***Dave Does the Game
Since I’ve been looking at Stamina for … well, for practically every character I have … something I missed in my reading:
Stamina requires two other powers from the Fitness pool (Swift, Hurdle, Health) as a prerequisite, and cannot be taken until level 20.
Knew about the level req, but not about the other pre-reqs. That’s annoying.
At least I’m not playing that addictive of a game. (Quietly tallies up the number of PB&Js and Chinese delivery he’s eaten over the last week or so …)
Actually, while Kitten can be a bit of a distraction during the game, she also provides some good (if involuntary) “breaks.” Which is probably annoying to the folks running with us at the time, but that’s the way it is. And we’re trying to make an effort to also make sure she doesn’t feel like a MMORPG Orphan …
Maybe I should set up a new Gallery page for these …
Dear Mom,
A good chunk of Saturday was taken up with the “P Squad” — top-to-bottom in the picture Margie’s P-Siren (Bubble Defender), Stan’s Puck Bunny (Grav Controller), and my Psi-clone (Illusion Controller).
After a while we got tired of (a) the Hollows, and (b) teaming with all squishies, so we headed back for the “real” part of town (Steel Canyons), and Stan swapped out his character for Robenmatsu 3 (tanker, on the right), so we had someone to draw good aggro for us.
One of the really keen bits about CoH is teaming with the wife. That’s tended to involve lots of new characters, as Margie plays around with different archetypes. Here’s the Buckle Brigade: my AR blaster, Honeygun (left), with Margie’s longswords scrapper, Kazima (right).Because you really wanted to know. I can tell.
Current roster:
I could put the above info in the sidebar and update it there, as someone noted. But that would suggest an obsession with the game, like every other post was going to be about CoH or something, so I think I’ll give that a pass at the moment.
I set up Global Chat (“/chatbeta 1”), but I can’t figure out what I want to use as my “handle” — using a character name (the default, and, for me, currently “@Velvet Jones”) is a bit too … obsessive for my taste. But I don’t have a normal semi-anonymous nom de plume I use. And you only get one chance to redefine your handle. Hmmmm. It would, though, resolve the annoying problem of people building and changing around long lists of heroes for me to track. Ahem.
Our connectivity this weekend was really wonky. Mapserver disconnects way, way, way too frequent — except when in door missions (more limited maps) and while moving. Really irritating. I’m tempted to blame it on our network connection altogether, but that the server we were on (Champion) had an emergency we’re-kicking-you-off-now reboot last evening makes me think it wasn’t just us (though the problem didn’t seem to get better afterward). I did some preliminary research into a cable gateway; nothing resolved yet (and not likely to do so until next weekend at the earliest, anyway).
Margie’s all “What character do you want me to work on while you’re away on business this week?” To which I’m “What makes you think you won’t see me online? They have broadband at the hotel I’m at …”
FRIDAY
After Margie Gras, Margie and I did a bit of CoH, and went to bed (too late)
SATURDAY
Mostly CoH, mostly Margie and Stan and me, mostly in the Hollows in an oddball Illusion Controller/Grav Controller/Bubble Defender combo. Slow, but steady progress through way too many tunnels.
Eventually went elsewhere with Stan taking on his tank, which changed the dynamics a lot, obviously. Still, much enjoyment, and got Psi-Clone up to my second-highest character (at 11).
SUNDAY
Okay, so how many people have gone to church “as” their City of Heroes character? Not many, I suspect, for obvious reasons. Since Psi-Clone actually, ahem, resembles me and ensembles I wear (tan slacks, rust-red shirt, tweed sports coat), it wasn’t exactly a bizarro moment, except for the association that nobody around me except Margie would appreciate.
Back home after the birthday party Katherine went to, a bit more late afternoon CoH, interrupted by an emergency reboot on Champion, which gave us an opportunity to Feed and Bed Down the Child.
So, nothing too exciting, but some nice fun with the family.
Last night, I had problems in my CoH play:
Damnably enough, with all that, I still had fun (and got to wear my nice new FP duds for the mish). Go fig.
When I was a wee hero of 5th level or so (with Velvet Jones), I got an invitation to a Supergroup. “Woo-hoo!” I thought, and leapt at the chance (even though I didn’t have any Leap pool powers).
And … that was about it. The extent to which the SG played any role in my gaming was that the daily announcement, and other idle chatter, cluttered up my chat window. There was occasional news about task forces, all of which was geared toward a higher level than I.
But that was about it. Nobody contacted me. Nobody said hi. Nobody let little ol’ n00b me know what was shaking.
Then Doyce posted about SGs, and answered some questions thereto:
I think the lion’s share of the SG’s are really meant to be little more than a permanent Team-up, or a Friends List with a channel of its own and an excuse to have a slightly different costume. And that’s about it. Fine by me.
The bigger groups… the one’s that are more organized… the ‘real’ groups, if you’ll pardon my arrogance, are more than that.
a) Online friends and allies.
People that you like.
b) Support network.
“Guys, I need a hand with these Vahzilok.”
“What’s a ‘Crey Medic’? Are they dangerous?”
“Oh hell, I just dropped 54,000 influence on six of the wrong kind of enhancement!”
“Ugh… what power should I get?”
c) Pool of cool teammates.
Now, the bigger the group, the more likely this will work out for you. The Phalanx has about 55 people, and that works out to about 6 to 12 people on most nights, varying levels, with thicker clumps in the 20 to 30 range. That’s about a 20% online presence, so adjust accordingly for an SG of 10 people.
d) Folks who ‘get’ what you’re doing.
d-1) You’re in the Elements? Well, you know that it’s okay that you and the rest of the folks in your SG have more than a passing, polite interest in leveling. Conversation will be businesslike and efficient. Chatting in mid-mission is not done, and generally confines itself to ‘Boss’, ‘add!’, ‘snipe’, ‘pulling’, ‘found it’, and ‘need a Bounce Back’.
d-2) You’re in the Phalanx? You know that the folks in your SG will be chatting during the missions, in character: swearing about fascist mystic vampires, asking about where each other grew up… do your folks know you’re a ‘hero’… what a ‘hero’ *is*, and why those Crey Medics keep taking skin samples from you during fights.
Which sounded pretty cool. He made some recommendations, based on the groups he was involved in, and since I tend to trust the D-Man when it comes to RP, I made an application, and …
… well, after an interesting in-character interview at the feet of Prometheus in Atlas Park Lake, I am now a probationary member of the Freedom Phalanx. W00T!
And, in the course of the remaining evening, I chitchatted (in character) with various folks as they came on and off. I got invited onto an appropriate-level mission in the Hollows (where we eventually got our butts handed to us, sliced and arranged nicely on a bed of troll-green lettuce … but it was fun), and generally had a ball. Since Velvet is something of the bad girl/party girl, and has a nice Southern accent, there’s plenty of RP stuff I can do for flavor.
Again, fun stuff. It’s not necessarily what I’m going to be doing every outing, but it’s a nice added flavor bit for one of the characters. And the group seems pretty nice, which is an added bonus.
Oh, and I get a nice alternative Supergroup uniform! Which, as I look at it, looks sort of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleadery. Not that there’s anything wrong with that …
I find it amusing that CoH refers to its upgrades as “Issues.”
Here’s an interview on Issue 4, which focuses on PvP (Player vs. Player) action. Want to fight other PCs? Sign up at the arena. Not something I anticipate doing, but I know it’s been a huge demand of some folk.
The other Issue 4 changes are fairly minor, though there are more costume features:
Costume pieces! Lots and lots of new costume pieces. These are mostly inspired from the world of manga and anime, but I think everyone will enjoy these new options. And we?re adding specific sliders for various body parts. Players will be able to adjust the size of their shoulders, arms, legs and even their foreheads!
Spiffy. Costuming is one of the best features in CoH, and this should help even further.
Various CoH articles I’ve bookmarked. Note that some articles may be found at multiple sites.
General sites
Specific pages
I have several others I need to add to the above list, but I didn’t bookmark them, just printed them out. Later …
All on the Champion server:
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.
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:
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.
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)
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:
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.
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.
… 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 …
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:
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 …
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:
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.
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 …”