SUPER ME

A SORT OF REVIEW/COMPLAINT OF/ABOUT DC UNIVERSE ONLINE

By Marco Beltran, Entertainment Editor

    The game is pretty enjoyable. I don’t know what else I can say about it. I waited two years for this game to come out, partially because it’s an MMO that is playable in the PS3 and I’ve always wanted to wake up with super powers. I’m not saying that I thought this would be so realistic in its attempt at creating a game that puts you at the helm of a super powered individual. I just wanted to rekindle my relationship with an online superhero game that I didn’t need to upgrade my computer inorder to get the full, uninterupted, playing experience. That’s not what I found in this game. All I found was more of the same.
     The cities, the powers, the style of the game, were all too similar to 2004’s City of Heroes that I almost put the game down and ran out in anger. The story makes no sense. A version of Lex Luthor, Superman’s nemesis, from an alternate reality or from the future arrives, I guess, to warn Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman about an impending attack from Brainiac, a supercomputer bent on taking over Earth, that has collected the powers of every superhero on earth. That also includes, from some reason, magic and technological expertise. I don’t understand how a robotic being can compensate for an anomaly such as FUCKING MAGIC. I can understand mutations and shit like that, but not the idea that circuits and wires can compensate for magic. Isn’t there some intangeble shit that keeps robots from getting that stuff? Aren’t there rules for that or something somewhere that say robots can’t do magic. I know that sounds a little racist, or will sound racist in the future when robots become fully fuctional and sentient to the point in which we will have to have debates on whether or not it is moral or immoral to marry a robot, but I don’t care.
     So, Future/Alternate Lex Luthor decides to help out by giving random people super powers. Your character, mine is named the White Flash, is tossed into a world gone to shit because of that. Wouldn’t it have been easier just to replace Lex Luthor in that demension/timestream and work toward a way to keep Brainiac from taking over? He’s supposed to be a genius.
     That’s just nitpicky stuff, I know, but there are a few things that will keep people from continuing past the first city. One is that for each opponent you defeat while traveling around the cities and fighting in the missions, you only get a really small amount experience from defeating them. Because of that it becomes really hard to level up. This becomes a problem when there is no start point. There are like four or five missions that are perfect to start off in that are in the same city, but if you want to get stronger you need to head over to some far off city. I spent hours just trying to get to the other missions before getting lost and finding out that there is a slightly easier, not by much, way to get around.
     Because of the constant traveling you come up against the bigger problem of the game, which is that the Player versus Player, Hero vs Villain, stuff start off randomly. I spent the majority of my time respawning only to get killed again. It got a little frustrating when I would get within a few feet of a base or my next mission, only to get beaten by a hero/villain, and get sent fucking far away to some of the really spacedout respawn points.
     The saving grace of this game comes from the missions, which allow you to fight a variety of villains/heros as well as interact with them during the course of the mission. Another cool/interesting thing in the game is that after you beat the boss of a mission set, there are little comic book-style animations that tell you why the boss is part of the good or evil side of the game.
     So far I’ve given up two days of my life in order in see which powers are the coolest and put in a lot of time trying to make a character that I thought was cool, but it’s going to take a really long time to get anywhere in this stupid shit, I already paid for this shit, so fuck it. This game is going to ruin my life.