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.
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| "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!
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| 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.
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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.
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| 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.
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| 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 1st?”
“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.
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| "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.
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| "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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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)?
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| 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.
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.
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| 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!
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