So I really hope this game brings a similar great feeling of having captured what it would be like to be Spider-Man, to the next generation consoles.   And its got different costumes in it which catches my attention straight away.  Especially the unexpected appearance of Spider-Man 2099.   I’ve seen that the Scarlet Spider can be unlocked too.

Can’t wait for the first reviews and demos to appear.  The game’s got a lot to live up to, especially with the recent Wolverine and Batman games being great fun.

Click here to view the embedded video.

That content was the first of the new weekly episodes.  These episodes are released once a week, and each builds on the last to tell a specific story.  In this case, you find yourself escorting a Deferi Ambassador back home.  Things start to go pear-shaped when the Breen transport into the city and its up to your away team to clear them out.

Broken down, its not that much that much different to the gameplay in other missions.  You escort a ship to a planet, beam down, clear out various spawns of enemies, then beam back up for some ship combat.  There’s dozens of missions throughout the game that have this same structure.

Where it differs greatly though is in presentation.  There’s obviously a lot of love gone into the design of this mission.  Firstly, the new area of sector space for the Defera System uses the new style seen in season 2 where the traditional grid markers and lighting are turned right down, creating a more atmospheric system.  However once you get into the mission, its not all run-and-gun.  The escort itself is largely uneventful, save for an unidentified (later revealed as Breen) ship, warping in and out.  There could have been the temptation here for the developers to make this a ship battle, but instead they wisely left it a mystery, with the ship warping back out before it can be identified.  This nicely builds suspense that something is going to happen later on.

When you beam down to the planet, the attention to detail at atmosphere is similarly evident.  The area you beam into is well designed with buildings, giant sculptures, and is bustling with people.  There’s a real feeling that this is a busy part of the city you’ve beamed into.   It really had the feel of an episode of Star Trek more than just some mission in an MMO, thanks to the pacing.  If this had been a combat mission from the outset it would’ve felt more generic, but the slow build up really had the feeling of getting you to know characters and a race that are going to be part of a larger story, rather than a 20 minute mission.

Another nice thing was how this mission drew on the diplomatic mission at Starbase Sierra 7.  When I found the Trade Discussion mission I had no idea it tied into this weekly series, but it was nice to bump into an Ambassador I recognised, who then referenced the trade discussions.   It added to the feeling that this was an evolving universe, and its a nice idea having these little prequels in the game prior to the main event.

I can’t wait for the next instalment come Saturday.  But I mentioned a turning point above.  Perhaps a rash statement?

And in some ways I do really think this mission has the potential to be.  If the further weekly episodes hold the same quality and atmosphere as this one, then we’ve got some really nice new locations and detailed storylines to look forward to.  But I’m also talking in terms of the community.

The official forums have been a fairly downbeat place for a long time, with the mood verging on outright hostile  at times, especially with some of the big bugs that have been in the game more recently (like the Star Cluster issues I mentioned in a previous post).   However last Saturday, that all changed.   The release of this high quality episode brought a real positive buzz to the forums, as people congratulated the developers on the release and praised the new content.  For the first time in quite a while the forums were actually quite a pleasant place to be as the whole community came across as quite upbeat.

I’m really hoping this mission shows off the kind of thing the developers are now looking to produce.  There’s an interesting tease to future missions hidden away, and it shows that there’s a storyline that’s been thought about as well as a nicely designed area map.   With the likes of ship interiors, a new style of sector space etc now in place, and season 3 promising to bring more polish to the game, Cold Call really shows the kind of thing we could look forward to seeing in the future updates.   And if that’s the case, I think a lot of the people who have been complaining about the game will turn around, and then hopefully the positive “yeah, it had a shaky start, but then they really turned things around and have some really nice content” buzz can start to build.  Its not a short-term hope, but it strikes me as something definitely achievable over the next year.

I had previously dabbled with World of Warcraft, but new seasons of The Guild always make me want to give it another go.  On top of that, other members of my Star Trek Online fleet are into it, so that pushed me to reinstall and resubscribe.  Not to mention, with millions of subscribers, its got to be worth a shot.

So having reinstalled, I immediately rolled a new Night Elf Hunter, just to rerun a couple of early tutorials to remind myself of the game.  That done and feeling suitably reminded of the basic game mechanics, I’ve now switched by to my original human mage character to try and just focus on him

I have to admit, playing the game is still pretty slow work.  When I’d last left the character I’d just moved to getting new quests in Westfall, and quickly found almost every spawn in the zone totally out of my league.  Since coming back I’ve been slowly picking my way through the quests, but its very slow and repetitive.   Most groups are only a level above me, but anything other than carefully isolating a single target and zapping them from a distance quickly results in death.

Which means, when most of my quests involve killing endless arrays of creatures trying to get a certain item to drop, it can get a bit tedious.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a ranged damage dealer.  I’m supposed to be squishy.  That I understand.  However, I can’t help but feel underpowered when any combination of 2 creatures will kill me within seconds and there’s pretty much nothing I can do to try and survive.  While I’m slowly making progress, I still can’t help but be slightly frustrated by the sheer amount of time I’ve spent dead and running back to my corpse.

I have to wonder if this is down to me.  I seem to have a reasonable combat strategy now, so my main deaths tend to come from another creature coming round a corner at the wrong moment, or sneaking up behind me while I’m distracted by what I’m attacking.  But I have to wonder if the Mage was maybe a poor choice for a starting character.

The minute you get in a team though, things improve immensely.  Granted I’ve not yet managed to get into a proper Guild or anything, but I did manage to team up with a fellow mage in Westfall and between us we started getting through the quests a lot faster.  We were still limited to only 1 or 2 targets at once but dealing twice the damage made a big difference to the pace.  I can really see how if I could get into a Guild, these early levels would start sailing past.

However, for now I’m still solo.  But I’m also not hating the game as much as it may sound.  Certainly at the moment its coming across a major time sink to get anywhere, but there’s still a lot that I like about the game and want to give a chance.

For example, there’s not just my main mage skills. I’m also working on my tailoring skills, which have let me quickly get extra bags for my inventory, as well as varying my character’s look to keep me amused.

There’s also the world itself. While the simple, cartoony graphics may put some people off, they’ve also allowed the developers to save on performance which means a lot of the world is seemless with no loading screens, which is really immersive. I’ve recently used the Griffin service for the first time to get quickly between locations and the flying system is fun to see in action, as you soar across the areas that would’ve taken some time to walk through.  From the point of view of an immersive world that’s fun to explore, World of Warcraft is great.

My main hope is that at somepoint I’ll exit the early levels of the game, and start getting to a point where I’m more comfortable with my character.  In City of Heroes for example, around the middle of the 20s, your character gets to a stage whereby they’re reasonably well kitted out with powers and enhancements and you start to genuinely feel like a superhero, and so I would hope something similar will click into place with Warcraft, wherein I’ll have not just a decent array of spells, but enough upgraded equipment that I can explore areas without getting into too much trouble as long as I’m reasonably careful.  I know, for example, that around level 20 I should get my first mount, which will greatly speed up travel, and that’s something I’m looking forward to.

So, for now I’ll continue to chip away at the quests, and see if some more meaningful ones start to come my way.  I’m enjoying exploring the world, so hopefully the quests will become more interesting, and I’ll start getting rewards that will make that exploring a little easier, without having to rely on constantly dying and running around as a ghost.

And therein lay the problem.  The default Xandros installation provided a good frontend, but to be honest, the update mechanism wasn’t great, and the updates I had managed to install on getting the netbook had pretty much pushed the storage capacity to straining point.

That was fine at the time, but 2 years on, not having been able to install updates was a bit concerning. Not to mention some websites were starting to complain about the outdated version of Firefox.

So being the good little Ubuntu fanboy I am, I thought “sod it, lets give this Netbook remix a whirl”.

Wow. Was I impressed. Now, when it comes to installing on a netbook, you’re thrown an immediate problem. No CD drive. However, Ubuntu’s download page came with great, simple instructions. Download the iso image, insert a USB stick of sufficient size, then download and run a neat little utility that sets up the USB stick with the equivalent of a liveCD. From there, just use the USB stick on the netbook like you would a normal Ubuntu LiveCD to test and install the new OS.

I was really impressed by how painless the whole process was. Granted, I knew from my laptop what installing Ubuntu was like, but I’d been braced for the netbook install to be more complicated.

Once it was installed, the good experience continued.  Canonical really have done a brilliant job of converting Ubuntu to work within the confines of a netbook.   The launcher interface is clean and easy-to-use, and apps make the most of the available screen space, running maximised with the OS’s application menu bar doubling as the usual title bar for applications (and so containing things like the close button).  Software updates and installation are handled just the same as on the main version of Ubuntu, and getting Chromium installed was simple.

Given the tight confines of my netbook (the previously mentioned 7inch screen and 4Gb hard disc) it would’ve been easy for me to run into problems, given how quickly the netbook market evolved to use higher specced machines, but nope, Ubuntu Netbook Remix runs as easily as it installed.  All the hardware worked straight out of the box (so to speak) and I’ve now got the reassurance of knowing all my software is being kept up-to-date.

So in the spirit of shameless self-promotion, and for any of my readers who care, I’ll make sure I post links up here to any Skaro reviews I do.

First up is the latest installment in the Doctor Who Adventure Games series: TARDIS, now available for free from the BBC website.

Read the review on Outpost Skaro.

Well, the cover kind’ve gives it away.  My only niggle with this issue really, that a lot of mystery is given to who Kyle’s signalled, when Hannu is right there on the cover.  Kind’ve like trying to hide who the bad guys are in “Planet of the Daleks”, its a bit redundant.

Anyway, nit-picking aside, this is another solid issue in the story, and felt like a step up from last month.  Its mainly focused on two aspects, John and co trying to rally the people to help defend their world and rescue Stel, but also on Cyborg Superman forcing Ganthet to attempt to restore the Alpha Lanterns to normal.

We learn that when the manacled figure took the manhunters, they also told Henshaw that Ganthet (specifically) had the ability to restore an Alpha Lantern, hence Henshaw deciding to convert himself.  There’s some nice continuity with Ganthet pointing out he’d left the GLC when the Alphas were created, so admits he has no idea how to restore them.

This does raise the interesting question of why, specifically, Ganthet can restore Alpha Lanterns.  Is this linked to his experience as a blue Lantern and opening himself up to emotions in a way the other Guardians haven’t (a fact brought up when Ganthet feels grief for the Alphas who die during his attempts to save them)?  Or is the mysterious figure just playing Cyborg Superman and setting Ganthet up as he/she has a grudge against him?

Resolving the story of the Alpha Lanterns has been one of the big draws of this arc for me, and so this issue gives us some tantalising glimpses into it.  While Ganthet is trying (and failing) to convert Alpha Lanterns back to normal, Boodikka locates Kyle, John and Natu’s hiding place with Stel’s people.   This confrontation quickly escalates as Hannu arrives, prepared to kill Boodikka as he sees what she’s become as a perversion of his old friend.  During the fight, he smashes her power battery, which seems to remove the Guardian and Cyborg Superman programming and allow her own personality to surface.

This was all pretty interesting.  We’ve known for a while that the Alpha Lantern’s original personalities were still present (from the two-part Boodikka story in GLC, but had been increasingly overridden by their programming.  This now offers up the possibility that Boodikka can be restored if they can find some way to stabilise  her physically (since damaging the power battery also means she’s dying).  But this was also a great little character scene, drawing on the fact the Lost Lanterns had been held prisoner by the Manhunters and Cyborg Superman for years (and there’s not much really between the Alpha Lanterns and the Manhunters).  Drawing on this as a reason for Hannu to attack Boodikka so brutally was a nice touch, and you really got the impression this was something that had been brewing with Hannu for a while.   Despite Hannu being largely unused throughout GL and GLC, this one short scene really helped underline his personality for his further appearances (Tony Bedard has said Hannu will be one of the mainstays of his run).  I’ll be very interested to see where these characters go next.

Next month is the conclusion to the storyline, but so far I’m finding this to be a great start to Tony Bedard’s run. Assuming Boodikka is somehow restored next issue, I’m going to be very intrigued to see how, and if Ganthet is involved, if it gives us a hint as to how he might be connected to the person that is collecting entities over in GL.

The August Engineering report went live the other day, and includes some nice updates.

There’s a few things due to come out in the next few weeks that I’m quite excited about.  The new weekly episodes sounds like they’ll be excellent for adding much-needed new storyline missions to the game.  Since hitting Vice Admiral I’ve been replaying the game with a new character, and doing strong story-based missions like City on the Edge of Never (time travelling, genetically augmented Klingons who try to change history) and the missions in the Romulan sector that deal with the Hobus explosion and the Romulan’s research into Borg technology are very satisfying, so more missions with that kind of attention to moving the plot of the wider universe along will be very welcome.

The upcoming addition of the two Excelsior ships is also welcome, as the Excelsior is one of my favourite starship designs.  And I do appreciate how the developers are trying to find a compromise between the game and the C-Store, putting the original style Excelsior in the game at tier 3 (Commander level) available for purchase with energy credits, while the Admiral level tier 5 version must be bought in the C-Store.  I appreciate how the devs are trying to listen to the community’s unrest with the C-Store exclusive items in this way.

Talking of which, while I assume they’ll end up C-Store exclusive, its also nice to see Enterprise get some love, as the NX-01 Enterprise and that show’s uniforms are also in development, along with the uniforms from Star Trek The Motion Picture (won’t excite that many, but I’ve always liked Kirk’s Admiral uniform from that film that recently got nicely referenced in last year’s movie).  Finally the fact they’re working on new minigames is welcome, as they’ll nicely beef up some of the social areas, like the new ship interiors.  Dabo has been a really nice addition to Deep Space Nine.

However, aside from the new missions and vanity items, the thing that’s been best I think, is the change in focus for the developers over the coming months, moving away from a lot of this new content, to give more focus towards polish and bug fixes.

Its been a widely held assumption by the player base that the game was rushed out the door early, and that’s shown in terms of the lack of content, and the bugs and stability issues that the game has.    With the last 6 months or so seeing the advent of more missions and game content, the time seems right for the development team to start stomping on some of the issues that have been plaguing the game recently.

In fairness, a lot of the game is playable, so I don’t mean to cast a bad picture here, but there are some issues that have been dragging the game down.  The recently revamped PvP interface will hopefully help address the issues with that side, however one of the big sticking points for me has been the issues in the star clusters.

Star clusters take the shape of dynamically generated missions, and they’ve been one of my favourite tasks when levelling up, as they grant you badges of exploration that can be used to purchase green-level equipment at the Sol Starbase, and so are a nice way of quickly beefing up the weapons on a new ship.  These also form a large part of the end game content, offering Vice Admirals the chance to earn merits they can spend on new equipment and ships.  However, since season 2 debuted , there’s been a few issues with them.  They no longer seem to support teaming, so you can only solo your cluster missions, and the ability to exit a mission and continue it at a later date is also broken.

Now, this is only one aspect of the game.  Normal systems, task forces, fleet actions etc all still work fine, but a lot of players rely on the cluster missions, which means there’s been a lot of heated discussion generated in the forums, and that doesn’t really help the game.

The good news is that over the last couple of days, the devs have managed to get in some forum time, and are reassuring players that these issues (which have found to be complex, hence the time being taken to fix them) are being resolved.   Their own frustration with these bugs is evident, but from a player point of view, its just nice to know that the player base’s concerns are not going unnoticed and fixes are in the works.   And its for these reasons that I think switching the development focus to polish is a good thing.  Content-wise the game’s got a good platform now for further additions, so taking this point to stop, and make sure the worst of the kinks are worked out means the developers can then go onto focus on producing new quality content on a stable base.   This makes a lot of sense, and while the atmosphere in the forums is a little disgruntled at the moment, I think in the long term this is definitely the strategy that will pay off the best, rather than just continuing to provide new content while the bugs just linger around.

Communication is really the key to all of this.  Part of the reason the forums got so heated was the lack of developer response.  Now, I don’t blame the developers for this, as presumably they didn’t have the time to post on the forums as they were busy trying to actually fix the issues, but the shift in tone on the forums over the last couple of days has been obvious to me.   The engineering reports are a great tool for not only generating excitement over new content in the works, but also reassuring the playerbase and, to an extent humanising the developers.  Its easy for forums to rail on a group of faceless developers, but when you’ve got dstahl (the chief developer) posting on the forums about being so frustrated with bugs that he started re-coding things from scratch, it really helps to underline that these are real people, working hard to give the fans of the game the fun experience they’re after.   I really think Star Trek Online has been one of the best games I’ve seen for this kind of direct developer interaction, and I really hope it continues, as to me, it really adds to the experience of being a player in this game.

This is an interesting title.  When first announced, it appeared it was going to be a Guy Gardner monthly, and indeed this first issue does come across a bit like that, with Guy taking centre stage.   However, what actually is happening is more GLC being split into two books, with Peter Tomasi taking Guy and various key members of the cast over to this new book while Tony Bedard continues with the rest of the cast.

Its interesting though, as this book really comes across more as a direct continuation of Tomasi’s GLC run rather than a new book.  Guy is the main focus for this book, but other central characters of Peter Tomasi’s GLC run are to appear.  We’ve already seen Sodam Yat in this first issue, and Kilowog and Arisia are promised (presumably as Guy puts together his new team).  To be honest, out of the two books, arguably GLC comes across as the newer title, with the new team of Kyle, Ganthet and John headlining.  However, Peter Tomasi is undoubtedly the bigger name in DC, and out of the GLs, it makes most sense for Guy to get the new book, so I understand why things worked out this way.

None of which has anything to do with events in this book.  So onto them

Mainly, the book is setup for the direction for this series.  To help differentiate it from the main GLC book, the focus is obviously going to be on the unknown sectors.  Guy’s noticed increasing issues with criminals using the unknown sectors, as they’re outside GLC jurisdiction, so he goes to the Guardians and proposes putting together a team that’ll be proactive about dealing with issues arising from those sectors.

Obviously, this’ll form the basis for this group of characters being separated from the main base on Oa, with characters we know will be focused on, like Kilowog and Arisia being amongst Guy’s recruits.   Presumably Sodam Yat will be joining up as well, since we see him on Daxam, and Tomasi spent some time investing in his and Arisia’s relationship during his run on GLC.

The unknown sectors thing I find slightly odd, as it seems to be at odds with what we know about the corps.  The entire galaxy is supposed to be divided into the 3600 sectors, so how come there are now these “unknown” sectors?  Granted, they offer up interesting story possibilities, placing the GLs in unknown environments, where no one knows or cares who the Green Lanterns are, but I just find it a bit odd these have just suddenly appeared.   I guess in New Earth continuity, the Green Lanterns only patrol a certain percentage of the galaxy (or I’ve misunderstood how things stood in the past).

The other main focus of this issue that gets brought up, is Guy’s deal with Ganthet and Atrocitus.  He’s clearly not happy with Atrocitus being involved, and having a team out in the unknown sectors is a part of their plan, whatever it is.  I guess its going to give Guy his own team who are operating outwith the Guardians influence in some way, which would explain him surrounding himself with experienced Lanterns who are his closest friends on Oa.  I definitely remain interested to see exactly what the nature of this deal turns out to be, and if there’s a reason given why Ganthet would go too Guy rather than Hal or Kyle (who he’s traditionally been closer to).

Finally, there’s the ending in the unknown sectors, where we see a pair of Green Lanterns, bringing in people they’ve caught to “Salaak”.  Except its not Salaak, and wherever they are, its not Oa.  Now, I’m unsure if this is a new enemy who appears to be controlling these Green Lanterns, but it does look a little like Bolphunga.  Again, I’ll be interested to see where this is going, however my only issue is that this “evil GLC” style story is currently going on in GLC with the Alpha Lanterns revolting.  It feels a little too familiar, however hopefully this new (?) enemy will spice things up once the story gets rolling.

Regardless, the action continues on from last month, with John about to be converted into an Alpha Lantern, while Kyle and co arrive to rescue him.  As part of the conversion, John’s mind is linked to Cyborg Superman’s, and it neatly allows Tony Bedard to fill the gaps of what he’s been up to since we saw his skull rescued by the Manhunters at the end of the Sinestro Corps War.

Of course, Cyborg Superman’s big motivation these days is his own death, so Blackest Night was a pretty big deal for him.  Seeing his reaction to it, including how his Cyborg body meant the Black Lanterns and Necron completely ignored him was a nice scene.

What happens next was interesting, as it throws another wrinkle into the ongoing Green Lantern storyline, as we see the mysterious figure from that book now has the Manhunters under his control (in exchange for pointing Cyborg Superman at the Alpha Lanterns).  Cyborg Superman also straight out mentions that Ganthet knows the figure.  Really at this point, if that figure isn’t a renegade Guardian I’ll be shocked.  Given what we’ve seen of the figure so far, I really have to wonder if this Guardian wasn’t directly involved with the Manhunters in some way.  We first saw him/her in sector 666, and now they’ve claimed the Manhunters for their own.  I have to assume its all linked to that massacre.

In some ways, this issue does suffer.  Its very much the middle of the story, so aside from the Cyborg Superman/manacled figure scenes, there’s not many other big moments here. But the story has moved along nicely, and John is now free to team up with Kyle and Soranik to rescue Ganthet and somehow solve this whole mess.  And I really have to wonder whether or not the Alpha Lanterns will be returned to normal after all this, or if we’ll just see their original personalities restored, overriding both the Alpha Lantern and Cyborg Superman programming.

So anyway, on to GL #56.  The story with the entities rumbles on as the mysterious figure frees Hector Hammond and Hal heads out to find Larfleeze to ask him how he managed to contain Ophidian (who is trapped in the Orange Lantern).

To be honest, the reveal that Larfleeze had captured Ophidian was a bit of a surprise, as I’d taken it from the previous Agent Orange story that Larfleeze had just inherited everything.  However thinking about it, while Larfleeze found the Orange Lantern and its temple, its possible Larfleeze later trapped Ophidian.  However there’s still backstory to the Orange Lantern that we’re waiting on being revealed.

Another thing I enjoyed about this issue was breaking up the Hal, Carol, Sinestro team.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been greatly enjoying the characters.  However for me Hal was starting to feel a bit like a guest star in his own book.  As a result, the Hal/Larfleeze scenes felt more paired down to me, in a good way.

It is also interesting to note that Larfleeze is right back to being a mostly comic relief character as well.  Any hint of menace from his initial appearance now is lost in his writing letters to Santa and the like.  Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, as it does help make him distinct amongst the raft of new characters.  If you want menace, then Atrocitus and the Red Lanterns have that in spades.

However it will be interesting to see where Sayd’s been sent…

The hunt for the entities remains at centre stage despite the shift in cast for this issue, and I must say it was very nice to see Saint Walker again.  The Blue Lanterns were a big hit for me when they first appeared, but since then, they haven’t really been explored much at all, unlike most of the other Lanterns (barring probably the Indigos).  Especially now they’ve lost both their Guardians, I remain keen to see more of the Blue Lanterns.  However, I’m not entirely convinced its going to happen outside of Saint Walker and the Blue Entity.

It was also good to see Hector Hammond’s previous appearances pay off in this issue.  He’s been a nice lingering threat throughout most of Johns’ run, with red herrings early on that he’d be linked to the Orange Lanterns (of course he wasn’t, that turned out to be Larfleeze).  So here we get to see that pay off, as he frees and joins with Ophidian.  Hammond’s been a successful character in this run, well done as a creepy threat and its nice to see him take centre stage for next issue.

Overall, this issue grabbed me a lot more than last month.  I still feel a little close to burn out with the various new Lanterns and Entities, but Hal felt less overshadowed this month to me and the mysterious figure (who appears to be hot on the trail of the Predator in Las Vegas) continues to be intriguing.