Ironheart and the Eyes of Wakanda

Continuations of Wakanda...

Ironheart

This six episode series focuses on who I currently believe is the worst hero to date. Riri Williams (played by Dominique Thorne) is a girl genius who rivals Tony Stark's tech using what is basically salvage and has already had some "hero experience" abroad, but upon coming home she just can't help herself and her need for money. To this end she does illegal stuff just short of becoming a ho and joins a gang of crooks and ends up accidentally making the most annoying AI person available but then is unable to operate without said AI person. Maybe she grows/arcs out of it.... nope! She's still the same selfish ass hat at the end of the series. Weak acting doesn't really help the case. Not recommended. 

Eyes of Wakanda

This animated series with four episodes is much better than the above, despite the "kiddy" style art the stories and violence within are quite enjoyable as we follow various Wakandan spies out in the world throughout many points in history - usually trying to retrieve their own tech that's gotten out in the world. Short enough to be worth a try. :)

Midnight Suns: For the Mother

[Part of Superhero Stories]

"Impossible," muttered Doctor Strange as he fell to his knees on the marble tiles of his Sanctorum, a gaping bloody hole through his chest. "Foolish sorcerer supreme," taunted Wanda as she gently floated towards him, clutching the Darkhold in one hand with her eyes glowing an unnatural hue of green. "I am Wanda no longer! You now face Lilith, the mother of demons!" With a horrible realization Doctor Strange screamed as he let loose one final spell that exploded into a swarm of butterflies.

"For the Mother!" screamed a mind-controlled Hydra soldier as he foolishly charged Iron Man with a stun baton, only to be blasted off the roof of the Avengers tower. "Where is Hydra getting all these clowns?" asked Tony over the comms as he continued to blast more Hydra soldiers away while launching rockets at the helicopters that were taking turns in either dropping off more troops or firing directly at him. In the distance he spotted "the Chimera" a SHIELD helicarrier also under Hydra assault when suddenly it exploded in a massive green cloud that fell upon the city. Tony Stark had to take a moment watching that, fighting every urge to go help as he knew he couldn't leave the Avenger's tower defenseless. "Jarvis, please tell me there are survivors!"

But it wasn't Jarvis who replied, instead it was Doctor Bruce Banner: "Tony, the Sanctum is gone." This had to be some terrible nightmare - who on Earth could take down the Avengers so easily? As usual Tony moved quickly from panic to shoveling blame barking "Where are you Bruce!? Things are falling apart over here and you're god knows where not even helping!" as he continued to battle the seemingly endless Hydra soldiers who seemed determined to simply overwhelm him with numbers.
 
"I am helping! I'm quite surprised your password for everything is still 'I AM IRONMAN' though," replied Banner. Suddenly the kill switch in the Iron Man suit activated and the armor self-stripped from the billionaire just as more Hydra troopers arrived with assault rifles drawn, mortally wounding him under a hail of gunfire. Collapsed in a pool of his own blood, Tony could only ask one thing as Hydra forces moved in to finish him off... "why?" Banner replied coldly. "For the Mother."

Bullets work just fine if he doesn't have his armor.

Warframe: Hildryn and Protea

Later game female frames.

Hildryn

If you ever felt your warframe doesn't have enough abs, then Hildryn is probably the bodybuilder you are looking for. Her main blueprint is locked behind rank 3 of the Vox Solaris syndicate though which means it might take awhile before you can get at her, and even when you do - you'll need to collect her other components by facing the Exploiter Orb a minimum of six times. Remember too that you can only fight the Exploiter if you've done the Thermia fractures event which isn't on all the time.

Once you get her, you'll quickly find Hildryn's gimmick is shields instead of energy. Yep, she spends the thing protecting her to do more things! These include flying around (slowwwwly), link shield power to boost allies shields or -tickle- damage enemies, powerup her exalted Ironman blaster which you can toggle to use instead of your secondary or pillage enemy shields to recover your own while clearing status effects. Just remember to do that last one while you have shields, because without shields you have no power to steal more shields. She really takes this shield maiden thing seriously huh?

While Corpus seem to be her chosen prey it balances out against the infested who have no shields for her to pillage. Despite that, Hildryn is quite readily usable "out of the box" as long as you have some shield mods (which by the time you get her, you will). It's also funny that energy leech eximus enemies will just look at you and cry.

Protea

While you can potentially meet Protea early on with The Deadlock Protocol quest (which also gives the handy Xoris) getting her parts will take a bit of doing: you'll need to hunt down Corpus treasurers who spawn on Corpus ships, kill them to take their coin of which there are three versions, then use said coin on a golden hand in one of the Corpus ships (can only use one per mission), defeat the specters of Granum void within the time frame (the Xoris helps a lot, and also pick up any little gold pyramids that add 10 seconds to the count down), and if you do well in there and win the original mission too you have a 11.11% chance to get one part of Protea (based on the coin you used).

Phew! Got all that? Great, now you can get this time engineer frame who can toss grenades that either kill enemies or protect allies, deploy short lived but powerful turrets, pull out ammo/energy/life pickups from her shapely bottom, or drop a temporal anchor which gives you a few seconds to deal damage before time rewinds (only for her) which somehow deals the same damage again, but restores anything she might have lost in that period. Including her life.

That last one is particularly amazing visually, but in reality? I hated her kit. As per her lore she is more geared for defense but there are better defender frames out there. The ammo/energy/life poop is her best skill, and since that is subsumable by the Helminth well... she's worm food.

Iron Man (2008 Game)

The movie was fantastic. The game, not so much.

While this is "based of" the movie, in reality it only starts and ends like it - with a ton of filler between those two points. That's not a bad thing on its own, but when it makes for a nonsensical plot combined with clunky controls, enemy AI that only has one setting (advance and shoot) and poor graphics, that's just a recipe for disaster. Here's a cut scene screenshot as a sample:

Pepper on boob duty.

It does have some good things though: the idea of power modulation and level design that lets the player fly all around and in most cases, through interiors is a plus, but not enough to make up for the rest of it. It's funny that Stark also ignores the "main" bad guy for the majority of the game and instead basically goes on a killing spree to "save lives". I give it one tank QTE (Quick Time Event) out of five.

Captain America: Civil War

When there are no bad guys to fight, heroes must fight each other!

Thanks to more collateral damage while the Avengers are out doing their thing, the world has decided to reign in all these enhanced individuals to make them work for the UN. This divides the team on the accountability vs freedom front and one very lucky bad guy manages to leverage this into a more violent and entertaining conflict where heroes fight each other.

We're not fighting, I'm just repairing Cap's shield.

What's good? Marvel characters galore with quality acting, humorous segments that made me laugh along, nice action choreography and high budget CGI. Introducing even more characters in an already large line up seemed like a bad idea to me but they pulled it off just fine. I also quite like the idea they had behind the bad guy, who really is nothing special - a good contrast to all the powered folk of the Avengers.

On the negative side the biggest issue for me is that said bad guy was extremely lucky that so many things went his way for as long as they did. There's one bit where he would have had to get past a number of security check points AND somehow kill backup generators in what I'm guessing is a high level building, unless of course there are no backup generators in a world where they have underwater prisons and guys that fly in suits of armor?

It's not explained how he manages to do all of this, he just does, which is a bit annoying. The other problem will be for anyone who hasn't watched the Avengers or the previous Marvel films - you could get lost really quickly with "who is that again" even with the 3 minute intros. All up I enjoyed the film and give it 4 Vision lasers out of 5, even if it is a "moving pawns across the board for the next movie" sort of thing.

MMO Agenda: Do you quit at max level?

[Part of my MMO Design folder.]

Simple question today, and one that most MMO devs assume the answer is "Yes" hence the hamster wheel for experience or items. I just want to see if they are correct. After working hard to level up your character to become the most powerful he or she can be, do you then quit the game or would having a god like character actually keep you playing?

"Absolute strength is boring."

Saitama (One Punch Man) art by Lee Woo-Chul

I don't know, I think absolute strength would be fricking amazing. At least I'd get my dailies done faster, and maybe I'd even try the other content I'd usually avoid due to it being too long or too annoying. If I had a character that can one hit Tiamat, I'd definitely play Neverwinter Online a lot more, not a lot less - especially if more updates kept coming in, without any more hamster wheels to run.

What about you? Do you end or reset the experience as soon as the game no longer poses a challenge?

Future Tech: Exosuits and Invisible Helmets

Time for something a bit different. I love coming across tidbits of technological advancement, especially when they come with cool video clips! Not sure if these are of interest to anyone else but I thought I'd share. Note that some of these are actually older now, so I can only imagine the progress that's been done on them. :)

Let's start with the Invisible Bike Helmet. Scroll halfway down this page to watch the video. I think it's pretty amazing. Then let's move on to exoskeletons!

This is now the -old- model!

The exoskeleton projects have also always interested me, however in the past there's always been the slight problem of having a huge power cable running along behind you. Well, that seems to have been solved and now it seems there are exoskeletons being deployed in nursing care (Japan tech) and the armed forces (USA tech). Shouldn't be too long till we see ground based Iron Men I would think. Here's an extra TED talk about the HULC system for those keen on this technology. Would be cool if they combined it with the new combat armor tech too!

Lastly is the highly viewed jump by Felix Baumgartner. It's a pretty cool vid and one certainly worth at least one watch, especially if you like sky diving. In this case I think he's starting pretty close to space though. :P 

Final Score

Part of my XCOM: Defenders of the Earth series!

And so came to an end the great war, and with it my position as commander due to the politics that followed soon after. Bradford was killed in a fluke base accident after Dr. Vahlen, overjoyed to learn that she herself had the psionic gift, put him inside the containment unit which suddenly activated on its own accord. Big Mike took my position as commander and with Dr. Shen's help began fielding armies of SHIV units across the globe reducing the need of human combatants in the field.

Still, Techno Viking stayed on as a close quarters advisor while Blunder Buss returned to the UK to train more snipers in predicting alien movement. Due to extensive injuries Rocket Man became the first cyborg soldier in the project, often deploying with the SHIV units at crisis zones, this time fighting terrorists, looters and profiteers instead of extra terrestrials. He's now known as Iron Man
.
After discovering her ... relations with pretty much ALL the staff at the XCOM project, Party Girl was given a dishonorable discharge and was headed to Los Angeles to seek employment there. Elvis went with her, retiring from the soldier's life to start up his music career. Alpha also retired. She returned to her home, a little cottage in Germany, where she continues to practice her marksmanship skills. Some say she now hunts werewolves. As for me, well I've got places to go and things to do - and you'll probably read all about it on this blog. ;)

Final Score: 9390 (Classic Mode)
Days: 290
Countries Supporting XCOM: 16
Countries that Left XCOM: 0
Aliens Killed: 451
Soldiers Lost: 39 (1 pilot)

Till the next alien invasion!