The other day I noticed I hadn’t received any veteran rewards in City of Heroes since Issue 8 (in which they were introduced) had gone live. I went in and checked my account details, and sure enough what seemed to have happened is that only my UK account time was being taken into account.

However, I had originally had a US account for about a year, so I emailed the NCSoft Support guys asking if that shouldn’t have been taken into account. Well, GM Max got back to me, and sorted the whole thing out. So now I’ve got the full three years worth of veteran rewards and am proudly displaying my “Addicted” badge as my title.

Above you can see Reilly (my level 41 main) with his new Nemesis Staff and Clockwork pet, in our Supergroup base beside our new Longbow Chaser. Excellent

And here’s Colonel Lightning, my Electric Blaster with her Blackwand and Rikti Monkey pet.

Ok, its a pointless one this, but its something that’s been bugging me for a bit.

As some of the images I use in the blog posts can be a bit wide, I tend to switch of text wrapping around them (an option in the Mandiva theme), as it can cause layout problems. Instead I usually just stack images and text ontop of one-another.

However, this doesn’t look as good when its a small image in the post. I’ve always wanted to be able to selectively use the text-wrapping based on the individual post.

Well, I actually got off my backside and figured it out today. So in the previous post, I altered the img tag to include style=”float:left” and that got it the way I wanted it.

So, it turned out to be nice and easy afterall. That’s what I was hoping for

I’ve gone back to playing Battlefield 2142 over the weekend after several months out. I’d forgotten how much fun it was

One striking thing was the lack of UK servers however. Granted, the 1.40 Beta patch may be partly the cause (I’ve stuck with the stable patch). However, I think it may also be a sign that the playerbase has stuck by Battlefield 2, something I’d noticed previously. Its a shame though, as I tried playing Battlefield 2, and found it a nightmare to get into. I prefer 2142’s condensed classes, and everyone playing BF2 seemed to have been playing it for years, so as a newbie trying to find my way around, I tended to just get slaughtered an awful lot without accomplishing anything.

Despite not playing for months, I still found myself in the role of Squad Leader quite a bit. Although I’m not really too fussed about being in charge, I tended to end up in the position when the existing leader quit out of the squad. To be honest, in some ways it suits me better, as most squad leaders don’t seem to bother issuing orders. Since orders tend to be the key to teamwork, and the bonus squad points, it makes me wonder why they bothered creating a squad in the first place.

So while it may not be my ideal to be in charge, at least I always issue squad orders, and get my team the bonus points which not only mean we hit the next rank quicker, but also get those handy field upgrades.

Well, the war between the Green Lantern Corps and the Sinestro Corps is well and truely underway. The one-shot was just cracking stuff, with fantastic art by Ethan Van Skiver, and Geoff Johns’ story really started strong with Ion defeated by the entire Sinestro Corps.

The second part was definitely a lot slower, although no less enjoyable. The emphasis in this issue being Hal Jordan’s characterisation, and a lot of obvious build up for the Hal/Parallax rematch, with Hal having to face his two greatest fears (his father’s death, and his betrayal of the Corps at the hands of Parallax).

Kyle as Parallax is an interesting idea. I don’t believe at all that its going to be permanent. Rather, I suspect Geoff Johns is going to use it to allow Hal to forgive himself for what happened. As he sees what Kyle does under Parallax’s influence, I suspect he’ll come to realise he’s not truely to blame and finally move on from that part of his life.

I like the way Johns has handled the fallout from Parallax. It would’ve been too easy after Rebirth to just sweep it under the rug and blame it all on the big, yellow space bug. But with Hal still blaming himself for what happened I think Geoff Johns did well building on that period of the Green Lantern mythos rather than just ignoring it.

Turns out Morrisons is a regular treasure trove of old cartoons on DVD. In addition to stocking Transformers: Robots in Disguise and MASK, I managed to pick up a triple-pack of the He-Man DVDs for only £5.99. Its a great trip down memory lane

It also re-affirms what a great re-imagining the 2002 series was. They really operated under the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality for that show, and only did minor updates to the characters to bring them into the 21st century. They stuck to a lot of the underlying plots and characterisations from the original show.

Nice souls that they are, Blizzard sent me a free copy of the WoW expansion: The Burning Crusade complete with 10 days free gametime.

Sadly I think that having 2 MMOs on the go is more than enough at the moment (and that’s ignoring all the other games I want to find time to play). However, life’s not affording me much gaming time at the moment.

I did play WoW for a bit, and it was quite fun. Sadly the minute I had to go into a new zone, I found myself unable to move without being slaughtered, which really kind’ve spoiled the game for me. Although I do team sometimes, I generally play solo quite a lot, and I got the vibe that World of Warcraft wasn’t really going to suit solo players.

As many of you will know, the first 6 years of Doctor Who were in black & white, moving to colour episodes when Jon Pertwee took over in the 1970s. However, when the BBC destroyed a whole load of Pertwee episodes, some were later re-discovered, however only black & white copies of those colour episodes were found.

I’ve been following a thread in Outpost Gallifrey where some of the fans are re-colouring stills from the black & white episodes using photoshop. Its interesting stuff, and some of the results are fantastic. However, some fans are taking it a step further, and re-colouring sections of the episodes.

Here’s a clip one of them has put on YouTube of a re-colourised version of one of the black & white episodes of Planet of the Daleks. Its excellent work.

I set up a test server copy of City of Heroes on my PC last night to check out Issue 10.

The actual invasion scenario itself is great. Above you can see my character tailing 3 dropships as they attack Peregrine Isle, carpet-bombing the streets below. Sadly my hyper-phase power had konked out, so I was eating floor about 10 seconds later.

The changes to the Rikti crash site look interesting, although they’re difficult to gauge on test server, as it involves a cooperative struggle with both villains and heroes trying to destroy Rikti pylons and then attack the mothership. With the test server actually pretty quiet, there wasn’t much point hanging around (those Rikti pylons eat blasters for breakfast). The Thin Red Line is good though, with the Vanguard base defenses attacking any wandering Rikti that get in range.

My only real complaint so far, is that its easy to be wandering around, oblivious to where the action is. With such a fuss being made over this big event, it can be frustrating logging on, and flying around for half an hour wondering what all the fuss is about. Some kind of pop up message when you log in, telling you which zones are currently under attack would be nice.

Well, issue 10 of City of Heroes has hit the test servers. The Invasion event is looking to be as much fun as we might’ve hoped.

Here’s a clip of a dropship flying through the city, only to be attacked by (presumably) a Supergroup that someone’s put up on Youtube. Looks like a heck of a lot of fun.

So it was officially announced today that Donna is returning as a full-time companion next year.

I’m a bit dubious about this myself. Concerns about Catherine Tate’s “shouty” acting from the Christmas special aside, its a bit of a step backwards for the show. Its one thing to revisit Sarah Jane years later, or to bring back Captain Jack (since we’d been told at the time he’d be back), but I thought the ending of The Runaway Bride was quite powerful. Finally, a companion had knocked back the chance to travel with the Doctor full time, as he and his lifestyle was too dangerous. That’s up in the air now.

Plus I loved Martha as a companion. Granted she’ll be back in the second half of season 4 (although I don’t believe we know how many episodes that’ll account for), but I’d hate to think she’s been shunted to the side to make way for a bigger name.