McNum

There's a lot of good arcs mentioned already, but I think one that stuck with me was the Syndicate arcs of the Responsibility Loyalist track. Oh, sure, it starts off good. Meet an undercover agent, infiltrate the group. Then things get bad, slowly, and suddenly you're actually performing hits for the Syndicate and learning that they're big on honor. Finally you get the opportunity to take on Wu Yin and Tub Ci, when you're hit with the reason why they fight: Penelope. Suddenly a simple choice becomes not so simple.

Loyalist: Strike a crippling blow that the Syndicate will not recover from
Resistance: Help an old man rescue his daughter

Law or good? Pick one. With all the nasty things you did to get this far, can you throw away this chance? But can you live with not helping the man who begs you to save his daughter? And the kicker? If you choose Loyalist, what's the arc souvenir? A picture of Penelope Yin. It's easy to feel like such a heel after doing this arc.

Also, an oldie, but a goodie is the original Hero's Hero arc. Yes, it was a blatant boss rush against the evil counterparts of the Freedom Phalanx with each mission being not much more than a target and a throwaway reason. And then you reach the finale. The mighty Statesman held captive and the only way to release him is to defeat his evil double. At this point in the game, Tyrant was one of the nastiest things in the game other than Hamidon, and when you finally beat him, you just saved Statesman himself. You're now a Hero with capital H, and the big guy himself acknowledges that. Great way to end the I1 story.

I have a request for a trail aura: A solid colored line of energy. Ideally it should persist for a second or two.

Like this!

Yup, I'm asking for a trail similar to that of the Powerpuff Girls.

I look forward to seeing how they write angry Freeza. He's scary enough when he's bored, looking forward to seeing him angry.

Also, welcome back normal opening. I guess the Ginyu Force opening got obsolete when the Ginyus were killed.

Finally, I dare them to improve on the orignal dub for Piccolo fusing with Nail. So awesome. *woosh* Then again, they handled the Ginyus pretty well, so I'm confident.

I had Anti-Matter pull a really dirty move on me with his Disintegration.

Disintegrate! *heal* *heal* TIME FREEZE! *dead*

That was just too funny, really. Points to Anti-Matter for being a dirty cheater.

So while talking to Big Blue Prometheus, I noticed something he said in his exposition.

When a powerful being dies permanently, its power is transferred to the Well, but future beings may draw on that specific power to become an Incarnate of [being]. Statesman is the Incarnate of Zeus. There's only one way that can be possible if what Prometheus says is true.

Zeus is dead.

When did that happen and who is powerful enough to take out Zeus? It makes sense, really, because there's no way Prometheus would be standing where he is if Zeus was still around. Those two didn't get along. At all. Did Prometheus have a hand in that, or am I just not up to date on my Greek mythology? Does Greek mythology have a doomsday story?

Today's the day!

And there was much rejoicing. "Yay."

Streakbreakers on the Incarnate rewards. Get 10 reward rolls and still no Rare? Next one will be. 50 and no V. Rare? Same deal. Slightly more runs that you'd need if you were buying them with Empyrians, but low enough to be sure that you'll get what you need in a reasonable amount of time.

The new My Little Pony is actually pretty good. It's well animated, has great voice acting, and is written well in most episodes. It's basically a slice of life comedy starring pastel colored magical talking ponies in a fantasy setting, and somehow that works.

Of course, some fans do take it a bit far, this happens with every fandom, but most bronies are pretty friendly. Still, as always, I suggest people give it a fair shot before dismissing it. I can't link to it, of course, but the full name of the show is "My Litte Pony: Friendship is Magic".

If we're adding things to Force Bolt, I got a nasty idea.

Knockback mag 0.3
Unresistible, unaffected by buffs and debuffs.
Recharge increased to 15 seconds

With that, anything in the game will be knocked down by Force Bolt. Minion, AV, giant monster, anything. Even if it's supposed to be knockback immune. And since the magnitude is so low, it becomes knockdown on the target, unless it's vastly lower level than you. Of course, the resistible knockback we aready have will stay, Force Bolt is a great positioning tool as it is.

Well, operation over and successful. The Launcher behaved quite nicely and just looked at the files already in the folder and said "Ready to play!" Now I just need to remember how to make the Test and Beta installations appear... but there's a sticky topic for that.

I'm sitting here, frantically copying out files from my PC to temporary storage as my PC most likely won't be booting after the next time I shut it down. (Moral of this story: A PC that occasionally fails POST is not "cute", it's your first and possibly only warning.) Got everything vital just about done, so I'm moving on to the rest, which includes City of Heroes.

Can I just copy the folder out like I used to be able to with the old launcher? You know, copy out the files, run the launcher and point it to a folder, then copy everything back and let it verify the files? Does that work with the NCSoft Launcher?

Also, since I'm asking, anything I should know about running CoH on Windows 7? Getting a mostly new PC tomorrow, only carrying over GFX card, my DVD drive, and harddrive. Are there any compatibility issues I should know about? I remember when Vista was new. That was "fun".

You can't unlock Statesman's specific plate, but I believe that the Valkyrie pieces you get with the Mac Edition of CoH has a similar piece. Maybe the Roman pieces off the ITF, too, but I can't remember.

The only thing that bothers me a little about this is that I'm going to respec my forcefielder... again. The lure of a Power Build Up + AoE bubbles is just too tempting.

I'm going to miss Dominate and Mass Hypnosis, though. Mind Over Body and Temp Invul is more or less the same for me. Guess it's time to play around with Mids Hero Creator again.

The Sphere of Life?

So there's this new pony themed music video out using cuts of the show and a parody of a real song. This is pretty much par for the course, there are hundreds of these things all over Youtube. Some are good, some are bad, some are quite insane.

But only one of them is made by the crew behind the actual show.

Pinkie Pie sings "Equestria Girls"
(Yup, same voice actor, too.)

Looks like Hasbro and the Hub have indeed spotted the peripheral demographic, considering Pinkie Pie actually uses the word "brony" and confirms the DJ PON-3 stage name for one of the side characters. I'm not sure what to think about that, except that it's pretty cool.