[What really happens when heroes and villains interact? In Champions Online, we don’t have the opportunity to chat with our adversaries. There’s some random speech bubbles and the occasional monologing cut-scene, but no real dialogue.]

…

“I’m not a super-villain.”

“You have a lair.”

“I have a lab.”

“It’s hidden in a deserted warehouse.”

“The lease was cheap.”

“It has security cameras and electrified doors.”

“In this neighborhood? I should think so.”

“It has multi-level interior defenses, including pit traps, gas bombs, and little flying robots with lasers.”

“I like my privacy.”

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Lane Carter didn’t think much of Supers. Heroes were chumps; villains were creeps. So what’s a girl to do when an alien death-ray backfires, granting her super-speed and super-strength? She managed to keep the strength a secret for a while, but after the incident with the baby and the tiger cage, her speed gained her fifteen minutes of unwelcome fame.

Okay, so she got a nice writeup in the papers, and a big thank-you from the parents, but she also had to register with the feds, listen to boring speeches about Responsibility, deal with the suck-ups who insisted they’d always been her Best Friends, and learn to cope with the Internet. The bloggers were only a brief annoyance, and the way-too-personal edits to her Superpedia page were quickly reverted by the editors, but the basement-dwelling mouth-breather who called her “Fast Lane” and wrote hardcore lesbian “team-up” stories was too much. She thought his scooter looked much nicer as an ashtray.

Once they found out about her strength, the recruiters showed up:

• "Join your 'team' and fight for justice? How about 'no'?"
• "Become your 'henchman' and help you take over the world? Is your stupidity contagious?"
• "Be your sidekick? Oh, come on, did your Mom make that outfit?"
• "You want to give me 'special training' and a 'unique costume'? Put it back in your pants, creep."

The worst part was that she liked her new powers. She could explore the City any time of the day or night, zipping past terrorists, gangsters, aliens, and creepy middle-aged men without being noticed, and if someone did try to mess with her, well, a girl who can toss an SUV like a softball only gets hassled once.

If only there were some legal, rational way to use them to make a decent living…

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…this weekend, anyway. Champions Online is offering people a chance to try their game out for free, from 10am Friday through 10am Monday. If I weren’t already playing, I’d start.

Even with the bugs, imbalances, and graphics glitches, even with the inept proofreading and occasionally 7th-grade-level writing skills, they’ve built a game that’s an awful lot of fun to play. With a few months more polish and playtesting, it will be even better, but it’s worth a look today. Honestly, I’d pay the monthly fee just to play with the character designer; the fact that the combat system is dynamic and exciting is a bonus.

Speaking of the character designer…

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Is Chloe the only model you’ve never managed to publish a bad picture of? Could you please apply this same high, perky standard to all the other girls?

[NSFW! NSFW!]

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LG paid two Korean girl groups to record music videos for their latest ad campaign. I don’t know what the other group did, because I can’t seem to tear my eyes away from Girls’ Generation…

[link goes to the cleanest HD version I could find on Youtube, sadly tagged by some clown who thought his handle was so important it needed to be embedded in the video at beginning and end, as if he were the second coming of MTV]

What is the result of feeding this expression to a Bash shell?

cat<<<dog||dog<<<cat

I don’t know what they were trying to sell, since my mailer didn’t load the images from their web site, and their HTML message had no actual text (which didn’t help it get past my spam filters…), but the subject line conjured a very peculiar mental picture:

Extreme hoe's makeup

As I learn more about powers and combat styles in Champions Online, I find that many of the choices I made early on are sub-optimal. You can retcon your powers for a price, and the price isn’t outrageous at early levels, but since I’m still learning, I want to stick with my choices as long as possible, and try to make them work.

Case in point, The Cybernetic Librarian has mostly Sorcery powers, with two early slots spent on healing and shielding to avoid the damage that she was taking at low levels. Her major single-target ranged attack takes a lot of time to charge up, likewise her ranged AoE damage/stun. But she still gets into trouble when a large group of henchmen are spread out and plinking away, so I picked up a power that summons three zombies who freely attack anyone attacking you (March of the Dead).

Turns out the single-target attack (Eldritch Blast) has long range, and when fully charged can take out a henchman in one shot, from beyond his aggro range. The AoE stun (Condemn) is also slow to charge, and only affects things very close to the target, but if you attack from outside aggro range, everything moves towards you to attack, and they tend to bunch up enough to allow stunning several. And the zombies? They get summoned at her current location, and if she’s flying over a group of villains high enough to avoid aggro, they drop to the ground as soon as they appear.

They take some falling damage, but they don’t start fighting until something attacks her, so the villains ignore them. So the new strategy for outdoor fights is to fly right over a group, airdrop the zombies, one-shot a henchman, then move into range and gather them up for a stun. The 28 seconds that the zombies last provides plenty of damage and distraction.