DC Universe Online

Trapped in a world without color I don’t actually talk, or type, like that texty speak. I don’t know what came over me. Well, I kinda know. There was a bunch of bloggish commentary a few months back on the kind of random ranting bloggers do. You know, bloggers don’t have any deeper insight than anyone else on anything, by and large, but we do have our blogs. It makes us feel more important, gives us a louder voice. But everyone shouts on the internet. It gets tiring. I realized that I really don’t have anything to say about the current state of MMOs. I’ve stopped trying to follow the crowd to every new game; Sim City 5 cured me of that. Wow, way to buy into the hype, right? ...

Hangin' with mah Supes Last week, we Spodians decided to shake things up a bit by, THIS week, trying to join a raid. You kinda have to raid, at some point. Almost every piece of gear costs Marks of Triumph, and the gear for the content you are doing typically requires a set number of marks. A typical Tier 3 “daily double” mission might give 150 marks; which isn’t bad, except the T3 armor requires a couple thousand for each piece. ...

Yellow constructs? No problem! After our hard-won victory over the Supreme Justice last week at the South Gotham Courthouse, where the game kept presenting that alert as the “daily double” every week, we wondered if we’d be forced to do it again this week for the best rewards. The game, though, has tuned itself to the needs and desires of Team Spode, and wasn’t going to send us back to the Bailiff just quite yet. Stryker’s Island was the alert of the day. ...

Objection Overruled I haven’t written about DCUO in awhile, not because we haven’t been playing. We’ve been playing every week. I haven’t written about DCUO in awhile because we’ve been working on one particular instance, the South Gotham Courthouse — and we kept losing. Now, we haven’t attempted the court house every week; it’s been a spotty summer, with people having other obligations some weekends. But every Sunday when we did meet up as a full group, the South Gotham Courthouse would be the daily double… taunting us. ...

Arkham Asylum Before we get started, I want to draw your attention to the right bit of the screenshot above. Where we see the entrance to the Arkham Lobotomy Theater. With marquee lights to attract passers-by. They sell snacks and Soder Cola at the door, and tradition has it that you’re supposed to hurl popcorn at the doctors when they make poor incisions. Commissioner Gordon had sent us to the asylum because, apparently, three of its most notorious residents – Drs Pamela Isley, Victor Fries and Jonathan Crane – AKA Poison Ivy, Mister Freeze and The Scarecrow – have not only escaped, but turned the three wings of the Asylum into their own private playgrounds. Lore scattered through the place implies that their common attending physician had been driven crazy by the three and mysteriously disappeared after giving them their freedom. ...

Kaptain KY shows off his jerkin That pun wasn’t mine…. Anyway. Since both the good Kaptain and I had both squeezed into Tier 3 over the past week, we spent the first half hour or so of our DCUO night enjoying all The Flash’s home town, Center City, had to offer a collection of tired but scrappy group of superheroes from the mean streets of Gotham City. We took down a bunch of Paradox Reapers, strange creatures from the nooks and crannies of Time, and then their boss. No screenshots! Argh. ...

The Digibit Disco Globe in STAR Labs “My greatest failure will become my greatest triumph!” Dr. Tomek O. Morah, Oolong Island Those were the wise words of T. O. Morrow, just moments before we finally destroyed his Tornado Tyrant android after weeks of our own failures. More wise words from Morrow. Ya know, these pictures of famous people, often quoting them saying things they didn’t actually say, are such a meme that there’s now a counter-meme where famous people are apparently saying the most possible wrong thing the artist could think of… ...

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? ...

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. ...

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. ...