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August 10, 2004
The Beginning of the End
If you don't want to get addicted, don't let the crack into the house. Well, I let the crack into the house and now Henry and I are both trying to wean ourselves off of the hours and hours of play on City of Heroes that we've logged since the 28 April launch.
There was some misinformation at launch, with some people reporting that certain stores were selling it ahead of the scheduled launch time of 9 pm Central Time. (What an odd time to release something). Ultimately, I was able to track down a copy and asked Henry to pick it up for me the evening of 27 April.
Unfortunately, my video card (ATI RADEON 7200) wasn't up to snuff and I had to get a new one, which Henry was kind enough to pick up for me the following day. With a new ATI RADEON 9200 in place, I was able to get fully logged in and playing. I let Henry have my username and password so that he could play during the day while I was at work.
Apparently, that was all that was needed to get him hooked too, which surprised me. He got his own account that day, and spare time has pretty much been City of Heroes time since then. Henry's up to level 40 with his Controller. Me... I keep making character after character. I finally settled on an Empathy Defender a week into the game and played it for about six weeks... before I accidentally deleted it early on a Saturday afternoon in June. RIP Tororossa.
I mourned the loss until dinner, which was long enough for Customer Service to confirm what I already knew: they couldn't do anything to recover the character. The character deletion process has since been changed to prevent the kind of lag-induced accident that caused my character's deletion. Started a new Defender that same evening, though I restyled the character as a Force Field Defender this time around and set about building it up to "replace" the old character as soon as possible so that I can keep playing with the circle of friends that I had made as the old character.
I was able to duplicate the previous six weeks of work to reach level 21 within two weeks, and then proceeded to race onward to rest at my current level of 32. In the interim, I've made other characters and started running them up in levels, too, with a range between 6 and 11 right now. My newest favourite, when I'm not playing my main, is a Mind/Empathy Controller, intentionally chosen to be gimped and therefore a challenge to play.
I should probably set up an updatable list somewhere on the sidebar so that I don't have to keep dropping name changes here. In the meantime, all on Guardian server:
- Roughrider Girl (32 Force Field/Dark Blast Mutation Defender)
- Sister Snowjob (10 Mind Control/Empathy Magic Controller)
- Laundry Day (11 Martial Arts/Regeneration Natural Scrapper)
- Bantam Bluejay (11 Ice Blast/Ice Manipuation Technology Blaster)
- The Nutcracker (6 Invulnerability/Super Strength Mutation Tanker)
At one point or another, I've also had Papa Smulk (Papa Smurf meets the Incredible Hulk), Cancer Stick (looks like a cigarette), Erik Estrada (complete with CHiPs uniform), Vanilli (paired with Milli), the Casting Couch (giant pimp daddy), 20 min Workout (how 80's can you get?), and No Class Lass (like school in the summertime).
It would be easier to get off this game if it wasn't so much fun and I didn't meet so many cool people on it.
Posted by KinCross at August 10, 2004 04:14 PM