Drunken Comics Rage

You know the worst thing about Monday holidays? It always delays comics by a day. It kind of puts a somber note on the joy that is a four day work week, does it not? Fortunately I've decided to counteract that particular sorrow by taking Friday off and turning it into a three day work week.  How's that for sticking it to the man?

Hopefully everyone had a nice three day weekend. Hopefully some of you got to see Indiana Jones (I did not).  There were several entertaining bits to come out of the weekend. Some were comic related (sort of), some were not at all. Either way, you get to read about them if you continue further. Let's start with the demon tree in my backyard.

So I have a hellspawn of a tree in my backyard. If God had given Lucifer a bit of shrubbery when he cast him out of Heaven, this tree would have been it.

It's at the edge of my property where it back up to a horse field. the sucker is like 40 or 50 feet tall (guesstimating of course) and covered in these nasty sharp thorns. Now when I say thorns, I'm not talking about rose bush sized thorns. We're talking here about thorns that protrude as much as four or five inches off of every branch jutting in every direction. They are super sharp at the point and super sturdy. It takes a bit of pressure to snap one of these things off (unless of course you were to step on it I'm sure). There are so many of them, I cannot imagine a bird or any other critter finding safe haven in it. Every time I go out and look up in it, I half expect to see a squirrel impaled somewhere about twenty feet up.

This is an evil, evil tree.

They not only stick out off of all branches, there is actually a cluster of them on a knot about three foot up from the base of the tree. It almost looks like some sort of cannon it is ready to fire this deadly barrage of thorns from should anyone invade its personal space. I don't know what in its evolutionary process this tree was protecting itself from, but it must have been something along the lines of a velociraptor.

So of course, this tree has to sit about ten feet from where my sons playhouse is anchored in the yard. Needless to say, I needed to do some trimming of the demon tree. One might argue it would be easier to move the playhouse then to do battle with a tree from the netherworlds, but in truth having those thorns fall anywhere in the yard is probably not a good thing for any member of the family. Having them fall on the playhouse is really just insult to injury.

In the previous week I had purchased a tree branch clipper with an extending pole, leather working gloves, and protective goggles for the coming conflict. Had it been readily available for purchase, a chain mail suit would have been handy. So now adorned in my combat gear, I began hacking away at the branches of Satan's shade tree, running like hell every time a branch would fall so as to not get skewered. Somewhere along the lines I noticed a vine running up the side of the tree with three leaves on each stem. I'm no expert, but it certainly looks like poison ivy to me.

Fortunately I did not touch any of the ivy (I don't want to be that close to the fucking tree anyhow), but the fact remains this is a devil tree. I cannot conceive of how this tree could become more deadly. It would actually have to be mobile at this stage to be more dangerous. This tree should have it's own entry in the D&D 4th Edition Monster Manual. That tree in Poltergeist that almost ate the annoying little boy? This tree would totally kick that tree's ass. It would likely hold its own against the Ents in Lord of the Rings. The Ents would likely have a height and reach advantage, but I'd still give this tree even odds.

So my next plan of action will be to call a lumberjack and a priest, or ideally a lumberjack priest, to exorcise this damnable tree and then get it the fuck out of my yard. Updates will be forthcoming as the summer rolls along.

The gang and I took some time Saturday morning to play City of heroes with the intention of checking out the new content with issue 12 that went live last week. What actually occurred was all of us making new alternate characters and teaming up. The justification was to start a lower level dude so as to hit the "new" story arcs when they first become available at level ten. In all honesty, it was a bullshit lie we told ourselves because your contacts will direct you to the new content regardless of your current level. The truth is we all just have a serious addiction to creating new alternate characters. Although to be fair, one of the new additions in this issue were additional character slots on the server. So one could argue that in creating another alt, we were using the new content.

The new alt I created ended up being an homage to Sunfire named Ronin Starfire (screenshot will be forthcoming). Most of my characters start as homages to a well known character and then sort of take on a life of their own. You have to be careful in that if you get it to close to the trademarked character, you will get your guy "generic'd" and have to redesign him, which I have had to do on one occasion. Anyhow,  in running around with Ronin Starfire I didn't see much in the way of the new content. I just didn't make it that far really in the limited time I had this weekend. Most of what I saw was the "quality of life" stuff. One update that came in damned handy was the ability to trade-in inspirations. For the non-CoX players, inspirations are little bonuses you can blow that will give you hero bonuses for a short period of time. They give the various bonuses one might expect, damage,m health, accuracy etc. However it always seems to end up in such a way where you have like nine of the inspiration type you never use and none of the one you need. Well, not anymore. Basically the trade-in allows a three for one swap. you can take any three of the same type on inspiration for one you do want. The swap happens immediately and you don't have to go anywhere to make the exchange. So in short, you are never more than three inspirations away from being able to get yourself a resurrection inspiration. Very handy even if it is not an earth shattering game change.

I realize the cast majority of what I said in the previous two paragraphs is completely lost on anyone who hasn't played CoX. Never fear though. I will do my best to berate the others (and myself) into more CoX posts to explain some of the finer points of the game and to give a "fair and balanced" view of recent updates.

I know I'm going long, so one last story, both game and semi-comic related from the weekend. In addition to a little CoX playing, I managed to play some of the Marvel Ultimate Alliance on the Wii. I found it at a Best Buy on clearance so I got it for something like $15. Between Marvel comics goofiness, the fun that is the Wii-mote and the price I figured it would be hard for me not to get my money out of it in entertainment.

Well, right from the jump it's kind of obvious that this was a game built for the other "last generation" systems that was ported to the Wii. It's not bad at all, you just do feel that very fluid integration with the game controls to the Wii controller. They show cool pictures on the back with a guy holding the Wii-mote and nunchuck like Spidey's webshooters or Cap's shield, but the shit just don't seem to work that way (at least not yet for me). So in execution combat looks more like an epileptic fit than you living out your superhero fantasies through the game.  Again, not bad or particularly hard, just not the cool factor I was hoping for.

The game starts you out with a team of four heroes, Captain America, Spiderman, Thor, and Wolverine. You are all gathered on a SHIELD helicarrier that has fallen under attack. When you think about it, has there ever been a more impressive piece of hardware that is rendered useless more regularly than a helicarrier? I mean these are supposed to be SHIELD biggest and baddest pieces of equipment and they are pretty regularly infiltrated, attacked, immobilized, sabotaged, or somehow rendered useless. Short of the Death Star they have to rank as one of the most underperforming pieces of technology ever. But I digress.

So your merry band of heroes go rolling around the surface of the carrier whupping on Ultron robots. My first thought was we should find Hank Pym and kick his ass because clearly this is all his mess somehow. Not very long later, you run across  the Scorpion. Yes, the Scorpion. There you are with Cap, Spidey, Wolverine, and Thor facing off with Scorpion. It makes you wondering what Scorpion was thinking at that stage. He was certainly talking a lot of shit, that much I know. Maybe he felt more ballsy with those Ultron robots at his back, I dunno.

Anyhow after dispatching of Scorpion you make your way to the command center and talk to Nick Fury (the original, not the Sam Jackson flavor). Apparently Dr. Doom has formed up the Master of Evil and decided to whup on SHIELD as part of a master plan he can't share with you, but feels confident mocking you with on the monitors. Somewhere along in there I discovered the SHIELD access point which allows you to buy upgrades to your guys and swap heroes out for other heroes, or revive guys who bought it at some point earlier. There were quite a few characters to choose from and obviously more to be unlocked as the game moves forward. I played with various combinations of characters for brief stints, but I think I primarily ended up with a group consisting of Iron Man, Wolverine, Thor, and Moon Knight. Moon Knight is kind of the odd man out there, but what he lacks he power he makes up for in crazy I suppose.

My new and improved merry band of heroes went rolling down to the flight deck to stop some nukes from being fired off by other members of the Masters of Evil. Okay seriously here folks. If you can't keep your  damn helicarrier secure, I don't really think it is a good idea to keep live nukes and their launch codes on deck, do you? So many Ultron robots and Doombots later, we run into Bullseye. Don't ask me how, but Bullseye drops Thor like a bad habit. He then drops Iron Man and Luke Cage (Wolverine had been temporarily removed from the experimentation at the time). So it fell to lowly ole Moon Knight to finish Bullseye off. Only in video games folks.

Upon stopping the nukes, we revived Iron Man and swapped out Thor for Colossus.I know that sounds like a step down, but I thought perhaps Thor needed some time to gather himself and get over the embarrassment of getting his ass handed to him by Bullseye.

Off we go rolling out again, this time to the barracks. There we ran into Winter Soldier and Radioactive Man teamed up together. So apparently not only has Doom formed up the Masters of Evil again, he's recruiting anyone with a pulse and a bad disposition. After a couple of conflicts with them, we put that dynamic duo down just to be informed the end of the ship is being attacked by a giant dragon.

Sure enough, he comes Fing Fang Foom.

Foom was the boss of the whole level, so in typical boss fashion, someone had to go and man a cannon and fire it at him as he swooped past the ship. When you hit him, he would tumble and then actually land on the deck where you could beat him down with your normal powers. All the while your other dudes keep fighting Ultron robots who are spawning. It actually sounds harder than it was, but I lost Iron Man before I figured out the whole cannon thing and then  Colossus bought it in the last round of cannon fire. That left Wolverine and Moon Knight to but down the surly dragon.

Which of course, they did.

So in a battle that sounds like it came out of the plot to a NextWave comic, Wolverine and Moon Knight put down Fing Fang Foom. With Moon Knight more or less being the MVP of the whole level. You gotta love cracked out superhero video games.

That's all for now. No reading list as comics aren't out until Thursday. Perhaps I'll try to sneak a post in Thursday or Friday with the list as it looks to be a hell of a week.

Filed under: Games!