This one is about the Cold War. Most of the action takes place in the embassy to a foreign country that is never identified directly (the gates just say “People’s Republic” and then there’s some Cyrillic-looking text I don’t even know if it is real or not), but basically its the Soviet Union. They’re the Commies, they’re the Reds, they’re the target of the Invaders in this one.

We get to see David Vincent actually being an architect for what I think is the third time in the show’s run. The narrator tells us he is enjoying a “precious lull” in his fight against the Invaders. I guess he just hasn’t caught any sign of them for a bit. But then the Commies come to him and tell him that they have captured a man who was trying to steal documents from him and they he has no pulse and they want to bring Vincent in as an expert. It all goes pretty badly and soon the Commies are suspicious that the man they captured is some manner of biological warfare project designed and manufactured by America to stop them. Vincent tries to tell them the truth, but the captive Invader isn’t helping.

Anyway, David Vincent has to work with the Invaders again, kinda. He has to break out the embassy because he knows that if he doesn’t they are gonna blow up the whole embassy and America will be blamed. The only reason the Invaders are willing to accept this is because, as Vincent points out to them, they don’t want to inherit a nuked world. Anyway, in the end Vincent wins. No surprises, but it’s nice to watch him get there. Also, there’s a Commie doctor woman who survives and becomes an ally but she has to go back to her country to warn them. That kinda stuff.

I’ve thought on more that one occasion that some of the production effects on this show are superior to its contemporary scifi show, Star Trek, and I have to say I thought it again when the climax of this one had a helicopter. I don’t remember any helicopters on Star Trek.

Some of the alien stuff I like to make note of: Dr. Commie notes that the Invaders have skin that is like cellulose. Also, one of the Invaders who dies in this one grabs a chair while he falls and when he incinerates, the chair goes with him. We’ve seen them take some of their own technology with them as they go, but I think this may be a rare case of an Earth item going with them for sure. Anyway, that’s it for this one.

And so begins another year of Phone Guys, for some reason.

I already did a Rocket Racer update last week, but this is an emergency! It has been brought to my attention that Marvel is doing crossovers with Magic: The Gathering and they forgot their main guy. Don’t worry though, I took care of it:

I admit, there’s a bit of an issue. I know even less about Magic: The Gathering than I did about Marvel Snap when I heroically designed the Rocket Racer card for that. But I put about half an hour of research into this, so I’m pretty sure this is perfect.

I gave him First Strike and Haste because he’s fast. His whole deal is he rides on a rocket-powered skateboard, so if we don’t represent that, what are we doing here? So I looked up other guys who have those powers to see what kind of casting cost and those whatever little stats at the bottom are they’re likely to have. I erred on the side of a lower stats, but gave him the ability to fly while he’s attacking. If it was all-the-time flying that would risk making him too powerful and this just feels more interesting to me, someone who doesn’t play the game and can’t know if it actually is more interesting or not.

I’ve listed him as a “human mercenary hero” to show that this is his desperate-for-cash era, where he strikes out against capitalism in a way I deem heroic, but which is strictly speaking for profit.

I couldn’t get everything I want into the card, but I see that M:TG will give legendary figures multiple cards to explore different aspects of their character. Once they pay me for this one, I’ll come up with another card that focuses on Bob’s engineering side.

Superman destroys a museum using giants as weapons.

Okay, like the last one, this short begins with a fresh corpse. Kids love that. This time it is a scientist at a museum that focuses on Ancient Egypt where a guy has been found dead, and his assistant gets the blame for his murder. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I always like when a Superman story is about proving someone’s innocence of a crime. This time, though, the woman has not been the victim of a frame-job or even police incompetence. This time the real culprit was a booby-trapped sarcophagus. Some scientist guy discovers that and tells Clark about it, then Clark immediately trips the exact same trap relying only on his Superness to prevent his own death. And then there’s a fight with some giants and the short is done.

I’ve spent pretty much all of these write-ups about the shorts pointing out that they love Superman as a sci-fi figure going up against the newest science stuff of the day. They love putting him up against big machines like trains or planes, or devices like death rays and robots, or marvels of nature like gorillas and volcanoes. This is the one where I have to say we’re up against what seems to be a supernatural threat. When Clark opens the sarcophagus, it activates four giant guards. I guess they could be some kind of artificial creation, but that isn’t the story we’re told and they sure look like giant people. This is straight-up magic in this one, people. That said, I do still think science is the feature here. 1943 feels a little late for the prime era of America’s obsession with Egypt, but still that archaeological fad was a big deal in the youths of the people making this cartoon. The bulk of this story is actually a museum guy giving us the story of King Tush, a King Tut-inspired child king, while we see ancient artifacts and drawings, all designed to appeal to the young Egyptophiles of the day.

And once you realize that the real set piece is the lecture on Egypt, you can see how phoned-in the fight is. Sure, the giants almost throw Lois and the museum guy into the big fire pit that I assume all museums have, but Superman beats these guys by just shoving them around and breaking the museum. It feels like the whole fight lasts a couple seconds.

Also, I just want to note that Lois (who follows along to try to steal the scoop from Clark) is shown as being bandaged after the attack at the museum. It’s kind of surprising to see physical consequences for these adventures. She’s still in good enough spirits to make a bad joke, though.

With it being October and all, I decided I would play an adventure game that deals in the cartoonishly spooky. I discovered Champy The Useless Vampire. It turned out to be a much shorter game than I anticipated, so I can hardly use it as my October-long Halloween game, but it turned out to be a bite-sized little game clearly made by someone who loves the genre. The puzzles felt competent, but never actually challenging. My main complaint is that the title is wrong. Champy isn’t useless, he does the whole adventure. Saves the day and all that. He’s more competent than Roger Wilco, based on this game. The game was just a bit of welcome fun.

Anyway, a short game, so what could I possibly muse about from it?

Well, it did one thing I liked a lot. Point-and-click adventure games get a lot of flack for “pixel hunting” and that is sometimes justified, sometimes not, but there have been attempts to fix it. My favourite way games have tried to make it easier to find what’s on the screen is when you can highlight the hotspots. Any time I’m in a new point-and-click I find myself hitting tab or shift or spacebar just to see if that’ll do it, since I’ve had games do that in the past. In Champy though, it isn’t a separate button, but rather you hold down the left mouse button and it shows you everything! And it feels so right!

That button is already the primary means of interacting with the game world, so using it to look around, which is what highlighting the hotspots essentially represents, makes it feel I’m still interacting. Having a devoted button for it was always fine, but I realize now that it breaks the continuity of being in the game world in just the most minor way, but holding down the button doesn’t. It appeals to me greatly.

I don’t love HOW the game highlights its hotspots. It puts a little theme-appropriate bat icon on them, which isn’t terrible, but I’d prefer something that didn’t cover up the thing being shown. Since we’re supposed to be seeing the things, seeing less of them isn’t ideal. I’d probably prefer just outlining them in red or something, but still, the system is good.

It’s very likely this system has been used in games of higher profile that I have just not played yet, as much as I’d love to credit the innovation to a small game like this. But no matter what the case, I can credit the makers of Champy for picking the right way to do it.

If I ever get back to trying to make an adventure game on my own, this is the way I’d want to handle it.