{"id":5176,"date":"2009-09-24T06:07:53","date_gmt":"2009-09-24T10:07:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=5176"},"modified":"2009-09-24T09:26:10","modified_gmt":"2009-09-24T13:26:10","slug":"heroes-of-champions-online-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=5176","title":{"rendered":"Heroes of Champions Online II"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m afraid I’ve let you down again. No Fuel \/ procedural content post today. No good excuse, really, except that I’ve been playing a grotesque amount of Champions Online. Here, let me show you:<\/p>\n

This is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.champions-online.com\/character_profiles\/1056303\">Concealed Carrie<\/a>. Her bio: My mommy says it’s wrong to hit people. So I shoot them. I’m also not allowed to talk to strangers. So I shoot them, too. <\/p>\n<p>Are you a stranger?<\/td><\/tr>
This is Concealed Carrie<\/a>. Her bio: My mommy says it’s wrong to hit people. So I shoot them. I’m also not allowed to talk to strangers. So I shoot them, too. <\/p>\n

Are you a stranger?<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

I’ve spotted a few other people going for the “cute little girl superheroine” concept, although most people mess it up and just make their character small<\/em>. She ends up looking like a tiny adult. If you want a little kid:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Go short, obviously.\n<\/li>\n
  2. Make the head nearly as large as possible.\n<\/li>\n
  3. Eyes should be really big. 90% -ish.\n<\/li>\n
  4. Eyes should be as low on the head as possible. You’ll need to move the cheeks down a bit as well to keep them from interfering.\n<\/li>\n
  5. Ears should be a little large.\n<\/li>\n
  6. Turn muscle way down, and body mass down.\n<\/li>\n
  7. Maybe nudge the feet and hands up a little in size.<\/li>\n
  8. Shorten the limbs.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The common approach is to have a little kid with a really violent superpower like swords, claws, dark magic, or somesuch. Concealed Carrie is a munitions character, and she became my main the moment I discovered the joy of the Lead Tempest<\/strong> power. Did you see Christian Bale in Equilibrium<\/a>? How they did that gun kata thing<\/a>? Well, you get to do that. And it is awesome. Especially as a twelve year old girl.<\/p>\n

    I’ve pretty much built the character around leaping into groups of guys and then shredding the group from within in a fountain of bullets. I also use the assault rifle for when someone gets ornery. A lot of people swear by the minigun, but I haven’t run the numbers to see which is better from a time \/ power drain \/ damage output perspective. And even if I’m not getting 100% combat performance out of her, she’s still a lot of fun.<\/p>\n

    co_char17.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

    Thematically, she should absolutely use speed or (even better) acrobatics as her travel power, but I learned the hard way that the designers of Champions Online have a cruel and malignant hatred<\/em> of non-flying characters and have designed this world in order to torment them. The guys on buildings, the inexplicable cliff<\/strong> in the middle of the city, the rat-maze canyons in the desert, and the un-scalable mountains in Canada: These are things that will impede you on the way to fun if you cannot escape the embrace of gravity. Really, they should give speed runners the ability to run up walls for a short distance, and acrobats should get some sort of Prince of Persia style wall jump that angles upward. Both types of travelers need a way to move without needing to wade through every damn mook in the world while their flying compatriots effortlessly cruise by overhead. If you’ve never tried to go up six flights of spiraling steps in a third person game just so you can see if the guy you’re looking for is up there, then you’ve never really understood what it means to suffer. The camera doesn’t know what<\/em> the hell to show you.<\/p>\n

    For Carrie, I compromised and went for swinging. Swinging is still slower than flying and is useless indoors, but at least I can get over the walls of the maze without straying too<\/em> far from my character concept. <\/p>\n

    I’m not sure what inspired me to make her. I think after going through The Path<\/a> I wanted to balance things out and play a little girl who could kick some ass. <\/p>\n

    And speaking of Little Red Riding Hood, here is someone Star on Chest ran into in the starting zone:<\/p>\n

    co_char12.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

    And here is someone else, in the same zone at the same time:<\/p>\n

    co_char13.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

    And here is the conversation they had:<\/p>\n

    co_char14.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

    The puns on these two made me laugh:<\/p>\n

    co_char16.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

    I love these wings: <\/p>\n

    co_char18.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

    You have to see them in motion for the full effect, but I think they’re magnificent.<\/p>\n

    EDIT: And here is the world’s most awesome tooltip:<\/p>\n

    co_dsp.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

    Yeah. “DSP” turns “DSP” mode on and off. Awesome. Good thing every single person in the world will instantly know what DSP is and why they might want to make it on or not<\/em> on. I mean, naturally I<\/strong> know what DSP is. Naturally. I’m not some rube who goes around being ignorant of important things like DSP. But what if – and I’m just being hypothetical here – what if you met someone who didn’t know what DSP was? I mean, that would be hilarious, right? But how would you explain DSP to that person? Not that I’m asking. I mean, there’s no need, since I already know all about DSP. But I’m just wondering how some people would explain it using plain English. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I’m afraid I’ve let you down again. No Fuel \/ procedural content post today. No good excuse, really, except that I’ve been playing a grotesque amount of Champions Online. Here, let me show you: This is Concealed Carrie. Her bio: My mommy says it’s wrong to hit people. So I shoot them. I’m also not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pictures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}