MIDDLEMAN EPISODES

I just got a comment asking what I thought of the MIDDLEMAN series after I reviewed the pilot. Well hopefully I will have reviews for all the episodes so far by FRIDAY. I can say that I’m a fan of the show, but I’ll go in depth later this week

FINALLY COMIC-CON review

So I’m just going to do a quick LOVE/HATE recap of things I found awesome

LOVE

• My favorite writing duo, SETH ROGEN & EVAN GOLDBERG, will be writing a episode of the Simpsons next season
• DC is literally making their books a ode to everything I love: MILESTONE characters are coming to DC proper…I finally get STATIC in TEEN TITANS.
• WATCHMEN. I’m actually looking forward to it
• my favorite comics writer, GEOFF JOHNS, is bringing one of my favorite bits of SUPERMAN’s history to SMALLVILLE…The Legion Of Super Heroes.
• The team from GREEN LANTERN:REBIRTH(which made me realize again why HAL JORDAN was one of my fav characters as a kid) will be tackling a character I never got a real chance to connect too…BARRY ALLEN-FLASH REBIRTH. Thank you again GEOFF JOHNS
• KEVIN SMITH will be working on a BATMAN mini series…why yes please I’ll gladly sign up for that
• More DC UNIVERSE ONLINE…my PS3 will have a use
• DC Panels…listened to all of them and they were awesome. People forget that comics are the only reason COMIC CON exists in the first place.
• FIREBREATHER cartoon, the comic is awesome can’t wait to see it in motion

There’s alot of stuff thats escaping me right now…Now to the stuff that either didn’t excite me or I just didn’t care

HATE

• MARVEL panels and upcoming events…I haven’t really enjoyed a big MARVEL event in about three years(the space epics not withstanding). Every one seems to start off good then just begin to blow donkey. So with Secret Invasion boring me to tears, and with some new story featuring a character I can’t stand and wish didn’t exist(the 3rd Summers Brother:VULCAN) and a character who can’t talk(BLACK BOLT) I just can’t get into it. This might just end the streak MARVEL’s had with actually good space stories…Quesada and company had to ruin space like they have the regular MARVEL universe to make it even.
• BLACK PANTHER ANIMATED SERIES: This kinda skirts the line, I love the character of BLACK PANTHER but hate MARVEL’s shoehorning of the relationship between he and STORM. But I do like the art style of the show being like that of JOHN ROMITA JR.
• IRON MAN NICKELODEON CARTOON: Same as before, I’m always happy to get a animated show based on a comic book, but I can count the good MARVEL cartoons on one hand. Oh and IRON MAN is going to be a teenager to appeal to the NICK KIDS…we’ll see, they did the same thing to X-MEN and it didn’t last very long.
• BATMAN-BRAVE AND THE BOLD: it seems I’m on the fence with these cartoons but I WANT to love them, but everything shown did nothing for me. BATMAN:B&B did excite me more simply for the scenes of guest characters, but the super kiddy look kinda sucks. But hey, SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN surprised me to become one of the best cartoons of the season.
• THE SPIRIT movie…ugh just ugh…I only liked SIN CITY, I am not in the mood for another SIN CITY look alike from the guy who created SIN CITY..way to mine your artistic sensibilties…god I really don’t care for FRANK MILLER in any shape or form.

I know once I post this I’ll think of something else but as a whole COMIC CON was good…it reinforced what I’ve known for awhile now…MARVEL isn’t really for me anymore, and DC is giving me everything I want on a silver platter. I don’t really like to talk about movies at COMIC CON because I feel strongly about what I feel to be explotation of Comic books and their fans to shill products that have nothing to do with comics or the sci fi community. It’s like shooting fish in a barrell…I understand it but don’t like it.

IGN:SKATE 2 HANDS ON

I’m going to say this now, theres a pretty short list of video games coming out that really get me excited and SKATE 2 is very high on the list. I still play SKATE at least once a day, I freaking love good skateboarding games.

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Last year, EA and Black Box redefined the skating genre with Skate by creating one of the most natural (and, arguably, realistic) control schemes that we’ve ever seen in a sports title. By assigning tricks to the right analog stick instead of face buttons, move inputs mimicked the actual rotations and flips of a real skateboard, bringing gamers closer to being on an actual board than ever before. Given its commercial and critical success, a follow-up was only a matter of time, and now Skate 2 is on the way. The sequel picks up some five years after the first title, and after the events from the Wii and DS Skate It titles. In the Nintendo iterations, San Vanelona is rocked by a series of disasters, necessitating an entire rebuild of the city. Behold, New San Vanelona. Before I get ahead of myself though, let me get to the main purpose of the demo: the new control scheme. Or, as it were, the expanded control scheme. Not wanting to fix what wasn’t broken, Black Box simply added new moves and abilities to the existing control system. In other words, you can sit down with Skate 2 and play it exactly like the last game without any problems. You’ll be missing out on the new stuff of course, but veterans of the first title will find that the sequel feels exactly the same at the start, which is fantastic. Veterans will also find though that the new stuff fixes pretty much all of the outstanding “problems” with the first game, adding in the ability to do hand plants, get off your board and much, much more.

As I mentioned, all of the new controls simply build off of the existing setup, which means that the new moves feel extremely natural to tie in to your existing arsenal. For example, you can now perform finger flips by holding one of the triggers to grab your board, and then doing a Flickit move as per normal. Easy. To kick out one or both of your feet during a trick, simply hit one of the two kick buttons during a move. Again, easy. Performing an Ollie, then holding your board and pressing a kick button will perform a foot plant. You can now grab your board while grinding, and you can land into a grind while performing a grab. You can also now perform hippie jumps, which is where you leave your board and hop over something as your board goes under it. These moves were possible to do in the first game with impeccable timing, thanks to the physics-based trick system, but now they’re built right into the control scheme. By pressing and holding both kick buttons, and then releasing to jump, your board will stay on the ground while you catch some air. For now, you simply perform a basic jump, but the team is looking into the possibility of having you run while in the air, so you would be able to do something like performing a hippie jump onto a car, running to the other side and hopping back on your board again. Visions of Marty McFly race through our heads…

The right shoulder button is used for hand plants, which puts you into a basic hand plant position at the top of a quarter pipe. Then, pressing a trigger and tweaking the move with an analog stick will give you access to more hand plant tricks. And, if you press a kick button or two, you’ll kick that leg out and tweak the move even more. It’s somewhat basic in setup, but since you’re given what seems like analog control over your tweaks (coupled with the ability to kick one or both legs), you have a good amount of play here.

The last new addition to the control setup that I got to try out is the ability to actually get off of your board and wander around the town on your own two feet. This is a substantial addition not only because it allows you to get over curbs or up stairs much more easily, but because it also allows you to alter the environment. Anything that you see that would be moveable by a real person can be pushed and pulled around in the game. Benches and small ramps are the two most common candidates here, both of which allow you to set up custom lines or new ways to access various areas. All of this editing is done in the game, in realtime, as opposed to popping out to an overhead editor or something of that nature. And again, if something is too big to move in real life, you won’t be able to move it in the game (so no shoving around busses or large shipping crates).

Various Black Box reps hinted at the potential of having small puzzles in the game, where you might need to move benches around to get somewhere you couldn’t otherwise reach, but the folks also mentioned that you can use these objects to help mold the environment to your strengths. So if you love rails, you can set up a ramp-heavy spot to better suite your skills. What’s also sweet is that any changes you make are persistent, so if you move some ramps and come back 10 hours later, they’ll still be there.

I was able to try out the new control tweaks through three new environments — the Waterfront, Slappy’s Skate Park and San Vanelona Mountain. The Waterfront is situated alongside the shores of New San Vanelona and is a street trick-happy skate park. Similar in many ways to the school from the first game (and its demo), there are plenty of benches, rolling ramps, curling rails and so forth. It offers tons of variety and experimentation in setting up your lines, which is awesome.

Slappy’s Skate Park looks like it was built specifically to film highlight reels, and looks like it was created especially for skating much more so than the Waterfront. Tons of kickers lead into rails for plenty of multi-trick combos, making it pretty easy to amass a nice collection of your own reels.

New San Vanelona Mountain is the biggest change from anything we saw in the first game, however. Largely a downhill track in nature, you can start at the top (how you get there is being kept under wraps, though there will be multiple ways) and wind your way all the way down to the bottom of the massive mountain. A race awaits you here, obviously, with checkpoints split into multiple sections that allow you to take shortcuts rather easily. There are a number of places you can stop at along the way to hit up various ramps and such, making for what looks like what will be a hot spot for skaters and highlight reels when the game arrives.

The rest of New San Vanelona will need to wait until later to be explored, but we do know that the entire city is being re-built from the ground up. This not only reflects the story (with regards to the city being destroyed in Skate It), but it helps take advantage of the new rendering engine as well. At first glance, I thought that aside from the skater models (which are clearly improved), the game looked largely the same as the first. However, after going back and watching a few old replays, the differences became much more apparent. Texture detail is a good bit sharper, and the lighting model is much nicer. Oh, and best of all, it runs at 60fps. The Xbox 360 version on display had a few hitches where it dropped below 60, with the PS3 dropping even more often, but both versions clearly run better than the first game already, and there’s still plenty of optimization left to go.

While I got some great hands-on time with the new controls at a number of skate spots, EA and Black Box are being tight-lipped on practically every other element of the game, including the story, overall progression, online stuff, replays and reels and pretty much everything else you can think of. Fortunately, what I was able to play was fluid, natural and, best of all, very inviting for veterans. So far, it looks like this is the game that fans of the first one were crying out for, so hopefully the other elements live up to the promise as well. I know I can’t wait to thrash more of New San Vanelona.

by Chris Roper
IGN.COM

IGN:CHAMPIONS ONLINE HANDS-ON

The first thing I have to mention about playing Champions Online with the Xbox 360 controller is the sheer ease and intuitiveness of gameplay. I am primarily a PC gamer and although I do love my PSP / DS, I am not a console gamer of any great skill. My six-year-old nephew drags me around in LEGO Star Wars on the Xbox 360 and sighs when I double-jump, miss the ledge yet again and my character dies another horrible death. So I approached this hands-on preview of Champions Online at their Media Day with a little trepidation if not mild panic. How many different buttons do I have to mash to fire off that special attack?

I really should have been reassured by my knowledge of Jack Emmert, Chief Creative Office of Cryptic Studios. Jack is a long-time tabletop gamer and comic book aficionado, not a huge computer MMOG game player. He is the creator of the sidekick system, a concept that has been adopted by many MMOGs following City of Heroes. Also known as a Mentor or Apprenticeship system, it basically allows players of diverse levels to play together by raising and / or lowering their levels while grouped together, often with added bonuses to both players.

“Developers tend to design the game they want to play,” said Jack, “I whined about not being able to keep up with my friends playing MMOGs.” The sidekick system, according to Jack, is the direct result of wanting to be able to continue playing with friends. Keenly aware of the importance of accessibility in bringing players into, and then hooking them on a MMOG, Champions Online is designed with a low barrier of entry, featuring intuitive game play without complicated combinations of button-mashing on the console to achieve required results. To wit, the play on both PC and the console has to be fun.

I breathed a sigh, half of relief and half of disbelief when I saw the laminated controls card sitting by the Xbox game controller. Button combinations for that special attack? None. Instead, you build up an energy bar. Smaller skills / attacks build this energy bar while the more powerful attacks spend it, requiring a bit of tactical decision making on the player’s part as to when to spend that bar. Billed as an action oriented game, the combat of Champions Online takes a leaf (pixel?) from console games and is more active / reactive. Every enemy has a “shtick,” a signature move that telegraphs so you can prepare for it. Sure, you can ignore it and hope it doesn’t do too much damage to you, but you are better off blocking, a single button move, to avoid the worst of that attack.

Another characteristic of console action gameplay design used by Cryptic for Champions Online was the drop of “boosts” from enemies killed. These drops provide health, power, or attribute boosts to your character and to use them all you had to do was run over them. With drops, there is no need for inventory access for “potions” and certainly less need for healing / buffing skills. It looks like an excellent solution for Cryptic to keep the game away from “waiting for bars to recharge” and to provide for continuous action. These boosts look like they will also be a way for tuning on the fly, so to speak. If the encounter is too tough, more boosts can be dropped. If it’s too easy, cut out some of the boost drops. Boosts that a character cannot use will not be consumed, and care is required, as there are negative “boosts” as well. It’s a nice way to keep players on their toes and away from “boost rolling.”

My first character was a Brick. That is a tank, a strong man. Able to thump chest! Yargh! I digress. The character was wonderfully made. With large exaggerated upper body and huge arms, he moved like the Hulk. It’s a great show of what character customization can do. Hand to hand was my weapon of choice and I was strong enough to break up a bit of pavement and throw it at my enemies. I am, after all, a super hero. We had two scenarios to run through and somehow, I ended up with a Brick twice with no one willing to change stations with me.

The first scenario was an indoor boss raid. We were to infiltrate Stronghold and “contain” Menton, a new character developed by Cryptic, disposing of his guards and minions that were in the way. He was tough, so we died like rats, then re-spawned quickly and learned to recognize his shtick and run over boosts. We finally took him down.

The second was an outdoor scenario in Snake Gulch. We were met by Belle Steele who filled us in on the history of a playground gone awry, leaving a Canyon filled with robot cowboys toting electric lassos and saloon gals with really electrifying kisses that they could blow at you. We triggered a quest there and after destroying a bunch of these yard-trash robots, out came the mini-boss, Annie Oakley (or was it ASCII Oakley?), to see what was going on. Robotic of course. I threw a lot of rocks.

It is difficult to write a good preview of a game given only two short hands-on sessions on mid-level characters. I can report that the art is lovely. Art Development Director Shayne Herrera likens playing the game to “playing in a comic book.” It is highly detailed and yet has the comic book cel-shaded look. The customization promised is exciting, given that Champions Online is following up on the character customization we saw in City of Heroes. Customization of powers is in the works, and players can also customize their character’s stance and moving animations as well as set facial animations.

The controls were quick to learn, and with developers pointing out the “shticks” and boosts, the game was easy to play. Skills clusters are assigned to the game controller’s face buttons and swapped out using the right bumper. At the hands-on demo, we hardly had to swap out any. I surmise that, as skills scale, this will remain a constant but it may prove awkward if more than two clusters of skills are required.

This is an early slice of the game, and we were not shown much of the game interface nor anything else besides the quick action combat, pre-built characters and the humor in the game in the design of Snake Gulch. Champions Online will debut on both the PC and the Xbox360 in spring of 2009. If the action-combat scales up and down without adding too much complexity to the game controls, Cryptic has another winner on their hands.

by Carolyn Koh
IGN.COM