The Summer of Platinum # 3

I

The Devil’s Brigade Volume II

So far so good with the xbox360achievements.com guide to get the dog tags.  After about four hours of playing spread across three days, I have sixty-one out of the ninety-five dog tags, but I’m getting close to that point in the game, I think, where everything goes wrong and I miss one or two or three of them.  I was hoping to finish it all tonight, but a sudden wave of exhaustion set in and I’m beat and in need of sleep.  But not enough that I can’t write a few thousand words or so here.  Ha.

II

The World of Assassin’s Creed

Assassin’s Creed came out something like fifty years ago, give or take about five decades or so, and it wasn’t really on my radar at all.  I remember seeing a friend play it on the Xbox 360, and I was somewhat impressed with it until I played it myself and couldn’t even get into the game because it was repetitive.  It wasn’t until a few years later when Ubisoft released the sequel, appropriately named Assassin’s Creed II, that I gave it another whirl and fell in love with the game, and the entire franchise which has sense become an annual sort of thing.

The main reason I fell in love with the game is because the setting of the second game is Renaissance Italy and you get to interact with many architectural wonders and even talk to that Leonardo da Vinci guy several times.  The Assassin’s Creed games allow video game players a very unique opportunity in that they are essentially time machines that let you travel back to certain time periods and actually be a part of that environment.  It’s different from books or films that are period pieces because they’re either descriptions from the author’s point of view, or they’re motion pictures also given to you from a certain perspective; never are you allowed to go to those places and adventure in them of your own free will.  You don’t get to climb around the Colosseum in a movie or a book, but here, in Assassin’s Creed II, you can.  Without getting arrested and thrown in prison like you prolly would if you attempted this in real life.  It gives one an entirely different appreciation for the architecture of such places, and there are many of them decorated throughout not only Assassin’s Creed II, but the entire series.

There’s also a huge history element that is absolutely fascinating.  This particular game deals with the Borgia family and their attempt to do all sorts of wrong things.  The history is as accurate as one could hope for in a fictional world – if historical accuracy is important to you and all that – and it’s simply fascinating to watch it all play out as close to how the events actually unfolded plus the added fictions that the development team threw in for dramatic intent.

And some of those fictions deal with a whole lot of science fiction.  One of the main plot points for the game is that you’re not actually playing Ezio (or Altair from the first game), but are playing Desmond, a young man that lives right now – well in 2012, because… yeah.  Desmond is related to Altair and Ezio, and he’s reliving their memories through his DNA thanks to a machine called the Animus.  A corporation – that’s evil, ‘cause every time a corporation is introduced in a fiction, especially science fiction, it has to be evil, right? – is trying to dig up specific memories from Desmond’s head in the first game, and then he goes rogue in the second game with a band of folks that claim to be assassins.  You’d get it if you played it.  There’s a lot of science fiction stuff going on and it’s good stuff.  It’s not all too whacky…

But then again!  It is!  Assassin’s Creed has this aspect to it that I’m calling the Tinfoil Hat to Protect Yourself From Mindreading Aliens elements.  If you’re at all familiar with the Ancient Astronaut Theory, then this stuff will be old hat to you.  And you’ll probably roll your eyes and call bullshit.  But wait!  I’m not a tinfoil hat wearing crazy guy, and I really enjoy the Ancient Astronaut Theory.  Not because I believe it’s true to the slightest extent, oh, no no no.  It’s just as much bullshit to me as it prolly is to you, but what it is to me is absolutely fascinating; especially from a fictional point of view.  And the version of it that Assassin’s Creed presents to me, as a love of all sorts of crazy fictions, is just awesome.  I’m still excited to see how it’s all wrapped up for the Desmond character as I’ve yet to finish Assassin’s Creed III.  My original goal was to finish Assassin’s Creed III on December 21^st, 2012 because that’s the day the game took place on, but I failed miserably.  I suppose I could set my PS3’s clock back to that date and pretend, but it probably wouldn’t have the same sort of nerdgasm level of nerd… gasm.

Assassin’s Creed II also tells a very unique story within those re-lived memories.  Unlike a lot of other games where the story is eats up a relatively short amount of time, this game covers almost an entire life span of a single character.  From birth to mid-life, we’re told the story of Ezio Auditore de Firenze and his involvement in the overall plot of the series.  It’s very interesting and quite unique to see a character grow from an infant the first time you meet him, to a young man that gets into all sorts of trouble, to what he becomes at the end of the game – and further continues in Brotherhood and Revelations, and even the short film, Embers.

III

In Memory of Petruccio

These fucking things.  It seems that in order to make a video game nowadays that’s not a first person shooter, you have to include these tiny, almost missable items that you have to collect in order to get 100% completion, and then they add on top of it a trophy that requires you to get ‘em.  If it’s not dog tags you find on the corpses of sometimes well hidden soldiers, it’s feathers.  FEATHERS.

The reason it’s feathers in Assassin’s Creed II actually has to do with the main character, Ezio, and his young brother, Petruccio, that is executed along with his father and his older brother.  So, to remember his brother and do him a great service, Ezio continues to collect the feathers and places them in a box at his home.  I completely passed over this activity the first time – and only – time I played this game from beginning to end, ‘cause I was gonna do it much later, and take my time with it.  Then I lost my save file, and now I gotta play the whole game over again and start from scratch, which is and isn’t fun at all.  Collecting feathers.  Feh.

IV

Show Your Colors

The capes in the game are part of Ezio’s attaire and have some pretty decent features.  The first cape you get is the default one, and it doesn’t really do much of anything.  The other capes, however, like the Medici cape, the Venetian cape, and the Auditore cape all have different effects on how noticeable you are in each of the cities in the game, with the Auditore having the most negative effect of the three.  The reason it has a negative effect is because the Auditore family has been completely disgraced and framed for a bunch’a bullshit, so they instantly assume you’re up to villainy when they see you wearing this cape.

The trophy comes from obtaining this cape – which requires you finding all the feathers – and wearing it in each of the cities you can visit in Renaissance Italy.  Unfortunately on my previous play through, I didn’t find all the feathers, so I never even got this cape, let alone the opportunity to wear it anywhere.  This time will be different!

V

Sweeper

This trophy just pisses me off.  It’s a simple one.  You pick up a pole arm, like a spear or a pike, and you do a sweep move when surrounded and knock down five or more guys.  That’s it.  Unfortunately, I don’t think I ever picked up a single spear or a single pike and did anything with it, ‘cause Ezio’s default weapons, and the weapons you get throughout the game are much better than a goddamned pike.  After playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed III and learning how to get EVERYONE’S attention ‘cause I forgot how to play it, this trophy really shouldn’t be a problem to get at all.  Whatsoever.  None.

VI

Game Mishap!

The other day I decided to order all the Lego games ‘cause I really enjoy playing those goofy little fuckers.  I already re-obtained Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga on the Xbox 360 – ‘cause it has Achievements, whereas the PS3 version doesn’t have trophies – so I said, “What the fuck,” and bought the rest of them.  Relatively cheap.  I went ahead and got the other two that didn’t have trophies on the PS3 for the Xbox (Lego Batman and Lego Indiana Jones), and ordered the rest on the PS3.  I got them today, and, well, there was a mishap.  One of the games I got for the PS3 was Lego Pirates of the Caribbean, and instead, the folks selling this copy through Amazon saw it upon themselves to send me the Xbox 360 version instead.  And this probably wouldn’t be a problem at all if, well… if I hadn’t already scored 56% of the trophies on the PlayStation 3.  So, now I have to make a very unexpected trip to GameStop tomorrow to fix the situation, ‘cause I’m not fond of returning things.  I’ll just trade it in instead.  I’ve got a few other games I wanna trade in, anyway, so it’ll make it easier.  Dumping off F.E.A.R., The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for the PS3 because they don’t have trophies, and I have the last two already on the 360.  Hopefully I can pick up F.E.A.R. for the 360 and Lego Pirates for the PS3 tomorrow, but we’ll see.

VII

But, wait!  There’s More!

I don’t just play video games and try to get all the trophies and achievements, mind you.  I also do other stuff.  Like work.   I got a job, y’know!  But one of the other things I do that eats up a lot of my free time that my writer’s muscle doesn’t like is read a LOT of comic books, because comic books are an essential and important part of the human imagination’s diet.  You like to not think so, but then you pay ten bucks to go see a comic book character beat up some dudes on a giant screen and lazily lay there snarfing down all your popcorns and sodas that cost you just as much as it does me to make one trip to the comic shop.  Only I get more outta it!

Been reading Rick Remender’s run on Uncanny X-Force from beginning to end, and while I wasn’t caught up on all things X-Force prior to the Uncanny X-Force series, but I have to say it wasn’t required reading.  The original X-Force book was created by Rob Liefeld and others from the declining-in-sales New Mutants book and was reimagined as a high-octane action adventure book revolving around mutant affairs, instead of being just a bunch of kids learning stuff at school.  Which isn’t all that interesting of an idea, even though I’m not so sure that’s what the original New Mutants book was about.  I wouldn’t know.  I never went near it because it didn’t have an X in the title.  My rationale was pretty retarded when I was a kid.  The new X-Force was reconfigured to be an elite strike team of X-Men that had no qualms about pulling no quarter when it came to killing folks.  So, naturally, the team was led by the one and only Wolverine.  Like how all that connects?

Uncanny X-Force comes after that X-Force title, and Wolverine has his team of wholesale slaughters still in effect: himself, Archangel, Psylocke, Deadpool, and Fantomex.  Only, this book goes pretty deep.  It deals with the Apocalypse.  Not the Christian Apocalypse, or the end of the Mayan Calendar apocalypse, but THE Apocalypse.  En Sabah Nur, Marvel’s FIRST mutant.  Born in ancient Egypt, En Sabah Nir was born with special abilities and eventually became selected by the Celestials, cosmic being things that do stuff, to ensure that evolution was kept on its proper path.  It wasn’t.  Apocalypse was killed (more than once, if I remember right), and eventually, Archangel becomes his heir.  So that’s what Uncanny X-Force was about, and it’s INSANE.  It’s insanely hilarious, insanely violent, insanely well drawn and well written, and insanely good.

I also made my first weekly trip to a comic shop to pick up physical comics in four years.  I’ve been reading digitally for quite some time now, but I wanted real comics.  Real paper comics.  And I got them.  But I haven’t touched them yet.  I did manage to find a hardcover collection of the first eleven issues of the pre-Rick Remender X-Force X-Force book and snagged that happily enough.  I also ordered vol. 2 of that same series.  Excitement.  A part of me feels sad for non-comic book reading folks.  What hollow lives you live.

The Summer of Platinum # 2

I

Enter the Wolverine

Wolverine was first introduced to the world in 1974 via a cameo appearance in The Incredible Hulk # 180, with his first full appearance coming an issue later.  Wolverine was a spit fire character, short and stocky, that was sent by the Canadian government to kill the Hulk.  Since that time the character has grown wildly away from his original inception (the claws were originally supposed to be JUST part of his gloves) and has become the default, go-to-character to symbolize Marvel Comics’ X-Men franchise.  Wolverine was brought into the X-Men fold in 1975, a year after his introduction, as part of an attempt to inject new blood and new life into the pretty much dead X-Men comic with Giant-Size X-Men # 1.  If I remember correctly, up to that point, the X-Men had been all but cancelled and had been little more than a showcase book that was reprinting the earlier issues drawn by Jack Kirby and written by Stan Lee.  GSXM put four of the original X-Men (Marvel Girl, Iceman, Beast, and Angel) in extreme danger, and left Cyclops and Professor X to form a new team of X-Men to rescue them.  The team was made up of international characters, of which the Canadian of the group was Wolverine.  The goal of the issue and the re-launch was successful and the X-Men took off again.

Several years later, in 1982, Wolverine would get his own series as his popularity grew and grew.  This series was written by Chris Claremont who had taken over the writing of the X-Men title (which was eventually redubbed The Uncanny X-Men) in 1975, and illustrated by some hot shot illustrator named Frank Miller.  Miller and Claremont’s mini-series (of which was the basis for the new 

Wolverine film coming out this summer) escalated Wolverine’s popularity even further.  Wolverine would eventually begin appearing in titles he wasn’t normally related to in order to push the books into a better sales strata.  He appeared multiple times in the Punisher War Journal, a handful of times in the Amazing Spider-Man, amongst other titles, much to the distaste of long-term fans that didn’t care for the character, or would grow to dislike the character because he was appearing everywhere.  During the 1990s, Wolverine’s mysterious past kept digging up to bite him in the ass, though the publishers at the time wouldn’t get into too much detail about what happened.  In the early 2000s, ORIGIN was released, written by Joe Quesada, Paul Jenkins and Bill Jemas, and illustrated by Andy Kubert.  ORIGIN dealt with Wolverine’s youth and the moment his powers kicked in and some of his history in the late 1800s.  This comic series served as a basis for a good deal of the X-Men Origins: Wolverine film, which the video game is based on.

I first met Wolverine in 1985 in the mini-series Kitty Pryde and Wolverine.  Instantly he was my favorite character I had ever been introduced to; it was also my first comic.  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Wolverine continued to be my favorite character (with a slight nod and tip of the hat to Spider-Man) and through him, the entire world of the X-Men.  I adored and consumed everything Marvel published with that giant X on the cover.  When the first X-Men film came out I was delighted and overjoyed by Hugh Jackman’s portrayal of the character, and am very glad he’s continued to keep with the role despite the bloated whale that was X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

It isn’t a good film by any stretch of the imagination.  I enjoy it, but that’s because I’m very biased when it comes to anything X-Related.  The film attempted to cram too much X-Men mythology into a ninety minute film (as did its predecessor, X-Men: The Last Stand) and it suffered because of it.  The game is a different creature altogether, however.  While it shares a lot of the same plot as the film, the game was originally intended to be a stand-alone effort with no connection to the film, and it was somewhat late in the development of the game that it was brought into the fold; right along with character models based on the actors from the film and voice acting by Hugh Jackman and Live Shreiber.  The game has significant plot differences from the film as well as one massive epic fight sequence (entirely playable) against a Sentinel, which still has yet to be seen on the movie screen.  These differences between the movie and the game give the game a whole lot more oomph than the film has, as well as thinning out the bloated feel of it.

II.

The Best There Is

Not quite in the realm of video games, but he’s getting much closer.  Wolverine’s history in video games is pretty short and usually little more than a half-assed effort just to capitalize on the Wolverine name and the X-Men brand.  This game is a step in the right direction, and it’s the first game created to give players the “ultimate” Wolverine experience.  There’s the healing factor (it’s pretty hard to die in the game, unless you really fuck up), there’s the heightened senses (which just change the color of things on the screen, you don’t actually hear better or smell anything, which is probably a good thing on that smelling better part); and then there’s the claws.  Those beyond-razor-sharp claws made out of Adamantium, that fictional metal from the Marvel Universe that’s unbreakable.  Mix that with the tenacity of Wolverine and a whole lot of hacking and slashing, and you’re literally covered in blood and limbs are flying constantly.

But it’s not quite the best comic book based video game out there.  Marvel’s video games don’t seem to be taken all that seriously by the main Marvel company, and are given lighter efforts than a lot of other video games.  Video games that are made solely to be video games first and foremost are always the best sort of games out there.  Licensed games can often be fun, but seem to always lack ingenuity, attention to detail, and all the other bells and whistles that make video games great.  Wolverine isn’t very different.  It’s a step in the right direction, sure; but when you compare it to say a Metal Gear Solid, it pales horribly.  Then there’s DC’s current efforts.  DC has suffered from the same problems that Marvel has with video games for almost the same amount of time until Batman: Arkham Asylum was released in 2009.  This was the first time I can remember that any licensed property was taken just as seriously as an original property was and given the best efforts the dev team could come up with.  Arkham Asylum can and has gone head to head with many of my favorite games and franchises for my attention and has won on numerous occasions.  As has its sequel, Batman: Arkham City.  I can tell that Marvel doesn’t take its video game properties seriously when you play a game like Marvel vs. Capcom 3, which I thought was a very amazing effort once again by Capcom, and you beat it, and your given second-string art for the endings instead of getting some of the guys that have been making Marvel look extremely pretty over the last decade or so.  Guys like Bryan Hitch, or Steve McNiven, or Mike Deodato Jr, or even Joe Quesada himself.  It’s all very sub-par art, the kind you used to see on Marvel’s lesser tier books back in the 80s and 90s.  Marvel’s got a long way to go in the game development department, but seeing as how the Mouse owns them now, and the Mouse just shut down LucasArts to license out all the Star Wars games, I doubt this will happen any time soon.

The combat engine of Wolverine is very similar to the combat of the Action RPGs that Activision published for Marvel on the last generation and this generation of consoles (X-Men: Legends, X-Men: Legends II, Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2) with a little bit of God of War thrown into the mix.  It’s not an original design by any means, but it is most certainly a fitting one.  Mashing the buttons along in this game doesn’t seem all that out of place for a character like Wolverine; especially if you take his berserker rage into consideration.  You can gain some special abilities, but they’re not very useful most of the time in the game as the basic attacks and the lunge attacks are more than sufficient to dispose all the bland and un-inspired enemies.  The most difficult areas of the game, especially when the combat comes into play, are the boss fights.  The fights against Sabretooth, the Blob, Gambit, and that thing they call Deadpool but isn’t at all Deadpool.

Despite that somewhat recycled control mechanics of the game, it does have a unique feel to it.  Which is pretty important when there are other games of this same genre that simply outclass it across the board.  This isn’t God of War or Devil May Cry by any stretch of the imagination, but with the addition of Wolverine and is unique set of abilities it does tend to stand out.  Wolverine’s healing factor alone makes the game a bit unique as he tends to take damage from all points and can be rendered little more than a bloody metal skeleton at times.  It’s actually fascinating to finish disposing of the badguys in any given area, try to get the camera as close as you possibly can to the character to see the damage and exposed innards of the character, and then watch him heal.  The wounds close shut, the flesh regrows, and it’s pretty effin’ cool to see.  Even after all these years since the game’s release, I still get a kick out of watching it.  Then there’s also the somewhat unique experience the game offers by being set in the gigantic Marvel Universe – even if it is just an extended version of the X-Men movie version of the Marvel Universe.  If Marvel was smart about their video games they could expand on the already existing Marvel Universe from the comics by creating games that are comparable in scope.  Wolverine is just the tip of the iceberg.  When you battle the Sentinel, you get a small glimpse of how massive this Universe really is.

But then there’s the Unreal Engine 3.  This is my least favorite graphics engine in video games today.  The only dev teams that I’ve seen handle this engine without any fault are Epic Games – which is expected ‘cause they created the engine – in their Gears of War franchise, Rocksteady with their efforts in the two Batman games, and BioWare with the Mass Effect series of games.  This engine is plagued with glitches that go from poor drawback, to irritating pop-in effects.  Often times in this game, and a whole lot of others, you’ll see a multi-colored blob show up on screen and the details will slowly pop-in after a few seconds.  And unfortunately, Wolverine is one of the worst offenders.  Horrible pop-in on an all-too-frequent basis, and sometimes enemies will appear on the screen just standing their long before they’re supposed to spawn in the game.  The Leviathan creature is the worst at this.  Despite all this, the game has one of the coolest openings I’ve seen this generation.  The Team X helicopter is blown out of the sky, and Wolverine plummets to the ground, but he pops his claws just in time to land claw-first on a badguy and creates a lovely impact crater for his efforts.  It’s ridiculously neat.

Of course, as with all these action adventure type games, you can level Wolverine up and learn new moves, and make him more lethal.  It’s interesting and fun, but for some reason I think it’s unnecessary due to the game being about Wolverine.  This game is centered around one of the most badass and ruthless characters in the Marvel Universe.  Levelling him up is superfluous and instead, what the game should’ve done, in my opinion, is just become more challenging and difficult because that’s what you do to a character like Wolverine: you put him through hell.  He’s relatively unkillable, he’s almost indestructible, and he very well could live forever if left alone.  You make his life hell, levelling him up in a game like this makes the game easier, not more difficult.  If you level Wolverine up to the max, nothing stands a chance, and there’s no challenge in the game anymore.  When doing a game centered on a licensed character, you revolve the entire game around that character by challenging him.  This is what Rocksteady did with Batman in Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, and this is even what Beenox did with Spider-Man in Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions.  One of the cool features of the game, though, is playing it out of context.  The game flashes back and forth between pre- and post-Weapon X Wolverine events.  You get the bone claws and you get the Adamantium claws.  It’s interesting visual, and pretty fun, but there’s no design difference between the two, which is unfortunate.  Also in this game, as expected, are the collectables you can find, and even some Easter Eggs thrown in for good measure.  You can collect “action figures” which unlock various costumes for Wolverine, his old brown and tan one, his black and yellow one, and his X-Force black and grey with red eyes looks are in the game.  You can find other additives as well that extend gameplay functions, and then there’s the dog tags.  The dog tags you can find on random corpses of soldiers decorated and hidden throughout the game, and there’s ninety-five of them total.  And it’s these pesky little additives that have stood in my way of obtaining that platinum trophy.

III

The Devil’s Brigade

My first attempt at gathering up all these annoyances came just shortly after I collected every other trophy in the game.  I don’t know why I do this, but I always put these collection trophies on the back burner while I try to get all the others, and it always comes back to bite me in the ass.  I did it with Wolverine and I did it with Assassin’s Creed II; and I’m sure there are others floating out there as well.  I can’t remember what game it was, but there was one I played that had a collectible trophy similar to this one and I did it all by myself.  No guides, no help; nothing.  So of course that stoked my little ego too much and I thought I could do it with every game.  Then came this game, and no matter how hard I tried, or how many times I went looking for them – thank you chapter select – I just couldn’t find them.  I played through the game three or four times this way from beginning to end looking for these bastards, with and without using the heightened senses vision, and found nothing.

My second attempt, which was another three or four playthroughs of the game, I printed off a guide from GameFaqs.com and checked them all off as I went, and somehow still managed to not find them all.  I believe that this guide I printed off was copied from what I’m about to talk about next because it was missing one or two.

My last attempt came a year or so ago when I finally said, “Fuck it,” and bought the official strategy guide from BradyGames.  I do not buy BradyGames strategy guides on principle alone.  Nor Prima for that matter.  It has to be a really pretty hardcover book with some nice pages of artwork for me to buy these bastard books because they absolutely suck.  They’re written horribly, the information they give is often wrong or, as in the case with this particular game, it’s missing a lot of it.  The game only lists ninety-two or ninety-three of the dog tags.  I followed the guide line by line, page by page, picking them up, and checking them off as I went.  I didn’t miss a single one that the guide showed me, but when I checked my stats at the end of the game ‘cause the trophy didn’t bing; I was missing two or three.  I think it was two.  Then I went back and counted.  Yep, missing information.  And this isn’t something new with this company (or Prima) but because these two are the only publishers of these books, gamers are being duped and cheated out of their money on a regular basis.  I only ever suggest books by Piggyback Interactive.  While distributed by Prima in the United States, this publisher is independent of Prima and their bullshit tactics when it comes to guides.  Piggyback are in the same vein as the now defunct Versus Books in that they take care not to spoil anything plot wise to the player, and they cover everything that will be included in the game at launch.  They also have awesome extras, such as the beastiary in the Resident Evil 5 guide; interviews with the creators of the games; game histories; and all sorts of other cool stuff.  The collector’s editions of their books come in wonderful hardcovers and more pages of neat stuff.  Prima and BradyGames are butt.  Needless to say, after that last attempt I was about ready to give up on collecting these dog tags, until I decided to do this little project.

IV

Current Status

Sometimes you just don’t need to waste money on guides at all, and I wouldn’t if I weren’t a collector of Piggyback’s guides.  The Internet is a wonderful and immediately accessible database of information, and that includes video game information.  And gamers, despite all the bad press we get from how some of us behave out in the real world, or in online competitive games such as Halo or Call of Duty, we love to help one another in the overall theme of things.  Not too long ago I discovered PS3trophies.org, a game site dedicated to PlayStation news as well as listing every trophy imaginable for every game published on disc, on the PlayStation Network, or even in Japan.  Then there are the forums for this place, which can include massive trophy guides for games, i.e., strategy guides that center around on getting trophies for games.  I found this place first ‘cause I was trying to find what a few games hidden trophies were so I could get them faster, since then it’s been a valuable resource for trophies that are nothing but a pain in my ass to get.  They also have a sister site called xbox360achievements.org that does the same thing for Xbox games.  So I found a hopefully very reliable guide to help me get these bastard dog tags.  I’m at forty out of ninety-five so far, and I’ve not missed a single one.  I should be finally able to platinum X-Men Origins: Wolverine after all this time.

The Summer of Platinum # 1

I.

Single Trophy Blues

Welcome to the first entry in a series of Summer-long entries that are going to be devoted to my attempt to earn the Platinum trophy on as many PlayStation 3 games as I possibly can between the months of May and September.  If you're not aware, Trophies were Sony's response to Microsoft's Achievements on the XBox 360, with the added bonus of the bragging rights bing and notification of the Platinum.  I'm glad they added these little things and I'm thankful for Microsoft for bringing them to consoles (I really don't know where these things come from, to be honest) because it's driven me to do a lot of things I wouldn't normally do in video games.  Like constantly replaying the same games over and over, for instance.  On every generation that has come before the one we're in now, I'd finish a game and be done with it.  Including games like Final Fantasy VII, God of War, and so on and so forth.  The only came I continued to play no matter how many times I completed it was Castlevania: Symphony of the Night; not including fighting games of course.  Everything else was pretty much a one-hitter-quitter.

When the Trophy system was first implemented in July, 2008, and I got that first bing and pop-up notification, I began tracking and collecting as many trophies as I could from the games I tend to play (which is a lot).  These new little added bonuses have seen me play through several RPGs multiple times, as well as action adventure titles, first person shooter games, and who knows what else, trying to do things that normally I wouldn't care about.  And then there's the Platinum Trophy.  A special added bonus that isn't available to the XBox 360 that's really just there for bragging rights.  It's an I DID EVERYTHING sort of trophy, because it actually requires you to do EVERYTHING all the other trophies require you to do in order to obtain it.  It's intensely nerdy, absolutely frustrating, but for some reason it's a very satisfying experience.  At least for me.

So, I decided to blog about my adventures in trying to get as many Platinum Trophies over the Summer as I possibly can, which I'm pretty sure I've already stated, and thus, I'm repeating myself, sharing with whomever it is that reads this thing that intensely nerdy side of myself all for the sake of shits and giggles.

The Single Trophy Blues comes about when you need one meager little trophy to bing off in the top right corner before you get that Platinum one.  These trophies somehow manage to elude you for any number of reasons.  It could be that you need a partner to help you get it, as is the case for me in Resident Evil 5 where the trophy War Hero is all that is needed for me to get the Platinum Trophy, We Will Survive.  To get the War Hero trophy, you need to beat all chapters on Professional difficulty, which is nothing but a frustrating pain in the ass to even attempt to do by yourself.  Mostly because Sheva is a piece of shit when she's controlled by the AI and is always dying at every turn.  And in a game like this, where the co-op is forced upon you, you almost always have to do something hokey like running across the map 'cause Sheva got stuck and killed and you need to revive her.

Or the trophies can be ridiculously simple, but for some reason or another you just can't get it.  Like Devil's Brigade, a single bronze trophy in X-Men Origins: Wolverine that requires the player to find all the dog tags decorated throughout the game.  I've attempted this on many occasions, and every single time there's one set of dog tags that I can't ever locate.  I tried it four or five times by myself, and then additional four or five times using various guides on the Internet and even the official strategy guide on one occasion.  The official strategy guide had all but one listed in the book, which I suppose is to be expected from Brady Games (or Prima for that matter, as both publishers put out the shittiest strategy guides in video gaming).

Or they can be the closest thing to a nightmare as possible, at least for me.  Such is the case for the Hard to the Core trophy from Dead Space 2.  This trophy requires the player to beat the game on Hard Core mode, which isn't all that difficult as far as monsters and combat and the like goes; but it's made more difficult in that there are no check points in the games, items are a bit rarer to find, and you only get three saves the entire game.  You have to practically memorize the game inside and out before attempting it and knowing where the best save points are (i.e. the ones right before you die a horrible death) and you have to avoid making any mistakes whatsoever (like backing up into environmental hazards that lead to instant death, whoops!).

These are the games I'm going to begin this summer with.  I'll try to record every little detail; every triumph and failure; and every time I want to poke a game dev in the eye for subjecting me to this nonsense.

II

Double the Dosage

Surprisingly, I don't have many games that need just two trophies to get the Platinum.  Just one game, actually.  God of War III.  Unfortunately, they're both trophies that I'm not very excited to even attempt in any sort of way.  Unhuman is the first one that requires the player to beat the game on Titan Mode, which is the game's hardest difficulty setting, and it's not a setting that's very Dameyon-Friendly.  I've made two attempts at it already, and both times I saw myself turned into a pile of mush over and over again at the hands of sub-boss after sub-boss.  I didn't have any problems with the bosses, the Gods themselves, but the sub-bosses were awful little bastards.

The second one is Up to the Challenge, which revolves around beating the Challenge of Olympus, and the God of War challenge modes aren't something to just wink at and give a quick smirk two.  They're horrible little things that can (and probably have) lead to the death of many controllers across the world.  I've finished these challenges on three different God of War games (God of War, Chains of Olympus, and Ghost of Sparta), but God of War II and III aren't a whole lot of fun for myself.  I'll get 'em done, but it's gonna take a lot of effort.

III.

Infectious Trifecta

The games that need only three trophies don't number very high either, including only Assassin's Creed II and God of War II.

God of War II has Bleeding Thumbs, which is another challenge-based trophy; Eye Sore, which requires the player to collected twenty Cyclops' eyes; and You Know the Germans Make Good Stuff... which requires the player to collect all the Uber Chests.  I would have had the last two by now if I kept at it, but I got side-tracked by a plethora of other games.  The challenge one is another butt-clenching situation of frustration.  Whatever that is.  I'm gonna be a bit miffed if these two challenge trophies for God of War II and III turn out to be rather easy to get after failing so many times before.

Assassin's Creed II is a bit more humiliating.  These three trophies are ones that I was going to get after I had finished the game a few years ago because they're all very easy to get with one just being rather time consuming.  But I lost my save file and now I have to start over from the beginning of the game and play it through to the end in order to unlock all the cities and whatnot.  I have In Memory of Petruccio, where I need to collect all the feathers; Show Your Colors, where I need to wear the Auditore cape in each city; and Sweeper, where I have to sweep five guards at once by using a long weapon like a pike or a spear.  All three are bronze trophies.  The one good thing about this one is that I've been wanting to replay all the Assassin's Creed games leading up to Assassin's Creed III for a while -- especially since the last time I gave it a whirl, I had completely forgotten how to play Assassin's Creed III.

IV

The Fantastic Four and Fox Force Five

I got three games in this section.  Dragon Age: Origins and Batman: Arkham Asylum both have four trophies needed, and Mass Effect 2 has five.

Dragon Age: Origins has Easy Lover which requires a romantic relationship with Zevran which is the most annoying character in the game to me.  I hate that guy.  Then there's Hopelessly Romantic, which will automatically trigger once I hook up with Zevran.  Kinslayer's next which requires me to complete the Dward Noble origin story, which I tried to do before, but it gliched out and the other dwarves wouldn't stand where they were supposed to.  I wonder if I still have my Dragon Age game saves.  Prolly not!  Then there's this pain in the ass one called Perfectionist which says, "Across all playthroughs, discovered all possible endings," which I don't even know what all the endings are or what ones I've got!

Batman: Arkham Asylum is a stupid one.  The game is amazing, don't get me wrong, but the trophies are need aren't fun to get at all -- which may make them more satisfying to get.  The first one is Freeflow Silver, where  I gotta get sixteen medals on combat challenges, followed by Freeflow Gold where I gotta get 24 medals.  These aren't easy for me to do because some of the maps you do the combat challenges on are ridiculously hard.  Floors get all electric-shocky-like and whatnot.  Then there's Predator Gold which requires 24 medals on Predator Challenges, which aren't easy either.  Each map has three requirements you need to get to get the medals for.  I'm not sure if you need to get all three in one attempt, or if you can get one, then another on a different playthrough; etc.  Then there's Perfect Knight, which needs 100% completion to get, which, along with the Platinum, will automatically ping when I get those other three trophies.

Mass Effect 2 is just butt.  It's a butt experience filled with butt situations that are all butt.  And not good butt, neither.  Mud butt type butt.  If only because of the Insanity trophy which says I gotta beat the game on Insanity Difficulty -- which I've done on Mass Effect 3, but for some reason ME2 just says, NO, YOU'RE NOT GONNA DO IT, FUCKHEAD.  So I don't do it.  The character I play just doesn't seem to jive with the horrible butt situation that is Insanity Difficulty.

V

To Infinity And Beyond

Or something to that effect.  The rest of the games are too plentiful and the trophies to bountiful to continue listing what I need to get to grab the Platinum and run.  I have pretty close to two-hundred games now and while not all of them have Platinum trophies, or are even on the PlayStation 3; there's still a lot to go through and cover 'em all in this one little entry.

As a bonus, however, since I've just recently acquired an XBox 360 for the first time, I'm also gonna cover the achievements I gather in a little section at the bottom of each entry.

And that's it.  Pretty lame, really, but it's all in an effort to keep me writing more.

Bits and Pieces 14: Stomping Grounds

AND WE'RE LIVE

One of the main reasons this blog of mine has seen less activity than a nerd's sex life is because I have a laptop that isn't worth a shit.  It's a nightmare piece of hardware that slowly drains the life out of anyone that uses it and for the most part I opt not to.

So I do everything from my phone nowadays.  Lucky for mr there's a blogger app that will allow me to update this thing without having to use that shitty laptop.

THE AGE CONUNDRUM

Since I've started reading a lot of comics lately on a regular basis, going from just Invincible and the regular Batman title to also reading seven X-Men titles (eventually eight) and a Spider-Man book making it eleven monthly titles come April, I've been noticing some quirky things regarding the ages of the characters.  In All-New X-Men young Scott is said to be 14 and now Scott is said to be 40.  That means out of the sixty years of publication for the X-Men Cyclops has only aged 27 years.  During Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men he has Emma say she's 27.  Is she still 27? Or does Scott like the younger ladies?  And for how long has Scott been 40?

I love this because it continues thr history of the universe and adds to it.  I love fictional history, not continuity mind you, but history.  All-New X-Men is my current favorite of the Marvel Now explosion -- followed closely by Cable and X-Force and Deadpool -- because it hits those nostalgia points for long time X-Men readers while providing a fresh take on the X-Men world of things.  Which is a lot of fun.  It seems that all the new X titles from Marvel a presenting fresh new spins on that corner of the Marvel Universe and it's more than enough to get me hooked.

SUPERIOR IS AS SUPERIOR DOES

Speaking of fresh new spins, Superior Spider-Man is just that.  Writer Dan Slott is having fun with the book, and you can tell by how he's writing it, and having fun with the readers.  All the stuff that seemed to be controversial before the series started is being undercut by awesome bait and switch moves that keep things interesting.  And the art is this hyper weird mix between Todd McFarlane and one of those more cartoony guys that's worked on Spider-Man since Todd's departure two decades ago.

SNYDE

Where did Scott Snyder come from?  Dude wasnt on my radar almost two yeara ago and now I adore anything and everything he writes.  My first experience with Mr. Snyder's work was with Batman # 1 from the New 52 launch and I didn't buy it because of his name.  I bought it because I'm a long time fan of Greg Capullo's art.  And I wasnt that impressed with the first issue and financial issues kept me from sticking with it past the first issue so I decided to wait for the trade.  Now Batman is a title I buy month in and month out, I buy the American Vampire hardcovers when hr become available and I've started going back and buying everything with Mr. Snyder's name attached to it beginning with Gates of Gotham and The Black Mirror.  He's really good at what he does.

THE BLOG IS COMING

Oh, shit!  Here it comes!

Now that I'm using my phone to write this stuff on, more content will be coming.  The 20 Year Anniversary stuff for Image Comics even though Image is now 21 years old, the Art of Todd McFarlane,  other comic book stuff and other video game stuff I've been meaning to write about but kept putting off because of that laptop. All relatively soon!

So, yep!

Welcome Home?

It's been slightly over two decades since I've been a regular reader of any kind of X-Men comics.   I stopped reading around 1991 and 1992 because the art took a huge leap backwards when Jim Lee, Whilce Portacio and Rob Liefeld left the books.

During that time I'd flirt with the titles here and there.  I read some of the Fatal Attractions issues where Magneto ripped the Adamantium from Wolverine's bones and I tries to read Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men as it was being published but lost track and eventually opted to wait foe the trades.  After Morrison left I had no interest in the X-Men world at all.

Then Marvel did their Civil War event which I'm a big fan of and things started to pique my interests.  The main book that piqued those interests was a book called Schism, which could be billed as a Civil War for the X-Men.  I bought kt and read it and though I was less than impressed with it at the time, the ideas of the book kept me interested for a while.  I bought the first issue of Wolverine and the X-Men and that was about it.  My interests went elsewhere.  Comic wise it went to Invincible -- my favorite superhero comic ever -- Savage Dragon and Batman, because Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo are champions. I also spent a great deal of the past two years replenishing my lirbrary of books I had gotten rid of, damaged or lost over the years, and re-reading them.  And then there's video games.  Comics can't compete with them for my attentiom most of the time because vidro games give me much more bang for my buck.  And I play a lot of video games.  I did manage to read the Rise and Fall of the Shi'ar Empire, which was okay and Second Coming, which I adored. I also tried to keep up with some of the books after Schism that followed Cable and Hope and X-Force, but couldnt keep getting to my local comic shop.

My interest in X-Men actually died last year or so when Marvel announced the Avengers vs. X-Men event.  It sounded weird, made little sense to me and I thought that if this was a fighting game being done by Capcom in the similar vein as Marvel vs. Capcom, I'd be all over it.  Time went on, the series was being published, and nothing was winning me over. At least nothing that I was hearing.

Then a truck driver that delivers gas to where I work began talking up the AvX story and I was mildly interested.  I decided to wait for the trade and was more than happy to see that an omnibus was coming.

When the omnibus arrived I sat down and devoured it.  It was essentially basic superhero comics stuff but the way it was presented was very interesting. And the aftermath that started coming in after the omnibus was published with the Marvel Now initiative, it just kept coming. The interest I mean.

So I bit the bullet and started trying some of the books beginning with Deadpool, then with the Uncanny Avengers 'causr it's hard to go wrong on a boom illustrated by John Cassaday.  Then more started coming.  Uncanny X-Force grabbed my attentiom because of the cast of characters that included Storm, Psylocke and Spiral. And then there's All-New X-Men which is reminiscent of Days of Future Past in that Beast goes back in time and brings the original five X-Men to the present to show them what's become of everything.  I've also added Wolverine and the X-Men and Cable and X-Force to the list, both of which are awesome in their own rights.  I'll also be reading Uncanny X-Men and X-Men omce they start as well.

The world of the X-Men has changed drastically in twenty years but in a very good, almost fresh and new sort of way and I'm once again happy to be an X-Men fan.

A Fan's Retrospective: Looking Back At Image Comics

Part I:

YOUNGBLOOD

Rob Liefeld.

What can be said about Rob Liefeld?

If you Google up his name right now you'll probably get a lot of hits for the guy and most of them, I'm assuming, will be negative.  You'll read about him stealing art, bad business decisions, how he's a hack, how he can't draw feet or women or proportions or very much of anything else; you'll probably find a page or two that claims that he single handedly (sometimes with the six other founders) destroyed the comic book industry.  You'll find all that stuff elsewhere, however, not from me.  For me, Rob Liefeld's always been a huge inspiration.  A self-taught comic book artist that had the balls behind the idea of forming Image Comics and leaving the big two publishers, Marvel and DC, caught with their pants down and jumped for it.  Rob's art isn't my favorite comic book art to look at, but I don't hate it.  I'm rather fond of it.  Comics, especially superhero comics, take place in universes that don't acknowledge our realm of physics, so why bellyache if an artist draws hyper-misproportioned figures to reflect that?  Why continue to do it after twenty-fiveyears of him doing it?  Just move on to something you enjoy instead, right?

Youngblood was Rob Liefeld's first foray into creating comic characters he owned (after creating a great heaping gob of them for Marvel, as was the last artist I can remember to do so), his first foray into self-publishing (albeit, with help from Malibu Comics in the beginning), and it was the first comic published by Image Comics.  Unfortunately, I'm no longer in possession of those original publications, so looking back on them from a writing standpoint is almost impossible.  What I do have is the digital re-publication of that material that's been slightly remixed and re-organized with a re-scripting by Joe Casey, who I'm a pretty big fan of.  I suppose this could be called a director's cut, or even the special edition of those original four issues.

Before I get into all of that, however, let me set the stage a little bit.  Rob Liefeld's career began with Megaton then went on at DC Comics on a Hawk and Dove mini-series that caught the attention of Bob Harras who, at the time, had recently been seated as the editor of the X-Men line of books at Marvel.  Harras hired Rob and put him on The New Mutants with writer Louise Simonson as of # 86.  With Rob on the art chores, and with the introduction of a mysterious new character he helped create, Cable, the boots sales numbers began to grow.  Simonson left the book at # 97, and Marvel gave control of the book to Liefeld on plots and pencils, with Fabian Nicieza scripting the book on the last three issues before Marvel rebranded the book with the same creators.  New Mutants ended with # 100 and Rob Liefeld introduced even more characters in those last three issues.  I think it should be noted that, if I remember right, Rob Liefeld was the last artist to work for Marvel that created new characters for the company with any sort of lasting or staying power: Deadpool and Cable.  The book was retitled X-Force (which is also still around, though vastly different than it was back then), given a new # 1, made an event out of and sold like bananas.  Liefeld cemented himself as a powerhouse in comics in 1991 and, just as wild as it was to rebrand a title with a # 1, he decided to take it a wild step further and created a whole new publisher with his friends.

I think that's the correct history.  I could have some minor details wrong.

Youngblood is, as one would guess, a superhero comic.  And despite the fact that it's always easily dismissed by a great deal of comic book readers as a nothing sort of comic; as underwritten, overdrawn dreck, Youngblood didsome stuff in its pages that is still relevant today (maybe even more so today) and it was the first time I'd seen anything like it.  Not just in Liefeld's crazy action pose filled art, but in content as well.  Right out of the gate Liefeld's pencils are in your face with massive characters, massive guns, and massive pouches.  Things that seem to bother everyone in the world that loves superhero comics except me (and I hope people that are like me, I don't know!).  The pouches on Liefeld's characters always made them much more interesting to me I always wondered what was in them -- even back with Deadpool and Cable -- and, believe it or not, it also made them somewhat more practical.  Let me explain.  Look at the Punisher's design, from the original design from the 1970s to today's variation of that same design.  Black jumpsuit, black boots, white skull and a really big gun.  Where does he keep his extra ammo?  If you look at soldiers today, twenty years ago, forty years ago; they have more in common with Liefeld's pouch-heavy designs than they do military-based characters like the Punisher, Captain America, Taskmaster, so on and so forth.  Also right off the bat we get to see an amazing truth in those first few pages of this new digital edition of Youngblood that holds true now as much as it did back then: creator owned comics have much more passion in them than work-for-hire comics.  Regardless of how fond the artist or writer is of the character, you can feel the passion in a creator owned comic that's entirely absent in a work-for-hire book.  I can find many reference points for evidence for this from books like Youngblood, the other books I'm reading for this blog, and books like Battle Chasers, Sin City, and Hellboy.  It's not just in the action here in Rob's art, even though the lines are bolder, more distinct, and there seems to be an attention to the detail towards the look of the book that Marvel couldn't replicate at the time, but also in the introduction of a character named Jackson Kirby, an obvious dedication to Jack Kirby who, without him, there wouldn't be much of a comic book industry today.  As a creator you only base characters on real people for two reasons, I think: to mock them or to show them an unrestrained respect to them.  Liefeld's depiction of Kirby as an action hero in his comic is much more the latter than it could ever be the former.

The actual story of Youngblood opens up in another dimension with a group of a freedom fighters -- that are gathered together like the usual five man superhero team -- trying to escape the clutches of the Darkseid-esque character named Darkthornn.  I had always read that Youngblood was intended to be a Teen Titans book over at DC, but it isn't until now, twenty-years of comic reading later, that I can see it.  I don't know if it's true or not, but I can see the similarities.  With the prologue out of the way we get to the "real world," where Rob takes us places that I hadn't seen before in comics: the superhero as a celebrity.  I can't tell you with any kind of certainty that Rob was the first to do this sort of thing.  Truth is, I don't really know.  I do know, however, that I've seen it since a great deal of times, but I don't recall ever seeing it in a comic that was published before 1992. Superheroes,as I knew them -- maybe as you knew them -- have always had secret identities that they had to keep separate from their superhero life, and they had to fight to keep those identities secret.  Batman does it; Superman does it; Spider-Man and the X-Men do it.  Youngblood didn't.  Youngblood is a massive team of superheroes split into two separate strike forces (one to do the famous regular superhero stuff, and one to do the military-styled black ops stuff) owned and operated by the U.S. Government.  I never quite understood the Youngblood name, and I still don't, to be honest.  When it was first announced, I remember fearing that it would be a comic about hockey like the movie of the same name from forever ago.

That premise alone creates an interesting dynamic for the characters to operate in, one that, as I've stated already, that's been used a lot since 1992, where superheroes are publicly known and treated as celebrities.  They have television deals, action figures; are followed by the tabloid media and paparazzi, and all sorts of things like that.  It's a very interesting concept that could have only been born from the late 1980s and early 1990s and stays just as relevant today as it was back then because of our society's complete fascination with the lives of celebrities.  Before Youngblood, superheroes were billionaire playboys, mild-mannered reporters and the like.  An archtype born out of the pulp heroes like Zorro, the Shadow, the Phantom, and many others.  To top it off, Youngblood's other side -- which leaks out to the media in the plot -- is something superhero comics really haven't seen since the 1940s, except in a few panels of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen: superheroes tackling real-world issues.  Youngblood's hidden side, it's black ops side, leads a strike on a middle-eastern dictator bearing a striking resemblance -- in name and appearance -- to Saddam Hussein: Hassan Kussein.  The conflict, however, is mostly predictable superhero stuff. Big action poses accompanied by dialogue that stunts the tempo of the action, which, here, has at least been updated to feel a bit refreshing than I remember it being originally. The coloring isn't too much different than I remembered them being, either.  It's also worth noting that in 1992, coloring like this hadn't really been done before.  Image Comics' publication levels, especially the quality of paper and coloring, blew everything else out of the water.  And it only got better.

The second issue of the series introduces another new character of Liefeld's that's proved to have a bit of lasting power in Prophet: a time-travelling super-warrior of some sort that has connections to the Darkthornn character from the prologue.  Youngblood finds him in Kussein's basement (after the dictator was disposed of rather relentlessly in the first issue, naturally,by the away team's telekinetic Psi-Fire).  A typical mistaken identity superhero plot battle erupts between the team and Prophet until the real threat makes itself known.  The third issue flashes back and forth between the home team as they battle supervillains and Prophet battles the real villains over the bodies of the defeated members of Youngblood and the freedom fighters from the prologue.  The fourth and final issue is both Youngblood teams united with the freedom fighters and Prophet going to war with Darkthornn.  I remember really loving this issue when it was originally published and I can still see why.  You can really see Rob's anime influences shine through in some of these pages.  They're fresh, richly colored, and pretty detailed at certain parts.  The action, too, is a hyper mix of both Western and Eastern comic book approaches to story telling.  Liefeld's work in fight scenes and action sequences, in my mind, is very similar to the big booking style of the WWE with lots of highspots and signature moves; not a lot of mat work, but it works almost the same (well, as long as you have decent performers in the WWE).  I also think new pages of art have been added here and there as some are very unfamiliar, and I poured over these books for a long while ages ago.  They look just as good, if not better, but fit in seamlessly and actually push the narrative along at a better pace.  The re-arranging of certain sequences and scenes also helps in that matter.  The end result is that the first four issues of the Youngblood series aided with the re-scripting by Joe Casey, isn't that bad of a comic at all.  I enjoy it, not as much as I did twenty years ago, sure, but I still rather like it.  It starts out as something new and fresh but delves back into being a typical superhero comic in the end, but one that's still, as I said, relevant.  The celebrity thing is still as fresh as it was then and hasn't been overused, even though it's been used a lot.  I've seen it used in the pages of Powers by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, in New X-Men by Grant Morrison and a plethora of different artists, and I've seen it used in the Authority during Mark Millar and Frank Quitely's run.  Mark also touched on it in his run on the Ultimates with Bryan Hitch a bit.  I don't know if Liefeld is the originator of the idea, and I don't know if those other guys were at all inspired by Liefeld's Youngblood; but it's definitely something I'd like to see a lot more of in comics.  I don't think it's been explored to its fullest potential at all.

With Joe Casey's help on the refurbishing of the original series, I think that Rob Liefeld has a comic on his hands that has stood the test of time for twenty years now and will still stand for the years to come.  It has aged very well.  No, it isn't a genre altering piece like Watchmen or the Dark Knight Returns, but it isn't a horrible example of what the comic book medium has to offer, either.

Next up: Todd McFarlane and His Spawn.

A Fan's Retrospective: Looking Back at Image Comics

INTRODUCTION

1992 was a pretty revolutionary year for me as a fifteen-year-old-going-on-sixteen-year-old kid. I'd began reading comics just seven years before, in 1985, with Kitty Pryde and Wolverine # 2.  Sure, I had owned comics before, but I had a hard time reading much of anything at all at that point and, besides, almost all of the comics I owned before then were DC Comics.  I didn't care or like DC's library of books or cast of characters at nine years old.  I thought of the 1960s Batman television show every time I thought of DC and I didn't really wanna even look at comics with a pre-teen boy in tight pants going BIFF POW and WHAM on a bunch of shitty looking criminals.  And at nine years old, I was picky about everything.  When I began reading comics I instantly gravitated to the characters that were familiar to me and the publisher that brought them to life.  I knew who the Incredible Hulk and Amazing Spider-Man were because of the live action television show with Lou Ferigno and Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends that also featured Iceman and Firestar (Iceman being an X-Men character is a huge catch here, and Firestar was actually created for the cartoon and then introduced to the comics later).  This one comic, one that my mother bought for me on a trip to a grocery store in Virginia, was published by Marvel Comics -- the same publisher whose logo appeared on the television shows I just mentioned -- and I figured it was safe.  It featured a vicious looking, almost animalistic character named Wolverine and the spritely (!), light spirited character Kitty Pryde.  Non-comics reading folks would recognize them as being portrayed by Hugh Jackman and Ellen Page in X3: The Last Stand.  With that single comic I was introduced to a world that would, undoubtedly, change my life forever: The X-Men.  For the next seven years I read X-Men related comics almost exclusively.  There was only one exception: The Amazing Spider-Man.

These comics were presenting a whole new universe of characters, each with their own personal histories as well as a massive overall history, that was quite exiting to me.  I devoured all of it.  So much so that by 1990 I knew pretty much all one could possibly know about the X-Men and Spider-Man without having read every comic published featuring the characters -- hell,I even knew some of the other Marvel characters' histories from books I thought were exceptionally corny on an almost DC-like level; like those Avengers chaps.  My constant quest for knowing everything about these character started drawing me towards the Whos.  The Whos being those responsible for bringing the comics I was reading to life.  The artists, the writers, the editors, the inkers, the colorists; even that Stan Lee guy (who I already knew because he did many voice overs for the Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends program). And, as with what I imagine to be a great deal of comic book readers, it was the artists on the book that I learned of first.  Marc Silvestri was the first I gravitated towards with his sharp -- sometimes raggedly sharp -- edges on the Uncanny X-Men and eventually Wolverine's own title.  Then Todd McFarlane's spindly Spider-Man with Spaghetti Webbing on the Amazing Spider-Man and the subsequent, adjectiveless Spider-Man book.  Jim Lee followed Marc Silvestri on Uncanny with sporadic issues, a lot of covers, and a short but amazing run on the title before jumping to an also adjectiveless X-Men book.  This guy blew the doors off of everything with every line he drew.  On X-Factor, a title that followed the adventures of the original five X-Men were the intense pencils of Whilce Portacio who followed Lee on Uncanny.  Over on the younger end of the X-Men spectrum was a book called the New Mutants that followed the newest additions to Xavier's School for the Gifted and it was being pencilled by an equally young Rob Liefeld.  Following Todd on both Amazing Spider-Man and Spider-Man, oddly enough, was Erik Larsen who is responsible (well, and David Michelinie wrote one of them) for my two favorite stories featuring Spidey: Return of the Sinister Six and Revenge of the Sinister Six. These guys were my favorite artists in comics at the time and all of them drew for Marvel Comics.  In my eyes, no one could touch them.  Not even the saints that had come before like Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko or John Byrne.  I was a kid.  I was stupid.  Shit happens!  No one at Marvel was this good and no one at DC came even close.

By the end of 1991 all my favorite artists were practically gone from Marvel.  They were either on sabbatical, had permanently left those titles announcing their self-imposed retirement, or were just doing layouts and covers here and there.  Without getting too much into the politics of what was going on behind the scenes, what was going on was that these six artists, plus a guy named Jim Valentino, were exiting Marvel altogether to create something new, something fresh, and, ultimately, something that they owned.  Image Comics was birthed from the collaborative minds of Rob Liefeld, Erik Larsen, Todd McFarlane, Jim Valentino, Marc Silvestri, Jim Lee, and Whilce Portacio, and it was to be simply a publishing house for comics that owned nothing.  What ultimately followed was a revolution that changed not only myself but the entire comic book industry, and, indeed, the medium itself forever.  Up until that point, I was exclusively a reader of X-Men related comics and Spider-Man, as I mentioned before, and I never thought of reading anything else, nor did I even want to.  Until they left, anyway.  What happened when all of them left Marvel was suddenly there was a void of pretty art as the artists that were replacing these guys were aping their styles and not doing a very good job at it.  But it isn't their fault as Marvel had a horrible habit of enforcing specific styles upon their writers and artists that mimicked the successful team that came before them. It was actually years and years after Chris Claremont left the Uncanny X-Men that they allowed another writer to deviate from the text-heavy caption boxes that rendered the art useless because that was the "X-Men" style. All my favorite comics and favorite characters suddenly got very ugly.  Almost overnight.

The first Image Comics book debuted in April of 1992.  It was called Youngblood and it was the brainchild of Rob Liefeld.  It was followed a month later by Todd McFarlane's Spawn comic; in July Erik Larsen gave us the Savage Dragon.  In August we saw both Jim Lee and Brandon Choi's WildC.A.T.s and Jim Valentino's ShadowHawk and in October Marc Silvestri teamed up with his brother, Eric, to bring us Cyber Force.

I was obsessed.  It was like I had discovered comics for the first time all over again.  New characters, new worlds, new histories, and, for once, they looked better than my old favorites at Marvel ever had.  I abandoned Marvel for the better part of the 1990s, I didn't return until the Fatal Attractions crossover with the X-Men books where Magneto ripped Wolverine's adamantium off his bones, and even then it was for a very short period of time until Grant Morrison came knocking.  I stuck with Image and bought almost every book they published until eventually branching out to other publishers because these seven guys, and those that worked with them and even brought their own creations under the Image banner, had opened my eyes to see past the Marvel horizon.  There was Frank Miller's Sin City, for instance.  Arthur Adams' Monkey Man & O'Brien stories, and a good portion of the books published by Valiant Comics like Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Bloodshot, and X-O Manowar proved to be eventual favorites of mine.

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Image Comics.  Almost all of those properties that a whole lot of fans and even some professionals said wouldn't last five years are still going, and decently well.  One book, Savage Dragon, is still being written and drawn by its original creator: Erik Larsen. This year saw the return of several of Rob Liefeld's creations as though they had never went anywhere, and Cyber Force was rebooted in October.  And that's just the tip of the iceberg.  Image Comics now is a very different place than it was twenty years ago.  Where it was once a publishing house dominated by creator-owned superhero comics, there's now creator-owned dramas, creator-owned science fiction, creator-owned horror and even a certain creator-owned zombie comics called the Walking Dead.  Everyone's heard of that, right?

In an attempt to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of my favorite comics publisher (still!  to this day!) I decided I would revisit those original six comics -- and the seventh one that almost got away -- to see what the thirty-six year old version of myself thinks of the comics my fifteen year old self adored.  So, hold on to your hats, it's bound to be an interesting ride.

First up: Rob Liefeld's Youngblood.