Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

games

Krisis's coverage Dungeons & Dragons and 5e-Compatible supplements, board games, and the occasional video game.

But I Regress, pt. 4

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In my last installment I had given up pretty much all elements of boyish whimsy in favor of being REALLY SERIOUS about college, music, and dating, not always in that order.

Then came graduation. Or at least the specter of graduation on the horizon. I was zeroing in on a something-cum-laude diploma, my relationship with E was going well, and I was no longer maxing out my credit card to keep up with my new CD acquisitions.

In short, the pressure was off.

I let a little bit of whimsy back in to my life. When my mother bought a house I brought all my old comic books to my college apartment, slipping highlights to Erika and Gina under their doors. On a whim E and I bought Warcraft III, but our addiction was elastic – it never waylaid an assignment.

Then came what I refer to as my lost year. Actually, it was a year and a half. No, not the Behind the Music period with the evil girlfriend and all the vodka. (I’ve already blogged about that enough.)

I should have been so lucky. Nope, this time it was all me. Me, and City of Heroes.

Having drawn my comic collection back close to my bosom, I had gotten to wondering what was up with all of my former favorite heroes. In reading about their recent histories I also caught up with other industry news.

In my reading I kept catching rumors about a game that would totally immerse you in a comic-book world. I never retained the name. Whenever E and I would hit a mall I’d snoop around for said game, but I never saw it.

Then, smack in the middle of completing my Senior Project, I found myself reading an article about City of Heroes.

This was it – the superhero game. It was completely non-denominational – not Marvel or DC, but a continuity-free universe to plan your own hero in.

It was a long weekend at the end of April, and I decided to download the game client for a trial. It would be a way to let off steam between bouts with my Senior Project. I created some characters, including my sardonic superhero version of Rabi.

The incomparable Cassandra Lewis in action.

The next thing I remember is Autumn of 2005.

Okay, not really. Well, sort of really. I mean, I recall the rest of 2004 and most of 2005. I finished my Senior Project, graduated, moved in with Elise, and got a job. We moved into our house on Greenwich street and had a big party.

I just don’t recall anything else.

City of Heroes wasn’t a video game – it was liking living inside of a comic book. That’s what I always wanted – way back from my original comic book days when I was writing my Crisis Team novella on the bus.

I was playing it semi-professionally – like, 7.5 hours a day on the clock, double on weekends. I didn’t socialize. I didn’t write very many songs. Essentially, I worked, dated E, and played the game. THAT WAS IT.

I was known for showing up at 6pm on the dot with a martini in hand. My main character, the Rabi-derived Cassandra Lewis, was well-known to higher level folks on my server. I was a numbers guru, with lists and spreadsheets calculating damage and detailing game badges. I was a captain in my super-group. My under-bill consisted of dozens of other characters who – in my mind – all knew each other.

I even started talking about the game at work – a sure sign of deep, intractable addiction. In fact, on my lunch breaks I had begun penning a novella to tie all my characters together in a single sweeping narrative.

It all ground to a halt in the fall of 2005. The CoH staff made a big change to how they calculated data, and I realized that all of my spreadsheets and characters and stories didn’t really belong to me.

I was doing exactly the thing i swore never to do again when I started Crushing Krisis – write within someone else’s continuity, someone else’s editorial control. Quite suddenly my heroic bubble burst. I wrote a calm letter to the head game designer thanking him for 18-months of fun and went back to writing songs.

Thus came the second dark-age of my geekdom, which was spoiled this June by Mikeyil.

Tune in Thursday for the next installment in my saga. In the meantime, have you seen my Guide to Collecting X-Men Comics as Trade Paperbacks? That’s what started us down this whole geeky rabbit-hole of memory.

But I Regress, pt. 3

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Warning: This image actually has nothing to do with the rest of this post. It just makes me giggle.

Holy continuity, Batman! Do you remember where I left off over a month ago?

In short, I had to give up my monthly comic book addiction to fuel my constant need to be online, which brought with it Real-Time Strategy games like Warcraft & Starcraft. Static characters on a page couldn’t hold a candle to tiny sprites with their own hit points and attributes.

Oh, Sega Dreamcast. We had such good times. I will remember you. Will you remember me? Don’t let your life pass you by. Weep not for the memories.


Then idle gamer-me met college. With unlimited bandwidth and nearly unlimited time, Freshman year Peter kept playing Starcraft solo, but added shooters like Unreal and Rogue Spear to his repertoire, playing with his (okay, enough: my) roommate Kenny and the gang from Shafted.org. I got addicted to in-browser games, particularly the deeply strategic Archmage.

I even got into console gaming, playing endless rounds of Madden 2k on Kenny’s Dreamcast.

Yeah, I’m old.

Actually, our college D&D sessions represented a major milestone for me - I RPed a male character!


Then the utopia of free time, free games, and free T1 internet came to an abrupt halt. Sophomore year found me working to pay for my apartment and with a single meager line of dial-up and a teeny 13-inch television with no console. It also found me starting a blog and finally scraping together the money for a nicer guitar.

The result? The Peter who dug comic books and video games evaporated completely long before I turned 21. Elise never met him, aside from a weekly night of Dungeons & Dragons and some in-browser gaming.

Any attention and cash I had left to spare after class and E went to my burgeoning collection of songs – both by other people and by me – and concert tickets, when I could afford them.

I really thought geek-Peter was completely dead and gone. That is, until graduation…

To find out how that happened next, you… well, you don’t have to do anything. I need to write at least two more entries of this transcribed oral history of geekdom. And, hey, let’s not forget that the impetus of this entire thing was my best-in-class Guide to Collecting X-Men Comics as Trade Paperbacks. As of today I am officially caught up to 2010 in X-Continuity!

But I Regress, pt. 2

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Where were we? Oh, I was telling you about how with the responsibility of owning a home I have suddenly regressed to being a teenager.

Last time I detailed my overwhelming love for comic books, and how it was vanquished by the great expanse of the internet.

To this day I marvel at how mercenary I was about my decision. When it came down to $40 a month on comics or on internet access I phoned up the comic store and canceled my orders without a second thought.

How could I?

Comics were a world I could dive into and experience alone, but the internet was a world I could lose myself in along with millions of other people.

To put it in today’s terms, comics weren’t social.

I wanted them to be. I’d skulk at the comic shop … beg my mother to let me find a pen pal at the back of The Maxx. I would read the letters page in X-Men and imagine being able to talk all day with people as obsessed with the characters as I was.

The internet had all of that, available 24/7. Within days I was on a Dungeons & Dragons listserve and in a Final Fantasy fanfic club. After years of being a pretty insular only child, I found out I had things in common with people. Lots of things!

And, while building my first website became a top priority, so did Warcraft II.

I have never been much of a PC gamer, so was completely unfamiliar with the concept of real-time strategy war games. When my friend Lucas made me download the WCII demo over my 14.4k modem I was floored – it was like Risk crossed with Dungeons & Dragons, but with none of the plastic pieces or dice rolls.

(I was the kind of kid that, when bored, would set up elaborate six-person games of Risk between my GI Joes and play each side against each other for hours. Actually, I still do that a few times a year with my LOTR Risk, just sans the GI Joes.)

(My wife finds this fascinating)

All it took was one modem game of Warcraft II on the single demo map and I was hooked. I had an army of orcs to do my bidding, and friends to trade taunts with all night. And sea turtles!

I had no interest in quick, decisive battles. When we both bought the full game I’d make maps packed with endless gold mines so we could entrench and battle for hours on end.

Much as my comic obsession stayed mostly contained to X-Men, my RTS urge was isolated to Blizzard games. Even after buying my first guitar put the whammy on many of my other adolescent hobbies (say goodbye, fanfic!), I remained a devoted late-night WCII addict.

The addiction was made worse senior year when one of my friends slipped me their extra copy of Starcraft. It was Warcraft . . . in space!

I think that – and how it relates to my current predicament – is a story for next time.

The impetus for this whole tale is my recently-launched Guide to Collecting X-Men in TPBs, which is meant to aid former adolescent addicts such as myself in catching up on what they’ve missed.

Tuesday Tech Links

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Here’s the techier side of the links I re-remaindered out of last night’s remainders post.

Why did Duke Nukem’ Forever take forever? I’ve read some great articles on this vaporware legend (my fav example of which I cannot seem to track down), but none with a line so succinct and close-to-home as this one:

t’s a dilemma all artists confront, of course. When do you stop creating and send your work out to face the public? Plenty of Hollywood directors have delayed for months, dithering in the editing room. But in videogames, the problem is particularly acute, because the longer you delay, the more genuinely antiquated your product begins to look — and the more likely it is that you’ll need to rip things down and start again.

Substitute “pop music” for “video games” and you have the story of Chinese Democracy, or my long-promised LP. (Via Daring Fireball).

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Indie acousta-rocker Scott Andrew got tired of trying to sync his blog to MySpace, so he wrote an app for that.

I’ve been seeing little boxes from LaLa on just about every blog albums-of-the-year/decade list, proffering handy audio samples. Apparently Apple just bought the La^2, and in the process scuttled a longstanding CD swap service. This is notable because they backed out of it in (what I considered to be) an apologetic, helpful fashion. Take note, MySpace/iMeem.

Via Contentious: An E-Book Buyer’s Guide to Privacy charts what personal info different eBook services can track. This chart should be combined with “An E-Book Buyer’s Rights” guide that talks about what privileges can be rescinded by each service. For example, if you replace your Kindle it will not reload your purchased periodicals.

(For the record, I am anti-eBook – if I wanted to read something I don’t own from a screen I’d just keep sitting in front of my laptop.)

Also via the same Contenious post: Backupify to back up your Twitter, FaceBook, and Gmail … for free. That is, sign up for it now, get a grandfathered freebie account even when the service switches over to a paid model. Quote from Backupify president: “[S]torage is cheap while customer acquisition is very expensive.”

Smart guy.

In a similar vein: Download videos from YouTube with Gazzump I come and go on the usefulness of this service. I used to want to sit on my own personal archive of everything. While I still feel that way about my audio collection, I think I’ve sacrificed video to the cloud. Still, handy.

Finally, not strictly a tech link, but: The Flag of Earth.

Play at playing with The Beatles. Or, just play with The Beatles.

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The pair of surviving Beatles recently appeared at E3 to hype the impending The Beatles: Rock Band, out on September 9. It represents a remarkable milestone – mass licensing of Beatles songs to a third party, cooperation of all four Beatles estates on new intellectual property, release of new studio chatter from the band, and creating multi-tracked masters of songs originally recorded live in mono or stereo. (see the full fact sheet)

In the game, you and your friends can take the Beatles from the Cavern Club days all the way to the rooftop in your own living room, not mention traipsing through their imagined acid trips. You’ll start out with 45 Beatles songs in-game, but many more will available as downloadable content – starting with the complete Abbey Road.

Assuming you already have a plethora of plastic video game instruments lying around the house, the a la carte game will cost you $100. If you need all of the plastic instruments to go with it, you’ll be dropping $250 for the full kit.

Seems like a bargain to play along with 45 of your favorite Beatles tunes, right?

Not really. Because, if you have an actual instrument lying around the house, you can buy The Beatles: Complete Scores hardcover tome for half the price of the a la carte game and learn how to play the actual music to every single Beatles song.

If you need an actual instrument to go with it, you can pick up a starter guitar or bass package plus the book for about $250 – yes, even including a replica Hoffner bass! (The scores plus drums will run you a bit more – $300-$500).

Herein lies your dilemma. Do you want to have a primary experience with the music you love, or a secondary experience?

If you’re a non-musician, you might argue, “I don’t really have a choice,” but I think you do.

You might argue, “I don’t read music,” yet you’re willing to learn an arcane method of notation in Rock Band that’s not too different from reading guitar tab, which is included in the score book.

You might argue, “I don’t have nimble fingers, a sense of pitch or rhythm, or a decent voice,” yet if you expect to surpass even easy mode on Rock Band you’ll need to hone some or all of those skills just as you would playing actual music. In fact, Rock Band is much less forgiving of mistakes with drumming and vocals than a jam with friends would be.

You might argue, “I don’t have time to practice music enough for it to be worthwhile,” yet you have time to play Rock Band two or three hours a week. That same time would serve you equally well training on an actual instrument. You could probably learn how to play “I Want To Hold You Hand” on guitar in the same time it takes you to reach your first save point.

Convinced yet?

Other Rock Band titles offer the allure of collecting disparate, virtuosically-difficult music into a video game – much of which is impossible to track down as printed music. None of that is true this time around – the music comes from a single source, the virtuouosity is in the ease of playing, and it’s all collected in a single, relatively cheap book. It’s a completely level playing field for anyone – novice to expert.

You can’t say that about any other Rock Band game or for any other artist in the history of music.

Essentially, you have no argument to buy The Beatles: Rock Band other than perhaps, “I already know how to play all 213 originally released Beatles songs, and now I’m bored.”

The game does have some redeeming features in the areas of drumming and singing – the two bits of Beatles that are the hardest to master on your own. Designers worked closely with Ringo to make the game a tutorial for his unique drumming style. Also, the game features a harmony training mode, which will allow you to voice any part in the band’s remarkable multi-part harmonies.

Based on that, if you’re a Beatles-loving singer or drummer starting from scratch I can appreciate wanting to purchase the game for some guidance. If only the game also allowed you to plug in an actual midi-guitar in to test your chops against the recordings … then I’d buy it in an insant!

Otherwise, if you’re a Beatles-lover who wants to experience playing their music yourself, my advice would be to actually play it yourself.