Midnight Suns is tons of funs

The new Marvel RPG can be fairly described as Slay the Spire meets XCOM. The card collection, deck building, and card play are all there from the former, and the positioning (now in 3D, not iso) and tactical coolness of the latter.

The most fun for me, though, comes from the characters. Few Marvel games (Marvel Snap comes to mind) or shows or movies can bring together superheroes from all parts of the real Marvel Universe. X-Men quarrel with Avengers and Ghost Rider starts a club with Spider-Man… it just goes on and on.

You are a character in Midnight Suns with the unfortunate name of “Hunter.” The interpersonal system to gain friendship points (I swear it’s more fun than that sounds) includes a light/dark score system, but it’s more nuanced than, say, Mass Effect’s paragon/renegade. Your Hunter gets bonuses for trending toward light or dark, and there’s a third option called balanced that’s also available. Along with your character comes a harrowing tale of dark magics and domination, but there has to be something to save the world from, right?

Some of the characters you hang out with are members of little cliques, and some of them actively dislike each other. As the “chosen one,” you have to do some work to help them get along. Also, before I forget, if you ever wondered what it would be like to live in the same house as Tony Stark… wow, that guy is so annoying.

Thankfully, getting to know your big family of roommates allows no romance to be pursued. Unless that happens later on. Romantic relationships (including doing the nasty) get so very ugly in RPGs (I’m looking at you, Witcher.) Oh yeah, and the voice acting is very good. The actors for Nico and Carol actually sound like their TV show and movie counterparts.

There are many cosmetic options for you to choose from, including color schemes, for your many characters. You can earn these with in-game currency that you will be piling up before long. There are cash microtransactions, but after playing for quite a few hours, I don’t even know what they buy. No gameplay hides behind a pay wall.

I’m loving Midnight Suns. I found out that it has some post-campaign content like a new game plus feature and other stuff you can do after you save the world from your mom. I think if you like (a) turn-based team combat, (b) interpersonal role-playing shenanigans, or (c) Marvel super heroes, you’ll have a good time. Don’t forget to pet the dog.

The sandwich is a gaming invention.

Sure, you’ve heard how John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, popularized the kind of food we eat so often today. But did you know he needed a sandwich because he was gaming? Wikipedia told me so.

It is said that Lord Sandwich was fond of this form of food because it allowed him to continue playing cards, particularly cribbage, while eating without getting his cards greasy from eating meat with his bare hands.

While we’re on the subject of sandwiches, I’d like to mention that the strict definition of a sandwich involves two pieces of bread. This means, of course, that the notorious KFC Double Down is not in fact a “chicken sandwich” as advertised. It’s just a pile of stuff that will kill you.

Besides, a sandwich is named for its contents, not the delivery mechanism. If the Double Down were a sandwich, it would be a bacon and cheese sandwich, not a chicken sandwich.

Everything is more fun with Zurg. (WATCH)

Bayonetta watches Bayonetta play Bayonetta.

I pretty much had to post this, all things considered. Thanks to Rick for this one!

SORAG: A fond memory.

In 1981 I partnered with the dear, departed Don Rapp to create a company called Paranoia Press. We made supplements for the Game Designers’ Workshop (Illinois, not GW from England). science-fiction roleplaying game Traveller. (Paper and pencil, not a video game, kiddies.) The company was named for the fact that we made Marc Miller, one of the game’s creators, paranoid. Or so Don told me.

We specialized in new character generation systems for the game, and had already done a couple when I had the idea to do a spy/espionage kind of thing. I didn’t know I’d be doing almost all the work on this little production.

I worked for a printer in the art department (actually, I WAS the art department) so I did the layout, artwork, typesetting, and pasteup. (If you don’t know what pasteup was… oh, never mind.) For this book, I also shot the negatives, stripped them, and burned the plates. As it turned out, I did even more than I bargained for, but more on that later.

The name of the product was influenced by my friend Steve Vice, who was staying with us at the time (this was just before my son Brian was born). He had worked for an organization called SOG (Studies and Observations Group) in military service in Vietnam. (You can see their cool skull logo at the link, which shows you they do more than study and observe). Inspired by his tales of plans to drop plague ridden rats on Hanoi, I christened my new project SORAG.

The look of the product was the result of a book I received from another friend at the time, Robin Rhodes. Also with the military, he was stationed at Fort Campbell. He knew I was interested in all things military so he gave me some old manuals of all kinds; tactical dissertations, weapons operations, even a pilot’s manual for an F-4 Phantom jet fighter (this is where I got the term “canopy knife,” which I’ll explain another time). One of these books was about operations in Vietnam. It had a red cover with black lettering, presumably because that was impossible to photocopy at the time. I guess. Anyway, much of the look of the cover of SORAG came from this book. It looked so evil and secret and angry.

Obtaining that red cover stock was very difficult. It had to be special ordered from the paper company. Even the people in the print shop oohed and ahhed when it came in. (At the time, we owned not one but two red cars, and LWC and I have a fascination with red that continues to this day.) Needless to say, the book was quite striking on a game store’s shelf. It would be even today, I think.

I wanted the book ready for Gen Con, which was coming up soon. It had been printed, but not cut, folded, stapled or packaged. When I told the print shop workers that I needed it this weekend, they said, “I’ll show you how to use the folder and stapler.” So in addition to all the other work I’d done to produce the book, I did all the finishing work for about 500 copies. Everything but print the damned thing. And I took it to the convention, and it was a big hit.

Some other fun facts about this book: I included on page one “pronounced SOAR-ag” when somebody in playtesting called it SO-RAG. That had to stop immediately.

The idea of exactly what the Zhodani alien race in Traveller was just beginning to be properly formed. You’ll find that my book describes an intelligence organization much like the CIA or Army Special Forces. Not a lot of psionic telepathic alien flavor there. In fact, I had named a character “Colonel Flagg” (a tribute to M*A*S*H) and GDW made me change that to “General Preshezdanratl.” Zhodani names were always a mouthful.

The credits for the book are what I called “movie credits” with my name prominently featured at the top in larger type. Look, I’m proud of the work we did, but the term “vanity press” is not far off.

I credited one of the illustrations to “Art Clip.” Of course, that was clip art.

SORAG is dedicated to my dear friend Dan Hillen (also unfortunately departed), and I’m proud to have his name on one of my most favorite projects. Dan got me into hobby gaming. Period. He sat me down with another friend to play Stalingrad (“Play one of these board games, you’ll like it”) and told me to run D&D (not T&T) when I moved to Fort Wayne. My many many hours of running and playing paper roleplaying games with him (after I returned to St. Louis) was “Game Designer 101.” That’s where I learned about game balance and how to make the players happy.

Video game art is like fine art… in reverse.

In case you weren’t aware, most artists that paint things that don’t look like real things didn’t start out that way. The usual path is to paint from life, and then later develop abstractions. Picasso, for example, used to paint figures that looked like folks you know. Later in his career, things got cubist.

This here fella muses that video game art is taking the opposite path. He was at a Guggenheim exhibit of early 20th century painter Vasily Kandinsky.

On the lowest level, at Kandinsky’s earliest work, I saw the closest things in the exhibition to a Gears of War or God of War.

At the top of my spiral journey, I saw Pac-Mans and Centipedes.

Is there a place in modern video games for an abstract art treatment? Or will every publisher continue to pander to the general public’s desire for realism?

Professional athletes are video gamers too.

I watched this play by Brandon Stokely, running along the goal line to use up time. I thought that was a real heads-up thing to do. He says it was based on his video game experience.

When I caught up with Stokley by telephone a few weeks later, I asked him point-blank: “Is that something out of a videogame?” “It definitely is,” Stokley said. “I think everybody who’s played those games has done that” — run around the field for a while at the end of the game to shave a few precious seconds off the clock. Stokley said he had performed that maneuver in a videogame “probably hundreds of times” before doing it in a real NFL game. “I don’t know if subconsciously it made me do it or not,” he said.

Reminds me of Lewis Hamilton, Formula 1 driver, in his first season, when asked about a track he’d never driven on, even in lesser formulas: “Well, I’ve done the Playstation.” Reportedly some of the NASCAR guys use video games to learn tracks as well.

Yay gaming!

Do you choose the video game or the mini muffin?

FREE! TAKE ME! said the note on the table by the video games and mini muffins. By noon that day, only one muffin remained… but NINE video games were still on the table. Proof positive that gamers value snacks over games!

Umbra Witch news… that’s Bayonetta, for you uninformed.

Bayonetta: Empowering or exploitative? is an article by a woman (gasp!) who says she finds Ms. B to be the former:

As a woman, I haven’t often been satisfied by female character options that effectively boil down to “the same thing as a man, just with breasts and a ponytail.” Thanks to its innovative approach to the idea of female power, Bayonetta is the first action game heroine that’s made me directly conscious of how cool it is to be a girl.

Bayonetta – Sexuality as Decoration vs. Celebration is an article by a different woman (gasp again!)says it’s all for show:

Sexuality as a weapon is nothing new in terms of women characters in gaming. We’ve seen this countless times before, and the only way Bayonetta is any different is that there are a lot more combo moves, rose petals, and photoshop flares sprouting out of her kicks and twists. This is artistically in parallel to the game’s High-Def Rococo approach to everything, and that being said, functions in the same way. I guess that it could all be interpreted as a joyous explosion of girl-shaped confetti in a celebration of female sexuality, but I really can’t see this as an empowerment of the female sex when it’s all for show.

How hard should it be to play an MMO?

A lot of the on-ramp for WoW is superb. They’ve recently revamped the new player interface, and it’s slick and better than ever. Questing is a breeze, and so is leveling your character. Heck, it’s even easy to find a group to run a dungeon with now. Itemization, however, is crazily out of control.

I downloaded a spreadsheet to help me determine what kinds of items to seek out for my character, and how to improve them with secondary enhancements like enchantments and gems. This spreadsheet is also supposed to help me understand how my character’s talents work and how to maximize their efficiency. Click that image above to see it full size. The image I have included is only a portion of the spreadsheet; it has TEN TIMES that many rows.

On the spectrum that goes from fun to homework, this is WAY too far over to the homework side. I understand that this will be simplified with the next expansion. I hope it’s going to be simplified a lot. Does a top-level MMO have to provide this kind of homework to be successful? Who really has fun figuring this stuff out?

(I feel it my duty to point out that none of these caluculations matter one tinker’s damn when I’m operating one of the “vehicles” from the last expansion that remove my character, her experience, and all her gear from the gameplay. But I digress.)