Comics and Superheroes

I'm rewatching the Iron Man movies at the moment.

Nah - not right now but I just finished watching Iron Man 2 again. Comics and superheroes give us a chance to escape the ordinary. For me, my first comic book addiction was Transformers. Machines that could change from the ordinary into Big Giant Robots. Incidentally, that's why the recent movies were such a letdown for me, because I was taken in by a back story built up in the comics that was far superior to the rubbish in the movies.

And there's lots more superheroes to choose from too. Supervillains too. Curiously though, there was a Massive Multiplayer Online game called City of Heroes which spawned a sideways expansion City Of Villains. I actually have several copies because I bought it and got free copies from magazines. CoH and CoV are dead and gone now (hence people giving it away) but they were built on good ideas.

Everyone wants to feel that they're special. And you know what ? You all are in your own particular way. You're all amazing people.

But there is that thought of being even better. Going by Marvel's catalogue :
HULK SMASH - or a modern take on Jekyll and Hyde.
Thor - the unstoppable god
Black Widow - with the power to own mens hearts and then kick their asses
Captain America - ok. Bit of a meathead this one ;-)
The XMen - although they were better served on animation than on the big screen. (Unmissable films but somehow missing something next to the various animated series)

And DC has Superman and a Batman who can stand toe to toe with anyone thanks to being a bad ass with lots of toys.

But the one I'd want to be most is Iron Man. Perhaps that's because that's the one I feel closest to. Ok, there's a few things missing but at the core, we share common themes :

Money - ok, I have enough but I'm not a billionaire. Or even close. Take a lots of zeroes off ;-)
Mega engineer - I'm trained in electronic and computer engineering but have a decent grasp of the other engineering disciplines as well. I'll look at something and go glassy eyed as I'm dismantling it in a 3d picture in my head. I'll be figuring out how it works and how it's put together. I can look at source code for computer languages I've never seen and have a reasonable idea of what it's trying to do.

Enthusiastic amateur - this definitely suits Iron Man. He's not trained in any military sense but he wins because his tech is that good.
Oily fingers - when you see him in the movies, he's not in the normal bit of the house, he's in the shop tinkering with the machines. And that's where I'd like to be too. Just got no machine shop here to play in.

Playboy womanizer ? Nah. This we don't share. I fixate on one and ignore all others. To some degree at least. That Grin will always be ready to try and coax a smile out of random strangers and I'll be flirty with anyone if I think it will make them smile and get them feeling just that little bit more special than they did before.

Tendency to rush into danger ? Hell yeah. If the Zombie Apocalypse happened tomorrow, I wouldn't last long because I'd be sacrificing myself to save someone else.

So yeah - which superhero would I be ? Definitely :

Or one of Shepard's sidekicks. Who's Shepard ?

She's the one on the right. It's a character from the Mass Effect universe, which is a first person shooter crossed with role play game set about 170 years from now where the galaxy is facing an impending invasion from sentient machines that intend to destroy all organic life. It has everything, sci fi, space ships, aliens, mystery, danger. I wouldn't be Shepard, that character has to be female. (Why ? Cos Jennifer Hale voices the character and that voice is incredible).

I'm in the early days of another play through of the third Mass Effect game and I'm also replaying Deus Ex Human Revolution (should really play the original). I wouldn't want to be the lead guy in DXHR, he gets chopped up at the start and replaced with mostly artificial parts. Woah ! Spoiler. Not really - ha. Good game but I blanch at being chopped up like that.

Yep - current times - let me be Iron Man.
Future times - one of the Shepard support characters. Either Joker the ace pilot with the brittle bones (voiced by Seth Green) or Mordin Solus, brilliant Salarian scientist.

Actually, anything with a little scifi will suit me but keep me away from AI's driven mad by conflicting directives :

What would your superhero alterego be ?