicates, though I am not sure if this is canonical, that Christmas has basically been suppressed in the Rogue Isles because Recluse does not allow the people to celebrate it under Arachnos Rule. Your basic task is to assist a breakaway Arachnos soldier in ensuring that the people of Port Oakes, at least, have the opportunity to celebrate the holiday.

It is later revealed that the breakaway Arachnos soldier is not necessarily doing this out of an abiding love for the holiday but because, whereas Recluse does what he does to crush the spirits of the people, the would-be new ruler of the Isles is doing what he is doing because he basically believes they are a bunch of superstitious simpletons and that manipulating them will be much easier once he has gained their hearts and minds.

To a certain extent, the soldier's plan is certainly more sophisticated.

I had a soft spot for this arc from the outset because the contact and my Widow, Ariadne, have very similar origins. Both are ex-Arachnos. Both are extremely politically motivated. Both have essentially rebelled against the current power structure of the Rogue Isles, even if they go about it in different ways. If this were one, large shared world that all of the MA stories came from, it would not be unreasonable to assume that the contact and Ariadne were contemporaries and that they probably, at some point, influenced each others' thinking and philosophies while both were still in the organization.

However, at a certain point their philosophies diverge. While Ariadne moves forward to embrace the writing of Marx and the leadership of Lenin, the contact essentially remains either a fascist or a warlord, who assumes that it is not the centralization of power in one person that is the problem in the Isles, but only the person in which that power currently resides... ie, Recluse.

On that level, it is likely that once beyond this current incident, Ariadne and the contact would likely become adversarial to each other.

However within the context of this narrative, even though she is a communist and has no particular sentimentality for the holiday herself, Ariadne would probably support the notion of giving the downtrodden and oppressed a symbol to which to cling. After all, like Recluse and this ex-soldier, she too understands the power of symbols in people's lives. She understands that eventually, in order for the people of the Isles to rise up and reclaim their land and home, there will have to be a match to light the flame of revolution.

And that match might be Christmas.

On all of these levels, this is a very meaningful arc. The actual writing of it, however, is strained in places. It could stand with a lot of fine tuning if the author decides to go that route with it.

My thoughts:

- I don't often say this, but 3/5 missions are probably too short to have much impact. The story is good, but the story has to work within the framework of a game and in order for the arc to be enjoyable, it has to play well as well as read well. The mission where you free your Longbow colleague and then defeat the boss took me approximately 18 seconds to finish for example.

- The arc is essentially more about the contact than it is about the hero. I am not sure if the author intended this or not, but without Ariadne's backstory to bolster my liking of this narrative, I am not sure if any of my other character's would relate as well or at all.

- No glitches or bugs, all of the map sizes are small, I think. There was some amount of mission variety and no complex mechanics to speak of. There were a few typos, but they were not distracting.

- Played on my Widow at 2/+2/Boss/No AV. If you can defeat Arachnos and Council, you will have no problem with this arc. There are 1 or 2 ambushes along the way, but nothigng that really wails on you.

Overall, I think this is a pretty strong arc and I liked it... mainly because of the character I brought into it. I think some work could be done to expand it out to have some greater appeal. It wasn't perfect, but if the author wrote it in a single night, it could probably stand to be looked at and worked out after a few more beta plays.

- S12

Thanks for the review, and the good marks. So as not to threadjack I've posted a more detailed reply to the arc's own thread.

I'll be taking some time off from doing this for awhile. My state of mind really isn't there to do it anymore and it would be unfair to any author whose arcs I'd be playing. I'm pretty soured on all things MA and I think it's probably that my reactions to other people's work would skew negative because of that.

It has a lot to do with being torched by a review that I'd been waiting a long time for and was looking forward to, but it has a lot more to do with only receiving 6 plays over a four month period. If I'd received more reviews and more plays, that one review probably wouldn't have reached such a position of overblown importance in my mind. I've pretty much concluded that this is a waste of time, (at least for me, if not for others), but I'll leave the door open to returning to it at some point in the future if my opinion of it improves.

Before I took my brief hiatus, I agreed to play PENGUIN by Tubbius, so when the MA Team guys sort of convinced me that I was being a little bit hasty, this is the first one I decided to do when I came back.

Introducing a character that an author likes is always sort of a tough proposition in this setting because there's always the propensity for the cool character that the author likes to sort of hijack the story away from the player's character. In a game setting, where the player is actively a part of the narrative, I think it's pretty important that the player's character to be, if not the central focus of the story, at least pivotal to the progression of the plot.

I am not saying that the author is guilty of doing the opposite in this arc, but it is pretty evident from the first mission that this is essentially the origin story for Waddle - a genetically altered penguin in the mold of other humanoid animal types such as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. By this, I mean actual animals that have been somehow altered, not human with animalistic powers.

Comic book stories come in all shapes and varieties. Some authors, (read S12), prefer to write in a style that's more reminiscent of the modern graphic novel, while others tend to write for what is obviously a younger audience. At least in tone. And I don't think either has any inherent superiority over the other - as long as the intended audience is entertained by what they experience.

And I think this arc accomplishes that.

The character gets to foil a Crey plot. The character also gets to help out and save Santa Claus. And the character is also partially instrumental in the origin story of a new hero who has the potential to be pretty entertaining for kids. I think each of these things has value, especially since so few arcs are particularly suitable for younger audiences that I've seen in AE.

Of course, to be honest, I haven't been looking for them, but this is one of the few I've come across that I'd advocate my nephew playing.

My thoughts:

- Crey is not my favorite high level faction. The combination of minions with high resistance levels, lieutenants with high resistance levels, and bosses with high resistance levels means that by and large, they are a faction that inherently slows down your game play. The combination of the ice armor minion and the lightning armor minion also seems to give my preferred style of character more problems than most other arcs. It's not quite like fighting Knives of Artemis in terms of being grindy or fighting Vanguard in terms of ow, but in the normal game, I tend to avoid Crey.

- Winter Horde are fine. I have absolutely no problem with them. And since they are sort of a niche faction, like the Luddites or the Ghost Pirates, you don't see them very often, which makes them a nice change of pace.

- Strobe, in the second mission, has a tendency to blend into the warehouse background for some reason. I must have passed him five times, and since I was on my widow, I did not aggro him, which meant I wasn't really sure what the key card clue was instructing me to do. I believed I was supposed to be looking for a glowie. The mission would have been short otherwise.

- Overall, this arc has plenty of room to grow if you choose to go that way with it. However, if you decide that your intended audience is kids, then you might leave it exactly the length that it is. It seems about the appropriate length for that audience's attention span.

- Played it on my widow at 2/+2/Boss/No AV. No problems with anything in it. One custom character that doesn't seem to hit especially hard. The rest is Crey and Winter Horde. In the final mission, you get the assistance, (probably unneeded), of two AI allies.

Overally, this was a pretty straightforward and fun arc centered around an origin story that was probably aimed at an audience on the opposite end of the spectrum from stories I normally favor. I think the overall effectiveness of this particular narrative will be determined by what the author chooses to do with Waddle in the future and whether the audience intends to develop him further.

At this point, we don't have a great deal of actual interaction with the penguin in question to judge him by.

On the whole, well done.

Thank you for your feedback, Sister Twelve. And, while I didn't necessarily have a physically younger audience in mind, I can see where that would potentially be viewed as the case, from the rescue of Santa to the big reveal being that of rescuing a penguin with superpowers. My intended audience (to use the language I bring out in my college English courses) was that of someone looking for a quick, short arc, with a fair amount of "It's a game; have fun with it!" sprinkled in. I was indeed looking to do something "fun-centered" with the arc; one other player has labeled the arc as an "offbeat origin story," which is perfectly fine by me. PENGUIN is not the conventional graphic novel or hard-edged modern comic. If anything, it hearkens back to the silliness and camp frequently seen in books from the '60s.

There is indeed more to learn about Waddle's experience, and that is the sequel to this arc, which is Waddle's Revenge (302196). In that arc, you get to see more of what really drives the penguin in question--what he loves, what he really doesn't enjoy at all, and what he's willing to do to exact his own sort of childishly minded justice. That story is a little more upbeat in the telling, with a shadow cast over the penguin and his sense of right and wrong.

If you ever want to give that arc a try, whether you review it or not, be my guest! Thanks again for the good review.

Great to see that you're back Sister Twelve, I've always found your reviews to be particularly interesting to read.

So tonight I decided to try "The Alien Tyrant" by Hound.

As it turns out, this arc is listed as a sequel to his newer arc, even though this arc was apparently published first. I am not entirely sure why, but if you play this one first, be warned that the beginning of this arc assumes a tiny bit of foreknowledge about the overarching event that combines the two narratives on your part.

At any rate, both arcs are drawn from the alien invasion of a paranormal universe that we've seen done many times in the past, including the Rikti invasion right here in City of Heroes. Stories like this have deep roots, including works like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Card's Enders Game series, Heinlein's Starship Troopers, to more modern works like Independence Day and Signs. Even really recent works like both Transformers movies owe a small nod to this sub-genre of science fiction.

Unfortunately, the further we go into the well for good invasion stories, the weaker, in many respects, they become. I will step up on my soapbox for just a moment, because my upcoming rant will... at least in a small way... relate to my thoughts about this arc.

I've always considered Independence Day and Signs to be two of the weakest invasion movies I've ever seen. Why? Stupidity. Not necessarily stupidity on the part of the creators. I don't assume anyone that can carry something through from beginning to end and do it in a cohesive way to be stupid. It's more a sort of implied stupidity, in the case of Signs on the part of the alien invaders, and in the case of Independence Day, a belief by the creator that the audience of his work is stupid.

Signs is much easier to explain. The aliens are, without a doubt, the most moronic, obtuse and ridiculously stupid ever conceived. Why? Simply put: They are allergic to water. And this isn't a mild allergy. This a 'water will kill you in seconds' allergy. They choose to invade a planet that is 80% composed of the substance that will kill them all. If that is not sheer stupidity, I don't know what is.

Independence Day takes a little more explaining and a lot of my friends argue with me on it. I think Independence Day is a movie that sort of requires the audience to 'go along with it.' But going along with with it requires you to be stupid. Or at least accept stupidity in its rawest form. And I don't think it's so much intentional on the creator's part. The creator needed mechanisms to reach specific points. Someone had to figure out that the aliens were about to blast us all into smithereens. So Jeff Goldblum's character, who is a computer genius, figures out that the aliens are using our satellite network to piggy-back on for their countdown. -blink-

These things drove all the way across the galaxy in their super advanced starships and need our satellites to count down from 24 hours?

Like I said, it's a 'go along with it' movie.

In the end, Jeff Goldblum manages to bring down the impenetrable shields of the motherships by introducing a computer virus into their computer systems. -blink- The aliens use Windows? DOS? Our computers can inherently interface with the aliens' computers?

So anyway, my friends usually humor me for a few minutes when I talk about Independence Day and tell me to 'just go with it.'

So anyhow, off my soapbox.

The reason I mentioned all of that is because this arc suffers a little bit from the 'go along with it' syndrome. For example, at the outset, the author needs a justification for how it is we know where it is we need to go to bring the fight to the aliens who have invaded our world. And that is all fine. Except he starts out by establishing that Recluse, the guy who wants to rule our world, is sharing portal technology with the aliens to want to rule our world, so they can come back and try all over again to take over everyone... including presumably Recluse.

I think this can be done a little bit better. Or perhaps you might dispense with the 'portal' aspect period. The Rikti by and large already use portals as their mechanisms for invasion. If you are going to tread the same path as the devs, then you want to make your alien race as unlike their alien race as you possibly can. And truthfully, it would be nice if some aliens in CoH actually drove across the reaches of space in their ships to do their invading instead of everything always being part of this pan-dimensional, multi-earth concept that the devs have developed over the years.

Just a thought.

At any rate, once your character knows where the aliens are, your superiors decide that it is time for humanity to go on the offensive. And taking down the alien empire turns out to be surprisingly easy. Not as easy as, say, transporting a single nuclear weapon to their world and detonating a la Battlefield Earth, but it turns out that toppling an alien empire can be accomplished in only 3 easy steps.

Which is a bit too easy in my eyes.

The major problem I found with this arc is that it is not big enough to accomplish what it wants to accomplish. I talk a lot about big stories and small stories. I think this story wants to become a big story. It's just not there yet. I just don't think toppling a communications tower, killing some heavy duties on the street, and then taking out the emperor is quite enough to topple a galactic empire that's presumably been around for quite some time now.

My thoughts:

- Your contact's briefings tend to be a little terse. You appear to have quite a bit of room to flesh things out, which is good because right now the story is pretty skeletal. It's the framework of a story, not quite a full story.

- Mission one is very, very short. It took my about 15 seconds to complete it, which means your arc is really only 3 missions long. I know lots and lots of people will tell you that shorter is better and largely I agree with that sentiment. But there is a happy medium between, "Jeez this is long" and "Huh? That's it?" You need to find that with this mission. It's part of the reason I didn't buy the whole portal thing. It seemed pretty contrived.

- I'm not sure if I see the correlation between taking down the tower and riots occurring in the streets. Was the comm tower generating some sort of psychic wave that was pacifying the population? Or was it more an inspirational thing?

- Mission three did not look like a massive revolt in progress. It looked like a minor revolt that had been brutally curbstomped by the powers-that-be. This was mainly because there were only 3 revolutionaries left and all three were captured. If this is what you want to convey, that's cool. But if you want to convey the people rising up against the brutal regime, then you need to have some running street battles and so forth.

- I tend not to give specific mechanical type advice, but in the last mission, I would put one of the royal guards at the front of the map to separate him from the other. At the moment, it is very easy for one to aggro on you while you are fighting the other and 1-shot you from a distance with what appears to be a shuriken.

- The alien race has a good look and by and large seems pretty balanced. The EBs tend to hit much harder than normal EBs created by the devs, but that's pretty true of nearly any custom EB created in AE.

- Played on my Widow at 2/+2/Boss/No AV. Other than the blind side shot that took me from full to 0 by the other royal guardsman who was way across the last room from where I was fighting, I had no problems. I was going to say something about the emperor's ambushes, but the guy is the head of a galactic empire. It makes sense that he has flunkies.

Overall, I would just just say that you need to give this story some scope and flesh it out a lot. I think the beginning is pretty contrived and suffers from the 'go along with it' syndrome and that weakens the narrative. There is the core of a good story here. I'd keep working on it.

Removed at the request of the arc's author.

A couple of days ago, I played "A Taste for Evil" by Fredrik Svanberg.

Whenever I am talking to people on these boards, I am never sure whether there are references I throw out that perhaps the majority of people here are not old enough to really get or remember. I think "Soylent Green" is probably one that is pretty safe. At least as far as the reference itself is concerned. Just about everyone knows what Soylent Green is made of... ironically even if they've never seen the film itself.

At any rate, there were a lot of films like Soylent Green made in the 60's and 70's, which a lot of contemporary academicians and critics consider to be the bronze age of science fiction. It was sort of an era of what I call 'conceptual science fiction,' that is... the writer would be sort of locked onto a cool speculative concept like telepathy or teleportation or some other 'science ficition trope' that we, in 2009, are very familiar with seeing and centering a sort of meandering story around this trope, just to show off the speculative concept.

So basically a 'concept' became a 'narrative' in many cases with varying levels of effectiveness.

To me, this is why a lot of movies from this period of time, especially science fiction movies like Phase Four and Logan's Run seem so dated to us now. It isn't the visuals like so many critica would have you believe. It's the fact that this is basically an empty shell surrounding a single concept with nothing other than the coolness of the concept to sell the film.

The reason I mention all of this is because this arc has sort of a similarly meandering type of structure to it. It is also part of a series of arcs and it might very well be that the overarching narrative is only one that can be appreciated if the player has experienced all of the Nutripaste arcs. However, the basic concept of this one is that you are ordered by Arachnos to test the substance and then you are sent out on a series of rather loosely connected assignments and at the end, you are done.

In the midst of it, you stop what appears to be a major Luddite uprising, (major in comparison to what I've seen of Luddite stories in the past... which is to say, not much). I also consider this uprising major because I've never seen a greater concentration of Luddite crusaders at one time before though that might have happened merely because of my personal game settings more than anything else.

My thoughts:

- I suppose since you are considered part of the Arachnos organization during this point in your villain career, Marshall Brass giving you the military version of the flunky treatment is understandable, but from what I remember of his arcs coming up in CoV, all of his dialogue toward the character seems a bit out of character.

- No customs, but the opposing factions selected for this arc are some of the hardest hitting against low level characters ever created by the developers. In order, you face Snakes, which chew up low level characters, Vahzilok, which chew up low level characters, and Luddites, which normally do not chew up low level characters, but if you give them things like lots of ambushes, they have the propensity to do so.

I don't know if you intended this to be difficult, but it turned out to be one of the more difficult arcs to solo I've played in AE and for that reason, it tends to grind because of the fight-recover-fight-recover cycle you get into.

- The map at the end is huge. It took a long, long time to find everything there. It didn't help that one of the bosses spawned all the way at the top.

- Played on my widow at 1/+2/Boss/No AV. Like I said... tough. No deaths, but took a long time to get all the way through it.

I think the author intends for this to be sort of lighthearted villainy, but the grindiness bogs it down to the point where toward the end, you just want it to be done. I think this might actually work better in a larger group. At least, I've always found that the more eyes are present, the quicker those 'find the glowies on the outdoor map' missions go.

Overall, it's not bad, but I'd have to see what the other VEAT arcs are like to really evaluate the overarching narrative.

Thanks for the review!

Just a quick comment: the other VEAT arcs I've made aren't connected, and the other NutriPaste arc I made has been unpublished - they weren't sequels, really. "A Taste For Evil" was always intended as a replacement for "The Secret of NutriPaste".

"Taste" needs some more work, though. At the time when I was working on it I was really sick of it, to be honest, since I had made two arcs with a similar premise in quick succession. I will revisit it when I'm done with my level 40-50 VEAT arc, or sooner if that takes longer than I expect.

A couple of nights ago, I ran "For All the Wrong Reasons" by Dark Respite.

This story was inspired by the upcoming Going Rogue expansion. Since the author is the creator of quite a few rather spectacular game inspired videos that serve as previews for the various past issues, it was not surprising to me that she would preview the expansion in a way, (or at least do some work to bring the Praetorians back into the collective minds of the players), with her entry into Dr. Aeon's competition.

The basic premise of the story is that the Praetorians are close to being able to stabilize portal technology in a way they have not been able to do in the past. This would threaten our world because the likeliest use of their portal technology would be as mechanisms for invasion, in the same way that the Rikti use them.

As I've said before, I tend to like invasion stories in general, because they allow typical roles to be challenged. In the midst of invasions, heroes can act less heroic. Villains are free to show their better sides because, as the saying goes, "it's their world too," and alliances are formed that would never be contemplated during other times. Invasions can serve as catalysts for new plotlines and to revive old characters that have become stale.

To be honest, though, I have never been particularly fond of the Praetorians. Their creation always sort of struck me as a development cop-out. It was sort of like, "well we spent all this time and effort creating these kick-butt characters, so the biggest, baddest adversaries we can think of for them are mirror universe versions of themselves."

However, be that as it may. With Going Rogue centering on them, it is obvious I will either have to tolerate more stories being written about them or spend the next year or so in the game walking around in a snit.

And considering that their ongoing stories have been wedded to something I have long wanted in this game, ie falling angel stories for heroes and redemption stories for villains, I will probably have to do a little more than tolerate them in the future.

The author indicates in a (very long) mission to start with that the Freedom Phalanx probably have a perspective on the Praetorians that the character will need to proceed with the plan to deprive the Praetorians of their newly developed portal technology. Once you have defeated a bunch of carnies and tracked them down, the heroes each grudgingly give you a bit of information.

In short, you learn that the Praetorian you need to target for the operation is Anti-Matter because he is the likely source of the technological advancement. Anti-Matter apparently has a relationship with Dominatrix, (which I honestly did not know and am not sure whether this is canonical, but I am willing to go along with it for the purpose of the story).

So the arc picks up the pace a bit after that and in short order, you kidnap a couple of Praetorians, break a rather famous Fortunata out of Longbow custody, use her to interrogate Anti-Matter and so forth, then return Dominatrix and Anti-Matter to Praetoria, kick Tyrant's tail (again) on the way out the door, and return home, having stopped the Praetorians' potential invasion plan.

I suppose the question the arc really asks is whether it is okay to do bad things to bad people if you are relatively sure they are about to do bad things to you.

On that level, I can certainly accept it as an entry for Dr. Aeon's contest, though I have to admit I never really felt all that bad about doing these particular bad things to these particular bad people, especially when I ended up returning them to their homes at the end. And kicking the tail of big bad of their world in the process.

My thoughts:

- The first mission is looong. I can deal with looong missions if the longness somehow is intrinsic to the story, but during what I consider the 'information-gathering' phase of an arc, going this long this early tends to result in loss of interest. I understand wanting the use the carnie map for the carnie mission, but the carnie map is annoyingly huge and trying to find multiple glowies and several Phalanx members on it is draggy.

- Once you get past the first mission, this goes away. The map sizes are reduced and for the most part, the pacing improves dramatically.

- Played it with my Widow at 2/+2/Boss/No AV. You face carnies and several of the Praetorian mob types from Maria Jenkins' arcs. You also face a few of the Praetorian EB/AV types. I had no problems with any of them, but my widow handles these types of things fairly easily. Squishier type archetypes might have some problems.

I enjoyed this story quite a bit. It was well written and the characterizations for the Praetorians were certainly a little bit deeper than what we've been given of them thus far. To be fair, the vast majority of the Praetorian material was written during a period of time when deep characterization was not in vogue in CoH, but we get more of them in three or four missions here than in anything that's been done before by the developers. The author humanizes them to a larger extent and that makes you care a little bit when you are doing bad things to them. On that level, I would give some kudos to the author because she actually goes far in making essentially unlikable characters just a little bit likable.

Overall, the one thing that I would take away from this arc is that the author seems to view doing 'evil' in a different way than many of the authors who wrote arcs for Dr. Aeon's contest. What you end up doing, (to me anyway), isn't really all that bad. In fact, when given the opportunity, at least within the scope of the arc, to potentially cripple the Praetorian threat facing our world for a long, long, long time, ie, taking out Tyrant, Anti-Matter, AND Dominatrix, the hero instead chooses pretty much to support the status quo and simply remove their ability to make war on us in the near future.

I am not sure if I would classify that as 'evil,' though I do have to say you end up doing some fairly bad things to some obviously fairly bad people.

Can you just remove that post about that other story. I took it down to rework it and make it better.

I, instead, put up a newer story that I have been working on for a while.

Sure, no problem.

Tonight, in adddition to the normal MA supergroup weekend activity, I ran "Cadaver Crackdown" by Star of Thade.

One of the common refrains common to superhero stories in general is that there are times in which normal law enforcement agencies or officers are insufficient to handle the threats that society faces. Batman becomes Batman, for instance, because crime has become so ingrained into the pulse of Gotham City that the normal people of Gotham need a symbol in order to stand up and take their city back. In other books, it perhaps isn't the world itself that has rendered efforts at upholding the law by normal people moribund, but that the threats have become so large, (the supervillain, the unstoppable crime family, the great disaster), that the normal man cannot defeat them without paranormal assistance.

And as the genre has evolved, writers have written about nearly every angle on every concept common to it. We have seen recognition on the parts of various heroes over the years that the police and other law enforcement agencies would not be able to handle these problems on their own. As recently as in Superman Returns, the man of steel referenced this concept obliquely when he is discussing Lois' pulitzer winning news article with her.

"Every day I hear them crying out for one."

In essence, he is saying that the world needs him because the people cannot handle the threats that face them without him.

And so, in this story, we see this concept from a different point of view. The police themselves, when they recognize that they are insufficient to face the threat, what do they do? Well, unfortunately, in this story, they turn to evil.

This is another concept common, especially, to American literature. Americans in general hold a certain amount of distrust toward authority in general and the police in particular. Perhaps not all of the police. When the police are protecting us from criminals, we appreciate their efforts. But when the police are giving us speeding tickets and otherwise 'harassing' us, we grow annoyed with them. And we have seen many cautionary tales about policemen abusing their authority and the trust that we have placed in them - cops tasering little girls to get them into their cars, cops beating on people, cops shooting people caught on video, etc.

Don't get me wrong. In whole, I think the police holistically are brave men and women who do a largely thankless job. And I appreciate their efforts. But I think these kinds of stories are necessary because they remind us that the police are not simply uniforms and badges. They are men and women and because they are men and women, they are just as capable of making the wrong choice, taking the easy way, and descending down the rabbit hole toward evil as anyone else is.

In contemporary culture, the most similar story to this particular arc that immediately sprang to mind is an episode of the tv show Angel I saw several years ago. The threat to the character is many-fold when the threat comes from the police. There is the immediate physical threat of injury that suddenly paranormal police officers represent to those who attempt to stop them. But on top of that, there is also the threat of loss... ie the loss of the character's reputation and perhaps the loss of freedom since the player's character has set himself against the legal authority.

In this story, the police view themselves as insufficient to face the threats facing King's Row, so they make a deal with a master villain to give them what they believe they are lacking. Power. One of them realizes, (probably too late for him), that they have made the proverbial deal with the devil and brings the player character into the situation to stop this from escalating beyond all control.

The character ultimately succeeds, but not before being forced to bring down nearly the entire precinct in the process. The overtone of all of this is that this particular precinct appears to be relatively beloved by the (much abused) people of King's Row, so there is an added element of pathos to the entire affair.

Overall, there are many elements to this story and, despite the mechanical issues that I had with the arc, from a writing standpoint, it is certainly one of the most sophisticated stories I have played through in MA.

My thoughts:

- I believe the contact's voice can be tightened. He ends up rambling in places and, although this might be intentional in order to make him sound sick, there are times when his musings tend to become unfocused.

- The second mission is probably the one that I think needs work. It takes place on a huge outdoor map, there are bunches of red herring clues, and only 4 clues that are really relevant to the advancement of the plot. In other words, it plays out roughly as a large amount of wandering with no reward because the only rewards in MA come from defeating enemies and it takes a long time to accomplish. There are many players who will not play through the rest of the arc, I would guess, specifically because of this mission.

- The captain of the precinct is, I think, considered by the author to be the ultimate enemy of the arc, however as it plays out, you really only encounter him once. The references to him are rather oblique, therefore you are unsure what he has actually personally done. In other words, the detective you defeat prior to the final confrontation with the captain has more personal meaning to the character because over the course of the arc, there is more build up to this confrontation that there is to the one with the captain.

- There are a few custom characters. They are bursty, as most custom characters are. The visuals on them are pretty well-designed.

- The arc also features that favorite faction of all low-level characters everywhere, the Vahzilok.

- Played it carefully with my Widow at 1/+2/Boss/No Av. The toxic damage of the Vahz and the Rad effects of the Eidolons were pains in the tail, but that is not the fault of the author, and otherwise there were no issues.

Overall, this story is extremely well written. There was quite a bit more to it than you typically see in Mission Architect arcs. It will require a lot of reading on your part, but overall it is a rewarding arc to play.

- S12

One thing I always really like about your reviews (even though I often only skim them unless it's an arc I liked/wrote/or am interested in) is how you compare it to other works of fiction with similar themes. I may not always read the whole review, but I often read the intro, and I always find it interesting.

She's gonna change the seocnd mission to have some enemies in it.