Chemo Patrolmen. We can deal with violent experiments that survive on toxic waste. Special security patrols, giant, venom-infused hounds and their masters, no problem. But if you want to see Team Spode start to panic, send in an Ace Patrolman with his Flamethrower of One Hit Doom. Last night was Team Spode’s first try at a Tier 1 group mission, the beginning of DC Universe Online’s end-game. Having leveled to 30, the game now ignores your level and bases every encounter on your “combat rating”, the game’s version of World of Warcraft’s gear score. During the past week, we’ve been separately working on our gear. The Tier 1 solo missions give some Marks of Triumph – the Tier 1 gear currency – some faction, and usually a piece of very decent gear on their own. Additionally, there are a set of three related missions in Gotham City that give fifteen marks per day, and the daily Vault lotto mission that occasionally gives 25 marks. ...

Incorruptible Hadleyburg It’s more than a little unfair to complain so much when I couldn’t play SimCity 2013, and then say nothing once I was able to play it. So here’s this post. I can play it and do enjoy it when I do; I’m playing in a corner of a region started by friends who fled to another server, so it’s as close to a single player game as it possibly can be. I’ve started two cities and a Great Work – an arcology. I’ve lost sleep just doing one… more… thing. ...

I am the egg man What does it take to defeat the Tornado Tyrant in Oolong Island? Three weeks and nine levels. But that’s done. After an impromptu mid-week play through some mission arcs, we all started our assault on Oolong Island Sunday at level 28 or 29. We flew through the early fights, which have become so familiar that we could just joke around and fly casual and have pterosaur barbecue, as much as we liked. Prehistoric drumsticks for everyone. ...

This is my life. Paused at the loading screen. During work today, I’d log into Google+ and read about the adventures my friends who were stuck at home were having in SimCity. Weather is cruddy here tonight, and the thing I was going to go to tonight has been moved to next Thursday, and I looked forward to some SimCity time! But nope. There was a patch, a restart, and then —– nothing. Nothing nothing nothing. I thought the contest to send in your “best cities!!!!!” was hilarious, but… here’s mine. ...

Code Hero Alpha Last year, or maybe the year before by now, I helped fund an innovative game on Kickstarter, Primer’s Code Hero. This game would teach you to create your own games using the cross-platform Unity game platform, UnityScript and JavaScript. UnityScript, JavaScript and Flash’s ActionScript are all closely related scripting languages, so knowing these things would be a Really Good Idea. Instead of a more traditional approach, Code Hero is the world’s first FPC (First Person Coder) game. You don’t write a game. You create a game around you. With your Code Gun. ...

The SimCity "Ha Ha!" screen I’m pretty sure that, sitting on my old Mac SE/30 in the living room, is an old copy of the first SimCity. Or if not on the hard drive, on a floppy drive somewhere. Assuming I could find it, and the computer could still read it, that I could play that original SimCity and have as much fun as I wanted. I could type in “FUNDS” if I got in a bind and get some extra money. I could save my game and then have Godzilla stomp it to rubble, then restore it and all these little SimCity people would be going “Whaaaa? I just had a feeling that we were all stomped to rubble… Oh well!” ...

Chatting with Delahnus the Dauntless Playing this game would be like steering a fifteen year old girl through the mall while she’s shopping for crates. All-consuming and much missed gaming site Old Man Murray once famously wrote that all games could be judged by their Start-to-Crate (STC) time, the “shortest amount of time it takes a player to reach the first crate, which represents the point where the developers ran out of ideas.” ...

Riddle me this! When Spode, after harvesting himself an exobit (an aggressive one!), proclaimed himself an exobit-ionist, KY and I nearly lost it in chat. That was DDO-level punmanship. And all the more appropriate since we’d just been facing the Riddler. The Riddler wasn’t being a supervillain in this adventure; he was being an investigator, having retired from villainy to become a clandestine resource for Batman. It’s the Riddler who clues Batman (and through Batman, us) that Joker is now no more than a tool for Brainiac. As a result of the Riddler’s discovery, the villain Deathstroke (whom we’re watching in “Arrow”) has been hired by the Joker to kill the Riddler. Once paid, Deathstroke will not stop before his target is dead, but Batman stopped the Joker’s funds transfer, meaning Deathstroke would not be paid, causing the villain to take off near the end of the fight. ...

Exploring a crypt with Roll20.net When there’s undead behind you, undead ahead of you, undead below you and for all I know, undead above, you just have to wonder if maybe this “living” thing is just a mistake. A mistake the gods are trying to fix. This is why Valda puts her faith and trust in good, solid stone. Stone that protects. Stone that builds. Stone which, when dropped from a good height, makes pretty short work of undead. ...

Haffer and Haffikin I was thinking that EverQuest II’s double xp days last weekend would be enough to push Arda up to level 95, the current level cap. I had xp potions running. I was working through the last of the Chains of Eternity signature quest. You’d think that finishing up the content for the latest expansion would leave you at the level cap. But, noooo…. I ended up at level 94. I hadn’t done as much xp grinding as Scatter had, you see, so I had a fair bit to go. These last levels are hell levels, taking vast amounts of experience – that’s problem #1. Problem #2 is that each kill in every expansion since Kunark gives only a very tiny amount of experience. Evidently, SOE thought they were being too generous in Kunark and decided to ramp things back a lot. ...