City of Heroes

I was writing a new Stout Henry story last night, when I got the idea to try and model him with the character creators from all the MMOs I had which could actually make unique characters. That left out EverQuest and World of Warcraft right off the bat; neither one has many character choices and people generally look a lot like other people of their race and gender. I started off with City of Heroes, because its character creator is legendary. Unfortunately, the options are not tuned so much for a medieval adventurer wearing simple clothes and wielding a staff. Still, after a couple of tries, it didn’t come out too bad… but it wasn’t Stout Henry. ...

I haven’t done a “what I’m playing” thing for awhile. So here’s my current roster of games, and I’ll start off with what I’m NOT playing. And that game would be Mythos. MMOs: Mythos had one of the strongest beta communities on record, with unparalleled access to devs. Community Manager Taylor Baldree would hold court in the #mythos IRC channel every night. Devs would respond daily on the forums. And all that was leading to a game that I very much wanted to play. With Hellgate: London’s reprieve by Namco Bandai, let’s hope there IS hope for Mythos as well. ...

I tend to play City of Heroes/Villains in spurts. Months will go buy without anything, and then I’ll play for eight hours straight. I have lots of reasons not to play that much. Most of the game is in the character creator, which is justifiably awesome. Once I’ve made my character, she’s made and barring inventions and trips to the tailor shop, will look exactly the same at 50 as at 1. ...

I was dinking around on Wizard 101, when I thought it would be really cool to see if I could take Tara from Wizard 101, and put her in City of Villains. It’s supposed to let you make near any costume, right? Well, turns out, first, CoV doesn’t do a great job of modeling children. Fine, so it would be a grown up Tara. And instead of the blue/blue outfit, one with that expensive purple I can’t really afford in W101. No peaked caps, so I went capless. And dragon wings because, well, they are neat. So say hello to Tara Mythcrafter – 23 Adept Conjurer in W101, 18 Magic Mastermind in City of Villains. Her minions are ninjas. She herself controls the wind and wields the power of storms. ...

Nostalgia the Guild took most of my time this last weekend. It’s supposed to just be a very casual, once-a-week grouping experience through EverQuest’s old world, and it shouldn’t really require as much work as I’ve put into it. However, I don’t see how it could have taken any less, either. If you have a static group, how do you keep everything arranged? Maybe I just want everything planned out. ...

It’s been a little over a week since I started blogging over at Massively, and while I am really enjoying myself, I think I still have a lot to learn about story ideas. It’s all about the page views, right, and what brings in the eyeballs better than our dear old friend, porn. So I suggested this to the editors, and they pretty much informed me that they already had plenty of Second Life coverage, and maybe I could work on this piece about “Shoulder armor through the ages – how high is too high?”. ...

Dr. Destroyer in Champions Online Champions Online is the new game from the developers of City of Heroes and the defunct Marvel Universe Online. When I first heard the name of their new game (and anyone who doesn’t believe we’re seeing the essence of what Marvel Universe Online would have looked like can just rest easy in their wrongness), I immediately slipped back twenty years to one of my favorite pencil and paper RPG campaigns ever. ...

A couple of friends from EQ1 play casually on City of Heroes. They still play on EQ1; I moved to EQ2, but I miss playing with them. Turns out they occasionally play on City of Heroes, although, unfortunately, not on my server (Virtue). So I remade my “main” on Virtue, Madame Scurry, to play with them on Liberty. I hadn’t been happy with Madame Scurry’s old look. Basically, well… she looked too nice, and not much like the cockroach from which she gets her powers of stealth and regeneration. And plus, c’mon… the original Madame Scurry looks more like a hero than a villain. ...

There’s been a lot of topics going around the blogosphere, and I’ve been holding off on them because, well, I don’t really have anything groundbreaking to say about them. But, what the heck. eBook Readers First up is a non-MMO one, but something I’ve covered extensively in this blog – eBook readers. “Ask Slashdot” fielded a question from a reader who asked Which eBook Reader is Best? The comments fell predictably into the camps that felt nothing could come close to the experience of reading an actual book; PDAs, cell phones and laptop computers were more appropriate for the task; Sony’s Reader comes from Sony and nothing more needs to be said (these are people angry less for the SWG NGE than for Sony’s rootkit adventures and their role as a quarter of the allegedly evil* RIAA). I use my Sony Reader every day, and daily rediscover old friends – yesterday brought Fred Saberhagen’s “First Book of Swords” and Julian May’s “The Many-Colored Land” onto my Reader. I didn’t comment on Slashdot, though, because… well, commenting on Slashdot on matters of opinion is pretty pointless. I doubt many would be sympathetic to my “I use a Reader because it looks good and is REALLY EASY TO READ” stance anyway. ...

While browsing Massively and reading the excellent article about the recent City of Herollians Meet and Greet, I saw they mentioned “Willpower” and “Dual Blades” as very new, player-chosen powers, of which I knew nothing when I picked “Willpower” as the secondary power set for my Energy Stalker. The ability to never be seen by anything ever. I love “Hide”, the first power in the “Willpower” set. I’m all like, “OH HAI, I IN UR BANK TAKING UR MONIES” in the Paragon City heist I soloed – and I killed that stupid hero, Flambeau, after a couple of really minor deaths, but still failed the mission (and of course I got the money, too). Maybe I needed to get to an exit? ...