But, under the terms of my contract and as a private citizen of an entirely different state, there’s nothing stopping me from publishing it myself, and a lot of people have been asking for it, so click here and enjoy.

Little did I know, when we undertook this labour of love, that this would be the very thing that would cause me to lose my own job with Games Workshop.

You see, while we were waiting for the seller, I took the opportunity to converse with and get to know the manager and staff at the Newcastle Games Workshop store. We chatted about this and that, about how their store was doing, what it was like to work at my store up at Castle Towers. We got along. When they asked me what brought me down this way, I gleefully exclaimed – over the moon as I was – about how I was finally going to pick up these Ork books that had eluded me all these years, and that I had arranged to use their store as a meeting point with my eBay seller.

It turns out this was a huge mistake. Because you see, the first thing that the Newcastle manager did upon seeing my manager at last week’s manager’s conference, was to step over and inform him that one of his staff – he even remembered my name for the occasion – had used his store as a meeting point to purchase goods over eBay.

Apparently the fact that the item in question was an out of print supplement from eighteen years ago and that eBay is the only place it can be found was irrelevant: I, a Games Workshop staff member, had purchased Games Workshop goods from eBay and was publicly announcing it at a Games Workshop store.

The Newcastle manager also went on to add that I had “acted like a smartass” by discussing the Ten Commandments of Customer Service with him and his staff. Specifically, when I was first approached by him, I congratulated him on completing the First Commandment (“Acknowledge and approach everyone who enters the Hobby Centre”) and introduced myself as a fellow employee. Now I don’t know if Newcastle has some fucked-up personal definition of “smartass” but where I come from, that’s called breaking the fucking ice. Finding common ground. Starting a conversation.

At the time he laughed and we got along fine, as did the other staff member whom I had roughly the same conversation with. I was not to know that the hypnotic conditioning in his brain had kicked into overdrive, and that my name, rank and serial number were being filed away to be reported later.

After spending maybe ten or fifteen minutes in store, I realised the seller was late and decided to go stand outside to look for him. I made my excuses and left; not knowing that when this whole story would be reported to my manager, the ending would be completely fucking rewritten to the Newcastle manager asking me to leave the store.

I had no idea of any of this at the time; in fact I had no idea up until today, over two weeks later when Jess and I went into my store to do some painting. My manager had asked me to come in so he could speak to me personally before he drew up the roster for the week. I jokingly asked when I arrived if I was being fired. He looked at me sadly and said “Yes”.

After having the whole ridiculous farce of a situation (complete with bonus alternate ending courtesy of the Newcastle manager) explained to me, he went on further to add that in any case he didn’t think I was a very good “fit” with Games Workshop – primarily, because I was not loud and energetic enough. You see it’s very important, at Games Workshop, that you make the hobby fun and exciting – which according to the company policy, means shouting all the time, something I struggle with. And Games Workshop take their shouting their “fit” very seriously; through some contacts, I’ve actually had the chance to read the Little Red Book, which is the top-secret management handbook written by the CEO of Games Workshop himself, Tom Kirby.

At the time of my hiring, I mentioned to my manager that I possessed this illicit knowledge. Recalling this fact, he used it to illustrate why I was being fired.

You see that top left corner? That, he explained, was where I was. Talented, yes, but not a good fit. “You’ve read the book, Tim,” he said, “You know what Games Workshop policy is about this.” Oh yes, I do.

When it comes right down to it, I still don’t know why I was fired. I can see why I might have been told it wasn’t working out a few months from now and perhaps asked gently to leave, or just quietly given less and less shifts until I quit of my own accord. But fired?

If enjoying the Games Workshop universe enough to collect all their sourcebooks is a crime, if trying to find common ground with other Games Workshop staff through entirely reasonable conversation is a crime, if being loyal veteran of fourteen goddamn years is a crime, then lock me the fuck up, you guys. Because I will re-offend.

–

UPDATE: Holy shit that’s a lot of comments. If you’re reading this, could you please leave me a comment showing me where this is being linked from? I’m dying to know. Thanks!

Well, these people don’t know shit. Let me tell you a story about yesterday, Thursday 1st October 2009. The 100% official, swear-to-god, worst day, ever.

It all began with the arrival of a package from back home. Jess and I have a wedding to attend here in Sydney, you see, and I cleverly left all of my formal clothes back in Perth. My parents were good enough to attend to my needs and send them over, but in my infinite wisdom I left it until the last minute, and indeed told them to send the wrong trousers.

With the wedding on Saturday, there was no time to get them to send over the correct ones. We decide to quickly run out to Target and get some new trousers, foregoing showers in our rush to do so. It is quickly warming up to be a stinking hot day, and my nose responds appropriately by deciding it is going to drip relentlessly throughout all of it. We are tired, sniffly, unwashed, sweaty, hot, and probably coming down with a cold. And we’re only just getting started.

We have organised to meet up with Sarah, Saturday’s bride-to-be, at her house. She is going to hang out with Jess and keep her company while I go into work three hours early (to what is only a three hour shift in the first place) to organise my cash-register login details and learn how to use the thing to actually sell products to customers. I am led to believe this is an important part of retail work. I am told this will only take about half an hour.

Thanks to Target, we are able to pick up pants quickly and easily, and then pick up Sarah. We are late and stressed, but that’s okay. A quick tour of her house follows and then we are off to the shopping centre in which I work. I leave the two lovely ladies in the food court and saunter off to work, arriving on time and expecting to jump straight in to training and learning.

Instead, I find that the assistant manager who organised the whole thing is off sick. The actual manager is on the phone, just back from holidays, and continues to be on the phone for about fifteen minutes while I kill time in the store. When I am actually able to speak to him, he professes confusion and says he is trying to organise my login details now, but it needs to be done synchronously with an IT Guy in head office and that said IT Guy may not be free to do it for up to an hour.

Enraged, I ask what “it” actually involves. It turns out I am just going to have to speak to the Guy to provide a password for my cash-register logon. I say that this is crazy: if I just need to talk to the Guy on the phone, he can call me on my mobile anytime, and exit the store saying that I will be back when my shift starts. By this time it has been forty-five minutes and absolutely nothing has been done, though I have taken a peek at my upcoming hours for October – which were promised to be “pretty intense” due to the school holidays, only to discover that October sees me working a whole six extra hours, in total.

Sarah needs to get back to her house, so we take her home. Once we get there, I receive a frantic call saying that I need to be back in the store because the policy is that I need to speak to the IT Guy on the store phone, while being physically located in the store. Jess and I swear violently and leave Sarah’s house to go back to the shopping centre. On the way back, I flip through the Myer gift registry for the Saturday wedding (something else we left until the last minute). Once we get to the centre, I toss the registry on the dashboard in the car and forget about it. This is important.

I head into work, still with over half an hour until my shift is to start, and begin to finally learn the things I need to learn. Jess waits around in the store for a while, and then decides to go down to Myer and grab some gifts for the wedding from the gift registry. The layout of the shopping centre means that Myer is about a ten minute walk away. She makes this journey only to realise that I have left the gift registry in the car, and hikes back again to accurately inform me that I am a cocksucker and she is going to go read in the car, and get gifts later.

When she gets to the car, the growing heat of the day has made it fairly uncomfortable to be in, even in the covered carpark. She reads for a while and then decides to use her laptop, which uses its blast-furnace like heat output to turn the inside of the car into a tiny sauna. Sweating in rage, she flees the car and decides to head down to Myer again. When she finally gets there, she discovers that Myer’s catalogue is mind-fuckingly insane and the products on the gift registry either do not exist, are wildly more expensive than listed, or are available, but only in damaged boxes.

Meanwhile, at work, I have actually sneezed so hard I split my lip open along some sort of geostructural fault line. It bleeds profusely and continues to bleed for about two hours, or almost all the remainder of my shift. Combined with my running nose, I am being slowly driven insane. My shift ends and I flee the premises towards Myer. It is 8:30 PM and the shopping centre is closing up. I trundle towards Jess at top speed.

We meet up and she regales me with tales of shittiness, while I continue to apologise profusely for leaving the gift registry in the car. We realise we are both hungry, and decide to get some corn-in-a-cup (it’s delicious, and nutritious!) from the nearby corn store, only to be informed that the corn store is out of corn – in fact the last corn-in-a-cup was just sold to the customer before us. We turn to the bubble tea place a few metres away, and desperately ask to order bubble tea. Unfortunately, they are out of pearls and in fact, they only just sold their last bubble tea.

By this point every second word coming out of our mouths is a furious expletive. We rage over to the food court and get in line at KFC for some “Mashies”, because we both want to try them. Unfortunately it appears that KFC was staffed exclusively by vacuous morons that night, as we were left in line for ten minutes and completely, blatantly ignored by no less than four counter staff before being served. In fact we were ignored to the point that the lady who queued up behind us was pulled out of the queue up to the front counter and served ahead of us.

In keeping with the pattern established today, the woman orders Mashies. In fact she wants a large one. And it just so happens that there was only enough left in the warmer to fill a large box. Jess ragequits the queue. I stand there out of spite, forcing them to serve me and make up an entire fresh batch for me. This takes another ten minutes.

We finally get our Mashies and head back to the car. They’re not even very good. In fact they sort of taste funny, but I am fucking ravenous as I have not eaten since 2:00 PM and scarf down all of them. On the way home, we remember that we need to get petrol, and pull into a service station.

Jess goes to fill up the car, only to realise the pump has malfunctioned and backfired, soaking the side of the car, the ground and her skirt with petrol. A lot of petrol. Things just keep getting better. I go inside to pay, while she heads off to the service station toilet to try and dilute the petrol with water and wash as much of it off as possible. I pay and head back out to the car, only to receive a surprise phonecall from Jess: “You know how this is the worst day ever,” she says. “Well, I’m locked in the fucking toilet.”

Locked in the fucking toilet.

I run inside to the counter and explain the situation to the clerk, who throws me a key and says something about “they’ve been having trouble with that door”. Taking the key, I run over to the toilet and try to open it. The key doesn’t fit in the lock as it has been damaged. The handle won’t turn, and the door barely gives. Jess and I have to shout to hear each other as trucks are barreling by on the road ten metres away. Eventually we are able to communicate that there is no fucking way to unlock this door, and I just begin repeatedly yanking at it, trying to force it open. Empowered perhaps by adrenaline, or a dreadful resentment at the universe, I wrench the door open, mangling the lock beyond repair and freeing Jess.

Taking the key back inside, I try and explain what happened to the clerk again, who only shrugs and says “Yeah, that door is pretty broken”, explaining that they reported it to head office weeks and weeks ago but nothing has been done about it. This does not exactly placate us but there isn’t really anything we can do, so we storm out, to finally go home.

Once we get home, we finally sit down and relax for a few hours, thinking that the day is finally over. But the fates have one last surprise in store for us: when I go to return Jess’s mum’s bank keycard to her, I can’t find it. Anywhere. We search the room, the car, the driveway, the garage. It is nowhere to be found. Up until now were starting to come to terms with the day, as all the shitty things that had happened had only affected us. But now, on top of all this, we had lost the keycard.

We pile into the car and drive out to the service station, thinking it must, surely, have come out of my pocket during my frenzied wrenching of the toilet door to free Jess. The clerk we talked to before has gone home and the new guy doesn’t know of any cards that have been handed in, and we can’t find it anywhere searching around the grounds of the station.

Desolate, and truly fucking infuriated, we return home, only to find the keycard lying on the floor under a pile of clothes.

Worst.

“Wow! That’s incredible! It looks like something straight off a, uh. Hrm.”

“You were going to say desktop, weren’t you?”

“Yes. Goddammit.”

Hello, Tim!

Actually, I have a number of problems. For example, my facial muscles tend to operate on a ten-minute time delay, which causes me to sometimes be unable to properly communicate emotions to people important to me. In the same manner one can look up at the sky and see the stars as they were hundreds of years ago, my face is a delightful mirror of the emotions I was feeling ten minutes prior.

Working in combination with my expressionless voice I often, to my great chagrin, give people the impression of being either utterly disinterested, monstrously sarcastic, or having actually passed away several minutes ago and now operating entirely on volatile corpse gas and twitching nerve reflexes. My thanks to all those who have frantically, and mistakenly, dialled for an ambulance. I appreciate it.

But we’re not here to talk about that, are we? Today I would like to talk about my unnerving tendency to not so much blur as demolish the line between the internet and real life. I have, at various times in the past done, and probably will do again in the future, the following things.

1. Picked up envelopes addressed to me, fresh out of the mailbox, and gleefully exclaimed “Oooh! Email!”
2. Mused aloud on the possibility of “bookmarking” delightful staff at restaurants so that we could come back to the in the future.
3. While sketching from a reference book, reached out to flip the pages of the reference book so that it would not go into screensaver.

Yes, I have done all of these things. I am not proud of these things, but they are my things, and I have done them. I will probably do more of them in the future even, until the time comes when I am found curled up in the foetal position on the floor, sucking binaric dregs from a blue CAT-5 cable and cackling quietly to myself.

Still, at least when I am asked in job interviews whether I “eat, sleep and breathe the internet”, I can hold my head high and say proudly: “Yes. Yes I do”. And then I can break down in a series of embarrassed, choking sobs.

I’ll always have that.

If you’re having trouble recognising me, I am the attractive ponytailed Adonis sitting on the right hand side. I think we can all agree I have a bright future in game reviews, if not actual successful game play, or any manner of timing and co-ordination.

For those who don’t know, I used to do a (semi) regular webcomic by the name of Refried. I was looking back through the archives last night, and aside from the odd cringe or two, it really made me want to pick up the webcomic gig again. This isn’t the first time I’ve felt like this; it’s been almost two years since I stopped updating Refried and so I’ve had quite a reasonable amount of time to consider my position. So much time in fact, that I apparently fell asleep at the wheel and drove my car off the webcomics highway into the blissful ditch of real life.

This of course begs the question of what I should do to get back on the horse, if you’ll forgive my wild switching of metaphors. As far as I can tell, I have several options.

1. Refried, Redux: Do what you know, as they say. The only problem I have with this is that I’m not really too happy with the Refried formula. When you boil it down, it is basically just another video game comic with a slight autobiographical bent, and that saddens me a little. There are enough shitty video game comics out there, and even though I wouldn’t exactly call what I did shitty, it’s still basically an oversaturated market that comes replete with its own ultra-dense fanbase and bullshit viewer expectations. On the other hand, I fucking love video games. So maybe I should just accept that.
2. Apathetic Randomness: I spent far too long slaving over every line, every colour, every shade on the Refried comics. I was driven to do this because I am a perfectionist idiot, and I understand that. It’s not too bad to be this way, but when you’re on the internet you can afford to be less picky. There are dozens of comics out there with less complex art, or no art at all, who are ten times as successful as I ever was. I could probably pretty easily push out a shittier comic at least once a week with no trouble at all. The only downside of this is, of course, that I would hate myself a little. But again – maybe I should just accept that.
3. Warhammer 40K: I know the Games Workshop universes back-to-fucking-front. You can’t play these games as long as I have, particularly Warhammer 40,000, and not have absorbed outrageous amounts of fluff and meta-game knowledge. And when you combine this into a comic form, which I have tentatively tried in the past in the form of guest comics, I think I have a recipe for myself to be fairly (or even very) successful. There is one main problem with this: it’s not my intellectual property. Games Workshop protects its IP with the viciousness of a cornered wolverine and I would never, ever, under any circumstances, be allowed to publish any comics I did featuring Games Workshop concepts, nor sell merchandise or profit from their IP. There are ways I could get around this: Jess has suggested a comic set in the universe of “WarAxe 300,000″, which would work nicely. And sure, I’d probably feel a bit creatively unfulfilled since I’d be basically playing in somebody else’s sandbox, but it’s a sandbox I’ve known and loved for a very long time. So maybe I should just accept that.
4. Original Work: For probably about a year on and off I’ve been developing a concept in my head, which I have shared with some of you. It’s called Spitfires and Six-Shooters, and you can find some concept sketches of it my sketchbook if you dig back far enough. It’s a story I’d love to tell, and I think it would make an excellent comic if I ever went through with it. Out of all the options I think this is the one I’d prefer to tackle, but it’s also the hardest by a long shot. There’s so much work to do before I could even start storyboarding, and yet I know that the sweetest comicky fruit is growing at the finish line. So maybe I should just accept that, too.

Yet even a list like this is another way of putting off that first tentative step. And by creating this list, I’m overlooking the possibility that I could easily do multiple of these things at once, if I could just get over my outrageous perfectionism. A while back Nick threw up a link to The Cult of Done Manifesto, which really struck a chord with me (so much so that I made this wallpaper for myself). It’s a little bit pretentious, and I think I have a ways to go before I can buy into it fully, but it’s nice to have something to aim for.

On today’s episode of Aluminium Chef, you will learn the following things:

1) Putting a Cadbury Creme Egg in the microwave to make it all “nice and melty” to go over your ice cream will result in a loud, ear-piercing shriek as the gooey creme filling bursts forth, geyser like, from the chocolate shell and sprays all over the inside of the microwave.

2) The gooey creme filling will be superheated to a temperature comparable to that of molten lava as it exits the chocolate shell. Touching the gooey creme lava will cause first degree burns to your fingers.

3) As the filling that decorates the inside of your microwave slowly cools, you will discover that it is almost impossible to clean off. You will spend at least fifteen minutes furiously scrubbing as you hold your hand in a glass of cold water, incredulous with pain and rage, alternating under your breath between vicious swearing and confused denial.

4) Thoroughly cautious, you will gently touch the now-empty but surprisingly intact chocolate shell of the Creme Egg, only to find that is in fact stone fucking cold.

City of Villains was pretty much my first MMO, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. And while I can look back and suspect that my shine for it might still be slightly rose-tinted for that naivete, I’ve since tried other MMO’s – Warhammer Online (for several months), World of Warcraft (for two weeks), Tabula Rasa (for six hours), Ultima Online (for… well, thirty minutes) – and I’ve even spent the last year balls-deep in development of another MMO. None of these games, no matter who I played them with, no matter how good the anecdotes about them, no matter how much I enjoyed working on them, none of these games have ever kept me interested, kept me excited and kept me coming back again and again like City of Villains.

As you may or may not know, the people behind City of Villains, Cryptic Studios, are currently working on another superhero-themed MMO called Champions Online. Naturally this sort of news is exciting to me, and while discussing it with my friends, all the good memories from the City of Villains days came flooding back. Our incessant talking about those halcyon days was enough to convince Jess that it was time to try it for herself, and so a few weeks ago we fired it up, and we haven’t looked back since.

There have been probably three distinct City of Villains eras for me before this one, and though I’ve always been pleased with the game’s ongoing development each time I’ve restarted, logging in again for the first time in nearly two years really floored me with the amount of improvements that they’ve been quietly crowbarring in. Though I’ve always loved the game to pieces, it has always had some distinctly glaring issues, or what I would consider to be incredibly obvious design decisions that needed to be made but which just weren’t. This time around, I could not help but be amazed at just how far they had come along in addressing those concerns. In fact, I’ve been enjoying playing it so much that I decided it was about time to write it all down and tell the world exactly why.

1. Costumes

Most, if not all, other MMO’s force you to begin the game as an ugly template of a character, letting you choose between 6-10 (if you’re lucky) different options for the way you look and shoving you into a world populated by countless other people who look exactly like you. As you level up and find better gear, you might start to look slightly unique. Maybe, if you’re willing to sink hours of your life into it, you’ll find the armour set that only two hundred other people are wearing. But not in City of Villains, because the first thing you do when you make your character is sit down and get gobsmacked at just how many goddamn options there are for your appearance.

No other game even comes close to the variety of what City of Villains has on offer. Not only can you adjust every aspect of your physical size including height, bulk and weight, as well as scaling your facial features, but the game offers you unlimited combinations of what must surely be over several thousand different costume pieces, all of which can be coloured or textured to your liking. You can be helmeted, armoured, brain hanging out, hooded, insectoid, scaly, freaky, glowing, winged, even wielding a goddamn shovel in your fist if that’s what pleases you.

What’s the end result of this? You can look as absolutely and completely badass as you want at level goddamn one. The game doesn’t force you to grind for months just to get a glimpse of what cool looks like, only to find that once you get there every other motherfucker around you is wearing the same thing. Your character is uniquely yours because you created it. And you don’t just get one costume either: at levels 20, 30, 40 and 50 you can unlock extra costumes, and switch between them at will. Getting sick of your schoolgirl wear? Current mission call for a bit of class? Open the costumes menu and change! Instant success.

But the costume madness doesn’t end there! As you level up, you unlock extra costume options, including the ability to surround your character in a completely customisable glowing aura just so everybody can see what a high-level motherfucker they are dealing with. And you can purchase recipes from other players on the Black Market to give your character access to crazy kit like fairy wings, dragon wings and even rocket boots. And the character creator allows you to save and load costumes to your hard drive, letting you experiment to your heart’s content without ever losing anything. By taking the aesthetics out of the level-grind-treadmill, City of Villains gives you a game where you can feel cool and unique as soon as you step out of the tutorial. And it is a good feeling.

2. Getting Around

So once you’ve got your beautiful unique character, it’s time to go somewhere with them. Now, one of the things I hate the most about MMO’s is nearly all of them making getting from place to place a chore. They insist on having huge, beautiful vistas and monstrous sprawling landscapes and this is, undeniably, a good thing. But once you’ve seen them two or three times and you just want to get the fuck on with it, you find out that they don’t think you’re good enough for any sort of reasonably fast travel until you’re level bajillion and can afford the necessary mortgage to buy yourself a horse. Not the case in City of Villains.

From as early as level three – which is, say, 15 minutes of work for even the chronically lazy player – your character gets access to jet packs, jump packs and all sorts of malarkey that let them soar majestically from place to place in seconds. Those are temporary in nature of course, but they’re enough to not only keep you from having to pound the pavement like a chump, but to get you all the way to level fourteen where you unlock one of the coolest things City of Villains has to offer: travel powers.

Whether you choose to super-leap, fly, teleport or just plain run really fast, travel powers open up the entire game to you. There is nowhere you cannot go, no building you cannot scale. No feeling is greater than bounding from rooftop to rooftop across the city, or soaring over the ocean with nothing in sight for miles. Because City of Villains uses a proper physics engine, jumping and climbing in-game feels solid, kinetic and real. Unlike other MMO’s where your character balks in terror at even the most knee-high fence, City of Villains lets you climb on houses, scuttle along ledges, tight-rope along power lines, bound up sheer cliff faces, all in a completely believable and intuitive fashion. You really feel that you are present in the world, and that everywhere is open for you to explore.

And it doesn’t matter where you do go exploring, because one of the beautiful things about City of Villains is that you can never, ever get lost. Finding your way around is a snap, because you can open up your map at any time, click on the marker of where you want to be, and the game gives you an instant, spatial heads-up view of the direction you need to go, and a ticking counter telling you just how far away you are. Simply head that way – using your travel powers to bound effortlessly over any obstacles or enemies in your way – and you’ll get where you need to be in no time. It is an almost insultingly simple system, and it boggles my mind that it hasn’t been appropriated by other games. Using a number of incredibly simple tricks, City of Villains makes it fun just to move around. But fortunately for everybody, there’s more to the game than simply getting from place to place.

3. Combat

City of Villains would be a pretty poor rendition of a superhero game if it didn’t give you the opportunity to knock helpless motherfuckers around like bowling pins. Luckily for us it gives you this opportunity, and in spades. The physics engine not only gives us realistic jumping, but allows us fast-paced and thoroughly visceral combat. Unlike, say, World of Warcraft, where “combat” means “two people standing an arms length away from each other and gently flailing until one person has collapsed”, City of Villains takes combat for what it really is.

You can propel people backwards off rooftops and ledges with well aimed blasts of concussive force. You can smash people into the sky with a classic, cartoon-style wind-up punch. You can stomp the ground, the shockwaves sending dozens of nearby enemies flying into walls and skidding across the concrete. You can summon a gale-force wind to blast a group of helpless chumps off their feet. You can pound your hammer into a poor foe and smash him into the ground, laughing as he staggers back to his feet, dazed. It feels real and exciting and you never want to stop. When Warhammer Online said an ability had knockback, it meant there was a small chance your opponent might skid backwards several inches. When City of Villains says knockback, it means your enemies better pack a goddamn lunch because they are going to get knocked all the way into motherfucking EVE Online.

But combat doesn’t just feel great, it looks great and handles great, too. The visuals and animations are top-notch and the combat, particularly at high-levels when the particle effects start flying fast and thick, is simply a joy to watch. Not only this though, but City of Villains actually generates realistic physics debris after many battles, littering the corridors and tunnels of your missions with proof of your badassery. You can kick these bullet casings and rubble chunks around just to amuse yourself, or even go so far as to swoop down the corridor in flight, watching the bullet casings swirl around in the air currents generated in your wake. It’s totally gratuitous, totally unnecessary, and totally gorgeous.

Combat is easy to control as well, allowing you to queue attacks even when they’re not ready to use, and even offering you the ability to auto-fire some abilities so that they constantly activate. If you only have one power so far and are sick of pressing the key to activate it, or combat is too frantic for you to remember to cast heals on your group, simply control-click on the ability and stop worrying. It’s beautiful and simple and addictive.

4. Gameplay and Level Progression

Many other games struggle with keeping players consistently interested, or place unnecessary hurdles in the way of allowing friends to play together. For example, during my time playing Warhammer Online, it quickly became apparent that my friends, who played staggeringly more often than I did, were actually impossible to play alongside. They were simply too high level, and there was no way for me to take part in any of their quests, fight by their side in the PVP zones or even get into their general area without spending 35 minutes trekking around featureless brown terrain.

City of Villains takes a different approach. The entire world is open to you at any time, and instead of quest lines, players are given missions by their contacts. Each mission is essentially an instanced dungeon set through a door or portal in the world, only accessible by the players that have that mission. If a player is in a team, all players in the team can enter the mission also, and the game automatically scales the mission up or down in difficulty as the numbers in the group fluctuate. This means that the missions are always appropriate for the team taking them on. Team leaders can see every team member’s mission and choose the team’s mission appropriately, and if several players in a team share the same mission, completing it for one person will complete it for all of them. This means that everyone advances together as efficiently as possible. You can even enter into a level pact with another character, meaning that experience is split between the two of you. So if you play your character every night for a week, even when your friend logs on, you’ll both be the same level and ready to kick ass and take names.

Even then, it is of course possible for friends to have characters who are of drastically different levels. In any other MMO, this would make it impossible for them to play together. Fortunately, City of Villains has implemented a system to counter this. If a high-level player wants to help out their low-level friend(s), they can malefactor themselves to bring their character down to the lower level, allowing them to fight alongside their friend(s) without being so over-powered as to take all the experience from their friends. On the other hand, if a low-level character wants to fight alongside the big boys, they can become a high-level character’s lackey, which brings them up to one level below that of their boss. This increases all of their health and endurance to the higher level, as well as adjusting their powers to that level of effectiveness, allowing them to fight easily alongside their friends without having to worry about getting picked off. It is a truly inventive approach and makes it possible for friends of all levels to enjoy gaming together.

Even with all this, it is still possible to eventually run out of storyline-related missions to do. When this happens, if you don’t feel like moving onto another zone, you can always just pull out a newspaper and thumb through it. Perhaps you’ll find an article about how some upstart gang lord by the docks is calling you out! What to do, sports fans? As a villain of course, your only sensible approach is to head to his family home, break in, and murder his elderly grandfather. These simple, one-off missions with no over-arching storyline are more than just instant gratification. Do enough of them and somebody will take notice of you, offering you the chance to have some real fun: running a Mayhem Mission.

Mayhem Missions are a delightful example of the developers sitting back and going to themselves: “We’ve got physics, right? You know what would be cool? Just fucking tearing shit up, man. Let’s make that happen.” And so they did, dumping you and your team in the middle of the city, with 15 minutes on the clock to rob a bank and cause as much carnage as physically possible. In the normal environment, only enemies are able to be damaged. But Mayhem Missions take it a step further: you can blow up cars, payphones, trucks, parking meters, barrels… almost anything. And the game rewards you with bonus time for your efforts, dumping another three minutes on the clock as you casually detonate your way through another carpark, sending dozens of SWAT team members flying through the air in flames. It is an adrenaline shot right to the eyeball of the game, and a great way to get the pulse racing.

Once you’ve built your character and got them to a reasonably high level, like any game, it is of course possible to start feeling discontented and want to start again. But what if you could run two alternate builds of your character, swapping between them at any time? What if one version of your character piled all their points into offense, but found she wasn’t that useful in team missions? Fortunately, City of Villains lets you do this, allowing you to visit an Arbiter at any time in the game and swap to a completely different version of your character, with all different power choices and abilities. It’s a beautiful, easy way to stay interested and keep your character performing at maximum.

5. Everything Else

Visually, City of Villains looks awesome. It has a beautiful and unique aesthetic, unlike that found in any other MMO. It has an incredibly rich and varied backstory, with all the different factions and characters having a wealth of information to sort through, but it never, ever shoves it down your throat. Each of the classes available, while fairly generic MMO archetypes, fulfill unique roles and provide endless replayability thanks to the large amount of powers available. And I haven’t even really mentioned the supergroup bases: completely customisable environments that your supergroup (or “guild” if you will) can fill with whatever items, weapons and furniture they desire. If you’re brave enough, you can even invade other people’s supergroup bases and try and take their stuff for yourself! Or, like me, you can just fill an entire room with photocopiers. The choice is yours.

I’m not going to lie to you. A lot of people don’t like City of Villains. A lot of people really enjoy grinding, questing, and knowing that they can move as fast as they do, and look as cool as they do, because they’ve put the hours in to deserve it. A lot of people enjoy waiting an hour to get forty people together to run a large-scale raid, then doing it again every night for a week because the dragon at the end didn’t drop the helmet they need. I personally think that’s bullshit, and I would question any game which actively gets in the way of the player having fun right from the get-go.

A lot of people also find City of Villains repetitive or frustrating. When it first came out, there was basically only one mission arc from levels one to ten, and every new character had to run it over and over again, which meant killing a whole pile of snake people. It is true to say that when I first played it, I found myself becoming bored or frustrated, and it was all too easy to stop playing. But I would urge anybody reading this who has been burned in the past by City of Villains to fire it up again, and give it another shot. There’s been so many tweaks to so many aspects that it may as well be a different game entirely, and it’s not hard to fall in love all over again.

I leave you with this group shot of our team of second-rate, washed-up supervillains. From left to right: Count Geiger (Michael), The Electrojogger (John), The Pinky Promise (Jess), Ms. Hellfire (Debari) and finally myself as Mechanigranny.

We’re currently rocking it on the Triumph server. Perhaps you can join us.

But what is the story, Tim. What’s it all about. Well, I’m glad you asked…

You see, I think Victoria Bitter is great. Not the drink, of course – it tastes like somebody accidentally spilled yeast into paint stripper and let it ferment. Not the drink, no thanks, but the… the meta. Everything about Victoria Bitter – its history of sportsmen and moustaches, its constant presence at barbeques, race riots and other quintessentially white-Australian haunts and even its delightful advertisements with their barely restrained homo-eroticism and their chest-butting, sheep-shearing, bicep-crunching, sweat-dripping machismo. All these things, I find utterly fascinating. But there is nothing about Victoria Bitter that I love so much as its theme music.

You know the one. Dun dun dun, da-da-da-da dah nah, da dah nah, dah nah, da-da-da nah…. It’s great. It is, isn’t it. It’s practically the second national anthem, or at least the third if you count Waltzing Matilda. And quite frankly I do, because any song about a guy who steals a sheep and then leaps into a pond to get away has my vote.

Anyway, the urge came upon me a while back to actually try and acquire this theme music for myself. If it was in my possession, then I would be able to play it any time I wanted. No more sitting glued to the car radio waiting for an advert to come on for me, no sir! I hastened immediately to the nearest computron and found the Fosters website, hoping that they would be able to provide me with the musical crack cocaine that I so desperately craved.

In fact, they didn’t. They didn’t have anything at all, other than a glistening photo of a Victoria Bitter bottle and an angry paragraph describing to me in detail just how much more chest hair I would spontaneously grow with every sheep-shearing swig. I was lost. I was hopeless. So I did what any sane man would do in my situation.

I filed a support ticket.

From: Tim
To: Fosters Consumer Relations
Subject: Victoria Bitter Theme Music [Incident: 080729-000]
Date: 29th July 2008

Hi guys,

Some years ago, I remember that it was possible to download the VB theme from your website. I can’t seem to find the link anymore. I love the theme to pieces and it would be great to have it on my playlist! Can you please bring it back, or send it to me?

Thanks a lot!
Tim

A reasonable request from a reasonable man. Surely Fosters would not stand in the way of my divine imperative! Two days later, just as my vision began to blur and the shakes set in, a reply arrived.

From: Betty (Fosters Consumer Relations)
To: Tim
Subject: Victoria Bitter Theme Music [Incident: 080729-000]
Date: 31st July 2008

Hi Tim,

Thank you for taking the time to contact us at Foster’s.

Plesae find attached the VB Theme music.

Please contact us again should you have any further queries we can assist you with.

Kind Regards,
Foster’s Consumer Relations

Yes! I eagerly downloaded the file, told the stereo to kick it to the max and hit play.

No dice. It was not the Victoria Bitter theme music. In fact, it was an mp3 recording of a radio advertisement about the Victoria Bitter theme music. Close, but not quite. It was clear they needed clarification. I pulled my broken heart together long enough to compose a reply.

From: Tim
To: Betty (Fosters Consumer Relations)
Subject: Victoria Bitter Theme Music [Incident: 080729-000]
Date: 31st July 2008

Hi Betty!

Thanks for the response and the attached mp3. Unfortunately I was hoping for the actual theme itself, not the radio ad about the theme. Is it available at all? I’m sure I used to have it. I could just dig up the Magnificent Seven theme, but it’s not the same :(

Thanks again,
Tim

They had been good before – would they be good again? I waited eagerly to see if they would return to me. Days passed, then weeks. Then months. I returned to a normal life, and forgot my dark past. That is, until December, when I happened to chance across the old email in my inbox. I immediately tried to fire off another reply to dear ol’ Betty but The Man slapped me in the face, telling me that my incident number was too old and had been closed due to lack of activity. They had forgotten me!

I raced to the Fosters website, retrieved my password details and opened another support ticket. I would not be denied.

From: Tim
To: Fosters Consumer Relations
Subject: Victoria Bitter Theme Music [Incident: 081205-000031]
Date: 5th December 2008

This question references closed incident 080729-000055.

I still have not received an answer to my question. Is it possible get a copy of the Victoria Bitter theme music? Not a radio ad *about* the theme music, but the theme music itself.

If you would like to bargain, I am happy to offer Fosters a large art project I did which features Victoria Bitter in the position of God in an Australian parody of Michaelangelo’s painting of the Sistine Chapel. It is about 5 by 4 foot long and would look great in the Fosters offices.

I am very serious about this! Please respond.

Here I was, putting my heart and soul on the line. Not to mention a 5-by-4-foot piece of polystyrene on which I had clumsily glued a Victoria Bitter related cartoon. Would they respond? It turns out they would, in fact. Four days later, I heard from the lovely and talented Moira:

From: Moira (Fosters Consumer Relations)
To: Tim
Subject: Victoria Bitter Theme Music [Incident: 081205-000031]
Date: 9th December 2008

Hi Tim,

Sorry it took a while, but we finally managed to get a copy of the VB theme music. We’d love to get a photo of your art work, which we will pass onto the brand team to have a look at.

If you have any problems with the file, please let me know.

Kind Regards,
Foster’s – Consumer Relations

Yes! There it was, in black and white pixels: an attached mp3 file promisingly labeled: “01 VB Theme Music”. I downloaded it, cranked the stereo, and hit play.

Glorious music. Sweet, beery majesty. No radio ads, no voiceovers, nothing but the Victoria Bitter Theme Music, a sweeping, uplifting piece of Australiana that looped over and over for five minutes and twenty amazing seconds. It was everything I wanted, and it was mine at last.

Jess, bless her soul, indulged me for the entire length of the song before politely asking me to not do that ever again. I agreed. I also kept my word, and sent Moira a picture of the art project I did. Here it is:

Moira never did get back to me. I guess they didn’t like what they saw, but that doesn’t bother me too much. I got what I needed, and if they can’t see fit to decorate their offices with the most definitive piece of Australian artwork since the time of Frederick McCubbin, well, that’s their business. Me, I’m just happy to be able to share this music with the world.

Matter of fact, I’ve uploaded it now.

I spent my entire childhood drawing. I devoured paper, notebooks and sketchpads, I collected books about how to draw cartoons and superheroes, I spent hours painfully slaving over tracing paper in order to blatantly plaigarise pictures I found interesting and draw my own costumes over the top. I owned entire Garfield collections, read every Tintin and every Asterisk and Obelix until I knew them back to front. It was nuts. It was crazy. It was great.

Then I turned eleven, and the strangest thing happened. I discovered video games.

Video games are addictive enough for any kid. But when you’ve spent your whole life drawing and suddenly you realise that these are drawings that move, and walk and jump at your command, something clicks and you say I am going to make some of these and good golly they are going to be awesome. I fell, and I fell hard. And so it began, years of planning and talking idly with friends about the game system we would create, designing controllers, company logos, bragging about the awesome graphics this thing is going to put out Jesus Christ man this thing is going to be the best thing ever can you imagine.

As it turned out, imagining is all an eleven year old can really do, aside from a whole pile of what are now completely embarassing sketches. But then I got older, and working through high school and into university, nothing ever dampened my desire to be part of the video game industry. I even enrolled in a double degree in Computer Science and Multimedia, thinking these would be the best things to combine to get me where I needed to go. Turns out they were working on a Games Technology degree anyway, so when that dropped, I dropped everything else and got on board.

I had so much fun at university. The Games Technology degree taught me so much about myself and about others, about the industry and the tools you use. I made some amazing friends and had some amazing times. And though I’ve never worked harder in my life, I never stopped enjoying it. We pulled 35 hour laboratory sessions, worked every weekend for 6 months to meet deadlines and stopped living our lives altogether, but we did it. We graduated and then, after a fashion, we found work.

I was lucky enough to get my foot in the door at Interzone. Getting a games development job in Perth is hard enough, especially at Interzone who at the time basically maintained a policy of total media blackout and radio silence. It wasn’t easy, and I was rejected twice before I finally got in – doing web development, of all things – but I did it. I made it and I was happy.

Working at Interzone has been the best job of my life. I will always count myself lucky to be able to work alongside such amazing, interesting and talented people for as long as I have. I found myself no longer living for the weekend, looking forward to getting in every day and tackling new issues, finding new ways to apply myself creatively and knowing that I was appreciated and rewarded for the challenges I overcame.

That was a year ago.

When I was young, I couldn’t put my pen down. I was always coming up with ideas, dumb sketches, getting excited over this or that. Now, when I come home from work – nothing. It’s just… not there. It’s not that I don’t want to draw or paint or sketch, I just can’t muster the energy to think about what I would need to do – I’ve taken all the creative energy I had, burned it up at work and left myself empty.

So, I fire up the ol’ video games, shoot a couple people’s face clean off, and call it a night. A night not wasted, I tell myself, because I’ve had a good day at work. I’m enjoying my job and I’m building a great career, after all. This is what I spent the last ten years working and striving for. This is what I want from life, right?

And though I am having fun, I am enjoying myself, and I guess I am building the start of a great career, in my heart of hearts I start to increasingly realise that… well, no. This isn’t what I want from life. It’s fun to be part of something bigger than yourself for while, and there’s great satisfaction in knowing that you’re appreciated, but when you take a few steps back it’s not hard to realise that you’ve just spent the last year building someone else’s sandcastle.

Ten years from now, if I keep doing what I’m doing, all I’ll have to show for it are some screenshots on the internet and my name in a couple of credit rolls. Twenty years from now, I might have worked up enough industry credit and connections to make it to a senior position, from which I might be able to have some slight say in what sort of shape somebody else’s sandcastle takes. Thirty years from now, if I’m lucky – very lucky – somebody will pay me a whole lot of money to design a sandcastle for them. Forty years from now, I’ll be too old to work in the industry anymore, they’ll cut me off, give me a brand new RoboSpine 9000 as a going-away present and send me on the first bus home and in all those years I will never, ever, get to build my own goddamn sandcastle.

At the end of the day, I think I’d rather be able to tell my grandkids that I was a cartoonist, writer and illustrator who was privileged enough to work on some video games, than end up bitterly recounting to their expectant young faces another story of how, many long years ago, their grandfather used to be quite good at the old cartoons. I can’t bear to think of a future where, no matter how successful I get, I will have forgotten what it means to do something for myself.

So, I’ve decided to get out.

I love my work and I’m hoping I won’t have to ditch it just yet. But it’s draining me, badly, and I fear I might have no other choice. Even if it means working shitty retail – even it means working good retail, or data entry, or something, anything to keep me afloat and fired up while I make the transition. I will do whatever it takes.

I wanted to work in video games. I sacrificed a lot to get my foot in the door and take a shot at the dream, and I don’t regret any of it for a single moment. And maybe this is all wrong, and maybe I’ll return a year from now, sobbing at game development’s skirts and begging for her to take me back, swearing that I can change. I don’t know. I don’t know a lot of things right now.

But for the first time in my life, I’m savouring the uncertainty.