Pounding on them, that is.
I was always a little reluctant to try one of the MMORPGs, in case I found it too interesting. Who needs another big time sink, right? Then I tried FF XI, because of LT, but it was pretty dull, with characters fighting wild rabbits and worms for the first few levels because everything else can just whup your ass. And I never did manage to hook up with LT anyway...but that's another story.
So my gaming buds Mal and TwitchMonkey have been telling me how much fun CoH is (CoH is the hot new MMORPG where you get to play a super-hero), so I bought the game, installed it, they showed me how to create a character Sunday...and now I'm hooked. At first level you get genuine cool-looking superpowers, you get to fight Thugs of various sorts (muggers, purse snatchers, gang members that start shooting you because you get too close, Space Nazis trying to amass weaponry to stage a coup for their alien masters, and good old flesh-eating zombies). You can really fine-tune your character's appearance, build, costume, and pick your superpowers from a fairly wide list, so that even two first level characters from the same archetype can have different powers, particularly secondary powers, and completely different appearances. And I'm loving it. Making up characters is nearly as much fun as playing (plus there's no extra charge for extra characters. The only limit is no more than eight characters on a particular server). So I already have 5 characters since Sunday, ranging from 5th level to 2nd level, and I have ideas for a couple more--I've barely begun to explore the various archetypes. And teaming with my friends, which we've only done one evening so far, is even more fun than soloing.
So as I feared, it's a big old time-sink. Work and social life haven't suffered (at least not yet), but I'm not getting as much DVD watching and reading done. I expect that the novelty will wear off after a bit (but not before I level at least one character up enough to take Flight as a power), but until then...
SPOON!
Posted by joshua at June 11, 2004 04:56 PM