Ding! 30! Just like in the original Guild Wars, the road to level cap in DC Universe Online is pretty much an extended tutorial ahead of the real game. As in Rift, the instances you get while leveling are just rough sketches of the instances as they appear at max level, when you get a chance at the REAL fight. And better loot. I started Nurse Goebbels (please, feel free to report this name I now regret) (and it should have been Nurse Mengele anyway) (I was trying to think of something really villainous, but I kinda went too far). Anyway, I started Nurse G as an outlet for DCUO game play when I couldn’t play my Team Spode main, Teal Lantern. We have leveling restrictions in place so that people with a lot of time to play don’t outlevel people with little time to play. ...

Team Spode and the Tornado Tyrant Last week, our lack of Kaptain KY’s greasing influence made it impossible for us to finish defeating the Queen Bee and interrupting her plans to ship Luthor’s future exobytes back up to Brainiac, who claims them for the destruction of Earth. True fact: there is no entity in the entire universe, outside of Earth, who does not demand Earth’s destruction. Only about half the people actually on Earth want its complete destruction; the other half only want to rule over it with an iron fist. Though forces spiritual, alien and technological join forces to crush our planet, at least there’s Team Spode, cut-rate superheroes from the slums of Austin, Toronto, Portland and New England, to King Cnut-wise, hold back the tide. ...

B.A. had the right idea The Adventure Company reconvened last night to prepare for our new adventures. We made a few changes since the last time we met. All new characters, for one – we’d all died in the last encounter, at the bottom of a deep hole, in front of a portal to an evil realm, a realm in which many of us are presumably now trapped for eternity. ...

Yearbook, Freshman Year at Iris Academy Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A child living in our modern world discovers she has magical powers and is invited to attend a wizard school and become part of a magical community hidden from the mundanes. Magical Diary is basically about a year in the life of a student of Hogwart’s, where there are no Dark Ones and no Harry Potter. But it does have, you know, boys. And proms. And school clubs. And also the exams are held in dungeons. ...

Ballpoint Boss Back when this was called College-Ruled Universe, it was one of the first games I helped fund through Kickstarter. It was a pleasant little R-Type-style shooter, written in Flash by an art student, Leo “Zigzag” Dasso, who had built an entire world, in Flash, out of the casual doodles he drew during classes. He had a friend compose an atmospheric soundtrack and put it on Kickstarter. I thought it was an amazing game, not so much for the mechanics, but for the pure expression of art. The funding goal was low, so I put in a few bucks, and the project was successfully funded. ...

Well, mostly, this post is to test how my usual article heading picture can replace the header image, which is cool. Secondly, yes, I am NOT ONLY playing DC Universe Online, though from looking at the past few posts, it certainly looks as though I am. It’s just that Arda is basically retracing Scatter’s steps from a couple months back. It’s the grind to 95, and all the fun content the first time is just stuff you gotta do the second time. ...

To the Moon, Alice! With Kaptain KY off fighting evil in Mexico this week, Team Spode was short a hero. Undeterred, we decided to make Metropolis a little bit safer by taking care of some of the “Wanted” poster quests – the Avatar of Sin, Bizarro and the Minotaur all met their temporary ends. Before all popping up again, minutes later, proving just how ineffective heroes really are. When you get right down to it, the exobits that turned regular humans into weapons of mass destruction echo the debate about whether arming every lawful adult in America would be a good or a bad thing. DCUO takes the position that unrestrained superpowers lead to devastation. And that’s with both heroes and villains coming together to take on outside threats, like HIVE. ...

I've been locked in your heart-shaped box Happy Valentine’s Day! Logged on last night to do the Valentine’s Day content that SOE patched in to DC Universe Online. There was a Valentine’s quest in my journal; I completed it and got all the rewards. Which was weird. It included a silly looking clown/ballerina costume! This morning, in my daily Vault run, I got a heart-shaped bed! This was a sign from the DCUO gods. Or something. ...

Power Girl, Super Girl, Wonder Woman Doctor Psycho, I don’t think you’re even a real doctor. But yeah, I can see that that would be a tough name to grow up with, plus being only a foot tall doesn’t help much. I thought your powers were lame, as I crawled through Metropolis General’s Meta Wing, where you forced me to pummel the entire hospital’s security staff while I freed the imprisoned meta-humans along the way. How did you ever capture Supergirl, anyway? ...

Harlequin & Robin One thing I really do love about DC Universe Online is its call-outs to all the various incarnations of the characters. For instance, Robin. In recent years, the various Robins have turned into competent fighters in their own right, leading their own super groups, and in general just kicking butt. A lot of us remember, though, Robin’s original purpose – to be kidnapped more than Princess Peach and have to be rescued, time and again, by Batman. ...