Ironik

Wait, when did you grow up? This is far too adult for the 19-year-old GG I know.

I do not know about it. I must! Tell us all!

That last part is important. I see it all the time. There are very few of the new "slick" artists who can convey a story. Stuart Immonen is one. I bought the Flash Gordon graphic novel last year and found it nearly impenetrable to decipher on some pages, because the art had zero storytelling sense. You can't just slap a bunch of lines on the page and make it look cool without doing the fundamental job of telling a story.

I agree with you on some of these guys, but I really did love Gil Kane's work back in the day. The one when Spider-man went to the Savage Land was lovely, and one of the first comics I bought for myself. And I read that Star Hawks paperbook collection at least two dozen times. Loved that robot dog.

Man, just look at everything going on in this picture. Great flow, awesome draftsmanship, terrific storytelling... it has it all. I mean, just look at the expression on Ka-Zar's face, and you can only see half of it!



I remember buying this at a hospital gift shop, but I don't know why we were there. The girl wasn't going to give us our comics because my brother and I didn't have the one penny sales tax. We were dejected and going to put our comics back when my grandmother came in and ponied up the dough.

Whoa... I've just spent the last two hours looking for technical drawings and cutaways of the Jupiter II.

I think you lost track of the fact that I was talking specifically about the VO in SW:TOR.

As for their implementation here in CoH, I think they'd be just as bad. In the beginning, the scripting for CoH tended toward the terse -- maximal information using minimal verbiage. Now it's incredibly verbose, with a bunch of stylistic foofaraw* that seems unending at times. Imagine trying to wade through that at speaking speed instead of the 10x you can accomplish via reading.

And yes, the VO in TOR *did* slow down computers, something widely complained about during beta. They tried to correct it I guess, but I never saw much improvement, suffering many stutters and often crashes during particularly heavy expository scenes. I don't know why that would happen, but it did.

* That's a real word.

Maybe not #1, but I think it's definitely a contender. I just half-watched it the other night and yet again I was taken with how for every really great scene (the initial warehouse scene, the motorcycle chase, the tomb with the scorpions) there were two truly terrible scenes, sometimes immediately afterward. There's a reason why "nuke the fridge" has started to equal "jump the shark" as a metaphor for terribleness: it's a genuinely awful idea and scene.

Especially when Indy 4 followed Raiders on TV the other night, you can just see the lack of quality when watching them back-to-back like that. The only mitigating factor is that Temple of Doom was so terrible. In the Starlog interview with Lawrence Kasdan when Raiders came out, he talks about the rejected-for-silliness gags from Raiders... all of which are in Temple.

So did the Kardashians. Kind of hard to conflate popularity with quality in some cases.

This is true. I never understood the hype for Phantom. I mean, it was a story that we already pretty much *knew*, so what was there to be excited about? Lucas made a number of gigantic missteps simply with his choices, but even if he had done it perfectly, there's no way that movie could've been a winner.

Riddick... Detention Room Monitor!

So sort of like The Thing... or perhaps the Skrulls. Interesting, as the tech for this already exists in-game (costumes, doppelgangers, etc.). Not entirely exciting, though.

Seems to me this one would be a bit too much like Starship Troopers movie or the Reapers from Mass Effect. Don't want to be accused of copycattery.

Not sure I can see this happening, either, since it might come across too much like the Clockwork. Or that B-movie from last year about the kids in Moscow fighting invisible energy monsters. (The forgettable title escapes me.)

Defining the look of the Battalion seems to be a terrifically thorny problem. Maybe some of these can be combined to make a hybrid model, some sort of amorphous shapeshifter who can project its essence to possess things (and people), thus leaving it vulnerable while becoming even more powerful, which would add a new dynamic to villain interactions we haven't seen too much before.

Well, I solo 97% of the game, so that's my perspective. The other team members not getting to see the game text has long been an issue with CoH. I don't know why that's never been addressed.


I did address why they're bad from a player's perspective: they slow down your gameplay, they're largely uninteresting and they're awkward to sit through on teams and annoying as hell the second time around.

It's not just that TOR and STO got them wrong, it's that everyone gets them wrong. I think they're fine for the new tutorial mission in CoH, and I've seen them well-done similarly in other games, but using them more than sparingly just makes everything come to a screeching halt. Mostly all they are is infodumps, and chunks of exposition are hard digest in any fashion.

I agree. Although the real issue is that they've been keeping the Starship Troopers franchise alive with 2 sequels, an animated series and now this latest lame CGI flick which came out this week.

Personally, I'd rather someone made The Forever War instead, which I preferred over Starship Troopers or John Steakley's Armor.

Since Rocketeer and Captain America were directed by the same guy....

I get that feeling from all of the Dredd trailers.

VO just slows everything down. Slows down your gameplay, your computer, everything. And being the altoholic that I am (waves vaguely at sig), it was especially maddening to have to click through speeches every time you wanted to do something a second time. Plus, I can read about 10 times faster than people talk, and there was all that *acting* going on. Which is nice... for a movie. I'm here to save the world, not listen to a distraught alien kvetch about spare parts.

I agree that CoH is over-reliant on the pop-up text in many of the new missions. When I first played the Freedom opening missions, I didn't even realize there WERE pop-ups because they were hidden behind my map. It's a neat little feature that feels like an interactive comic book, but it should be used for punctuation rather than extended dialogue.

I had the suspicion that TOR would play better solo when they said the fateful words: "Completely voice acted."

That's fine for a single-player game, but not one where you pay a monthly sub. I don't know where you draw the line at being wrong, but for me the story was boring and the gameplay was just dull. It looked gorgeous, but that was about the end of the good things for me.

I'm quite glad CoH hasn't had the resources to do that sort of thing, because even the cut scenes have a tendency to interrupt the flow of play.

It doesn't. It stung A BIT when it happened. I got over it, being a grown-up and all. (And having seen lots worse things happen in life.) I'm just saying that in the context of this particular game at that particular time, it was a teensy-weensy annoying to find an exclusive thing wasn't exclusive any more. You know, like when you get a splinter. You don't dwell on it, you just get aggravated while trying to work this small bit of pain out of your finger, and then years later someone mentions how they got a speck of dust in their eye and you say, "Oh yeah, one time I got a bit by a splinter in my finger, so I get it."

Does that spell it out enough?

I can see that, I suppose.

Although I must admit that it did sting a bit when every Vet got the pre-order Prestige sprints, thus devaluing the ones those of us had as badges of early-adoption, it makes some financial sense to let everyone have everything eventually. Doesn't do much for loyalty, though.

One kind of gets the notion that they're just throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks, without any clear vision of what they're doing. (Or ignoring whatever their original vision was... assuming it was anything other than "make more money, minions!")

I read the first few issues of some of the books... Action Comics was the clear stand-out for me, mostly because they went for a more hard-edged throwback Superman from the original run back in 1938. He's not all-powerful and busts chops like a dude with superpowers would if he were on a mission to kick some bad-guy *****. I kind of lost the thread of the book while I was in Africa and just didn't feel compelled to pick it back up. And that was a book that I *liked*.