Zombies in Disguise!

When last we left our hero, he had received some rather disturbing news: that some of the soldiers he had been working alongside this entire time were, in fact, mystically disguised zombies. How is our hero going to get out of this one?

Blight Of The Living Dead is the second Public Mission you'll encounter, the first being the battle alongside Ironclad by the Champions HQ in the tutorial. It comes in three stages: a quick one you might not notice is even happening, a slow, boring one, and then an awesome one that doesn't last nearly as long as the awesome one.

While wandering around the area immediately outside of Force Station Steelhead, you'll notice a little counter in the lower right section of your screen that appears to be rattling off mission objectives for a mission you've never actually been given. That's the Public Mission, and since it's area-based rather than questgiver-based, it'll always be active when you're within the borders of the mission area, and you can do it as many times as you want.


During the first stage, which nobody actually tells you about, near as I can tell, there are six survivors of ill-fated Steelhead scouting parties that are hiding in the woods near the base. You have to find them and rescue them... which is to say, you have to walk up and talk to them or they won't head back to base and save themselves. Without your words of warm encouragement, these hardened wilderness commandos can do naught but huddle amongst their dead teammates loudly bemoaning their fates.


Fortunately, there are superheroes friggin' everywhere. This part tends to go pretty quickly, as you can generally see one from the position of another. Most often all six will be rescued by other players before you even know the mission has reset, but if you know right where they are you get the pleasure of their thanks.



















Not sure I'd call several dozen zombies in the Canadian woods an apocalypse, but then, what do I know?

Once you've "rescued" all six lost Steelhead guard patrols, the mission goes on to it's second stage, which involves hunting down the mystically disguised zombies that have infiltrated the Force Station itself. Alas, this isn't nearly as interesting as it sounds.


To get this Zombie Device, you have to find one of two Steelhead soldiers who are waving their arms at you and talk to them. This is where ol' Iron Will came in at the end of his last adventure.


Once they've explained the situation to you, you get the Zombie Device out of a box at their feet and go around the base scanning soldiers until you've found all ten. This can take a while.

























When a soldier scans clean, nothing happens, although they might give you a few words of encouragement or complain that you suspected them in the first place. When a soldier IS secretly a zombie, though, they glow bright green when you use the scanner on them, before turning into a zombie... oddly, also transforming their clothing into tattered civilian garb... and attacking you. They also comment on the fact that they're a zombie and threaten you, which I don't like one bit. I like my zombies completely mindless, thank you. A zombie that talks is just all manner of disturbing, and makes you think twice about blowing their heads off en masse. This is simply no good.


I mean, come on, he knows how to correctly use the word Voracious. You have any idea how few high schoolers know how to correctly use the word Voracious? We should be sending these zombies to college, not pulverizing them.


I know, I know. Sorry, man. Just doing my job.


After you've scanned away their disguises and then beat to death the apparently thinking and feeling person underneath, you can either move on to another group of soldiers or scan the same group again. Now, you'd think that certain soldiers within the crowd are zombies all along and that the Zombie Device merely detects them, but I've found that soldiers that scan clean initially may in fact be zombies if you go back over them a second time. So what the Zombie Device actually does is turn perfectly benign soldiers into zombies that you can guiltlessly kill with a roughly 50% chance of effectiveness. Harsh.

Once all ten mystically disguised zombies have been outed and defeated, the base is suddenly swarmed by undisguised zombies that crawl out of the ground within the base itself. This is the part you've been waiting for. Time to put a shambling horde of undead back in the ground!



... Except there are only thirty of them. If you're the only one in the base not currently shopping or using the tailor (it can happen around 4am on a weeknight, sometimes) this might take a little doing, but typically there are between five and a dozen other players in the base who, though they had no interest in helping with the lengthy scanning process, are only to happy to join the fray once there are zombies crawling out from right under them. So the horde of thirty zombies usually peters out within half a minute or so, and somebody with a decent Area Of Effect attack will have racked up more points in fifteen seconds than you got in your previous ten minutes of patrol-hunting and zombie-scanning. Drat.

And, as if the disguised zombies being capable of carrying on a conversation wasn't bad enough, at least one of the horde even has a name.


I'm sorry, Joe The Evil Spirit!

All of this information together leads me to conclude that the Canadian Snow Zombie is less a standard modern movie "zombie" and more akin to a "deadite" of Evil Dead fame, some kinda crazy ancient evil snow spirit that possesses dead bodies and uses them to attack the living and/or taunt superheroes and flail at them ineffectually. Fortunately, unlike Deadites, they're put down with a single weighted steel punch to the gut.


And after that short flurry of combat, you have successfully repelled the ongoing zombie siege for a good ten minutes or so. You also get to claim an sometimes-useful item reward over by Justiciar, general rarity and usefulness depending on how much you contributed. The mission resets itself after five, and you can do it all again. Or, you know, move on, or skip it altogether. That's why I love Public Missions so much.


Woooooo!

You generally can't expect a lead this wide, though. When people are playing, generally the first place won't be able to get more than 700-800 points, I just did this in the middle of the night.


Alright, so the passengers are safe, the lost patrols are safe, the base is safe... let's finish off this storm and head back someplace warm, eh?

UP NEXT: The final showdown! ... Well, of this place, anyway.

Not Lost, we just don't know where we are.

Apologies to the... probably two?... of you who expect updates on this blog regularly. Some random service pack issue seems to have made my computer completely unable to process image files or create thumbnails of anything, which made screenshots understandably difficult to supply. I've found a little workaround for the issue, and I'm up and running again. Sort of. Kind of.

Many, many applications of the thermal laser later, and all the passengers stuck in blocks of ice have finally been freed. Righto, now that that's dealt with, it's off to find this Shepard guy. Fortunately, he's not very far away at all, cleverly hiding behind a rock from the ice demons I've just finished pummeling. He looks intact enough, but, as I really should have expected, there's a catch.


Apparently somewhere between all the rescuing of passengers and the rescuing of passengers, I forgot to rescue some passengers. Drat. I head off to find some non-frozen hostages of the demons, wondering just how many people were on that plane. At this point, I'm fairly certain that the flight was completely booked and that absolutely nobody died in the crash that tore the plane in half and scattered the pieces a mile or two apart.

I find the first one just over a ridge from where all the frozen passengers were, a tough-looking older bald man named "John". He seems vaguely familiar, but I have no idea where I could have seen him before.


I beat up the two Ice Demons that were preventing him from leaving and move on. Three more passengers to go. The next one's two hills over, past where I was just making the rounds thawing out frozen passengers. His name's "Finn", and he gives me a gruff man-thanks after I deal with his demon friends. That's cool, I can respect that. He looks oddly familiar too, though. Eh, whatever. Moving on.


The third passenger is named Furley, and he's out right in the middle of the plains being menaced by a full team of five ice demons, and wearing nothing but a T-shirt and shorts. He's a hefty fellow, which I suppose helps a little bit, but there's still some severe hypothermia in his immediate future if I can't get these guys away from him. Fortunately, I can, and he tells me that it was "totally awesome". I like this guy. Can't shake the feeling that I've met him somewhere before, though.


OH I GET IT! Well played, Champions Online.

Seriously, the game's full of stuff like this. I kinda love it.

The last passenger's name is Cathy, and she's right up the hill leading back to Force Station Steelhead. She's only got two Ice Demons bothering her, which at this point means about a one second fight if I use my left hand and my right hand at the same time. I think I'm getting pretty good at this superheroing thing.


The last of the passengers from the front end of the airliner saved, I head back to base to see what else Justiciar wants me to deal with while I'm in town. This whole supernatural evil from before the reckoning of mankind thing has wound up being pretty manageable, and I'm starting to think that as long as there's a straightforward enemy that I can walk up and punch, I can probably just go ahead and solve most of Canada's problems while I'm here.

I get flagged down by a soldier as I strut back into base, though. What seems to be the problem, officer?


... Wait, what?

Up next: Zombie Hunt?

Unsavory Fetishes

In which our hero Iron Will is made to feel somewhat uncomfortable!

As soon as I make sure that the pilot is being seen to by a few of the soldiers in the base, I head back over to Justiciar's post, which consists of a random patch of snow near the center of the base just out of earshot of the assorted rescue workers that he's presumably giving orders to. I'm having some trouble figuring out his placement, but I'm fairly certain that they just put him here to make him feel important. My working theory is that, as one of Canada's premier superheroes (which, if Ravenspeaker is any indication, isn't a terribly competitive title) he came out here as soon as he heard that there was a problem to offer his assistance to the Force Station Steelhead personnel. Once they discovered that his main superpower was being an amputee, though, they realized that they couldn't really use him, but felt bad about saying so. "Um... we need you... to... go stand over there and talk with the real- er, the LESS EXPERIENCED superheroes as they come in. Only you can do this, mighty Justiciar!"

Poor guy.


I report back on my success with the moving of debris and the punching of demons, and for the second time in as many days I'm told by a grown man who is not my father that I've done a very brave thing. Er... thanks. What other very brave things need doing?






















Great balls of steel! Some of these Ice Demons have ice powers! According to Justiciar, they've been freezing people solid in some sort of strange magical way that doesn't crush all their organs or cause their brains to die. I never knew that freeze rays had a stun setting, but I guess when you're dealing with ancient elemental magic, anything makes sense. He gives me a laser (SCORE!) that can melt the ice so that I can free the frozen passengers. Apparently there's also a passenger who managed to escape and call for help from somewhere, and he could probably use some rescuin' too. I can't think of a way to involve my new laser in that one just yet, but I'll figure something out.

There's something else, too.


He wants me to collect Tulzorgat Trickery Fetishes, whatever those are. I'm a little turned off by this. Most of my experience with Fetishes comes from the internet, and it's been almost universally distasteful. I don't even want to know what kind of fetishes spikey ice demons who enjoy helping people freeze to death would be into.

But then, he describes them as "charms" which might mean they're something else entirely. I remember fetishes were mentioned as objects in the syllabus of a course I was going to take called Magic And Witchcraft, but I dropped it on the second day when I realized it was an Anthropology course and that I wasn't actually going to learn to cast any spells. So really, I have no idea what I'm up against, here. Hoping that it's nothing I can catch any diseases from, I agree to go take away some of the ice demon's fetishes, wishing not for the first time that I had some sort of waterproof gloves to go with my jean scraps.


The other half of the plane is way on the other side of the base, facedown in a valley. Damn but these passengers are durable. I get to work hittin' ugly things in the face.

I'm unpleasantly surprised to find that on this side of the mountain, not only are there big spikey demons and bigger spikey demons, but they've also brought along with them some sort of weird reanimated human corpses.

D-D-D-DEMON ZOMBIES?!? ZOINKS!!!


It's okay, it's okay, I'm a superhero now. Zombies aren't a problem for me. Just gotta shoot 'em in the head. ... This one does not have a head. This is problematic.

Turns out, just punching them until all their bones are shattered puts them down just as well. They actually seem to be significantly softer and less dangerous than their demon counterparts, but there's just something unsettling about fighting a dead guy without a head.

I really, really need to invest in some gloves.

Once I'm done mashing the zombie into a foul-smelling paste and take out (albeit less completely) his demon friend, I notice that he drops some weird totem-pole lookin' thing.


Just as I feared. Sex toy.

I pocket the thing, hoping that the crusted zombie paste will block any dried demon germs, and wondering why Ravenspeaker wants them and whether or not this is in any way connected to his never wearing pants, and keep looking around the crash site. It doesn't take too long to find some of the frozen survivors that Justiciar mentioned.


It's mildly unsettling. I bust out my laser. Hope this works!


Ah-HA! Complete success. No, thank YOU, citizen, for giving me an excuse to use a laser.

It takes a little while to recharge, but it still might be the coolest thing I've ever carried around. Beats the hell out of my pocketful of demonic marital aids, anyway. I'll just pop around to see if there are any more passengers that need thawing out before searching for this Shepard guy...


Aw, hell.

Up next: More adventures with the most durable passengers ever!

Blizzard Entertainment

In which our hero Iron Will returns from a long absence to assist with the perils in Canada!


In case you missed it the first time, this is no ordinary storm!

After warning me once again that the storm we're experiencing isn't ordinary, the crippled superhero known as Justiciar lays out what he'd actually like me to do to help in this less-than-ordinary storm. Much to my surprise, he actually seems to have a pretty good emergency response plan.

So apparently not only did a plane get forced down by this completely ordinary storm, but the passengers who survived are stuck out there in the blizzard and, because freezing to death isn't really that big a deal on it's own, are being menaced by freakin' ice demons.

So, Justiciar wants me to head out there and help them escape, presumably since he himself can't move through the snow due to his disability. That actually sounds like a perfectly reasonable use for the superpowered help. I throw him a quick salute and head out the gate to find this crash site.

It actually winds up being a pretty short jog away, as the snow is apparently hard-packed enough that I don't sink into it at all despite weighing about a ton and a half at this point, and I can see plane pieces almost immediately on the other side of the wall. Some of which have struggling figures underneath them. Hrm.

My radio suddenly chimes in.


According to the little robotic voice that I used to think was Dr. Silverback but might actually be Justiciar or Ravenspeark or my own conscious or something, there are quite a few survivors trapped under various pieces of wreckage in the vicinity. Right in front of me, two ice demons are crouched over a guy stuck under a plane wing, taunting him and telling him to give up and die.

... So wait. There are who knows how many of these spikey ice demons with claws and fangs and horns and the like running through the hills menacing people... and all they do is stand near them and taunt them?

These guys are such dicks.

I run over and beat the two of them senseless, which actually winds up being about as easy as beating up mutants back in the desert. Apparently their bizarre supernatural powers mostly consist of being ugly and the ability to throw snowballs without first balling up snow. It's a really cold snowball, mind, but it just doesn't seem very impressive. Of course, it might be really devastating to somebody who still had blood flow in their skin or something... I dunno. Point is, they go down really easily.


I haul the plane wing off the guy, who springs right up and thanks me, assuring me that he'll be okay from here, and then runs off. ... Wait a second. So this guy, who was just on a passenger airline that crashed in the mountains, somehow survived falling out of the sky and an impact that tore an airplane in half, then getting crushed by several tons of metal, being stuck in the snow in the middle of a blizzard for half an hour, and after being freed he's perfectly confident that the roving bands of ice demons between him and safety won't be a problem?

This guy is amazing. I need to find him later and give him my card.

There are a few dozen others either trapped under debris or cowering in a small circle of demons scattered around the wreckage of the airliner, which seems to have broken in half and left it's rear section stuck in a lake that's frozen completely solid, as it hasn't sunk or anything. Convenient. I punch the demons until they quit breathing and lift wreckage off of survivors for a few minutes until it seems like I've gotten just about everyone.


That messy situation dealt with, I head back to base, stopping by to rescue what appears to be the pilot of the unfortunate aircraft, huddling next to a campfire and being menaced by demons. I take care of them.


This is one of the few missable missions in the Canada Crisis, so you might want to watch for it. It's also an escort mission, but it's less of a pain in the neck than most of them will be.


For whatever reason, the demons seem more interested in getting the pilot than any of the individual passengers. He asks me if I'll escort him back to base, so I do. A few of the monsters pop out of nowhere to throw themselves at my knuckles every couple of minutes, but they don't get past me, and we make it back to base without too much trouble.

So far, stopping ancient magical forces of evil from engulfing the land of the living in frozen darkness seems surprisingly similar to stopping crazy irradiates from blowing up a piece of the desert. I think I've got this.


UP NEXT: Yeah, pretty much.

No Ordinary Storm!

In which our hero Iron Will finds himself completely out of his element.


With a little effort, followed by a whole lot of effort, I manage to shift enough of the rocks away from the vault door to wedge it open a bit and worm my way back out. SO, that's dealt with. The radioactive miasma hasn't started to clear from the sky yet, but presumably business will soon return to normal. Maybe. If there's something else needs doing, though, I figure these guys can probably figure it out themselves, I took care of the supervillains for them. Time to go help that guy without pants. I jog back into the base and head over to the helicopter, the pilot of which has apparently already been contacted and is all ready to take me to Project Steelhead in Canada. Shiny. Off we go.


I must have fallen asleep at some point on the trip... it's a pretty long way from the southwestern desert to Canada via helicopter, I suppose. I wake up to Ravenspeaker's voice explaining the situation to me while the pilot gives the base a quick flyover. Ravenspeaker himself is standing on a hill under a thirty foot glowing projection of himself... must be trying out for the Champions... and telling me about the storm surrounding the base in a perfectly symmetrical cone of gale-force wind, which is apparently no ordinary storm in Canada. Good to know.

The speech continues. The storm is actually the work of ancient dark magics, part of a coordinated assault on the Force Station Steelhead base by a long-slumbering evil he calls the demon-god Kigatilik. A passenger jet has been brought down by the magic blizzard not far from here. Monstrous ice demons are roaming around the countryside and the dead are rising to attack the living. He would very much like my help.

Holy shit dude. This is entirely unlike hitting radioactive guys in the face. I briefly consider hiding under the seat until the helicopter takes off again, but it occurs to me that having an unnaturally focused storm directly overhead might make leaving by helicopter difficult. Also, a quick glance out the window reveals about a dozen men and women standing with assault rifles and shooting at misshapen figures along the ridge that I can only assume are some of the demons that Ravenspeaker was talking about. These guys don't have any special powers or damage resistances to speak of, but they're still here. Sighing, I climb down out of the helicopter and walk across the landing pad to a guy waving his arms at me. Don't know what help I'm going to be against demon gods and the risen dead, but I'm here to help, I suppose.


The man introduces himself as Andrew Duggan, and tells me that the storm is not ordinary. I actually already caught that from Ravenspeaker, but, um, thanks.

He doesn't have much else to tell me, just directs me down the stairs to talk to Justiciar, apparently the boss around these parts. Alright. Thanks for... um... the tip about the storm not being normal, man.

Down an exceedingly long flight of stairs and out across the snow (which doesn't seem to chill me even though I normally bundle up more to go to bed, so that's good) I find Justiciar standing in the middle of a circle of superheros and assorted freaks. This must be the place. Justiciar's a Canadian superhero, apparently, judging from his outfit, and his power appears to be that he's an amputee. ... Well um. That's pretty impressive, man. Although in fairness, he's not stuck in a cage or under a rock, so he's at worst the third least inspiring superhero I've met this week. I introduce myself and see if I can get any pointers for surviving under these crazy conditions.


Apparently this is no ordinary storm.

I sigh. Okay. Thank you for this information. What can I do to help?

Up Next: Quite a bit, actually!

F2P Patch

Well the Free To Play patch came out a week ago (give or take) and I gave it a try a few days ago. I've got mixed feelings on the whole thing. On the one hand, the level progression seems to be smoother, at least in the beginning of the game, and they've addressed some of the issues I've noticed with level gaps between areas and lack of coherent narrative to guide the player from one area to the next. On the other hand, they haven't addressed the most glaring issue with Champions Online, which is it's sheer lack of scale.

The main (in my view) problem with CO has always been the fact that there's really only one path to take through the game. Last week, that was starting with the alien invasion, moving on to the desert or canada (or both if you wanted to keep up with the level requirements of mission arcs) then back to the city for a while, then back to the desert, then back to canada, etc. They've changed this to invasion, city, canada, desert, apparently (though I haven't played through the entirety of the first twenty levels again yet, nor probably will for some time) but there's still only one path.

I contrast this with, for example, World Of Warcraft, which, though I don't much enjoy that game for unrelated reasons, is still the most popular MMO on the market and has been for a good six years (which, if we're counting, is three times longer than it took Champions to resort to letting people play the game for free). In World Of Warcraft, your character starts in one of six (and after the expansions, I think it's ten) starting areas, each one of which will get you to a high enough level to venture out into the wider world and start exploring, and in this wider world there are (or were) usually at least three or four different areas a character of a certain level could choose from to explore without either getting murdered by the local flora or being an unstoppable force with nothing to gain from the missions there. In Champions, there were a maximum of two places you could both survive and accomplish anything at a given level. Now, that they've "added content", it seems there's one.

In fairness, they have added content like new missions and a new power or two, but for some reason they took out some of the old content at the same time. This would seem to be not so much "adding" content as "replacing" content. That irradiated desert that Iron Will explored for seven entries or so? That doesn't exist anymore, apparently. Near as I can tell, it's gone. In exchange they've beefed up the story and missions in the city, but that doesn't strike me as adding content so much as replacing it. Plus, it means that if you're using this blog as a guide (this assumption is mostly just stroking my own ego, but hey, it could happen) then you can just ignore the last month or so.

For new players, this might work out okay. There's more to do in the city than there was, more direction for new players (down the singular path they've left available to every character) and a more generally cinematic game, as they've added a number of cutscenes and voiceovers. Existing characters below level twenty or so seem to've been shafted, though. Characters in any of the three original zones (Canada, desert, Millennium City) have been automatically teleported to the spot characters of their level are now "supposed to be"(in some cases with no way to get back as their old place doesn't exist anymore), their mission journals deleted, and given a new mission to set them right onto the single path Cryptic has laid out for them.

I find it more annoying than encouraging... though if you haven't been playing for the last year, your first playthrough will likely be better now than it would have been, so I'm still recommending the Free version to anybody who wants to try it. Though they've carefully avoided addressing the game's main shortcomings in lieu of shuffling stuff for slightly better functionality, the game itself is still pretty entertaining.


Anyway, logging on to Iron Will, who I left in the Canada Crisis, I suddenly find myself in Millennium City with a single mission to report to some guy in Westside. Bugger that, says I, and spend half an hour on zone chat and running around the city at random looking for a way back to the desert which apparently no longer exists, but I DO find a random helicopter that takes him back to the Canada Crisis, which is apparently not even a part of the new storyline they've worked out and is just a secret area people can access if they want to or something... but, it's where I was, and I wasn't done, so I'll be doing that next.

Stick around while I try to sort this mess out, eh?

Free-To-Play Update

Currently downloading and installing a patch approximately half the size of the game itself. Oi.

Now, if you bought your computer from a reputable retailer and it's reasonably new, this probably won't be a huge problem.

However, if you're like me and decided to build your computer yourself, despite being both cheap AND lacking any actual computer knowledge whatsoever, this will probably take the better part of a day.

So far, though, I've noticed a few changes they've made without even starting up the game. For example, they've updated their launcher!



Well this looks promising.

INTERMISSION

I was going to do the first part of the Canada crisis here, but find myself tragically blocked by server downtime. This, you'll notice, is a bit of an issue with Champions Online.


This is the longest one I've come across to date, probably because of the conversion over to Free-To-Play mode, but it's pretty frequent that you won't be able to play the game between 3am and 5am, for example. Bringing servers down for maintenance is nothing new for MMOs, although since Champions Online has different zones instanced and only uses one server (or uses all the servers at once, I dunno how these things work) it brings the entire game down, and simply switching to that alt on a different server isn't an option.

Furthermore, they tend to bring it all down at the same time every few days (or in some annoying cases, every day for a week or so) effectively preventing a certain segment of their user population from playing the game at all, if they have an unusual work schedule and would normally play while most people are asleep, for example.

This isn't really something you can get too angry about if you're free to play or have a lifetime subscription, I suppose, but when you're paying fifteen dollars a month for a service and then that service isn't being provided when you would utilize it, I think there's some legitimate grounds for annoyance there.

Me, I've got the lifetime subscription, so not so much.



So, instead, I'm going to waste your time with old screenshots of my main, The Centurion, who's in much higher areas of the game than Iron Will. It gets pretty epic later on.


If you go the Super Strength route, your characters physical might will eventually approach a level referred to in comics as "ludicrous". Observe.


This comes in handy, though, if your superhero is a "Flying Brick" type. Whether or not this route is for you can best be determined by the following 12-part quiz.



THE CENTURION'S GUIDE TO HEROIN'.
(not to be confused with diamorphine)

SCENARIO:
A powerful psionic woman with the ability to create blades of pure energy from her arms is attacking you in an enclosed space. Do you...
A. Try to reason with her?
B. Put as many obstacles between yourself and her energy blades as possible?
C. Punch her in the brain?





ANSWER: C








SCENARIO:
You discover that a paramilitary group is conducting illegal research at a remote jungle facility that is causing significant damage to the surrounding ecosystem. Do you...
A. Gather evidence and inform the international authorities as quickly as possible?
B. Sneak into their facility and sabotage their equipment, preventing them from doing futher damage until they replace it?
C. Punch them in the brain?





ANSWER: C







SCENARIO:
While carefully maneuvering yourself through an underwater school of giant electric jellyfish, you are suddenly approached by a mutated great white shark. Do you...
A. Head for the surface immediately?
B. Swim deeper into the jellyfish school, putting them between yourself and the shark?
C. Punch it in the brain?





ANSWER: C






SCENARIO:
You have discovered an old shipwreck at the bottom of the sea. Furthermore, the tortured souls of the deceased pirate crew still haunt the waters surrounding the vessel. Do you...
A. Go back to the surface and attempt to find a qualified sorcerer or priest to perform an exorcism and lay their souls to rest?
B. Attempt to communicate with the ghosts and see why they are still here?
C. Punch them in the brain?





ANSWER: C








SCENARIO:
A number of friendly robots have been hacked and reprogrammed by a supervillain of unknown origin. The robots are recoverable and extremely valuable, but also very hostile. Do you...
A. Subdue the robots long enough to reboot them and eliminate the hostile programming?
B. Attempt to harmlessly deactivate the robots and move them to an area where robotics experts can examine them?
C. Punch them in the brain?




ANSWER: C








SCENARIO:
While deep-sea diving for ancient Lemurian artifacts, a massive construct you had assumed deactivated suddenly begins to move. Do you...
A. Watch the construct and see what it does?
B. Radio for help and retreat to a safe distance until more divers arrive?
C. Punch it in the brain?





ANSWER: C








SCENARIO:
An ancient race of psychic extradimensional worms has been discovered in a tunnel deep beneath the surface of the earth. One among them has crafted himself a robotic suit and come to the surface world, vowing to enslave it as his ancestors once did eons ago. Do you...
A. Speak to the creature, convincing it that the world has changed and that your two peoples can live in peace without the need for conquest?
B. Collapse the tunnel, sealing the worms deep beneath the earth once more?
C. Punch it in the brain?





ANSWER: C







SCENARIO:
While patrolling an area near the graveyard at night, you come upon a vampire attempting to drain a living victim of blood. It is common knowledge that vampires are vulnerable only to sunlight, holy water, garlic, decapitation, fire, or having a stake driven through their hearts. Do you...
A. Distract the vampire long enough for the victim to get to safety, and then retreat?
B. Use your powers and your wits to create a flame of some kind to drive back or destroy the vampire?
C. Punch it in the brain?





ANSWER: C








SCENARIO:
A nether-demon has imprisoned the soul of a dead superhero and plans to release him at the head of an unstoppable zombie army to destroy the city. Do you...
A. Assemble an army of heroes to stand against the zombies?
B. Research a counter-spell to release the soul of the dead hero and work together to take down the demon?
C. Punch it in the brain?





ANSWER: C





Take a breather, you're almost done. In this final section, we will cover what to do in the event of large-scale, potentially catastrophic scenarios.





SCENARIO:


An ancient and powerful frost-spirit has been released from it's frozen tomb and has vowed to bring another ice age to the world of men. Do you...
A. Hurry to re-seal the tomb as quickly as possible, hopefully trapping the spirit once again?
B. Try to convince the frost-spirit that the world has changed and that his shadowy influence is no longer needed?
C. Punch it in the brain?





ANSWER: C




SCENARIO:


An enormous robot the size of a skyscraper has appeared in a heavily populated urban area and is launching an all-out assault on the city. Dozens of superheroes have banded together to stop the robot, but so far even their combined efforts have been futile. Do you...
A. Go in search of more allies to bolster the superheroes forces and give them an edge in the battle?
B. Go to the military and convince them to call in airstrikes against the gargantuan machine?
C. Punch it in the brain?





ANSWER: C








SCENARIO:


An immensely powerful renegade archangel has broken with the heavens and made a pact with the half-demon tribe of lost angels known as the nephilim to bring about the prophesied end of the world and ultimate destruction of all of creation. They have headquartered themselves in a church torn free from the earth and suspended several hundred feet in a bleeding sky, impaled on a pillar of light stretching all the way from hell to heaven above. Do you...
A. Research this prophecy and all of the players involved in hopes of finding a loophole or some way to stop the prophesied end of creation?
B. Travel to the far corners of the world assembling an army of the most powerful and knowledgeable heroes and villains in the world to unite against the forces of the apocalypse?
C. Punch it in the brain?





ANSWER: C





Thank you. This concludes our test.

If you answered anything but C. you may not be cut out for the "flying brick" school of superheroing. Also, you're a pansy.