Tales of the Blue Dolphin

There's a new Green Hornet movie coming out, although it looks like direct-to-DVD quality:
It's interesting how Kato's competence, relative to his boss, has changed over the years. I listened to the old radio shows and Kato, while clearly second-fiddle, was a smart and a capable guy. In the 60s TV show (which I haven't seen) Bruce Lee's character was so much better in a fight that folks wondered what the Green Hornet was good for. In today's movie it looks like the Hornet can't even use his gas gun properly, and Kato treats his "boss" with polite condescension.

It recalls an old idea I had of a superhero team member, a guy who had a job and an apartment where his team-mates could sleep and put their leotards on. (This was no doubt inspired by Arthur in The Tick.) Today the Green Hornet is just a schmuck who buys stuff to help Kato kick-ass. It reflects a more egalitarian take on the world, and I think it's more realistic, too. Ask yourself, who would make a better superhero: Paris Hilton, or your average struggling community college student? I'd vote for the second myself, as long as someone else was paying the girl's bills.

I just wrote this for Two Fisted Tales: The Golden Age. It was supposed to an essay on the plots you might have in a Golden Age super's game, but shifted at the end to more of a historical note. I'll probably have to expand it and split it later. In the meantime ... I'd appreciate feedback from anyone familiar with Golden Age comics.

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wellgull and moonlightalice showed me the demo for Arkham Asylum a few weeks ago, and like most folks I was incredibly impressed with the game. It seemed perfectly tailored for Batman, in that every fight required good judgment as well as Bat-Gadgets and acrobatic ability. It made me think about ways a game could approach other superheroes. Superman, for example.

Supposedly no one has ever designed a successful Superman video game, and I can understand why. Most Superman fights are pretty straightforward affairs, in which Superman beats up villain until villain gets Kryptonite, and then villain beats up Superman. (Even the famed Superman-vs-Batman battle in The Dark Knight Returns worked this way.) The fact is, Superman's talents are wasted beating people up. Anyone can beat up crooks -- they beat up each other all the time -- but only Superman can, say, stop a flood from wrecking a city.

I bring up the flood example because the first great Superman story was probably "Superman and the Dam," Action Comics # 5. A dam was breaking and he rushed in to save people. Along the way he came upon a bridge that was about to collapse:

You could imagine a mini-game derived from this scene. A train is coming, quickly, and you have to hold the bridge up so that the tracks are perfectly straight.

Many of Superman's challenges, in fact, would be a lot like this, involving a very careful application of force at just the right time and position. Take the airline scene from Superman Returns:

The airliner was a fragile object. If Superman just held his hand out and caught the plane as it fell from the sky the vehicle would have collapsed like an accordion, killing everyone inside. He had to grab the plane at the right spot (he screwed up at first by taking the wing) and then slow its descent. In a game much of this could be explained in voiceover ("I've ... got ... to ... match ... its ... speed!") but it would take a lot of skill to get right.

Obviously I'm not a computer/console-game designer so I'm never going to put these thoughts into practice, but no harm in fantasizing I suppose.

I've been playing Champions Online a lot recently, and I've found that I like it. Mechanically it's a lot like City of Heroes/Villains, but the environments and the missions are much less repetitive, and much more interesting. I can't say there's no grind, but it doesn't seem to have more than any other MMO. If nothing else, the quests are very quick, so you aren't stuck fighting the same bad guys for very long.

From Superhero MMO Screenshots

Characteristics and so forth resemble the Hero System's, but only on a superficial level; naturally, you don't have the same freedom you would in the tabletop RPG, since it would create absolute chaos in an MMO. Costume design is the main creative outlet, and as always I created three sexy super heroines. My main is "Ms. Natural," pictured on the left; she got the name when I realized she looked like an R. Crumb character.

Champions Online is not flawless, by any means. The game is quite buggy, more so than any other MMO I've tried. It requires a lot of memory, good graphics card, etc., and since my comp is a little old there's a bit of lag all the time. (I don't know why MMO's go the heavy graphics route, instead of following WoW's more inclusive example, but there you go.) Still... I like it, and it may be worth your time. If anyone wants to join me my screen name's Fantomah (yes, taken from my City of Villains main).

I stopped by the Champions Online website, and damn was I disappointed. According to the FAQ: "Champions Online does not use the HERO System." Goddamn it! It looks like they're using Champions for the background, not the rules, which seems a little weird to me, since I never thought the Champions universe was all that interesting. The rules were the whole point!

For those of you who are new to RPGs and never played Champions, let me just say it was the primordial point-build system; like GURPS or Tri-Stat, but 10 times as disgusting. The point wasn't to actually play the game -- the rules were so cumbersome it took forever to do anything -- as to create the most obscene characters possible, by abusing the rules as shamelessly as you could get away with. Third edition understood this appeal, and gave us some gloriously disgusting examples:

• "PlanetMan: This is your average guy -- with the ability to shrink planets down to pocket size ... if he is annoyed, he pulls one out and throws it, turning the Shrinking off while one of his six DNPCs teleports him to another dimension...
  
• "Landlord: For only a handful of points, you can build a base with grounds that cover the known universe. The Landlord bought it. He owns everything. And for 165 more points, Landlord can have 4 billion loyal followers (that's everyone on Earth)[at the time].
  
• "NovaMan: A man with an explosive temper. If bothered while in his private intensive care ward, he explodes, doing about 700d6. This will level skyscrapers within about a kilometer radius..."
  

Now what kind of spoilsport would keep guys like NovaMan out of their MMO game worlds? Game designers have no sense of adventure anymore.

Update: Joking aside, I really do admire the HERO system, even if it was an easy game to satirize and it probably wouldn't work in an MMO.