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Congratulations! You’ve been hired by the Justice League. Your title is “Hero,” your qualifications are “showed up,” and your first assignment is standing in Metropolis next to Superman while a stranger in a very small cape asks you where the good loot is. Welcome to DC Universe Online, the game where you can create your own superhero and then spend the entire first hour in the character creator, agonizing over the exact shade of your cape and a name that isn’t already taken by eleven thousand other guys who thought “Night-something” was original.

The premise is gloriously simple: you get to live in the same world as Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and the rest of DC’s heavy hitters, and the heavy hitters are weirdly cool about it. Nobody asks for a résumé. Nobody questions why a hero named “SteelGhostFlash7” is suddenly on the Watchtower. The Joker is out there being the Joker, Lex Luthor is out there being smug, and you are out there trying to figure out whether you’re a legend in the making or just a guy in tights who’s very good at following the glowing arrow on the map.

Leaping into the DC playground with us is David Gallaher, writer of some of your favorite video games and comics, which means he’s spent years inventing heroes and villains on purpose, a luxury the rest of us only get in a character creator. David has been on both sides of the page, so he’s perfect for the question at the heart of this episode: when you drop yourself into a universe where the icons were already established decades ago, do you feel like a hero, or a very enthusiastic extra with a better costume?

So grab your most dramatic cape, practice your brooding stare in the mirror, and settle in. Somewhere out there a hero is saving the city, and he’s definitely using a username he regrets.

Also be sure to check out the full post so you can see some of the stuff that Daybreak sent over for me to share. It doesn’t play nicely with RSS feeds.Continue Reading

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This week on play comics we ask ourselves what happens if you you can’t decide what you want to make a game about. Should you just give up? Should you really dig into your soul and decide what you’re super passionate about? Should you look and see if there’s any other related media coming out that you can tie this game into? Or should you act like you’re at the end of five different boxes of sugary cereal and justice dump the mall into a single bowl and see what happens?

There’s certainly one thing that I made my mind up about this one, and that’s how Perry Constantine from Superhero Cinephiles and Japan on Film needed to come by and help me make sure that I kept everything straight here. And it’s a good thing too because with more playable character than I want to count spread out across 7 consoles upon release and a few more as back catalogs were taken advantage of it would have been really easy to miss something here.

So was there an actual story for this game? Or was it just a giant excuse to squeeze in as many tidbits as they could so the other kids would think they’re cool? You’ll have to listen to find out!Continue Reading