Finally played Selene the Claws/Regen Scrapper again, after about a two week hiatus, working with Margie’s bubbler P-Siren. Had the most fun with Selene I’ve had in a while, which makes me think she’d definitely a team player, not a soloist. Just a thought.
Okay, okay, another CoH recap
Because I know you were all just waiting on tenterhooks for one.
We played a bunch of CoH this weekend.
Margie actually developed some additional characters, trying out different archetypes. Unlike I, who simply creates things that sound cool, Margie actually does research on this stuff. Yeesh.
I ended up creating an additional character, too, so that I’d have someone immediately-post-tutorial to team with her. That would be Totally Unstable, my Rad/Rad Defender. Fun guy, and remarkably effective. He’s in the pic to the right with TT, Margie’s Flame Tanker.
We did a fair amount of teaming up with others — the Testerfolk (who were kind enough to SK us or Exemplar down, since they play around at rarified levels above us), Stan, Scott — or, at least, chatting with them. Two noteworthy adventures that ended rather frustratingly, though:
- Hunting the Jewel of Hera in caves in Perez Park. Ended up with Stan and Margie and me having cleared the caves, found the jewel — but still lacking one dimwitted Circle of Thorns dude hiding somewhere. We ran around for a good 45 minutes in there, at least, searching high and low, before giving up and exiting. Frustrating.
- Outcast base against Electric Eel in the Hollows. Yikes. Don’t know how the adventure geared up so high (perhaps Doyce’s scrapper), but after many painful adventures on the second floor, including deaths, we finally battled through to the bad guy’s lair, only to find multiple purple and red folks who were two-shotting Doyce and then finishing Stan and Margie and me up for dessert. Yikes, redux.
After the last assault — where I could eventually see from my perspective on the floor that we were down to just Eel, and had him down to about 20% HP, the others on Doyce’s “I got more debt than George W. Bush” recommendation to simply quit the mission for another time.
Rrg.
I did manage to get Velvet (after too many deaths) up to lucky 13th level (helped by some direction to stores in Steel Canyons by Doyce). I need to do some teaming with her, though — most of the activities were solo, and I want to get back into the fray with her.
Some of the best times were Margie and me running duos. Lots of fun pulling the bad guys and defeating them in detail. Good stuff. Left a lot of crap undone for the weekend, but it was a fun time nevertheless.
City of Running-Dog Stooges
I deeply regret that this page of video game reviews, hosted by the Maoist Internationalist Movement, does not include any reviews of City of Heroes. One might speculate, though, from this review of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
Knights of the Old Republic … or should we say Cossacks of the Old Republic?
Although many people have given this role playing game rave reviews in the united $tates for mostly technical reasons, even the rabid fans have admitted that it is easier to be evil in this game and that the Jedi Knights are too much more powerful than other characters. Apparently one way to “win” is to kill one’s traveling friends.
The universe of Star Wars is not unlike our own. There are the common people, and there are the “great” people. Unlike in our own world, however, the “great” people in Star Wars have their own caste of warrior slaves with special powers who, under the guise of “maintaining stability” move against any insurrection and crush any move to advance the society.
In this game, the player takes a role of one such warrior that calls him/herself a Jedi KNIGHT. The manufacturer doesn’t even try to hide the connection to the exploitative feudal system of the Middle Ages.
Actually, the Jedi are a bit creepy, but that aside.
Perhaps a review like this of CoH would work:
City of Heroes … or should we say City of Oppressors?
[…] Even as the bourgeois citizen technocrats on the street flee from the so-called evils they, themselves, have unleashed — proletariat workers trying to take purses that rightfully belong to them, sprocket “robot” workers trying to build a world of their own, organized military resistance, alien “invaders,” and those who are driven mad and descend into religious opiate ceremonies — the self-labelled (and government-sponsored) “heroes” strike back against these true representatives of the masses, striking them down and sending them off to the unseen fates their masters decree.
Unrest must be suppressed, in the City of Heroes. Groups of malcontents who band together must be crushed. Those who stand out must be beaten senseless — doubtless without resort to the private medical care doled out to the “heroes,” who then must labor under crushing debt until they further serve their mysterious masters.
Yeah. I like that.
(via BoingBoing)
City of Costumes
One of the coolest things about CoH is being able to design your own character’s appearance. The character editor is wonderful — indeed, it begs for copyright/trademark abuse just because you can do so many classic characters with it. But it’s so wonderful that the places where it doesn’t quite work are all the more irritating. Things that are missing:
- Huge Females: You can be Female, Male, or Huge. The Huge characters are actually Huge Male characters (judging from the lack of mammaries), which makes hulking female characters difficult to do — you simply end up being beefy-but-statuesque.
- Kids: Kids (and teens) are not simply short adults — except that’s really the only option you have. Inspired by a classic side-kick? Sorry, old chum.
- Just Plain Folk: Every Male is cut. Every female is highly-bazongaed (as Jade points out). Want someone not quite as heroic in stature? You’re out of luck, except to the extent that a costume (e.g., the business suit) may drape those bulging pecs.
- Civvies: You can make pretty much every kind of costume you can imagine from the classic spandex set — but only from the classic spandex set. Try to go for more ordinary clothes — a baggy sweatshirt, or an untucked tee, or something like that — and the choices are much more limited. Granted, that’s part of the whole Silver Age vibe of Paragon City (and it’s amusing, when I’m in the sports-jacketed Psi-clone how many supers come by to “rescue” me as if I were a civilian), but a lot of comic book costuming since, say, 1985, has been much more casual, streetwear sorts of stuff. I mean, you can do some of that — a business suit, jeans, a tank top or form-fitting T — but it’s still a lot more limited compared to the cornucopia of other uniform effects.
So, for example, K-Two has cargo pants and a black t-shirt, which isn’t bad, except that the shirt looks more like a wetsuit top. Sister Chinook has as close to a sweatshirt as I could manage, which wasn’t very close. - Accoutrements: The game lacked capes when it was first issued (and even now they’re a lot more limited, though there’s good game-story reasons). I’m sure it’s because they add a lot of complexity to rendering, and that’s probably why two other obvious heroic accoutrements — jet packs and wings — are also missing, along with some of the specialized weaponry and gimmicks of the comic world — Cap’s shield and the Silver Surfer’s board and Gambit’s staff are good examples.
For that matter, weaponry other than guns, axes, swords and katanas is missing. It’s a bit goofy that the bad guys can go after you with baseball bats, and the cops flip around night sticks, but you can’t have either of them. - Chest logos: Okay, there are a zillion of them, but wouldn’t it be cool if you could submit designs yourself (requiring human vetting, natch). Or if NCSoft approached some organizations (sports teams and colleges come to mind) to see if some of those logos could enter the game? Heck, even if they had to charge, I’m sure there are plenty of sports buffs and alumni that would pony over to have their favorite team’s logo on their hero.
The game could use a bit more flexibility with how the chest logos can be placed. Each top has defined for it the size and placement, which can vary dramatically. In some cases this makes sense — for the business suit, the chest logo becomes a small blazer patch on the left breast above the pocket. In other cases, though, it doesn’t Dealing with women’s breasts seems to be a particular problem, as at least some top designs shrink the logo and place it just under the neck (e.g., Sister Chinook’s maple leaf). It would be great if you could set, as a “detail,” both the logo size (small, large) and its placement (either breast, centered, high, bicep).
Finally, you can put letters and numbers, but how about short words? Athletic department shirts, for example. Or a character name or trademark (“Fair Play!”). You could, if you want, enforce the obscenity filter, and I’m sure some folks would be “inappropriate” anyway, but I think those things could be worked around.
None of these are deal-killers by any means, of course. More of a wish list, along with the ability to make a (subtle, perhaps) costume change each or every other level.
“Ha! Chicken a la King!”
Okay, that’s a way-too-geeky reference to a George of the Jungle gag (um, the cartoon, guys — sheesh), but the point is that sometimes it takes a while to get a joke, and sometimes something that seemed merely amusing turns out to be damn-frelling-hilarious once you’re more familiar with what’s being poked fun at.
Thus, the couple of weeks last June that Scott Kurtz did City of Heroes-related strips in PvP, starting here.
For individual highlights, you can just look here, here, here, here, here, and here. Too, too funny. At least if you play CoH.
You can tell when Dave’s been nattering on about something for a while …
… when he creates a blog category for a topic. To wit, City of Heroes (technically set up as a subcategory of Gaming, where those posts were previously living).
UPDATE: Well, this entry got obsoleted when I actually moved all this stuff into its own blog. Yow! I guess that’s a real sign …
City of Married Heroes
Well, City of Married Players, at least. Wouldn’t want anyone to be confused between a post title like that and a picture like this:
On the left we have my character, Sister Chinook, Magic Controller (ice control, empathy). On the right we have Margie’s K-Two, Natural Scrapper (martial arts, agility). These two
Fun stuff. Margie’s interesting to play with. As those who’ve RPGed with her won’t be surprised to hear, she’s a strong strategist and planner, and took advantage of the delay in installation yesterday to hit the CoH boards. She has strategies for who to hit first, how to maximize her powers, etc., and once she gets the interface down pat, she’s going to be a nightmare to the villains of CoH.
Especially with me to back her play. 🙂
Now I know I’m getting into serious gaming …
So Margie got all of City of Heroes and its related patches in and …
… got all sorts of errors about how her video card didn’t support functions X, Y, and Z, meaning she was S, O, and L.
Downloaded the latest driver, which took care of Y and Z (and thus O and L), but didn’t do much for X (and thus S).
Hrm.
So she called me, and I ducked over to Best Buy, the Insidiously Convenient Tech Store Near the Office.
Now, I’ve intentionally stayed away from the whole video card thing, which tends to be focused on gaming fanatics who spend zillions of dollars to get stuff with the highest frame-rate-pixel-DDR-mega-buffer-socket bits and argue over it with a ferocious take-no-prisoners passion usually reserved for theologians and talk show pundits.
Eek.
So I really haven’t dealt with anything having to do with video cards since it was my job to crack open cases at the office and put in dual-head video for the CAD stations. So it was with some trepidation that I approached the video card aisle.
That I approached it “backwards” and started with the expensive $350-500 cards didn’t allay my fears.
I’d picked up a CoH box, so I had the minimum and recommended video configurations. And, of course, I didn’t see any thing that exactly matched.
And so I was reduced to seeking help from one of the passing BB Guys, who, frankly, didn’t seem to know a huge amount more than I did (though he knew enough to point out that, yes, one of the cards on the list was up on the shelf).
And then came the question — did Margie’s Sony Vaio computer have an AGP socket? Or did I need a PCI card?
Well … crap.
(Ponder, ponder, ponder.)
Ended up going with a different card than BB Dude recommended — a PNY nVidia GeForce FX5700LE. I went with AGP because, if the Vaio had it, then I wanted to use that, rather than the PCI. And I could always return it, right?
Got back to the office. First off — what Vaio model do we have. Hrm. No reference to it in the blog. Rats. …
… and then I found a reference to the reference page for the Vaio at Sony’s site — for our model: PCV-RX360DS. Where, in turn, I found a completely worthless Users Guide … and some marketing info that shows … yes … an AGP slot!
(And, yes, though a PIII/866 is close to the minimum specs for CoH, it’s still a scosh above that, and the 512Mb RAM should help … and the GeForce FX5700LE is above the recommended spec just a scosh.
Now, as long as it’s the right kind of AGP slot, I should be relatively home free. (He said, with great optimism.) Though, to be sure, the minimum specs include using (!) a 56k modem. Gads. It looks like it should be, though — found one ref to this Vaio having a 4X AGP slot, and the FX5700LE is referred to as being 4X/8X.
Hmmm. Looks like someone has gone through this (or close enough), but didn’t leave much info. This thread on the other hand seems to be full of people who seem quite certain of what the correct course is when dealing with going from onboard video to a video card … not all of which courses are the same. The Sony site seems to indicate for my model that it should autodetect the video card going into the AGP card, which would be the ideal, for sure …
We shall see. We’re having dinner out so we can go a Kindergarten orientation at Katherine’s pre-school tonight, so I’ll have to screw around with this after we get home. Crossing fingers …
(Now I remember again why I’ve usually avoided the whole video card thing …)
UPDATE: And the card is pretty, and has heat sinks a-plenty, and a fan. On the bright side, this should also resolve a problem that Margie was having with another game (SimRestaurant or something like that) she got a while back. Not that she’ll ever want to play another game …
C: vs D:
Margie’s hard drive at home is divided between C: and D:. Everything, of course, is installed on C:, and copying over a 900Mb CoH installation Zip file probably didn’t help things any. So the question came up of how to easily shift things between C: and D: without un/reinstalling various applications (bleah).
The three ideas (here described for WinXP Pro) came to mind. Best to have all apps closed during this:
- Do a Disk Cleanup. This is in the Start menu under Accessories / System Tools / Disk Cleanup. If there’s old installation files, unused temp files, etc., lurking around out there, this is the place to easily clean them up. Doing a defrag afterwards wouldn’t be out of place. (Margie had already done this.)
- Move the swap file over. Under Control Panel / System / Advanced / (Performance) Settings / Advanced / (Virtual Memory) Change. Use this screen to add a paging space on D: and eliminate or minimize the paging space on C:. There may be restarts involved, or multiple iterations to do so (hard to tell, since it turned out that this had already been done on her machine during a previous space crunch; I took advantage to add a large custom size to support upcoming CoH play). (Official MS KB article here.)
- Move My Documents over to another drive. Right-click My Documents (off the desktop or the Start menu), then choose Properties / Target. That will show you the current target folder set for your account as the My Documents folder. Click Move …, then choose where you want it to be (e.g., in D:\, creating a new folder called My Documents there). Accept, and Windows will ask if you want to move the contents over there, too. Yup, you probably do. (More info here and here.)
FYI.
In theory, you could some (or, more easily, all) the applications under C:\Program Files to D:\ by doing the move and then tweaking the registry, but, damn, that sounds like asking for trouble.
My Master Plan is Working, Bwah-ha-ha!
Tuesday night, after Margie watched me got pounded into the concrete in City of Heroes: “You know, I might like to do that.” Followed by, “So tell me about the different archetypes and power sets.”
Wednesday morning, over the phone: “You know, you could set me up on one of the slots on your account, and then while you’re at your Search Committee meeting tonight …”
Pride goeth before XP Debt
Margie switched off the TV. “Honey, I’m heading up.”
“Okay, I’ll be coming up in just a minute.” I’d gotten back from the Vestry meeting, tidied up the kitchen for the cleaning people, and was finally getting down to some admittedly-brief City of Heroes play, running Velvet Jones around Steel Canyons, beating up on Outcast gangs.
“No problem,” she replied. She came over behind me, watching me play. She asked a couple of questions. I explained what I was doing, how I was balancing toggles, dealing with Endurance, what the various colors of villains meant, the difference between hunting and running missions, how the bad guys behaved, how the civilians behaved, etc. She pulled over a chair and sat down.
I got over near the south transit station, beat up on a couple of guys, then spotted a largish group. Four white, one yellow. Hmmm. I expressed a bit of concern over the numbers, but Margie said, “Go for it.”
Ah, well. So I powered up a bit, then threw myself into the fray. A minute or two later, five Outcasts down with no really serious threat that couldn’t be handled in-battle by healing and endurance Inspirations.
Catch breath. Look around. Hey, there’s another group, same setup. One yellow, four whites.
“Go ahead,” Margie said. “Impress your wife.”
So I made sure I was all healed up, powered myself up, and set once more into the fray.
Wham, bam, punch, munch. “You’re going critical,” Margie noted as my health flashed down to yellow, then orange. No healing Inspiration left, but Dull Pain should do it. Click.
Few moments later, I noticed it hadn’t gone off. And that — hey, that stun a moment ago must have knocked down my defensive toggles — son of a — gotta click aga–
Thud.
Just goes to show you, guys. Trying to show off for the women-folk in your life will only get you in trouble.
Collect the whole set!
Okay, after this I promise at least three non-CoH posts. Really, truly.
City of Heroes trading cards, as mentioned yesterday.
Picking Teams in City of Heroes
While CoH has pretty strong solo play, even at higher levels, half the fun is teaming up (and more than half is teaming up with folks you know).
That said, teaming is a crap shoot. It’s difficult to tell, unless you’re doing the team picking, whether an invitation from someone to join a team is a good idea or a bad idea.
Rule #1: If the person couldn’t go to the trouble of coming up with an interesting comic book hero name, decline the invitation. “Fredasdfasdfasdf” is probably not who you want to run around with. It’s up to you whether proper capitalization counts.
That said, I dearly wish that there was a way to tell something about the person inviting you in, short of /telling them back to say, “Hey, what level are you, and what are you doing?” Which, I suppose, would be the proper and intelligent thing to do, but it’s annoying that there’s not some sort of facility to do that. (If there is, somebody clue me in.)
Rule #2: You do not want to be the highest level person in the group. Either your presence will skew the mission difficulty upwards (if you’re the leader), or else you’ll simply get the lowest experience rewards. In either case, it’s not a good thing. From a personal levelling standpoint you probably want to be mid-low in the group, though, obviously, not everyone can do that.
Now, there are things you can do with Exemplaring that I don’t yet fully grok. But, in general, if the rest of the team could either be your Sidekicks, or close to it, you probably don’t want to run with them unless they’re people you know you’re going to have fun with (because you know them).
Rule #3 (aka “Doyce’s Law”): Don’t be afraid to say “This is just nuts, let’s leave” about a mission — or, for that matter, about the team you’re on, if it’s clear that they’re not a disciplined group. Undisciplined teams are inevitably dead teams. Missions that start out all red and purple are not going to get easier further in. Teams that don’t recognize that aren’t smart, and dumb teams are inevitably dead teams, too. Suck up the time investment and quit, before you throw good online hours (and experience debt) after bad.
Okay, enough nattering for the moment.
Look! Another way to spend time on CoH!
Create your own CoH trading card. Coolness.
(via Doyce)
City of Heroes update
Well, since Champion just went down, current update …
I’ve narrowed my playtime to just four characters (which is still too many for quick advancement, but there you go).
Velvet is still my highest, at 11. She’s beginning to get a high enough level that she needs to start adventuring in scarier places, like Steel Canyon, or (again) Perez Park. She’s still a high-power punch-em gal, though she’s now had a couple of very bad team experiences in the Hollows that have given her a bit of debt.
Snipehunter, my previous hard luck case, is up to 9. Been on some good teams with him. The “snipe” power has come in quite handy. Torchielle, his fire-based sister, is up to 7, and I still like her best.
Psi-Clone has been the most fun, though, between his “hey, you, you now hate your fellow bad guy, so go whale on him” powers and his blind and his not-insubstantial spectral damage … plus, in case folks might think he’s a mean SOB, he’s doing heal stuff for parties, too, so that’s all good. Endurance-draining, to be sure, but a good excuse to stay far, far away from the action …
Mission-wise, it’s been a mixed bag past few. Had fun with Avocet on a larger mission, and with a number of Stan’s characters (with a number of mine). Stan and I SKed to Doyce and Jackie last night, which taught us both a lot about the fine art of weakling blaster/controllers and how to support the big guns effectively without being a target yourself.
I’ve had good teams and bad teams, the latter defined as either (a) not well managed, with nobody directing or nobody listening to direction, and/or (b) going up into missions that were way, way, way too overpowered for us, leading to grizzly deaths. And, of course, there’s the definition of insanity, which is trying the same thing twice, thinking the results will be different …
… but when it works — when you battle through, when the plan is followed, when it succeeds even after it all goes to hell, when the bad guys fall like chaff or fall only after repeated, desperate pummeling — then, damn, it works. And it’s a hell of a rush.
No regrets so far.
City of Heroes – My Cast
So what’s a game of City of Heroes if you can’t show off your characters? I tend to rotate through these guys, which keeps me from getting any one person up to a higher level very quickly, but also keeps things more varied for me. I’ll usually play one through a mission or up to a level before going on to the next.
City of Heroes – Random Thoughts
I’ve shied away from MMORPGs for years, realizing that, with aliases like “EverCrack,” it was likely to be too addictive and too much of a time sink in a life like mine that’s already 120% books. Add to that a distinct lack of interest in most of them (except to occasionally look over th shoulder) and that was pretty easy.
When Doyce, then Jackie, then others I knew started getting hooked on City of Heroes, and when I had a chance to see it, I knew that I was doomty-doom-doom-doomed.
Weekend update (so far)
Things that have happened or are happening:
- Margie’s still off in Frisco with Jackie and Mary, having (it sounds like) a grand time. I miss her gobs and oodles, and am ever-so-glad she’ll be back tomorrow evening.
- I’m doing a decent job (I think) of keeping the City of Heroes play time to a reasonable amount — not staying up too late, feeding the child, watering the cats, etc. I’ve a big post on the subject brewing.
- Margie sounded bemused, in a teeth-gritting way, upon learning of my new
addictionpastime. I think she blames Doyce, fortunately. - Went on our annual vestry retreat up at the Easter Seals Camp. Good time, as usual — lots of opportunity for bonding and planning and consideration of where we’ve been and where we’re going. It should be, I hope, a good year (which will be a nice finale to my vestry term).
- While I was up there, and Margie was in Frisco, Kitten got to have a “sleep-over” at Doyce’s. Neither she nor Doyce nor Justin seemed much worse for the wear when I arrived back this afternoon.
- That opened an opportunity for Doyce (on his PC) and I (on Jackie’s PC) to do some CoH team-ups, eventually roping in Lee on a rather nasty but enjoyable dungeon crawl mission. Good stuff.
And that’s been my life. Tomorrow: getting the house back in order.
Madcap journey redux
So, in the tradition of the Amazingly Insane Last Second Trip to the SDCC Last Year, Margie and Jackie have reciprocated by fleeing to San Francisco for an extended weekend, leaving Katherine and me on our lonesome.
I am proud to say that not only did I finish the laundry, but I did the dishes today, not to mention taking the kid to pre-school (and picking her back up shortly).
And, for those times not soaked up with Incredible Domestic Duties (and Employment), I’m finding something else to while away the hours.
Marvel vs. City of Heroes
NCSoft has filed for dismissal in the suit brought against them by Marvel, which suit claims that City of Heroes allows folks to generate clones of Marvel’s trademarked and copyrighted characters. The horror!
Some choice bits:
Kids with wandering imaginations have long decorated school notebooks with pictures of fantastic and supernatural beings of their own design. The ingenuity of individuals, as expressed through the creation of characters incorporating timeless themes of mythology, patriotism, ‘good,’ and ‘evil,’ has been a source of entertainment in the form of role-playing games for ages. In the face of technology that enables individuals to engage in such activities in a virtual, on-line context, Marvel Enterprises, Inc. and Marvel Characters, Inc. (collectively, ‘Marvel’) have taken the unprecedented step of attempting to appropriate for themselves the world of fantasy-based characters […]
City of Heroes is a tool that encourages originality, not slavish copying. It allows young and old to exercise their imaginations to create super-powered beings and send them off to interact with the creations of other individuals in a virtual world called Paragon City. If it should be banned, then so should the #2 pencil, the Lego block, modeling clay, and anything else that allows one to give form to ideas …
Hearing on the motion is scheduled for 7 Feb.
(via Thought Balloons)