Sewer Surfin'

Am I the only one who still hears the level's song whenever I hear that phrase? No? Alright, then.

The second I slip through the vents I fall about twenty feet and land in a cavernously large room that could comfortably house approximately eight families. These, I suppose, are the Millennium City Sewers. Fortunately, there are a lot of good hiding spots where I can wait and see who comes to pick up the money drop. Even more fortunately, I can hear them coming already, no less than half a second after I've breached their sewer. What luck!


Rather than a wallet, however, a pair of comically large sacks emblazoned with giant black money signs come tumbling down from the vent above. This flower company apparently not only considers a full disguise a standard-issue uniform, but it's employees carry their money around not in wallets or even in cash boxes, but in giant sacks the size of my torso. I'm more suspicious of the flower company than ever before, but resolve to put off my investigation into their nefarious activities until after I've dealt with this extortion problem.

Moments after hefting the bags, though, they spot me, presumably because I'm highly reflective and standing upright less than a dozen feet away behind a pile of garbage half my height. The chase is on! They lead me through a quarter mile of ludicrously oversized tunnels and enormous subterranean rooms, making no effort whatsoever to disguise their path as dozens of other gang members in their assorted purple uniforms are simply standing around down here and move to stop me. I get shot approximately three hundred times, but if we're being perfectly honest I barely even notice.


At this point I'm fairly certain that sustained fire from a gatling gun would feel more or less like a shower head with a massage setting used to, and these poor guys with pistols can't really injure me at all.



So naturally I walk up and exchange blows with them as if we're on anything approaching equal footing, causing severe and horrific tissue damage and internal bleeding if not subsequent death. Super heroic!


Eventually, I come upon a guy in a purple suit telling a little guy and Steven Seagal to close a big steel door behind him, warning that I'm coming. By name.


How the heck does he know my name? I shouldn't even be known in Millennium City; all I've done so far is beat up some guys in the park, and I didn't tell any of them my name. It's possible that the news mentioned what I did in the desert or Canada or something, but even then, I've completely pulverized (Rehabilitated!) every poor sod who's seen me since I came down here, so they shouldn't even have a description of me, much less my name. ... Unless...

Socrates! It's the one that sent me down here, claiming it had information from an "anonymous caller". It's the one that sent me down here to investigate some simple wallet-stealing, only to find a labyrinthine subterranean tomb filled to bursting with assassins and with no possible way to get help. I've walked right into a trap!


Thankfully, I'm significantly tougher than I used to be; probably significantly tougher than Socrates has calculated. I won't be dying down here today. But what to do about Socrates...?

One thing at a time, I suppose. Best to play dumb for now... if I play my hand too soon, there's no telling what Socrates could do to the city and the people in it before I've managed to completely dismantle it's network. Best if I collect more evidence and get some other superheroes in on this first. The Champions are pretty useless, but if I can convince Ironclad, he might know some others we could bring in. I could talk to some of those ludicrously optimized arena heroes that handed El Fierro his ass a couple nights ago to like, net or hold or freeze or in some other way immobilize Socrates' network and then run away. If I can get in contact with Chief Surhoff he'll probably be able to help come up with a plan, and that POW from the desert would probably be able to handle any job I have for him if I can find him again. Maybe get Justiciar to monitor the radio or something and tell him that's really important. Yeah, this could work, I've just got to play play dumb for now and hope Socrates' death traps don't get significantly more effective.

Oh, right, the purple guys. I guess I killed both of them while I was thinking about what to do with Socrates. The genius has the door code written on a piece of paper in his pocket, so I manage to bypass that particular security layer pretty quickly and find myself in a big room with a ladder up to the surface. Aw, hell. Did the guys with the bags get away? I have a feeling Defender won't be satisfied with the dozen or so dead ones scattered throughout the sewer behind me. ... In fact, I probably shouldn't tell him about them at all, come to think of it. Up the ladder I go!













I come out in a generic shady-looking warehouse of some kind. Or at least, it looks that way at first glance, but I find that it's architecture is actually a bizarre maze of rectangular storage rooms connected seemingly at random by long hallways that seem to leave a vast majority of the floorspace either walled-off or completely filled in with brick. The place seems to be filled mostly with cardboard boxes and assorted tanks of explosives. Yikes.

Oh, and more Purple Gang thugs, I should have expected that. I decide to punch one of the exploding tanks for no other reason than because it seems like something a superhero would do, and voila! The thugs go down from the intense heat and pressure of the explosion, and I remain completely unscathed but for a new layer of burn on my jean-rags, which are becoming sort of like a medal sash for the various horrible deaths I've shrugged off. Onward!


Finally, I make it to the security console. Which, I guess, was a goal? That I didn't know about? I can use it to shut down their security system, though, which sounds worth doing. It's mere presence sort of alarms me, as it means they probably have video of me casually strutting through the sewer and whistling while breaking the limbs and organs of their friends, but at least now they won't have any MORE incriminating footage of me. Little victories are still victories.


I'm just pondering whether or not they'd be able to sue for excessive force when every shot should show them discharging deadly weapons at me first, and whether the fact that said deadly weapons are entirely nonlethal in my case would hurt an aggravated assault in self-defense plea, when Defender hails me over whatever weird ear implant thing I have.

Apparently this whole time I've been wading through liquid feces and being shot at repeatedly, Defender's just been chilling by the front door waiting for somebody to unlock it. Now that I've done that for him, he's actually willing to help me take care of this gang problem of his and not mine. Hooray!

Well, at least he's looking cooler than the last time I teamed up with him, somehow. Armor upgrade, I guess? Maybe got an anti eat-shit-in-the-first-five-seconds-of-a-fight-and-not-get-back-up device? We'll see, I suppose. I prepare to do absolutely everything by myself and continue forward.

The random goons I run into in the hallways seem to be getting more varied as I make my way through the bizarrely mazelike warehouse. In addition to a few more Purple Gang members, I run into some more bikers like the ones I beat up in the park, and then at one point a colorful squad of 80's movie ninjas. What the heck is up with this warehouse?


Finally, I come out of the twisting hallways into a giant storage room that seems to have been rigged up like some kind of council chamber. Some tables are arranged in a circle, each one of which has some shady-looking guys in oddly thematic costumes sitting at it. I see purple gang members, bikers, what look like punk rockers but might also be clowns, and mimes. They're all sitting listening to a speech from a man in a dress who seems to be making fun of Chinese people with a clearly caricaturish accent and an extended joke about how Asians have trouble with L's.

No, seriously.


It takes me a few minutes to realize that this isn't some bizarre back-alley comedy show but a legitimate criminal gathering. The guy making fun of Asians is also talking about uniting the Westside gangs in the wake of the Qularr attack that's significantly weakened the Millennium City Police Department's ability to effectively control crime in the area. By the looks of it, he's got at least five oddly thematic gangs at least partially convinced. I've got to warn Surhoff!

The racist comedian seems to finally notice me and panics for some reason. With a snap of his fingers, he disappears in a puff of smoke along with several of the people sitting at the centers of the tables, presumably the leaders of the various gangs. From across the room, I can see Defender charging into the crowd, the members of which have already turned on each other and are descending into a chaotic brawl. Time to go to work, I guess!


My main problem at this point is how to gently take these guys down without accidentally crippling any of them. I mean, it's all well and good out on my own when they're actively trying to kill me, but it seems like the objective here would be making arrests, and the leader of the Champions is staring right at me. I'll have to be really careful to use the bare minimum amount of force necessary to-


WAS THAT A GODDAMN MISSILE?!?

Defender definitely just shot an unarmed man in the chest with a missile from a launcher that just popped out of his shoulder.

"Hey... listen, man, I get that we're outnumbered, but do you have to..."

He doesn't seem to hear me, and continues gleefully cutting down the fist and knife wielding gangsters with some kind of cutting laser and a minigun. I kind of just stand there. I don't really know what I'm seeing.

Most of his friends dead, one of the brightly colored ninja guys flees, noticing me and running towards me with pleading eyes, for protection, for a hostage, for answers, I don't know. He doesn't reach me, though. Defender unloads several dozen rounds from a shoulder-based minigun into the small of the fleeing, unarmed man's back, so close to me that I'm spattered with blood.


Wh... what the... I don't... What...

Defender struts over to me and nonchalantly discusses our next move, not even addressing the dozen people he's just murdered, some in cold blood.


Right... sure. Nip it in the bud. Gotcha.

He tells me to meet up with someone named Kodiak in Westside. Kodiak, like, the town in Alaska, I guess? I'm not really sure. I can't think. I step over a dead man, unsuccessfully trying to avoid touching the widening puddle of blood underneath him. Air, I need air. I stumble to the door and throw it open.


I'm in a warehouse district in a bad part of town, the clear blue sky a little pale with haze. Away to the left is the giant wall that keeps the Renaissance Center, home of the rich and the super-powerful, separated from the living spaces of the poor. I take several deep breaths, trying to clear the coppery smell of blood from my palate. Right. Kodiak. Nip gang alliance in the bud. Save the MCPD.

I've seen how Defender acts when confronted with a superior foe, and I've seen how he acts when confronted with weaker ones. He'll probably be impossible to avoid altogether, but I think I'm done taking orders from that particular superhero-cum-war criminal.

Let's see what this Alaskan person's all about.

UP NEXT: A Marginally Less Horrific Alliance!

Back to the "action"!

At last, our hero Iron Will makes good on his promise to the heroic Defender to go and bother people in the park! Action! Adventure!

Okay, so as an official I'm-not-sure-what-my-job-title-is, my first job is to go and bother suspicious-looking characters in the park for the leader of the world's premier superhero team, who's too busy standing in the middle of the sidewalk about a quarter mile away to do it himself. Fair enough, I suppose, I'm the new guy. Let's get this done.


I'm not really familiar with the various gangs at large in Millennium City, but judging by the matching vests and the fact that one of them has no fewer than ten knives clearly visible on his person, I'm guessing Defender means these guys. They're kind of just hanging out in the park at night minding their own business, but I suppose I might as well do as I'm told and question them.

I approach one in as non-threatening a manner as possible. "Excuse me..." says I.


He immediately stabs me with a combat knife while his buddy starts shooting me in the chest with some sort of a large calibur handgun, both resulting in an anticlimactic series of metallic clinking sounds.


Now, I consider myself a relatively patient person in general, but their use of deadly force in lieu of a "hello" back has brought me around to Defender's way of thinking in regards to these particular citizens hanging out in the neighborhood park. What if KIDS were playing here, man? Some kids die when you shoot them ONCE!

So I go about bludgeoning everybody I see with a certain kind of vest on to death with weighted steel fists. Superheroically.


About half a dozen utterly one-sided clobberings later, they finally deign to talk to me.


Huh. So apparently, some guy I've never heard of told them to back up some guys in purple against cops or superheroes.

My keen detective mind is sensing a clue here. Having had no idea what the other gang might look like until a few seconds ago, I wander through the park in search of some guys in purple, and find them over by the fountain, again mostly minding their own business.

Once again, I'm treated to an alarmingly sudden attempt on my life.


Several minutes of ineffective gun violence and horrifically effective fisticuffs later, the purple gang agrees to give me the time of day too.


Once again, somebody I've never heard of has told these guys to come here and not fight with the bikers. Near as I can tell, this means approximately squat.

The important thing to focus on, though, is that I, not unlike Batman, have successfully beaten up bad guys and intimidated them into giving me information. Swaggering a little, I head over to the nearest Socrates terminal to report my findings.

Socrates claims that it has information from an anonymous caller that the Purple Gang, which is apparently the gang's real, chosen name, is extorting money from the local vendors in the park. Naturally, they're careful never to do so when a police officer or superhero is around, so they don't have any hard evidence. What Socrates suggests I do is disguise myself and see if I can get them to do something illegal in front of me.

I have my suspicions. First, an anonymous call doesn't seem like a very trustworthy source, and second, Socrates doesn't seem like a very trustworthy source. Still, I did just spend the last ten minutes in open warfare with these guys and came out of it with nary a scratch, so I suppose that in the worst case scenario I'll be discovered and shot at ineffectually. Fair enough! I head back across the street to the park to see about finding a disguise.

"I need your clothes, your boots, and your flower cart."

I talk to one of the flower vendors across the street and ask if I can borrow a uniform. He tells me that he has a family and a business to think of. I insist I'll protect him. He says the gang members know where he lives. I tell him that's almost certainly a bluff. Finally, he agrees to give me a spare uniform so that these guys will rough me up, too. Score!

I was expecting a simple vest and hat, but bizarrely, the uniform comes complete with pants, shoes, a wig, and enough Caucasian skin-toned makeup to cover every inch of exposed skin. I um... I have no idea what this flower company is about, but I'm fairly certain that I'll have to start investigating them almost immediately after I'm done investigating the purple gang. But either way, it's one of the most undeniably effective disguises I've ever seen when I'm done.


I certainly wouldn't recognize me.

Almost as soon as I get back to the park, one of the guys in the purple suits waves me over, calling me "new guy". Here we go!

He tells me to put my profits in my wallet and walk over the sewer grate to the west of the fountain, then to drop my wallet. And, of course, to remember that he knows where I live.

Alright, that's all the clue I need. I haul off and cave in his sternum with a right hook, and somehow in the process not only tear my new uniform to shreds but also slough off every inch of makeup I'd so carefully applied earlier.


See, this is why I can't have nice things.

Alright, that done, I head over for to the fountain and look for this sewer grate. I figure if I can squeeze through it (or, more likely, smash through it) and wait at the bottom, then I should be able to find out who's been collecting all this money. Brilliant plan, if I do say so myself. Just as I'm about to pry up the grate, though, I get a call from Defender.


... Oh. Good. Defender's coming with. That'll make this way less annoying.

I sigh, plug my nose, and drop down into the sewers beneath Millennium City. It's all for a good cause, I keep telling myself.

Up Next: Showdown in the sewer! Good enough for the ninja turtles, good enough for me.

Distractions

More Iron Will coming soon (probablymaybe) as I'm finally done, as of about thirty seconds ago, with grad school applications. Still gotta go to Kinkos, photocopy some manuscripts, send some pre-addressed envelopes and letters to some recommenders, but by and large I should have significantly more free time this coming month than this last month.

In the meanwhile, two superheroes-in-video-games related things have happened.

ONE, the famous (or at least it used to be) MMORPG City Of Heroes has gone free to play after more than seven years running.

TWO, the wishes-it-was-famous MMORPG D.C. Universe Online has gone free to play after... erm, nearly ten months running.

At first, I figured I'd try them both. I'd already played City Of Heroes a few years back, and only really stopped because the subscription price wasn't worth the amount I was playing, so I knew it was at least entertaining. At just under four gigabytes, the download took most of a day on my connection, but it wasn't anything I couldn't handle.

DC Universe Online, on the other hand, wants a whopping 30 gigabytes of hard drive space, which not only would take my connection about a week to finish, but would require that I delete every other game that I have and probably a decent chunk of my music too. So, for that reason, I didn't get around to trying DCUO until I was at one of my friends' houses who already had it. More on that later.

My short-for-the-sake-of-short review of City Of Heroes is...! I forgot how very slow this game is.

That's really the only bad thing I can say about it. The character creation isn't as good as Champions', but it's also five years older, and it's still pretty damn good. The graphics aren't great but aren't terrible either, and it animates smoothly, which is more important than detail level, personal opinion. I was a little annoyed that I had to choose a class to pigeonhole my guy's roll into, but again, that's pretty much industry standard for MMO's and it's only because I'm used to the freedom of Champions character creator that I found it constrictive.

But when you actually get into the game and start playing, everything slows down. I logged back in on my old Centurion and spent the better part of an hour working my way through a single warehouse and beating up maybe twenty guys.


See, City of Heroes' combat system is based entirely on cooldowns. You have an array of moves... how many depends on your level, in Centurion's case about five... that you click to activate, no real surprises there. And then they go grey until the cooldown wears off. The thing is, you can go through all five before the first one has cooled down, and the ones that do a respectable amount of damage take four or five times longer. We're talking literally ten or fifteen seconds, here.

Not only that, but there's an energy bar that using your powers eats up. A lot of games have the same thing, of course, but unlike Champions or the rage bar in World Of Warcraft, though, the energy bar doesn't replenish itself when you use your "regular" moves. You literally run out and have to sit there and wait for it to fill up enough to hit the guy again. So even when the cooldown of your decent move is over, sometimes you can't use it if you've been doing anything but waiting in the meanwhile. This effectively limited me to fighting one enemy at a time, or two weak ones, because otherwise the majority of the fight would be spent waiting to build up the nerve to punch them while they just ineffectually flailed at my head.

On top of that, the HP damage of your powers is pitiful. The Centurion, here, is level 28. The level cap, I believe, is 50, so he's mid-range by this point. Most of his powers still do less than ten HP of damage, and the average opponent has north of 200 HP. He has some better ones that do 30 or 40, but those are the ones with the ten second cooldowns. So what you wind up with is a comedically slow-paced fight in which two guys square off against each other... one an invincible flying superhero, the other a low-level enforcer in the mob... and punch each other every three or four seconds until finally, after being hit a dozen or so times, the regular human guy folds.

Now, maybe not an enforcer for the mob, but I can bring a guy down in a dozen solid punches to his vitals IN REAL LIFE. With the super power of ten push-ups every morning. Presumably this sort of combat system would work in some sort of boxing match MMO, but I felt less superheroic playing this superhero game than I do after replacing a flat tire.

Although the flight's nice. You seem to fly significantly faster in City Of Heroes than in either Champions or DC Universe Online, which, while not enough to make the game entertaining on it's own, is a pretty important ingredient.

Anyway, I tried my best to make an Iron Will in the City Of Heroes costume editor, but it just doesn't look right. Here he is chilling with The Statesman.


But he's shiny! He's shiny like Will. That's something.


And here he is waiting around for his next chance to punch one of the alien circulatory system guys. It'll be about two more seconds.

So, while I did like City Of Heroes back in the day, it struck me as insufferably slow this time around, for whatever reason. Maybe I just don't have the attention span that I used to and the concept of playing the same mission in a video game for an hour is more repugnant than it used to be, but I can't really picture a non half-asleep/baked state of mind where I'd want to focus on this.

So, I moved the desktop icon into my "half-asleep/baked" folder and set my sights on DCUO.

The character creator in DCUO is oddly less impressive than either of the others (the others being Champions and City of Heroes) but still a few steps up from the "pick your face, pick your hair" ones that many MMOs get by on. The way they organize your options is really irritating, though. Like, for a male hero, you really only have three body types: giant hunchbacked monster, vaguely human, and creepy alien/cartoon child. However, since they don't let you alter their dimensions manually at all, they give you large, medium, and small options for each, making it appear as if you have nine body types to choose from. The problem persists in the details sections: you can't, for example, select a beard and select dreadlocks, you have to scroll down through afro, afro with sideburns, afro with goatee, afro with beard, afro with soul patch, crew cut, crew cut with sideburns, crew cut with goatee... until you get to "dreadlocks with a beard" some forty redundant options down.

They also only let you have three colors for your entire costume, and then you get to pick which costume pieces get which color. On the one hand, it makes for good looking matching color schemes whether you could have made one on your own or not, but on the other hand, let me make my goofy rainbow character if I want to, game.

Nevertheless, while more limited than either other superhero MMO, it had more or less the costume parts I was looking for to remake The Centurion, and while it wasn't quite as close to the mark as his Champions incarnation, he still looked pretty badass.


Alas, there were no options for a non-comedically-small-head other than the one where he looked like an alien, but overall I'm pretty happy with the look, allowing for most games' disheartening lack of corinthian helmets.

The power selection was also disappointing. Like really, really disappointing. There are only five powers to choose from, and they all seem to be some variety of "shoot energy in various directions and patterns" powers. I could be an ice guy, a fire guy, a magic guy, a nature guy (the animation had vines whipping around, which could be kinda cool but totally doesn't fit) and a gadgets guy, and that was it. Super Strength, by far the most common superpower in the entire DC Universe and the primary power of more than half the Justice League... isn't an option. So for some dumb reason, The Centurion had fire powers. I rolled my eyes, changed his backstory to being a newly-powered Centurion cosplayer rather than the Centurion himself, and went with it.

Problem is, I couldn't name him Centurion. Or The Centurion. In City Of Heroes I had to make do with "The.Centurion", but in DCUO that's illegal. No punctuation, no extra spaces, no creative ways around the fact that there's only one server (well, two, one for pve and one for pvp) on which every decent name has been taken for months. After several minutes of intentional misspellings and then even different names I made up on the spot, all of which (including "Allthegoodnamesaretaken") were taken, I just named him AGLKJSF so I could play the damn game. That wasn't his original random jumble of letters name, of course... ASDFG was taken.

DCUO starts out, like City of Heroes and Champions before it, with an alien invasion. I dunno, it's an easy way to get everyone going, I guess. 'Cept in this one it's Brainiac, and you've already been abducted, and have to fight your way out of a ship by repeatedly clicking with your mouse.

That's kinda where it loses me. See, DCUO is pretty obviously designed for a console controller. Running around with the left stick while mashing the A and B buttons to repeatedly punch the bad guys is the kinda thing that I'm used to on a console, but repeatedly clicking the left and right mouse buttons seems more obnoxious. Add to that the lack of auto targeting and the fact that the enemies move around a lot, and you have to drag the mouse to keep facing them while at the same time clicking both mouse buttons over and over again. It would work with a little joystick and separate buttons, but it's mostly aggravating with a mouse. None of the enemies were terribly challenging, so I still made it through, but I spent most of my time re-aiming AGLKJSF at the enemy units rather than punching them.

Then Superman busts in and helps rescue you from the ship, though, and you feel a little bit better about everything.


This is a particularly proud moment for me, as The Centurion's first mission ever, written in a spiral-bound notebook at the tender young age of seven, I think, involved him fighting back-to-back with Superman against kryptonite-wielding robots. Th...The fact that they had kryptonite weaponry meant that Superman needed help from a non-kryptonian superhero, see! The Centurion always had comparable strength and speed to Superman, but his lack of heatvision, freezebreath, x-ray vision, etc. put him clearly behind the Man Of Steel in any legitimate contest of skill. Even back then I knew it was lame to try to one-up established protagonists.

If Captain Marvel had burst in within the next couple seconds, I would have deleted my other stuff and downloaded this game immediately. (The three operated as a trio at least twice, see.) Alas, he did not.


Back in Metropolis, the graphics continued to impress, and I admit that I spent a good ten minutes flying around the city whilst looping John Williams' Superman Theme, but the combat controls were just too awkward, and I couldn't get past the fact that The Centurion's... pardon me, AGLKJSF's... main attack was a burst of flame.

I think the game could have some potential, mind, with a different approach. Namely, a console controller and a desire to play an energy-projecting character. I'd have tried it out with a few different characters if it had been my own computer, and tried to get used to the constant clicking while trying to reorient with the mouse. But, coming in with a specific character concept in mind, it was quite disappointing.

The costume editor did allow for a decent Iron Will, though.


Not quite as good as the Champions one, due largely to the weird torso anatomy (not optional, thereby not my fault, remember!) and limited clothing options, but pretty close, I think. And gave me an excuse to check out the other starting city, Gotham.



... Coooool...

Anyway, next week or two, back to Champions. Unless something unforeseen comes up with all the paperwork. So probably. Maybe. Possibly.

...


... -DA D'D'D'DAAA, DA-DA-DAAAAA!

Descent Into The Night Club Scene

I'm not sure just yet, but it appears as if Cryptic has fixed whatever issue was making the launcher fail to load every time and I can play the game again! Either that or one of my random little computer tweaks somehow made the stars align just right so that it would work again. Either way! Where were we?


A superhero nightclub, eh? Well that's a uniquely Millennium City bit of nightlife culture. I decide to go check it out.


... Maybe I'm a bit underdressed for this.

I head back to the tailor standing all of thirty feet behind me to see if I can't get some clubwear. The tailor's selection is amazing! She's got full suits, ties, vests, formalwear, businesswear, business casual, etcetera... there's clothing here for every occasion...!

... I realize about halfway through picking out an outfit that I really only have enough money for a new shirt or new pants.

Considering that my current pants are the same shredded pair of jeans that ice demons have gnawed on, mutants have microwaved, a building has collapsed on top of, and have been within a quarter mile of a nuclear explosion, I figure that they won't really go with any new shirts I could pick out and opt for a new pair of pants and some actual shoes instead. I don't really get cold since I turned into metal anyway.

Avoiding the eyes of the customer behind me, who would just happen to be the best dressed man in Millennium City and seems visibly offended by my very presence, I wander back over to the nightclub, hoping that the bouncers will let me in as I'm in half compliance with the shoes and shirts required rule.


SUCCESS!

So I'm standing in an intentionally dimly lit hallway leading up to a large poster of the same woman whose picture appears above the door, presumably Caprice herself. The hallway seems to branch in two directions, one towards a lounge and one towards a dance floor.


Well, I'm here, might as well check out both!
Club Caprice has two main areas, a crimson-colored lounge with a fountain, and a large dance floor with two bars. There's a significant aesthetic difference between the two, but mechanically, neither one has anything special going on. Both exist primarily as empty spaces in which players can interact with each other, and both contain a smattering of NPC characters who will talk amongst themselves or dance, depending on the room.


There's really nothing to do in either room except talk with other players, which can be fairly entertaining or entirely dull depending on the night. Sometimes there are friendly people around who want to get into an in-character conversation for the diversion, and sometimes there are a bunch of people standing around mostly silent or small groups of friends talking amongst themselves and largely ignoring the room. In my experience, most of the time it's the latter. And of course, if you show up as a female, more people will talk to you, but that's kinda just weird. ... So, in other words, they've done a nearly perfect job of recreating the experience of going to a bar or dance club by yourself in real life. Nicely done, Cryptic!


Well evidently being made out of metal doesn't make it any easier to make friends at a nightclub than before, or at least not a nightclub that caters specifically to superheroes. I have a few drinks and wind up dancing a while on the dance floor near some other folks, but I start feeling awkward and leave after a little bit. I might have better luck in a club where a living statue is the most interesting thing to walk in in a given half-hour period, but this is not that place.

Alright, back out into the fresh air. The night's still young, after all, and there's no reason to spend it all being awkward in the corner of some dance club. Besides, I keep thinking there was something I was supposed to do.

... Oh, right. Save the world from dastardly park strollers.

I suppose I'm all out of excuses to procrastinate this any longer. Time to go be obnoxious to some guys that haven't done anything yet, I guess.

UP NEXT: This superhero thing is a walk in the park.

On Original Character Concepts: The Cautionary Tale Of Sunspot

On the other hand, there are those rare characters that you think are a totally original concept but which are, entirely unbeknownst to you, actually a complete ripoff of something else. Next to "but it's an homage!" ignorance is probably the single most common excuse for blatant imitations of existing characters, and it seems like nobody ever believes the artist/writer/gamer in question, as the odds against somebody just coincidentally coming up with the exact same idea as an established creator are so very high.

Me, I think it's perfectly likely, at least to a point. As I mentioned a few days ago, there are at least three characters out there named Ironclad, all of whom are super strong, super durable guys coated in or made out of metal. As the name, originally a class of warship, quite self-evidently means "covered in iron" it's a really intuitive name for a character who's covered in metal and difficult to hurt, which in turn is a fairly basic concept that one could arrive at whether or not they were familiar with other characters that already used said concept. Therefore, if somebody came along and made a character named Ironclad who was super strong and made out of metal, I wouldn't automatically assume that they were copying the Ironclad who appears in Champions Online, for example. A super strong metallic character named Ironclad who was an alien gladiator? Still totally plausible, alien gladiatorial arena's a pretty common trope. A super strong metallic character named Ironclad who was an alien gladiator and got his abilities in an alien lab explosion, escaped, became a gladiator on an entirely different planet, escaped, and crash landed on Earth? Well, okay, that's suspicious, but you see what I mean.

Take me for example. I was making up a character for the Champions Online beta a good two years ago at this point and was sort of brainstorming backgrounds and ideas. It's pretty easy to make a character and just go, but I have this compulsive need to come up with at least a brief backstory or concept to go along with them, if for no other reason than I keep thinking I'm going to make comics someday and I might want to use them, or something.

I thought a solar-powered superhero was a neat idea. Granted, it's been done already; the most famous and arguably the first superhero ever gets his powers from the Earth's yellow sun. And farbeit for me to criticize anything about Superman, but super strength, speed, and invulnerability just didn't seem to be that thematically linked to the sun, to me. Heatvision did, but that was about it. I figured a solar-powered superhero would have more heat or energy related abilities, like the ability to get really hot and melt through things or breathe fire or make things glow or something. And, of course, fly, because any kind of energy projection could be used to propel oneself, and in comic book physics generating sufficient propulsion to beat gravity is only marginally harder than generating enough friction to create heat.

So I had this idea for a character who really only had one ability, to absorb and release sunlight and other ambient energy sources, but which could be used in a number of ways. He'd be jet black from head to foot, not because of a costume but because his skin absorbs all light that touches it, but would look otherwise normal. And instead of food, he'd subsist entirely on photosynthesis, absorbing sunlight all day long and getting some meager sustenance from starlight and indoor lighting at night.

Via some possibly nonexistent science that I don't know and am unwilling to research, he would get energy from the light and radiation of the sun, but would have heat left over as waste, like people suck all the nutrients out of food to turn it into poop. So for a set amount of time each day, he'd have to bleed off that excess junk energy, either by making his skin incredibly hot or by expelling it in a directed blast through his eyes or mouth. Again, via completely made-up science, this would in effect give him a force field (as energy attacks would be absorbed and incoming projectiles would simply vaporize within 0.1 inches of his ludicrously hot skin, see) and laser-esque eyebeams, as well as the occasional ability to breathe fire, melt through things, or fly by shooting jet blasts out behind him or some such. All of which would serve the approximate equivalent biological function of using the bathroom. Brilliant! Thought I.

I figured, as absorbing light takes the place of breathing as well, he'd spend a lot of time in space where there's nothing between him and the sunlight he's absorbing and where he'd be completely invisible if not between the viewer and a star or lighted object, and it would simply be assumed that that's where he was whenever I logged off. If he were to ever have comic adventures or a really in-depth backstory, he'd be doing zany intergalactic explorey things like the Silver Surfer, since he'd be a perfectly efficient engine with an unlimited fuel supply and no practical speed limit, and cosmic radiation and lasers and the like would only feed him. But, all this and he could still be decked by a good punch to the temple, provided he didn't have time to see it coming and raise his heat-shield, of course.

So, I thought this was a really good idea. I went into the character creator and made this, which was pretty much what I had in mind, making the last-minute decision to have his eyes glow, since they were the aperture he'd be shooting his eyebeams through and it would help to give him something at least approaching a face. His mouth would glow too, I figured, if I ever drew him, though there was no option for that in the character creator. But that would at least help to give him an expressive face, and probably make him quite a bit easier to draw in the first place.

Sure, he LOOKED a little evil, but I figured that could just be a part of his story too, that he was all persecuted at first by the general mutant-hating populace who assumed he was a villain just 'cuz of weird cultural prejudices against black costumes and glowing eyes. He wouldn't really have a secret identity because he couldn't ever turn it off, and he wouldn't need a day job or anything because all of his physical needs could be taken care of with eight hours of sunbathing a day. What a great concept, thought I.

The only question was what to name him. I cycled through the obvious ones but didn't like them: Solarman? Sunboy? Solar Shadow? Dark Sun? Darkstar?

I thought of the name Sunspot while I was looking up some of the half-understood science behind his abilities. I wanted it to have something to do with the science of Black Bodies, which not only physically describe him perfectly but seem to be exactly what I was thinking of when I came up with his powers. From Wikipedia: "A black body is an idealized physical body that absorbs all incident electromagnetic radiation. Because of this perfect absorptivity at all wavelengths, a black body is also the best possible emitter of thermal radiation." I mean, that's exactly what I was thinking of, innit?

Well, a quick google search for the term brought up a fair amount of porn, but also the wikipedia article on sunspots, which mentions the black body as part of an explanation for the clear visibility of sunspots as black spots on the sun. That, I thought, was a perfect name, not to mention a really cool phenomenon.

Now, when I hear the term Sunspot, I think of this:


Which is a perfect name for a jet-black solar-based superhero. Sunspot it is, I thought.

So, I name him, choose his powers (Fire and Flight, fits perfectly) and run around as him for maybe twenty minutes before somebody asks if I was the Sunspot from X-Men.

Turns out, there's already a character named Sunspot. Not just that, but he absorbs all of his powers from the sun. Which makes him jet black. Except for his eyes and his mouth.

When I saw the pictures of him, I did remember a jet black character from way back when in an issue of X-Terminators (see him on the right?) that I read when I was about five, but he was just a super strong guy who flew around and was always surrounded by little black bubbles that didn't have anything obvious to do with the sun. Turns out it's the same character, except now they've given him solar blasts which make him pretty much the exact same concept as mine, the main difference being that he can turn back and forth into a regular person and has flying brick powers in addition to the solar blasts. Different, but alas, not really different enough to justify keeping mine around, so away he went.

BUT, I'm happy that a character of mine made it into mainstream comics. By, like, you know. Having been invented by somebody else twenty years before I came up with him.

Point is, give the benefit of the doubt to someone you think is copying something else who insists they don't know what you're talking about. AND. You should always Google your supposedly original concepts before spending too much time on them.

On Original Character Concepts: The Evolution Of Iron Will

Aforementioned technical difficulties remain unresolved. Fortunately, I have enough random screenshots and unrelated images lying around to entertain myself, and possibly you, too!

So a lot of people... and by "a lot of" I mean "two"... have asked me where the idea for Iron Will came from, if he was a Colossus analog or if he was supposed to be the Silver Surfer or what?

The apparently long-awaited answer is: neither! I've had the basic idea for Iron Will for years, but the main inspiration for his look originally came from the Incredible Hulk video game, in which the player, as the titular character, jumps around Manhattan busting through concrete and punching cars around to one end or another. For a based-on-the-movie game, it's actually pretty good, especially considering I picked it up used for about four dollars.

Anyway, during the course of the game you fight quite a few enemies, among them a quartet of evildoers more or less equivalent to the Fantastic Four known as the U-Foes. One of them is a big bruiser type with the approximate dimensions of The Hulk whose name I didn't know at the time, and after you beat them (or fulfill some other obscure requirements, I don't remember exactly) you can unlock him as a skin for the Hulk and run around town busting through skyscrapers as a big chrome ogre rather than a big fleshy green ogre. Now, I love the Hulk... gimmicky alternate forms and multiple personalities notwithstanding... but something about running around breaking through buildings as a solid metal guy just felt better. To me, it was more intuitive; of COURSE he can run right through concrete, he's made out of harder stuff. It just looked better.

So really, this guy is the primary inspiration for Iron Will, or at least for his appearance. I didn't know anything about the character himself or his backstory or anything like that until a good while later, having assumed he was simply a throwaway bad guy designed for the video game rather than a character in the larger Marvel universe.

As it turns out, his name is Ironclad. No relation.

The main difference is, I never really intended to make a brute so much as a normal (ish) guy who had been transformed, so the proportions are totally different. And of course, ol' Iron Will doesn't have an Iron Costume or any of the involved accessories. His transformation didn't magically extend to his underwear.

So, the look of Iron Will is basically this guy, slimmed down, with clothes on. Not an entirely original visual concept, admittedly, but metallic characters are a well-used trope, and I couldn't come up with anything that was entirely original without going completely random or goofy.

And, as it turned out, somebody else had had nearly the exact same idea at some point and made another Ironclad that was much more like the design for Iron Will anyway:


Also from Marvel and also named Ironclad, this Ironclad was slimmed down, given clothes, and more or less the exact same visual concept as Iron Will except with metallic hair. If I'd known about him a year ago I probably would have scrapped the Iron Will idea altogether and gone with something else entirely, but I didn't, and I like mine better, so he stays.

Like Colossus, this Ironclad changed back and forth from a human to a metal form. I'd never heard of this guy before, but that was always something that bugged me, if just a little, about Colossus. I've always been a fan of the X-Men, see, owing largely to the 90's cartoon when I was in elementary school, and I always thought that the most compelling characters were the ones whose mutations were significant hindrances as well as advantages.

Most of the characters go on and on about how difficult it is to be a mutant, but few of the characters demonstrate it. Wolverine, for example, heals incredibly quickly, which may SOUND like an advantage in life, but on the downside he's also really strong and has an enhanced sense of smell. Storm, on the other hand, can control the goddamn weather, which might seem like nothing but a huge benefit at first, but you have to keep in mind that she's also really really attractive. Sure, Iceman can generate armor, control cold, and build potentially unlimited constructs out of ice, but when he's not covered in ice he's merely a regular person of exceptional physical fitness who can blend in with normal people anywhere.

Nah, my favorites were the disadvantaged ones like Beast, Rogue, or the under-appreciated Cyclops. You get strength and agility but you don't ever look human again, or the ability to steal other characters powers but never touch another human being, or Superman-esque eyebeams which carry the significant hindrance of never being able to look at anything with the naked eye without destroying it. Those were the interesting ones.

Long story short, I thought Colossus would have been a much more interesting character if he couldn't just drop his mutant form with all it's advantages and disadvantages whenever it was convenient and go back to being a regular human being. Like so many of Xavier's students, why a man whose unusual powers didn't come with any downsides had any need of instruction at a special school for mutants is beyond me.

Anyway, I made up a character in my head that was a super-strong, nigh-invulnerable human made out of fluid metal, but who could never turn back, and would need to hide himself when not among friends. To make him at least a little different, I'd originally conceived him as having normal tissues but invincible liquid gold blood that would tint his skin and make him invulnerable to any damage more than skin deep, but leave him feeling as soft and flexible as a regular person. I later tossed that idea when it occurred to me that non-rigid golden blood wouldn't protect his other tissues at all and that he would probably die just as fast from golden internal bleeding as regular. I usually pictured a blond guy with golden skin, more or less like the male Oracle from "Angel".


At the time, his name was "Golden Rod". I thought this was hilarious, but when I got a bit older I realized how few people are named Rodney these days and how much more likely it was that people would assume it was a dick joke.

I didn't give it a whole lot of thought, and it's not real similar to what I eventually wound up going with, but hey, I was maybe twelve. I also figured that he would be able to go outside in the daytime by wearing sweatshirts with hoods and that nobody would notice that he wasn't normal. The concept's come a long way since then... although, if we're being honest, there isn't all that much to Iron Will beyond "basically a nice guy who gets turned into metal" so I suppose I can't really say it's come a long way so much as that it's simply changed a lot.

Long story short, he has nothing to do with the Silver Surfer. He doesn't even look much like the comic version, which is what I think of when I hear the name, but the version from the movies does bear an admittedly close resemblance.


















... You'll just have to take my word for it.

Technical difficulties

Now, I have a fair amount of respect for Cryptic. They've put out some really good games, own the rights to some really serious franchises, and have pretty dedicated gaming communities investing a lot of time in their games. They still tend to be trailing competitors in MMO popularity and population, though, and I think one of the reasons why is that their tech support is frankly horrible.

Their recent patch has made the game quite unplayable for a number of users, myself among them, for about a week and a half due to a series of errors that prevent the launcher from loading, and despite a sizeable outcry on the forums, they've yet to resolve or even acknowledge this issue.

Their patches tend to come in pairs: there'll be a big one introducing some new feature or item, and then a few days later another one to repair all the glaring problems that the first one caused, but this is a more severe problem than most in the past have been, and it's taking them a long while to fix it.

Anyway, I haven't been on Champions for a while, but I assure you that this blog is still active. Just currently experiencing some technical difficulties.

Meanwhile, I've made an entry for Iron Will over on the Primus Database. The Primus Database is a fun little wiki for in-game heroes and villains that I forgot existed. A quick browse-through gives a pretty good impression of some of the more active members of Champions RP-community, and it's a pretty good read, personal opinion.