With my music video now up on YouTube, I was looking at the competition tonight, and stumbled across this little gem:

So, the latest entry to the Countdown stable was released this week.

Countdown Arena continues the plot that’s been slowly building for a while (since Ion?), of Monarch building an army to take on the Monitors.

Countdown Arena is a weekly event whereby Monarch has captured various versions of the DC heroes from across the multiverse, and is forcing them to fight to the death so that’ll he’ll have only the best for his army.

Its an interesting book this. The premise is a bit contrived, with the heroes fighting each other to the death, so its a case of “switch your brain off and enjoy”. On that level it definitely works. We’re also presented with the idea that the Supermen are refusing to comply and are going to be masterminding a breakout, so that will probably more interesting to follow than the bouts themselves.

However, I’m left waiting for the twist. For a couple of reasons:

1. The current Monarch is actually Captain Atom. Monarch, as presented here, will happily wipe out millions of people, purely to further his goals of building an army to fight the monitors. It seems to be wildly out of character for him, so I really hope there’s a twist coming.

2. This ties into my feelings of the death of Earth-15 a couple of weeks ago. The new multiverse is partly built up by incorporating various Elseworld’s titles. Yet in this comic, we see the main characters from those Elseworld’s stories killed off. So the question becomes, is there a point in having a Gotham By Gaslight Earth, if there’s no Gotham By Gaslight Batman?

I wonder if there’s a twist coming here, but as it stands, I really think Final Crisis will remove the current multiverse. Whether it replaces it with a new one, or we end up with a single universe again, I don’t know, but it seems to me that the “52″ multiverse has already had most of its worlds revealed, 1 of which is destroyed, and we’re now losing title characters from the others. My guess is that the “52″ multiverse has been a bit of a stopgap, with Final Crisis revealing what the makeup of the DCU will actually be for the forseeable future.

If so, that’s a pity, because I quite like the current multiverse, but DC seem to be deconstructing it at the moment.

These ads for World of Warcraft have been running on the TV the last couple of days. Funny stuff. If I’d been able to go a Night Elf Mohawk, I might’ve stuck with it longer

So, the story is circulating online that JMS tried to have his name taken off of the last two issues of Spider-Man’s “One More Day”.

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time something like this has happened. During all the fallout over the Gwen & Norman’s kids debacle, JMS went on record saying he’d been against the idea, and had tried to compromise and have Peter as the father. But he’d been over-ruled.

Its no secret that despite being part of the Spider-Man mythos for 20-some years, Joe Q’s always had a thing about trying to undo the marriage. To be honest, I’m one of the many that thinks its an awful idea. Heck, its been tried before and didn’t work.

From reading the extensive online spoilers about One More Day, it does indeed sound pretty awful. What I find particularly amusing though, is the use of Mephisto as the one who is ultimately going to retcon everything.

So what’s amusing about that? Well, from reading the Life of Reilly column, we know that back in the 90s, when the writers were looking for a way to get out of the Clone Saga, Mephisto was one of the solutions they worked on. However, it was eventually decided that Mephisto wasn’t really appropriate to use in a Spider-Man book, who’d always had a more street, and less mystical feel.

So, in order to get out of the marriage, they’re using a solution that not even the Clone Saga would touch

Well, since I previously talked a bit about replaying Knights of the Old Republic, I figure I should revisit its sequel as well.

Set an uncertain amount of time after the original, the player takes the role of the Jedi Exile. The Sith have returned to the galaxy, wiping out most of the jedi, and they’ve now set their sights on the Exile, believing him/her to be the last remaining Jedi.

Unlike the first game, the sequel starts you on your Jedi path straight away. While owning a lightsaber only comes much later on in the game, right away you get to start selecting force powers. The upshot of this being, that as you proceed into the later stages of the game, you’re a veritable Jedi powerhouse, cutting down enemies with lightning, and healing your companions from near-death with ease.

This game also introduced the influence system with your travelling companions. As is usual with these RPG games, as you travel to different locations new NPCs join your party. What was new in this game however was that your actions could determine the amount of influence you had with these party members. So if you helped out someone in trouble with the local mob, then your good-aligned companions would look more favourably on you, while you’d lose influence with those more inclined to the dark side.

The great thing about this system being that having increased influence would mean that your companions would only tell you certain things once they trusted you, and for some of them, once that trust reached a certain level, you could actually train them in the ways of the Force, and they’d become Jedi characters. Really helpful having a couple of jedi around to use Force Healing in the tougher fights.

However, the game suffered from one big flaw. Lucasarts had been incredibly keen on a tight development timescale for this game, so as a result, it was rushed onto the market. As a result of this, bugs are rife (some causing big gameplay issues), and huge sections of the game had to be abandoned, leaving several parts where its clear something was significant, but doesn’t actually lead anywhere.

Despite this, I still love this game. Revan’s character in the first game was very well defined (in terms of his/her backstory), whereas I find it more easy to role-play the Exile, as their past and motivations are a blank text. Getting influence with your companions and having them become Jedi was a great addition to the game, and gives you lots of different things to attempt on various run-throughs.

The new Sith Lords are great as well. Darth Sion is a really great, freaky creation, and Darth Nihilus had a great sense of mystery.

The bugs are the main downfall. Just the other night, I had a quest which stuck whenever I tried taking the light-side path to completing it, and so I eventually just had to take the hit and gather some darkside points in order to progress. Perhaps not a huge issue in terms of making progress, but in a role-playing game it really drags you out of the character.

Oblivion had petitioned LucasArts to allow them to complete the game in a later patch, straightening out the bugs, and providing some of the missing content, but sadly LucasArts said no. Some of what was intended (The HK Droid Factory for example) can still be found in the depths of the PC data files, and there is a project making progress at trying to restore some of this content.

Overall, I really do love this game. Its just such a shame it was never completed to the developer’s original intentions, as I reckon it’d have surpassed its predecessor. As it stands, the first game probably pips it to the post for stability, and having a more complete, coherent storyline, which is a shame, because the potential really was there.