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I've been playing a fair amount of City of Heroes&Villains lately. It was a game that I simply couldn't get into back when I was playing World of Warcraft, as they both went about the MMO thing in rather different ways. But I got the yen to play some superhero stuff a few weeks back after tracking down a...well, let's just call it a release...of the animated Tick series, and threw some bucks at CoH expecting to tire of it in a few days again--remarkably, I stuck, then the City of Villains beta (they handed out access keys like water in its last week or two in beta status) sold me pretty hard on it.

I've got three characters I'm splitting time between, not counting no-level alts made just to muck about with the chargen costuming bits.
This would be Rehabilitation, a hero based on the cheerfully idiotic notion that obviously the best way for a violent criminal to repay society would be to transplant his central nervous system into a superhuman robot body and teach him kung-fu. I'm most proud of the costume outcome of all of them; I was deliberately going for something that you might see in one of the various short-lived syndicated action series that you would find playing random afternoons on early Fox affiliates, and by "Bob" I think I achieved that goal perfectly.


Cheyne Stoking in the foreground--the name's the medical term for the "death rattle" breathing pattern that terminal patients enter in their final slide out of life. Being a mad scientist with a specialty in zombology, he's clearly not going to have a villainous pseudonym as sophomoric-intern as "Death Rattle". He's a doctor, thank you very much. Arrayed behind him are his zombie minions. He's a "mastermind" class character, which is one of the neater new classes City of Villains added to the game, essentially a pet-summoning-and-controlling schtick. There's four types currently, being robots, ninjas, soldiers, and of course zombies. Clearly I had to go with the zombies. The three little guys are the zombies proper, the lowest-tier minions; the big fellow in the leather-bar attire is the grave knight, the middle-tier summon. Eventually Cheyne will have two of them, and pick up a single third-tier summon, which I understand is a lich. He also only just gained the ability to pull a pissed-off ghost out of the body of a minion when it falls in battle, but they're only about for a limited time, and he dissolved before I could find my screenshot key.


And finally, this would be Thorn Delay. Some folks I used to game with back in college are making vague plans of putting together an Undead GOP supervillain group, and he'll be my entry if that ever gets off the ground. (There's an Arlen Spectre and Zombie Strom also around, you see.) He's all spikey at the moment as that's the effect that happens when his particular secondary powerset is activated. His powers are all plant-related--there was an incident with a shiv, but a friendly witch doctor brought him back to life with the aid of a plant demon. On account of the grassroots support!

Rehab and Cheyne are on the Virtue server; Mr. Delay's on Pinnacle. My global id is, of course, @drastic. I've also got three codes for a free two weeks of City of Heroes (not Villains, sadly) laying about that all came with CoV for various reasons; if any of my vast readership would like one, shoot me a line.
posted by Gar @ 8:03 PM