The Travails of being a Hero

I love comic books. If you don’t believe me, ask my Mum what happened the time she screwed up a Superman comic I was reading when I was supposed to be doing something less interesting (listening to her). Anyway, if you know me you are already aware of my comic love. If you don’t really know me but you’ve seen even like a photo of me you know this. My lips are almost permanently fixed in the “p-shew”

configuration as I pretend to fly to wherever I’m going. 

I would estimate that in my lifetime I have spent approximately six billion dollars on comic books.

I tell you this to establish just how mad I am for comics because I am about to ask you to consider how bad a game based entirely on comics would have to be for me to dislike it. I’m talking about DC Universe Online, a game seemingly made by people who love comics for people who hate comics. This seems like a strange conceptual angle and you could be forgiven for naively assuming that the crime against humanity that is DCUO might just be some kind of terrible misstep. But DCUO is so bad it can’t be a matter of simple error. This game is worse than the idea that when Superman’s home planet exploded and killed the entire populace a dog survived. A dog.

"Arf?" Real good survival skills.

 This game is the bad ideas equivalent of that dog. If all other bad ideas were ‘sploded into space, this game would stick around out of sheer bloody-minded annoyingness. Such horror cannot go unpunished. Someone fire up the bat signal!

Ben McDonough in the house again. 

We need the Batman’s assistance to put an end to this debacle. For every dreadful flaw displayed by DCUO, Batman will deliver one of his trademark staggering haymaker punches. It’s proven comic book science that nobody can stand up to any more than five punches from the Dark Knight. I think Batman even punched out a Tyrannosaurus Rex one time. He keeps it in the Batcave specifically so that Superman knows what time it is. So let’s see how long DCUO survives.

ROUND 1 – Buying the Game

So you’ve decided you want to buy DC Universe Online? That’s great! Before we go any further, here’s a thank you message from this year’s winner of the spastic thalidomide game design scholarship.

Buuuuuhh.

You’re helping to make their dreams come true. Of course, you know that paying $100 for that disc only entitles you to play the game for one month, right? Beyond that you need to pay a monthly subscription fee. In $NZ it’s about 30 bucks, the same amount of money you could use to buy an African kid (who could programme me a better game).

Luckily that original month’s access is about 29 days more than you need to play DCUO… and I got the game in February.

Punch!

ROUND 2 – Installing the Game

Worst alibi of all time: “What were you doing between the hours of 8:00 and 10:30 February the 1^st?”

“Watching DC Universe Online install, Officer.”

“That whole time?”

“Fucking… yes.”

“So you didn’t murder anyone.”

“No. I wanted to. But no.”

Install/load screens are never a good thing, but there are things you can do to make them more bearable. A static image of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Lex Luthor’s asses looking at a bunch of monitors like a goddamn superhero neighbourhood watch is not one of them. Seriously, that one picture spent so much time on my television that it was legally granted squatter’s rights.

"Batman hates squatters!"

ROUND 3 – TIME TO GET STARTED! OH… WAIT. NO IT’S NOT…

Because DCUO is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG in nerd shorthand) it’s expected that you’ll play with other people. Even though other people generally suck, this isn’t quite enough to justify a Batpunch, because it was the reason I bought the game myself. As I had next to no experience with MMORPGs, I figured one based on my secret dreams would be a good place to start. So my ichiban tomodachi Japan-living friend and I both ordered copies online. Here’s where it gets tricky.

We live in Japan.

We bought American copies of the game.

I have a New Zealand playstation account.

My friend has a UK playstation account.

This could go one of two ways: it could be a recipe for glorious internationalisation or, as the popular parlance goes, a ‘clusterfuck’. Care to hazard a guess?

DC’s premier superteam is the JLA – the Justice League of America. Do you know what they don’t have in the JLA? New Zealanders. Also Brits. Turns out the game disc is just as racist as the JLA, forcing us to create fraudulent American playstation network accounts just to play a game that clearly hates us and our descendants.

"Are you an American breed? Or a terrorist?!"

ROUND 4 – TIME TO GET STARTED FOR REAL!

Once all that bullshit is over with, it’s time to actually do some gaming on what has up until this point been a spiteful three-figure paperweight. DCUO opens with a sweet cinematic that depicts all kinds of famous DC super-powered folk getting shot, stabbed or just punched to death. The movie ends with Lex Luthor realising that some of these corpses will be needed to repel an alien invasion, so he (fairly flippantly, I must say) travels back in time to prevent it from happening.

I’m not even being sarcastic, this movie is the best part of the game. It’s like the game’s makers realise that you’re only hanging on by a thread at this point. If they had then rolled the end credits and said ‘thanks for playing’ I would have felt less ripped off than I do having played the hours of dross that follow. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Time travel back to the point!

The time travel plot is a canny move, because it became my only incentive to play on, trying to get back to the point where everyone gets horribly murdered again.

No punching?!?

ROUND 5 – MAKE ME A HERO

So you own the copyrights to let’s just say half of the world’s most recognisable superheroes and you’ve made a video game where players assume the role of a superhero. The first thing you have to do is crush the spirits of the vast majority of fans and lock out the ability to play as the Batman. I can understand that, otherwise you’ve got 28,000 Batmans running around, 21,500 Supermans and 1 Aquaman.

Awww...

Instead, in DCUO you can choose a costume “inspired” by the hero or villain that you wish they would just let you play. So if you favour Batman you will get something dark and creepy and invariably end up looking like some kind of gimp. If you prefer Wonder Woman, your costume will only cover half of each ass cheek. And so on. For some reason you can’t be inspired by Power Girl, even though she is an inspiration to everyone.

She has a 'prominent' role in in-game loading screens.

Hilariously, this method just meant that I saw a lot of ‘Spiderguy’ and ‘Wolver1ne’ characters running around the game world.

For my character I decided that I would take my inspiration from Batman’s inspiration. I would go a level deeper. As retold countless times in Batman’s origin story the young Bruce Wayne was terrified by bats when he accidentally fell into what would later become the vaunted Batcave.

But what if that formative experience had come in the form of the Momonga (or Japanese Dwarf Flying Squirrel)?

This little bastard has rabies, Ebola, animal AIDs and incurable diarrhoea. And it smells your fear.

Thus the Spangled Momonga (TM BigMrJosh) was born! With a two-tone brown & cream costume that mimicked the admittedly average colouration of the momonga and vicious knives attached to each forearm to mimic the tiny (but deadly teeth) of the dread momonga, I was ready to begin my superhero career.

ROUND 6 – THE NEVER-ENDING BATTLE TO ROUND A CORNER.

DC spared no expense when it came to giving us the true superhero experience. But they did adhere to a pretty strict rule of threes. For example, there are only three possible missions in DCUO. I list them here in order of frequency.

1) Punch a certain number of identical guys in the face until they die.

2) Collect a certain number of a certain item that drops out of the corpses of the guy you just punched to death.

3) Pick up something huge and put it in a specific corner.

You also have three ways of traveling to this bland, uninspired missions.

1) Flying in straight lines.

2) Running super fast in straight lines. And up buildings!

3) Clambering around like a monkey.

Obviously I chose the monkey option. That's how I'm livin'. This proved to be the final straw for DCUO. It turned out my ability to clamber up buildings was also my greatest weakness, because any time I tried to round a corner, The Spangled Momonga (still TM, I just haven't decided what direction I want to take the property yet.) would cling to the wall for dear life. So there I am, suspended literally centimetres from the mean streets of Gotham City, usually being shot at. 

The Final Indignity!

To sum up, in the words of my esteemed British colleague in terrible crime-fighting: "You could have more fun taping a comic to the wall and yelling at it from across the room." That sounds therapeutic. I'm gonna try it with the DCUO game disc.

Goddamn you, DC Universe Online. YOU BROKE MY HEART!

The Same as Last Year's...

I just went to the BNZ Literary Awards 2010 page to confirm that I hadn't won the Unpublished Writers Short Story Competition. I hadn't. Which is why I guess nobody felt the need to e-mail me. Thanks, BNZ. At least this fits nicely into my New Year's Resolution to show everybody.

I'll show them!

Admittedly, this is the exact same resolution I make every year, so it's more like carrying it over to the next year. I guess you could say I haven't achieved the goal to my satisfaction. New Year's provides a time to reflect, remember and refocus on my mission. It's kind of like renewing my vows. For vengeance.

Vengeance!

So since the BNZ doesn't want to pay me for my brilliance, I guess the rights for it revert to me. Which means you get it for free! At least someone wins.




A Walk on the Beach

We go for a walk on the beach. The shifting sand makes for hard walking, but Luke has a three-year-old’s desire to run and explore, which more than makes up for the tumbles he takes every once in a while. I am content to move at a slower pace, allowing Luke to rove up and down the beach, occasionally zooming past by way of a check in.

“Dad?”

I look up. I’d been miles away in my head, thinking adult thoughts, worrying about adult things. I welcomed the diversion. “Yeah, matey.”

My son holds out a tiny pink fist. “I found something.” He opens his hand to reveal a cream-and-orange crab claw. “Crab lost his hand,” he explains.

I adopted my fatherly wisdom face. “I expect he just traded it for something else.”

Luke looks dubious. “What like?”

“Maybe a seahorse tail...”

“Why would a crab want a seahorse tail for a hand?”

“Well he wouldn’t use it like a hand. More like a whip. To keep other crabs away from his dinner.”

Luke is clearly intrigued by this idea. He spends the next few minutes of our walk role-playing as The Crab with the Seahorse-Tail Hand. “Wa-pssh! Wa-pssh!” he yells as he flicks his left hand at afternoon joggers while his right hand snaps menacingly at the air. I get some funny looks, but I don’t mind. He isn’t hurting anybody. “Dad, what do crabs eat?” he yelled at me from up the beach.

“Salt and vinegar chips!” I call back.

“Get away from my chips!” he yells at passersby. For some reason he does this in a pirate accent. He scuttles up and down the beach merrily, warming my heart in direct opposition to the bite of the wind.

Eventually Luke tires of this game, and returns to his primary mission of scouring the beach. He retrieves the crab claw from his pocket.

“Dad.”

“Yeah, buddy.”

“So that means this claw belongs to a seahorse.”

“I guess it does.”

“I want to return it to him.”

“You can. If we see him.”

“’’k. Look for the seahorse with no tail.”

“Sure thing.”

Down by the water we add our shoe prints to the record of those who had passed by this day. There were dog prints, foot prints, shoe prints. Some of the prints face the same way as ours. Some of them are reversed. Luke tells me that those footprints are funny. “What’s so funny about them?” I ask him.

“Those people walked the whole way backwards. They’re so silly!” He giggles, and the sound lightens my heart. All of a sudden I was envious of Luke. I wanted to live in his world. The world that I inhabited had let me down one time too many. I gently guide my son around a pile of sand-encrusted dog droppings. The last thing I needed was to clean that out from between his toes.

A wave rushes up the beach, catching the two of us by surprise. I yelp and run for dry sand, but Luke stays, splashing gleefully. As the water abandons us he notices the pipis buried in the sand by his feet, blinking like a thousand staccato eyes.

“Dad, what are they doing?”

I wade back into the water and hoist him up into my arms. “They’re probably helping the seahorse look for his arm.”

But Luke is already over that and onto the next thing. “Why are there so many shells on the beach?”

I stopped to scoop up a handful of sand, and began to pick out the shells buried within. “Oh, there’s not that many. How many do you reckon there are?” I picked out the corner of a chocolate bar wrapper and flicked it away on the wind.

“On the whole beach?”

“Yeah.”

Luke’s face squished up into ‘think mode’. “Um... seven?”

I tried but failed to suppress the grin from my face. “Yeah, probably.”

Luke squirms out of my grip to collect his own handful of shells. Mount Maunganui watches cautiously as we slowly advance down the beach toward it. Legend says that the Mountain made a similar journey a long time ago, all alone. I wonder if it sympathises with me, or whether it thinks I’m being indulgent. The sky is overcast, and I pull my jacket a little bit tighter to fortify me against the cutting wind. Luke seems not to feel it at all as he quests all over the beach in search of mystery and adventure.

“So what are they all for?”

“Hm?”

“The shells, Dad! What are they for?” He holds one up to me.

“Payment,” I say, accepting his payment for fatherly services rendered.

“Pavement?”

“No, payment. Like money. Shells are sea money.”

“Oh. Has someone lost their money?”

“It looks that way.”

“Who? A sailor-man?”

“Well, some sailors get paid in shells, but remember that you can’t use shells to pay for human things, so they can only buy stuff off fish. Most sailors like to get paid in normal money.” I flick the shell over in my hand, studying it with exaggerated seriousness. “Probably all of these shells belonged to a mermaid.”

“What’s a mermaid?” Luke had started collecting shells. He stuffed handfuls of them into the pockets of his hoodie, the pockets of his little pants. When his pockets are bulging he looks at me imploringly.

I sigh as I bend down to do my share of collecting. “A mermaid is a lady who lives in the sea,” I explain. “She has some human bits and some fish bits so she can live happily under the water and swim fast like a fish.”

“Can I be a mermaid?”

“You would be a merman. That’s a boy mermaid.”

“Yup. I’m a boy.”

“I hope so. Otherwise Luke was a bad choice.”

Again my son giggled. “Dad, we have to return all this sea money too.”

Yikes. “How are you going to return it? You’re not a merman yet, mister.”

He bit his bottom lip, brain hard at work. “Maybe we can leave it somewhere the mermaid will find it?”

“Where would you suggest?”

“There.” With a shell-filled hand, he pointed to a rocky outcropping just beyond where the waves break. A thin path of rocks trails out to Moturiki, the blowhole.

I think very carefully about how far I want to take this. In the end, I decide life is too short, especially the period in your life where you believe in the magical and the fantastic. “Sure,” I tell him, “but there are rocks, and water pools at the bottom when the tide changes. You’ll need to hang onto me while we walk over there.”

“Okay, Dad,” he nods. So serious. Whatever it takes to get the job done. Again, I feel a small pang of envy. To Luke the world is still black and white: you find something that belongs to someone else, you try to return it.

I hoist my son up onto my back. “Hang on tight,” I whisper.

“I will, Dad.” His little arms grip around my throat and his legs cling to my hips. We must look like a koala bear family. I put one arm under his backside to hold him up and we’re on our way. As I carefully make my way up the path, Luke calls out items of interest he spots along the way. A beer can. A short length of fishing line. A chip packet. The remnants of a smashed and water-logged cell phone, now no more than raw building materials for the denizens of the rock pools. A nautilus shell, that Luke insists we retrieve. My knees pop loudly as I lean down for him to grab it. I sway unsteadily on my way back up and I realise that I’m nervous. I have my most precious possession clinging to my back and I’m – what? – climbing across sea-slick rocks to deliver a cargo of shells to a fiction.

I must be crazy.

The path is wider than I remember. The sand of the beach gives way to stubby grass. I exhale. My regrets melt away. Here we are alone, just the two of us and our story. Usually the island is host to many tourists, snapping photos and holding hands. The ominous sky must have moved them all on today. Or maybe there just wasn’t room on the island for them and our story, maybe someone somewhere knew that I needed it to be just me and Luke, and generously granted my wish. When Luke was born I promised his mother, her hand clinging weakly to my uselessly strong one, that I would try to instil in him the belief that the world was a special place. That was what she believed, and maybe I would too if she were still here to share it with us. I would hide the truth about this world as long as I was able – though God knew, some days were harder than others - and fulfil her last wish.

We reach the end of the island just as my arms are beginning to tire. The sea dips and swells, it ebbs and flows. The water is an impenetrable blue; I can almost believe myself that a mermaid waits just below the surface, rueing her financial carelessness. On the side furthest from the beach I lower Luke from my back. I indicate to him the point on the rocks where I plan to make our offering.

“Do you think she’ll see them?” he asks me.

“I think so. Mermaids come here most nights to sit and comb their hair.” I knew that the seaward side of Moturiki would be swept clean of shells by the next big wave. If Luke wanted to return to ‘check’ on the shell stash, we would find confirmation that the shells had been claimed. “Should we leave the claw too, buddy? Maybe the mermaid will have a better chance of finding its owner than we will.”

He agrees, and hands it reverently to me. He watches on from the flat grassy area at the north of the island as I clamber down on the rocks to build a rough cairn of shells. A lone seagull stands sentinel, watching me with a tilted head from the northernmost rocks. I crown the pile with the claw and gratefully clamber back up the rocks. I can’t understand how guys can climb down decked out with fishing gear - I was half petrified just carrying a pile of shells.

“Thanks, Dad,” my son says with a big smile.

“You’re welcome.” Although in a way the whole thing had been a ruse, I still felt strangely fulfilled for having made the offering.

As I wrestle Luke back up onto my back for the return trip, he notices some initials carved into the rock. “What’s that for, Dad?”

I couldn’t help the scowl that accompanied my answer. “Graffiti.” Not only the rock was scarred; even the trees had suffered indignations, swear words misspelt on their trunks, love hearts and boasts tattooed on Moturiki’s surfaces.

“What’s grr-feety?”

“It’s something silly that humans do. Come on, mate. Let’s go home.” Again, I cautiously navigate the rocky pathway. We trudge up the beach to the path leading back to the car. The grasses adorning the dunes sway in time to the rhythm conducted by the wind. Some grease-stained newspaper, remnants of a hot lunch, is passed like a netball between clumpy teams of grass. The pohutukawa trees lining the street would soon bloom.

“Dad?”

“Yeah, mate.”

“Why do people leave all this rubbish around the place?”

I look down into my son’s wide, wondering, wonderful eyes and for once I am at a loss for words. “I don’t know, mate. I don’t know.”

Happy New Year, readers. Don't make resolutions. They're stupid.