One of these things is not like the other

In fact, they could hardly be more different.

Two huger-than-huge MMOs are creeping towards their rabidly awaited releases and they're starting to get some time in the German sun at Gamescom. We've all been tripping over our own tongues in rushing to devour any tidbit from either, and these two videos are the best look at gameplay yet. Both feature co-operative combat against a boss-level PvE NPC and comparing the two is...revealing.

And then:

I grew up on Star Wars and I consider BioWare one of the best developers in the galaxy, but the video seems to confirm what I've heard for a few months. The Old Republic looks and plays very generic. The tank and melee engage the front line, healer at range and support DPS stationary in the back attacking other targets who are plinking them in the face, and all of it is pretty stationary until the melee DPS dies and it all goes to crap. Most disappointing is that the fight appears to lack any sense of dynamism or engaging fight mechanics. Stand there, take a beating and hope your healer can out-lengthen your life bar against the enemy life bar. The visuals and animations look nice and the lightsabers look awesome but they stop looking awesome when they have to whack a single droid several times to take it down. Then they start looking like oversized Jedi rave glowsticks.

The Guild Wars 2 clip also confirms what has pretty much universally been said by people who've seen it or gotten some hands-on time: It's great bordering on amazing. While the SWTOR vid rubs a warm glowstick on my expectations and gently lulls them to sleep, the GW2 vid yanks them out of my brain, impales them on a bone wall, summons zombies to stomp on them, gnashes them in a dragon's maw, tail-swipes them into the far horizon, then dares me NOT to pre-order.

If the BioWare game did not have the Star Wars property rights and Galaxy Far, Far Away styling, no one would be interested in it. They will sell a million-plus boxes on fanbase alone no doubt, but I don't think it will appeal long-term to MMO gamers. It's following a standard MMO formula that's starting to wear thin with gamers and is based on the golden triangle of tank-heals-DPS. Once the self-touted "BioWare-quality story" is finished I wonder if it may go the way of DC Universe Online with little replayability and not enough endgame for player retention.

If the ArenaNet game had the Star Wars property rights and that video featured 30 Jedi or Sith taking down a giant Rancor, the entire Internet including Jack Thompson and Pedobear would be wetting their pants and camping out at GameStop tonight. I've played Guild Wars off and on for a couple years and it never really grabbed me like other games, but GW2 may succeed in turning those oh-my-gawd-it's-great murmurs into a roar by release time. There will be no class golden triangle in the game and the world will dynamically change based on your questing decisions as you play through, and encounters like the video above are scattered throughout the game.

ArenaNet has been confidently open talking about their intent of new MMO design and gameplay and each video they release appears to back up the promises. BioWare has fueled the hype that any studio should when developing a long-awaited Star Wars game (and spending a rumored $300 million plus) and pounded the marketing buzzword button, but each content reveal milestone to the press and public has been met with a resounding "Meh." I do not yet think that SWTOR should be written off by any means, and I don't think GW2 will necessarily be the MMO genre changer that some think it will be. But now that each game has released its first substantial combat feature video to the public and they can be compared side by side it's easy to see where the SWTOR ennui and GW2 hype is coming from. It's also obvious that these two games are diametrically opposed in design philosophy. As they continue down their divergent paths toward release, the fickle and often brutally judgmental MMO gaming crowd waits with its expectations, a fanboy beast that will turn on its master the moment the fun runs out and disappointment sets in.

If I were one of these game studios I would continue working with quiet confidence. If I were the other I would be worried that marketing hype may not buy me enough time to feed the beast.

A Month of Sundays, nearly

Between the hot, dry weather and the taxes and the Cold War, and the bronchitis and the Art Institute and ComicCon and the pushpushpush remodel job in evening heat that could buckle the knees of the devil himself it's been hard to make it to a keyboard without slipping unconscious into an exhausted and well-medicated pillow of mental fog. Back from rubbing shoulders with Patrick Stewart in Chicago and back from the dead after an extended stay in Levaquinland.

I kept up with the news while sickaway, and felt like those TV "journalist" personalities must feel when they take a vacation and all hell breaks loose and they're not on to cover it. While I was out and out:

The University of Texas ruins yet another conference with their habitual greedy overreach

I don't hate to say I told you so last year. And the year before that. And the year before that. This day was coming, and we Nebraskans knew it like we know the fullback trap. Schadenfreude? Hell yeah. Lots of it. Good for Texas aTm to get out; better late than never, but there are a few schools that will be stranded and scrambling for inclusion in some conference, any conference. Buddy, can ya spare a dime for a poor Cyclone? We gots no conference because we gots nothin' nobody wants.

Too bad the other schools didn't believe Nebraska when we saw this coming and stood alone as the dissenting vote all these years. They thought it was safer to keep Texas and puppet Dan Beebe at the tiller and keep the short-term stability, as if banding together in Texas's best interests was going to offer some shelter come the day when the Bevo boys had their pieces in place to imbalance the conference beyond sanity. There is no safety in numbers when the majority votes to fall in line with the schoolyard bully. Hey Sooners--that's not a teat you're suckling. Bevo's a bull.

It was funny to catch ESPN writer David Ubben's weekend tweet: "When does Nebraska put up a 'Through these doors walks the Smartest Athletic Department in College Football' sign atop the Osborne Complex?" How about that, the world's first meaningful tweet. This after his mockery of Nebraska leaving for the Big Ten last year, which earned him a few pages of criticism from Huskers and non-Huskers alike and prompted him to follow up with a capitulation post after many accusations of Texas pandering.

Meanwhile, ESPN's $300m deal with Texas to prop up the Longhorn Network keeps their lips sealed on the aTm secession. On Michigan Avenue I could hear the sigh of relief all the way from Bristol when the Miami story broke this weekend and gave them something else to talk about instead of pretending to not notice what was happening to their new business buddy's conference. Maybe they could get Craig James to weigh in with his opinion. That would be a fun little piece to fit in this latest episode of ESPN's twisted world of interest conflicts.

Chicago ComiCon was mega-ultra-super

My first, and it was pretty cool. Not as much cosplayers as I thought there would be and it was a pretty heavy vendor-fest. Artist Alley was great and I met a few artists of whose work I've been a fan for years, such as Arthur Suydam, Mark Texeira, Dave Dorman and Ben Templesmith, as well as met a few talented newcomers who I expect to see in A-list titles before long. The artists were universally very friendly, approachable and talkative. Ben Templesmith is particularly engaging and fun to talk to but I would have liked to see more writers there and talk to them. I dropped a little more coin on prints for my room than I planned but it was a great time and my daughter and wife got some personal drawings for them by Art Baltazar and Franco Aureliani.

I didn't make it to any featured guest Q&A sessions, mainly because the timing was wrong for Bruce Campbell and Felicia Day's, and Patrick Stewart's would have been overfull and his lines were stupid long. Unfortunately I was planning on catching Morena Baccarin but she had to cancel due to a schedule conflict. Ah well. LeVar Burton was extremely friendly and my daughter was thrilled to meet and get a pic with him.

I'm just not a celebrity person though...just not interested in someone's fame for fame's sake, and I have no need to be in proximity of it. I watched Patrick Stewart sign autographs and chat with fans, yet after all the years of watching him command the Enterprise and wheel around in that Magneto-proof chair, I kept wondering if King Claudius would enjoy discussing Shakespeare sometime over some Earl Grey tea, hot. But otherwise they seem like just people. I'd rather chat with them than have them write their name on a piece of paper or a photo or a model starship. I'd rather ask Stewart what his intent was with the shrug as he drank the poison in the BBC Hamlet from last year and see if it lined up with my interpretation. I'd rather ask Ben Templesmith what movies he enjoyed this summer than pay $900 for an original print (though his Fell prints are fantastic). Maybe it's just the types of celebrity that I tend to fall into circles with, geeks and people who appreciate geekdom. Suits me fine.

Also, pretty sure I met a real Dalek. Almost exterminated for real. Close call, but I was able to escape into a mini TARDIS tent. Somehow this one wasn't bigger on the inside.

Oh boy! I like avenging!

A 90-pound asthmatic weakling is offered the chance to take a super serum, and with biceps suddenly bulging becomes one of America's most iconic modern folklore heroes. No, this isn't Barry Bonds: The Movie. Sickly and frail Steve Rogers displays equal amounts of heroism both pre- and post-injection chamber, and one of American pop culture's most emblematic and idealistic purveyors of justice is done justice on the big screen.

Captain America offers a good story and balances narrative with action well, carried by a solid cast and a script that doesn't overreach into melodrama or indulge in too much forced humor. It doesn't patronize either fans of the comic hero or the non-fan moviegoer, and if you scroll down a bit you'll find another summer super-flick that could learn a glowing green ton about exposition and backstory from director Joe Johnston. It's a fun and satisfying two hours and manages to be the most direct structural setup for next year's The Avengers as well as one of the better Avenger prequels as a film on its own merits. The first hour of the film moves through its exposition and character development at a steady pace before the action in the second hour takes over, but it's not a jarring transition and both halves of the movie are engaging. Writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely were wise to keep the origin setting in WWII, though I always feel bad for all the people back then who had to live their lives in sepia tones.

The movie isn't without a significant yet nonfatal flaw. Go back a few years for a forgettable action movie with a standard villain that always comes to mind. In 1997's Air Force One, hijacker Gary Oldman gets fed up listening to the righteous pleas of his captives and finally erupts with "You who murdered a hundred thousand Iraqis to save a nickel on a gallon of gas are going to lecture me on the rules of war? DON'T." It didn't take much and the line isn't Shakespearean, but at least in that moment Ivan Korshunav isn't just a bad guy; he's suddenly a bad guy who has his reasons for why he has made his choices. We don't have to be instructed to sympathize with an antagonist or feel manipulated into liking some part of a vile person. But when even a vanilla action movie can manage to give us an antagonist we understand on his own terms, the story is better served; there's a couple more layers of conflict and motivations at play and it's still satisfying to see President Han Solo triumph.

This is where Captain America loses its way. I've read critics praise the movie for presenting its heroes and villains without irony. Certainly that's true; this thoroughly red-white-and-blue-saturated tale manages to keep the protagonist and antagonist starkly black and white but that's not necessarily a good thing. It's fine to have this particular hero with his unerringly noble compass guiding him because he's lived his life as the little guy who hates bullies, but a villain who lusts after nothing more than world domination because he's crazy and jonesing for some world domination could use a little irony to escape the shallow end of the antagonist pool.

However, there is amusing irony in the fact that a movie about America's greatest patriot hero contains far less bombastic flag-waving, grandstanding or jingoism than Iron Man 2.

Giant flag backdrop: Check. Patriotic explosions: Check. Flag-bikini models: Check. Jon Favreau overindulgence: Check.

*Not pictured: Captain America.

I never read or was interested much in Captain America the superhero until the Civil War line a few years ago that polarized the Marvel universe into pro- or anti-Superhuman Registration Act. He was just too straightforward, too unerringly emblematic and always seemed to lack the multiple layers of personality or conscience that attracted me to other titles. It's a little like how filmmaker Paul Schrader believes it's impossible to not bludgeon an audience with a Christ figure; he feels that once the crucifix imagery is invoked, the symbol and all of its connotations overwhelm the viewers' own interpretations and the character your film has built disappears. Similarly with Captain America, it's pretty tough to look at that costume and shield and not see the symbols instead of the character himself. He was a hero created to serve a specific purpose at that time in America's history, which was nicely alluded to by the film (his first issue in March 1941 literally depicts him knocking Hitler's lights out with a democracy-sized right cross). For me and many readers of my generation, he was a hard superhero to relate to. The geopolitics of the world in which I grew up are messier and have more gray areas than the colors Captain Rogers was born with 70 years ago.

Johnston's Captain America manages to consistently present Steve Rogers, with or without Vita-Rays. Given the trappings and myriad histories of this character, that's a pretty heroic accomplishment.

Absolutism and inflexibility and their dangers aside, even I can admit to feeling a little rah-rah for Cap once in a while. This summer's movie goes a long way to putting some substance behind the star.