Oa Sciencells There’s just something about the Guardians that I don’t understand. These are the blue, gnomish creatures who, in the DC mythology, were among the first beings in the universe, and the ones tasked with keeping order in the cosmos from their planet in the center of everything. The instruments of their will are the Green Lanterns, each of whom are assigned one of the 3,600 sectors of the universe to patrol. Given that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, meaning each single Lantern is responsible for millions of galaxies, it’s odd, isn’t it, that Earth alone gets FIVE Lanterns? ...

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This is NOT EQ Next. Obviously. Soooooo…. after a lot of hinting that something great was on the Storybricks horizon by Namaste’s Brian “Psychochild” Green, the news broke last night that Namaste is partnering with Sony Online Entertainment to bring their AI technology to EverQuest Next. We saw last year how this tech worked in Namaste’s “Kingdom of Default” demo, where players could interactively create NPCs with complex, rules-based logic that could dynamically change NPC behavior based on any number of factors – and changeable in game. After an unsuccessful Kickstarter, Storybricks’ fate was uncertain. But, now it’s going to be part of my next gaming obsession. ...

Return to Oolong Island I haven’t played DCUO all week. All my gaming time has been spent on EverQuest II and other, single player games that I’ll talk about this week. The DCUO grind is just getting to me. I need a change of scenery… but that just might be in the cards, pretty soon. Last night’s Tier 2 daily double was Oolong Island, hard mode. The “easy” mode version wasn’t one of our favorites; it took us three sessions to get past the Tornado Tyrant the first time around, and we only beat it in the end because we pretty much leveled out of it. The follow-up encounter with the supposed boss of the instance, Chang Tzu, was relatively painless in comparison. ...

WoW Invaders in Darklight Woods The mood in EverQuest 2 is one of quiet anticipation as the world waits for Game Update 66 on April 30, which brings with it the modern rethinkings of the original EverQuest zones of Cobalt Scar and Siren’s Grotto. Cobalt Scar will be an open-world adventure zone with a strong story line, while Siren’s Grotto appears to be a series of instanced dungeons, likely in the quest/solo/heroic/raid variations we’ve come to expect. ...

Beating up the Bats After last week’s very narrow defeat by the Scion of Fear in the STAR Labs Research Facility, we were all kinda hoping that STAR Labs would be, again, the daily double. Spode and Sting have in the last week both ascended to Tier Threedom and are sporting new armors and higher combat ratings, while Kaptain KY and I still suffer in Tier 2. No such luck; last night’s daily double was Batcave: Outer Caverns. A bit of a backstory – bat-story? Batman, distrusting the godlike powers of meta-humans, created the semi-sentient satellite Brother Eye to collect data on all Earth’s superhumans, and their weaknesses. What could possibly go wrong? Well, pretty much everything. Now, Brother Eye is devoted to turning supers and civilians both into cyborg-like OMACs and using them to destroy all humans. ...

Brainiac dailies Didn’t take any good screen shots in our Sunday game of DC Universe Online, which was kind of a downer, because it was a really good night. Kaptain KY said he was going to be a little late, so instead of starting with missions, we went to the Brainiac Incursion zone in Gotham City to try and find some Sub-Avatars to kill. I think Spode or Sting hadn’t yet done the dailies, so we just started killing everything we saw. ...

Ghost Encounter of the Blurred Kind As a shaman, talking with spirits is what the dwarf Valda Onyxheart does every day. It’s in her wheelhouse. To be attacked by the hentai tentacles of a ghost when she was just trying to make some sort of spiritual connection … well, some insults just can’t be borne. It’s been a month since the Adventure Company last met, but only minutes have passed in the tunnels beneath a village surrounded and attacked by the undead. The villagers we have promised to protect have barricaded themselves within an old church; we are scouting the tunnels beneath the village for a clear path to a graveyard and an escape. ...

Team Spode vs Sub-Avatar Although last night was a wildly successful night for Team Spode in DC Universe Online, it turns out I took only two screenshots last night, and both were of the same thing: killing a sub-avatar. When I logged in, Lord Spode was finishing up the Brainiac dailies. I joined his group and headed to Gotham to help. See, Brainiac is slowly bottling and digitizing the buildings of Metropolis and Gotham City; once these cities are entirely digitized and stored, Brainiac will destroy the Earth. Preventing this is the role of the player heroes and villains. ...

Camp Check! First step in spawning the Ancient Cyclops in EverQuest 2 is to go back in time about thirteen years and log in to the original EverQuest. Journeyman’s Boots, one of the most highly prized items in the game, would give characters a decent instant speed boost in a game where most characters could not get anywhere quickly. JBoots, combined with a snare spell or ability, could allow most classes to solo in a game focused on groups. ...