Authors – Page 1094

Justice, Like Lightning…

May 26, 2015August 28, 2014 by Thalen

So I mentioned my favorite superhero team yesterday, and that their existence was a direct result of the less than amazing Onslaught event that occured in mid-90s Marvel Comics. Well today you get to find out who they are. (Marvel Comics fans should already have a pretty good idea)

So in 1996, Marvel decided it was time to do something big. DC had recently killed and resurrected Superman and then replaced Batman with a crazy guy in armor, and apparently Marvel wanted in on this. Thus, Onslaught the X-Men story that killed the Avengers and Fantastic Four. Basically, Professor X birthed/became an evil super-powerful psychic entity due to his mind-wiping Magneto. Somehow Magneto’s evil brain impregnated Xavier’s psychic brain or some such. I’m honestly still not 100% clear on it; I wasn’t actually reading comics at the time having quit a couple years prior, shortly after the Spider-Man Clone Saga started. That’s a whole different barrel of crazy we won’t get into today.

Anyway, evil super psychic guy. Ultimately, to defeat him, a whole bunch of super-heroes had to throw themselves into him to disrupt his energy form and destroy him. Conveniently, the mutant heroes couldn’t be a part of this for fear that Onslaught might possess one of them and start the whole thing over, so the Fantastic Four and the Avengers sacrificed themselves. No more Avengers. Well, some of the C-list guys were still around, but they went on like one mission afterwards that went really bad, then disbanded.

So that led into Heroes Reborn, where Marvel re-imagined the characters who had died in the main Marvel Universe in a new edgier universe written and drawn by Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld. It was kind of an early attempt at the Ultimate Marvel Universe as done by Image Comics.

Back in the main reality, there was a sudden hole in the superhero world. The Avengers were gone, so who would protect the world? Into this gap came a new team, the Thunderbolts!

Okay, it’s a pretty typical superhero team: patriotic leader, power armor guy, giant super-strong guy, tech guy, etc, etc. Cool character designs, but what make it special? Ah, well that’s where the final page of issue 1 comes in.

Wolves in sheeps’ clothing! Villains masquerading as heroes in hopes of gaining Avengers-level security clearance! This was huge; nothing like this had been done before. Individual villains pretending to be heroes for a single story maybe, but not a book with that as the base premise. Better yet, some of these were the sort of villain who might not want to give up the fame and respect that comes with being a hero. On top of that, this actually remained a secret until the book hit stands. Nowadays it seems like every big twist is spoiled weeks or months out, but this one had full impact.

I came across this book while leafing through comics at Books-A-Million one day. I got to that last page and was just amazed. I bought it immediately and got every issue religiously until the day they turned it into super-hero fight club. Boy, that was weird.

Thunderbolts is single-handedly responsible for my getting back into comics. From that one book, I branched out to pick up other Marvel books. Then Heroes Return brought back the characters that died in Onslaught, and I was pretty much in it for good.

Source: Thalen Speaks
Justice, Like Lightning…

First Turn Advantage

August 12, 2015August 28, 2014 by Kodra

So this week’s Extra Credits did a great discussion on First Turn Advantage in turn based games. It’s pretty solid and you should definitely check it out.

Today I’m going to talk about this issue as it presents in the My Little Pony card game.

Presenting the problem

So the win condition of the My Little Pony card game is to be the first player to reach 15 points. There are a number of ways to do this but the most straight forward is by confronting problems. There are at any given time two problems available on the board. The problems require you to play friends to those problems in certain quantities in order to score points.

That card in the middle is the problem. On my side it tells me I need 2 Orange and 2 Purple power to confront. On the other side it tells my opponent he needs 6 total power to confront. On our turn, when we have this power threshold met, at the end of the turn we score 1 point. If we are the first player to confront that problem, we score additional bonus points, in this case 2 points.

You play friends to these problems by using action tokens. Action tokens trickle in at a steady rate at the start of your turn. This is sort of the core issue with the game. At the start of the game, the start player gets to play with a board state where they are 2 Action tokens ahead of their opponent. The next turn, his opponent is playing in a board state where he has the equal number of action tokens. For the rest of this game, the start player has effectively 2 bonus resource tokens on their turn and the initiative. This is pretty huge.

That said, at the GenCon nationals, the advantage was definitely with the second player.

Explaining the contradiction

So in ponies, for the most part you can score points in small increments. Whenever you do a move that scores a large amount of points, it typically changes the board state to a position where your opponent is able to easily counter that large gain. This leads to a lot of standoffs where neither player is doing much out of fear that a big play will cost them the game.

In close games like this usually come down to a single faceoff for all the marbles. However, at a tournament if the game goes to time, the second player is granted a massive advantage. If I am the start player and time is called, my options for gaining points is still limited, because whatever big move I make will allow my opponent to counter. However, if I am the second player, since the game must end with my turn, I am able to act freely without concern that my opponent will be able to take advantage of the amazing board position I open up by whatever I do on the last turn.

This means that if I am a control deck, and I have locked my opponent out, I can spend my last turn clearing my villain (scoring 2 points), double confronting (scoring 2 more points) and then winning that faceoff (for another 1-3 points). In a normal turn I would never do this, because I am score 5-7 points and opening my opponent up for a juicy 10 point turn, but in the weird ‘player 2 ends the game’ I am free to get as many points as I can.

So I guess what I’m saying is that first turn will typically have an advantage, but if a game does not always end with a decisive victory, and the second player is ensured the last word, second turn may be more valuable than one thinks.

For more on Blaugust, check out the Nook!

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Death in Comics

May 26, 2015August 27, 2014 by Thalen

Isey’s ruminations in response to my post yesterday got me thinking more about death in comics. Death has been a part of superhero comics for a long time, and has been handled in varying ways. Sometimes it’s been done well, but more often it just seems like a last desperate attempt to do something shocking with a character that isn’t as relevant as they once were.

One of the earliest superhero deaths was that of Lightning Lad, way back in 1963. He remained dead for a less than a year and was then resurrected by super-science. There was never really any question that he would be back, though; even the end blurb of the story he died in alludes to his eventual resurrection. Gwen Stacy is another famous death from the 60’s, and one of the few that hasn’t been overturned. Later appearances have inevitably been clones.

These days, death and resurrection seem to go hand in hand, just another plot device among many. I can’t say I entirely disapprove of characters in superhero comics dying, but I do think it should be rare and meaningful. The death of the original Captain Marvel is a good example of a superhero death that was well handled and made for an excellent story. Much of the story is actually focused on how his friends and fellow superheroes deal with his death.

Barry Allen is another character whose death I can’t disapprove of. The Silver Age Flash went out in the most superheroic of ways, saving not just the world, not even just the universe, but an entire multiverse from destruction. His death in Crisis on Infinite Earths ended and era and passed the torch to his sidekick, Wally West, who took up the mantle of the Flash.

More often, though, character death seems to be a way to try and raise the stakes by knocking off a few heroes to show that the threat should be taken seriously. Avengers Disassembled killed off Hawkeye, Vision, Ant-Man, Jack of Hearts, and Agatha Harkness among others to try and drive the threat of the Scarlet Witch’s madness home. It’s worth pointing out that the first three of those characters have all been returned to life since, and the remaining two could be easily brought back at any time based on their established powers.

It’s always possible that part of why I accept the deaths from longer ago is the simple fact that they occurred before I was reading comics. To me, Wally West was the Flash and Gwen Stacy had always been dead. I’m sure readers of the time were as dismayed by their deaths as I was when Nightcrawler died (he’s also back now, by the way). Time heals all wounds, and distance lends objectivity.

Ultimately, death is a part of the story now, for good or ill. I guess I can’t complain too much, since it seems even the most ignominious of superhero deaths have a silver lining. Without Avengers Disassembled we would never have gotten the sublime Young Avengers. And my all-time favorite superhero team owes its existence to one of the most derided of crossovers, the story that killed off the Fantastic Four and Avengers all at once, Onslaught.

Heroes Reborn, on the other hand, was pretty much 100% hot garbage.

Source: Thalen Speaks
Death in Comics

Cannot be Tamed Questionnaire: Part 3

May 26, 2015August 27, 2014 by Kodra

Today I finish the past two days posts based on the survey from Cannot Be Tamed (part 1 here and part 2 here) about my gaming history. Let’s get started

15. Scariest moment in a game

This really couldn’t be anything besides Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I played this game for about a half hour, I had not even seen a single monster, but the atmospheric horror the game exuded caused me enough real world stress that I had to walk away. I have not played the game since, but those thirty minutes have stuck with me as an example of how atmosphere is really capable of creating a mood of horror.

16. Most Heart-wrenching moment in a game

So, Belghast hit on probably the biggest one of these with Mordin Solus death, but Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep definitely ranks up there.

You might be surprised to see DLC of a rather silly game show up in this category, but Tiny Tina deals with some heavy stuff. This is a preliminary spoiler warning. So don’t read if you care about either Borderlands 2 or Tiny Tina’s DLC spoilers.

During the course of Borderlands 2, you meet up with all of the main characters from Borderlands 1, with one of the earlier members being Roland, the leader of the resistance force on Pandora. At a point in the game, the main villain Jack kills Roland, leaving all of his friends to try and fill his shoes and deal with the loss. In Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep you are playing as characters in a tabletop roleplaying game, as controlled by the remaining members of the Borderlands 1 crew (Lilith, Brick and Mordekai).

During your adventures you keep encountering a white knight who is there to save the princess. This knight is portrayed as Roland, and everyone at the table is clearly uncomfortable with the fact that Tina is injecting their dead friend into the game, trying to encourage her to take on a different tack. Eventually Tina has to come to grips with the fact that Roland is dead, and everyone has to come to realize this is her way of dealing with the grief. It’s a really poignant story a midst the goofy D&D references.

17. What are your favorite websites/blogs about games?

I get my video games news aggregated by various social mediums, but the video game site I use the most is Escapist, just for it’s various web shows. I also am a huge fan of Extra Credits, and watch both Extra Credits and Design Club whenever they launch.

18. What’s the last game you finished?

Wolfenstein: A New Order. This game is way better than I had any expectation for it to be. It’s story is fantastic, the gameplay is varied and rewarding, the soundtrack is fun and the graphics are great. You get to experience a very well thought out version of what the world would look like if the Nazi’s won World War II. Killing the bastards has never been as sweet as in this game.

19. What future releases are you most excited for?

Destiny is a game that is so up my alley. I picked up a PS4 specifically for this game because it sounds like a combination of Halo and Borderlands with a more fleshed out realization of both of those games. It was a toss up between that and Civilization: Beyond Earth, but Destiny is certainly a thing I’m excited for.

20. Do you identify as a gamer?

Yes, but I feel that’s because so much of my personality and hobbies are wrapped up in playing games. Video games are just one small part of the variety of games I play: board games, tabletop roleplaying games, live action roleplaying games, video games, traditional card games, collectible card games, miniature games. If it is a game, I will probably give it a play. This label is kinda toxic right now because a lot of people who bear it are asshats, but I feel like it’s part of my identity and it would be dumb to hide from it.

21. Why do you play video games?

That’s a hard question. I’ve always played video games, and I just never stopped. I think it’s the feeling of agency they provide, being able to take action and watching the consequences of those actions unfold. It’s a feeling that is very rare in the real world, and I love watching the impact I can create in a game.

I also think that there is a very different take on how stories can be told in video games thanks to you being an active participant. The Stanley’s Parable is telling a very distinct story and that story could only be told in the form of a video game.

But ultimately, it’s a way to do something with friends who are very geographically disparate, and I love that experience more than anything else.

That wraps this up. For more Blaugust stuff, check out the Nook.

Source: The Keen Gamer