Sunday February 20, 2005

FIG-FIG

On general HeroClix stuff… I need a Veteran Vanisher and a Veteran DEO Agent. I just noticed, while poking around on my shelves (I have a small set of shelves in my bedroom that a friend gave where a lot of my ‘spare’ clicks are stored, and I also have extras from my Mutant Mayhem and Unleashed cases in two boxes under my couch, one box for flyers, one box for non-flyers) that I don’t have either fig. The Vet Vanisher is annoying in its absence, since I know I had one. I think what happened is, I decided to put the rookie Vanisher on display among my mob of X-Men villains, and tossed the Vet into the extras box. Then my brother Paul came over and picked through the extras boxes, and I probably thought that Vet Vanisher was an extra and told him he could have it. At the very least, I don’t have one anymore and it’s aggravating.

The vet DEO Agent I can honestly take or leave, but, well, I think I have very nearly a complete set of Unleashed otherwise, so it’s a hole I’d like to fill. Those of you with the collector mentality will understand that; those of you who aren’t cursed with such, bless you in your enlightenment. Now go from this place.

I also don’t have a Veteran She-Hulk. There are very few characters in comic books I loathe more than She-Hulk, but I just recently noticed that I don’t have a Vet Version of her, and I suppose, if I had one, I could put her over in the Avengers, like my Experienced is over with the FF. I’d be far happier living in a timeline where she never existed , but, since I have rookie and experienced versions, I might as well try to pick up a veteran, at some point.

There’s a guy at work I don’t much like who has owed me a Veteran Shadowcat for nearly a year. Months ago, he asked me if I had a spare Veteran Starfire, as he and his wife were looking for one. This was right about the time that I started playing briefly in weekly HeroClix games at his place, so I took my only Vet Starfire over on my first night as more or less a thank you gift. I didn’t ask for anything back, which, given that he’d already stood me up a couple of weeks before when he’d been supposed to pick me up and give me a ride over there, and he hadn’t even bothered to call that night and let me know (he really is a fairly wretched fellow, although he’s naturally charismatic and so is much better liked, in general, than I am) I thought was fairly swell of me. A couple of weeks later, he asked if there was anything I wanted in return, and I said, well, I didn’t have a Vet Shadowcat. I deliberately picked that fig because he collects X-Men specifically and I figured he’d have extras. (My Vet Starfire was my only one, but, at the time, I was still only collecting characters I liked, and hadn’t been bitten by the completist bug, so I didn’t mind giving her up. I later bought another one online, though, and I now currently have a complete set of Teen Titans, much though I loathe the latter day members.)

Anyway, months went by and this guy never, ever brought me my Vet Shadowcat. To be honest, it didn’t bother me. I always feel kind of bad when I dislike someone, and would prefer to feel that, if I do dislike someone, it’s for worthier reasons than petty jealousy (this guy, as I noted, is much better liked than I am, and he’s very good looking, so I have to listen to the chicks on my team at work wax dreamy eyed and rhapsodic about him fairly often). And I honestly do think this guy is a louse, for various reasons I won’t go into here, but which I’m aware could be largely subjective. Still, promising to give someone a ride and then blowing them off without even a phone call isn’t subjective. And promising someone a specific chattel and then letting months go by without even mentioning it also isn’t subjective. So I was happy to have fairly solid reasons buttressing my otherwise no doubt quite childish dislike of this guy.

However, he’s recently been on a kick to make me like him more, for some reason I cannot understand, since I am in no way important to him. Or perhaps he’s just been guilt tripped by proxy, since I’d mentioned the never-appearing Shadowcat to a mutual friend a few weeks ago. Anyway, just last week he actually came through on a trade… not the Shadowcat thing, because I recently bought the Shadowcat Unique, as well as a full REV of the fig, but he traded me a Vet Riddler and a Vet Doomsday for a couple of extra Unleashed figs I happened to have that he needed… one of the Big Barda’s, I believe, and a Veteran Raven.

So now I have Vet Riddler and Vet Doomsday, which is nice. And I can still dislike this guy, because he never did come through with the Shadowcat, and, well, he’s still a louse. So that all worked out

In other work related clix news, my supervisor Jane decided to pass out goofy joke awards this week at our Friday team meeting. We normally get awards every week based on our Customer Feedback Survey scores, but we don’t have any surveys in right now due to technical problems, so Jane made these up instead. It was pretty clearly simply an attempt on her part to find something unique to say about each of us that wouldn’t offend anyone. Mine was the Team HeroClix Guru Award. Which is, in some ways, pretty lame, but, on the other hand, since several of the people at work play HeroClix (just, not with me), it gave me something to point at and brag about. One guy in particular has bought a few clix off me and I frequently give play tips to; I showed him the award and advised him that from now on there would be a 20% Guru Tax for all services.

The newest clix expansion, Legacy, is due to be released March 2. It’s overall a good set, if nowhere near Silver Age enough for me (in fact, I’m not sure there’s one Silver Age fig in the whole set, come to think of it… no, R’as al-Ghul and Sinestro are both Silver Age characters, as is the Joker, of course… but all the other figs are definitely Modern Age; even the ones that go back to the Silver Age have Modern Age sculpts) and I’ve already put in my order for a case. (I just like opening a lot of boosters at once. Sue me.)

Having said all that, I’m now going to bitch about various things about the set that kind of piss me off:

The Joker – the new fig would have a decent chance against an Experienced Superman, which strikes me as ridiculous. Beyond that, what mostly annoys me is that the new sculpt is virtually identical with the Scourge, from the Unlimited expansion. In all honesty, it mostly appears that all they did was take Scourge and give him a new paintjob. I cannot honestly tell you how much crap like that annoys me. I’ve seen similar sculpts before, but this one is the laziest duplication yet.

Beyond that, WizKids has begun parsing their words in their rules interpretations to a ridiculous degree, and with this set, they’ve become absolutely sadistic in how they manipulate their players. The Batman REV, for example. Leaving aside entirely subjective stuff regarding how much I hate what the new fig looks like (it is, essentially, Batman in a pair of overalls), WizKids basically gave us a new Rookie/Experienced/Veteran version of Batman, finally giving us a Veteran version of Batman with the much coveted Batman Allies Team Ability (the previous REV had the Batman Allies TA on the rookie and experienced versions, but the Vet had the JLA TA, which sucked and kept everyone from playing him)… and then they took away his Incapacitate for most of his dial.

Incapacitate is one of two attack superpowers that works well with more than one ranged target. (The other one is Energy Explosion, and while Batman could certainly have a few grenades in his utility belt, it’s not something he’s known for.) Batman has, on his Vet versions, an 8 range (respectable if not great) and 2 range targets. The previous REV had Incapacitate all the way down his dial, meaning he could deal out action tokens to two different targets (representing him hitting them in a nerve cluster with a Batarang, or momentarily immobilizing them with a Bat line or a smoke cloud or something). This REV only has Incapacitate on his last couple of clicks.

This sucks profoundly. What makes it worse is, with this expansion, WizKids is putting a Feat Card called Stunning Blow into play. Normally, when you strike to Incapacitate, you reduce your damage to zero… you give the target figure an extra action token, which is never good, but you do no damage. With Stunning Blow, you get that back… you deal the action token, plus your normal damage. Since Batman has a 3 damage for much of his dial, this would have made a great add on to his abilities… except that WizKids has bewilderingly misplaced his Incapacitate.

There’s no reason for it. It’s not like Batman stopped stunning people, or momentarily immobilizing them to get a tactical advantage in combat, over the last couple of years in the comics. No, it mostly seems to simply be WizKids’ way of being rather cruel. Yeah, you can have a new REV of Batman with the Batman TA on the version with the best stats. Yeah, we’re bringing out a Feat Card that would work really well with the Batman we’ve previously had in play. BUT… well… we don’t want you guys to have TOO good a time with this game you’re buying by the ton lot, so we’re just going to take Incapacitate back off the new Batman REV.

For those who play by WizKids rules, this is even more significant, because WizKids retires older figs regularly from tournament play. Eventually… probably fairly soon… the Hypertime version of Batman will be retired, and the only REV of Batman in play will be this crappy Legacy Batman in the overalls.

WizKids is being annoyingly manipulative with some other figs, as well. While I’ll try not to bitch too much about the long awaited Superboy fig being the worthless, piece of shit Modern Age version in the goddam black t-shirt and blue jeans, rather than the classic Silver Age version I really wanted, I do find it annoying that the Vet version, the one with the best stats, has the stinking Titans Team Ability on it. The coveted Superman Ally TA got stuck on the Rookie Version. With a lousy 9 attack value and no range capacity at all, the Superman Ally TA is pretty much entirely wasted, and one click of Charge pretty much guarantees that all you’re going to do with this guy is ram him into someone else first thing… meaning he’ll be out of the game pretty quickly.

Under my HeroClix House Rules any version of this particularly odious Superboy is fairly useful, simply because they all have Charge, and Charge is a severely asskicking power under my rules. But by normal WizKids rules, Superboy is largely a waste of plastic. Nobody is going to play him other than as a random draw; under standard rules, he can’t even use Charge and Close Combat Expert together.

One thing I do like is that Sinestro has the Green Lantern TA on his rookie version. That’s a nice, sensible little touch, since Sinestro was a GL at the start of his career, before he went renegade. In fact, the Sinestro fig is one of the few things about this set I like wholeheartedly. It’s nice to have at least one classic Green Lantern villain in plastic form, given how many Superman and Batman villains are out there already. Hell, even Flash has Weather Wizard and Gorilla Grodd.

R’as al-Ghul got a pretty good sculpt and dial, and it’s not WizKids’ fault that I have never liked the character. R’as is Denny O’Neil’s bid to create an arch villain for Batman, and I have always felt the character was a waste of paper and ink. If his first few appearances hadn’t been drawn by Neal Adams, I have a feeling he’d be as forgotten and obscure as Chris Claremont’s Arcade, or that dreadful Morgan McNeil Hardy idiot that J.M. deMatteis did his best to jam into Marvel mainstream continuity by putting him into every single story he wrote for every single comic he was assigned to at Marvel back in the early 1980s. R’as al-Ghul has always seemed to me to be a character cut from much the same cloth as those other non-starters, so the fact that he’s well defined in plastic form doesn’t thrill me.

The Modern Mr. Terrific, however, is a good looking sculpt and will be very useful in all three of his versions. As the current JSA is one of the few books I like, I do enjoy the fact that Legacy is adding several new JSA figs. Stargirl won’t be particularly useful, especially given that she wields a cosmic power object that can do very nearly anything and isn’t given anything like that level of power on her dial, but what the hell.

Most all the other fangeeks out there are excited by the big numbers on several of the Unique figs in this set. Ares, Ultraman, General Zod, Mongul… these are all 200 point or higher monsters that apparently have a lot of fingers itching to get hold of them. Most people seem to figure they’re going to slap a Fortitude card on any of these figs and have an unstoppable tank. What’s interesting to me is that none of these figs have HyperSonic Speed, which is the most sought after power in the HeroClix superhuman ability array. In fact, a quick search shows me that only two characters in Legacy have HyperSonic Speed… the Kingdom Come Flash, and Kid Flash.

Nonetheless, what all the big guns listed above do have is some sort of movement power (Charge or Running Shot), high defenses (Ares has a 19) and very high damage (nearly all of them start out with 5, which was, prior to this set, unheard of as an unmodified damage value). That kind of power creep is bothersome to me. These figs are going to get played, and they are going to win, and as with Magic: the Gathering, it may quickly turn out that ONLY these figs, and a handful of others, ever get played on tournament teams again.

Which doesn’t matter to me, as I wouldn’t play in a tournament even if it were run under my House Rules (the kind of ultra-competitive “I am the alpha male bow down before me” geeks who turn out for tournaments of games like this fill me with a yearning for a helicopter full of napalm). But when you have a game with thousands of different components, and suddenly everyone who plays seriously is ignoring all of them except for maybe 10 or 12, well, the game is broken. And that does bother me… although only a little, since nowadays, all HeroClix means to me is collecting the cool little plastic figs. I’m pretty clearly never going to play again.

Another thing I’m not wild about in Legacy is the emphasis on Kingdom Come figs. This actually may not be fair; Unleashed introduced the Kingdom Come TA, and gave us 6 Kingdom Come figs… Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Bat Sentry, Magog, and the LE Shazam. Legacy is only adding 4 more KC figs… Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and Red Robin. It’s probably simply that I don’t like the story these figs are taken from and it pisses me off that WizKids is giving slots in two expansions in a row now to what seems to me to be a disproportionate number of these characters.

And yet, looking over the set, it would seem that in point of fact, Legacy has a good spread of all the different TAs. There are new Superman Allies, new Superman Villains, new Batman Allies and Villains, new members of the JLA (although none of them are what I’d consider ‘real’ JLA members), many new members of the JSA… in fact, I’ve just checked, and there are new additions to all existent TAs, as well as three new TAs, in this set. I suppose I shouldn’t begrudge 4 new members of Kingdom Come… but I do. When there are still thirty Legionnaires that have yet to be done in plastic, I’m not going to be happy at seeing more of these crappy Mark Waid/Alex Ross characters put on top of dials.

Yet, for all that, the Red Robin click is an excellent and useful addition to any team, and I will be happy to make use of him (assuming I get one) as an adult Robin for my Silver Age JSA line up. And although no one has commented on it as yet that I’ve seen, I have to assume some players, at least, have realized that his one click of Stealth will combine beautifully with the KC TA.

I suppose, honestly, it really is just the Modern Age emphasis of this set that has me pissed off and surly. Wildfire gets a fig, and he’s in some crappy costume that looks like something Tony Stark would design on an off day, instead of having the gorgeous outfit Dave Cockrum originally designed for him. Kid Flash has moon boots on. The KC Green Lantern looks gorgeous, and I hope to get one, but still, he’s an Alan Scott fig without Alan Scott’s utterly unique costume, and a Green Lantern without the Green Lantern TA. And while I’m all in favor of double sized Giant figs, WizKids has once again continued their asinine habit of sticking their foot in it with this newest expansion. Their first double sized fig was a Bat-Sentry. It came out before they formulated special rules for Giant figs, so it doesn’t get to take advantage of them. They stupidly made it a Unique, so by official rules you can only play one, even though in continuity there are actually an army of them that are all alike (Bruce Wayne created them in the nightmarish future of the Kingdom Come timeline to patrol and control Gotham City) .

To make up for this, they’ve given us a Giant Man fig that everything was wrong with (we Hank Pym fans begged for a Pym fig for years, and then they gave us this one, an Ultimates Giant Man who looks rotten and has lousy powers), and now, they’re giving us a gigantic female Steel fig. I don’t know who this character is and I couldn’t care less.

Adding injury to insult, since the mistake with making the Bat-Sentry a Unique, WizKids has made the two succeeding Giant figs Experienced versions (giving them blue rings, even though there are no Rookie or Veteran versions). This means you can only play one Bat-Sentry on your team, ever, but you can have all the Ultimates Giant Men and super-sized chick Steels you want. This is deranged and moronic, and honestly, gives any thinking person little faith that there is any intelligence behind the wheel at WizKids.

A lot of it is simply that I’m a bit spoiled by the previous DC expansion, Unleashed. This expansion was hardly what you’d call Silver Age themed, since it had quite a few Modern Age figures in it. But it also had around a dozen Silver Age figs, some of them long awaited, like the Hal Jordan Green Lantern. A Silver Age Batgirl REV, a Brainiac 5 fig with Proty-II sitting on his shoulder, Dr. Fate, Deadshot, Two Face, a Silver Age-esque Supergirl, Kilowog, Kobra, Scarecrow, Queen Bee, the Ultrahumanite… all of these made Unleashed a good set for me. In comparison, most of Legacy is from an alien era.

In other clix related news, I recently moved my X-Men and X-Men villains displays into my bedroom, as I found a set of old metal shelves out on a curb a week or so ago and brought them home. When I was setting the displays up again, I decided to add an Experienced Archangel behind his creator and master, Apocalypse. And that fig is pissing me off. He’s so hugely out of scale to the others, and so ungainly with those massive wings on his back, that any time I jar those shelves at all with my left elbow, he topples over. It’s just aggravating.

I HEAR THE MUSIC, DAYLIGHT DISC

Last night I went up to Wally World after work and did some shopping. I needed a few groceries, and hadn’t blown any money on myself in a while. I wound up buying a few DVDs, as well… John Carpenter’s The Thing, Speilberg’s Always, and a boxed set of the first season of The OC.

The last was really an impulse buy. I saw the first season of Deadwood on DVD, and yearned for it, but it was $72. The OC was a mere $45. Being wise in the ways of these things by now, I also checked to see just how much Deadwood I’d be getting. 12 1 hour episodes, no doubt with plenty of booby, but still. The OC set has 27 (TWENTY SEVEN!) first season one hour episodes. Now, I grant you, a one hour episode on network TV is more like 45 minutes long, but 60 minutes x 12 is still far far short of 45 minutes x 27. Between the cost difference and the varying amounts of material in both sets, I chose as I did.

I have actually seen one or two episodes of The OC and it struck me as being a very well written teen angst soap opera. I guess I’ll find out if I just happened to watch a couple of noteworthy eps, or if it does hold up consistently.

I’d never seen Carpenter’s version of The Thing prior to this, although I’ve heard it praised highly since it first came out. We showed it several times when I was on the Syracuse University Union Cinema Board, and I tried to watch it, and I’ve tried to watch it on cable and videotape since, and something about it always kept me from sitting all the way through it, or even watching for very long. Carpenter does a very good job of invoking both overt terror and subtle horror in this film, and he also gives one a very palpable sense of constriction and claustrophobia throughout the film… something I’ve never had much tolerance for, and I think that, more than anything else, had kept me being able to watch this movie prior to this weekend.

Nonetheless, I don’t recall ever seeing the movie from the beginning before. I think if I had, I’d have been hooked. The opening sequence, featuring some lunatic in a helicopter chasing a sled dog across an icy landscape, trying to kill the critter with an automatic rifle, and then, when that fails, with thrown hand grenades, would have been enough to grab and hold my interest, I think, especially when the lunatic landed his chopper, accidentally blew it up with a dropped grenade, and then opened fire on a group of people standing around the sled dog, all the time screaming in a foreign language.

From that rather bizarre and intriguing opening, Carpenter moves right into what may very well be his best movie ever. His pacing in the film is excellent; he’ll tune your nerves to a very high pitch of low grade horror at an unseen, unspoken menace, and then suddenly interject a brief burst of violence and unsettlingly gory special effects. Kurt Russell and a cast full of easily recognizable character actors (other than Wilford Brimley, who plays an atypically sinister part, and who can only be pegged from his voice as he doesn’t have his signature untrimmed hedge of a mustache in this film) turn in excellent performances, and while the special effects are rather dated looking now, still, this is one helluva good film.

Carpenter has since this time become the schlock SF/horror film director in Hollywood, and the only thing he’s done since The Thing that was even remotely interesting was 1995’s In The Mouth of Madness. And that movie wasn’t really good, it just had some fun concepts here and there. So it's nice to find out that he actually once did do something worth watching besides the first Halloween.

As to Always, I remember liking it much more than all the other Spielberg fans I knew back in the day did when it first came out. I’ll see if I still like it later this weekend.

In other news, Bewildering Stories has published another of my works, one of my goofier short stories, Meeting of the Mindless. So that’s… something. I really don’t know what.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.