- 158
City of Heroes Beta
April 23, 2004
Damn, this was a total surprise. I signed up for City of Heroes Beta, er, a couple days late. Thats why I told Jamie that its no use signing up at the time. Yesterday, write before I took my last road class for drivers ed, I received an email from plaync.com, inviting me to take part in the demo. Its just a shame that the beta servers closed last night at 11:00 PM, 11:09 PM to be exact.
When I got home, after the class, I verified my account and added the beta to my games on the account (its my only game on the account because Im too poor to pay for MMO games). Then, it asks you to create a message board account. Well, I decided not to. That was a big mistake. Without this message board account, I cant download the beta. So it took me forever to find the right message board to sign up for. Finally, after about 30 min of browsing around, there was a link to the board in the email that had the link to the beta download. At last, I was able to download and install it.
20 minutes of downloading, installing, and updating has flown by. Now, Im ready to create a character. If you are at least somewhat artistic or imaginative, you would definitely have a blast with the character creator. You can make your hero a male, female, small, huge, medium, etc. The customization is endless. During the beta, I didnt 2 identical heroes, EVER. Well, I saw 2 Black Mambas (Uma Thurmans character for those who have been living under a rock) but they only had the same yellow and black-striped jumpsuit, which is very easy to recreate. Their faces were both quite different.
I had so much fun creating my character. It took my about 30-45 minutes. First, I tried recreating Mast Chief from Halo, then I tried making my character look like me, but that would limit my creative output. Thus, I decided to combine the likes of Master Chief and some Dragonball Z influences lol. The result is The FatStrat. Yeah, its not a special name, but I JUST WANTED TO PLAY. You can even write a bio on you character so people can read it in-game. Damn, I wish I got a screenshot of one guys bio, It was sooo funny yet quite disturbing: The (insert name here I forgot his sn): I have an 18 inch e-penis so watch out! I might poke your eye out. After reading that, I ran away, far away.
You start out by going through a boring tutorial mode called Outbreak. I almost decided to uninstall the beta. You cant fight anyone! All you do is run around doing errands. After a couple of errands, you are sent to one of two places: Ms. Libertys area (she levels you up when you get enough experience points) or some alley full of thugs. I went to Ms. Libertys place.
To get experience, you have to either do missions, kill thugs, or just use some of you super powers for a long time (e.g. using your speed sprinting or rest powers). I believe the missions are rather filler. For every mission I did, I was sent to a warehouse to destroy all the robots there. They were all a piece of cake.
Combat is the primary aspect of this game. On the bottom right of your screen, theres a tray that contains several circles. In those circles are your powers and abilities. You can improve these abilities by collecting enhancements, which are dropped by various enemies. To fight someone (it must be a bad guy), you just click the enemy, and a fiery-color square would surround him, indicating that hes your target. You can hit Tab to switch your target, but doing so is quite faulty. You would end up targeting someone down the street instead of the thug right in front of you. After finding your target, you just click one of the circles with power or ability to fight. After using one of these, its circle would shrink and fade. It would get larger as the power recharges. Some powers recharge slower, others faster.
Movement is pretty much like a first-person shooter, using the WASD keys, but instead of using the A and D keys for strafing to the left and right, theyre for moving to the left or right. This control scheme is kind of similar to KoTOR (Knights of the Old Republic). One major gripe about the controls is moving the camera. You have to hold down the right mouse button and move it to look. Looking up and down is inverted. I hate using inverted look on PC games. With console games, such as Halo, I prefer inverted.
The graphics in CoH are beautiful on all high settings. Every pixel of your character is a visual delight. The beautifully designed buildings immerse you into this superhero world. Your enemies names are color coded, showing if how much stronger or weaker they are compared to you. This is a pretty neat idea. I had to lower my resolution and some settings when a lot more people joined the server. There is massive slowdown when youre in wide, open areas with a lot of people, but inside buildings, I get 60-70 fps.
Having covered the technical aspects of this game, lets move onto the actual experience. When I started playing, I thought this game was a steaming pile of ****. The inverted look annoyed me, but I got use to it after a while. I started having more fun as I progressed. Fighting thugs is a lot of fun, but some of them can be pretty tough. I died a lot, which resulted in a lot of debt (money is called influence), but I really didnt notice.
My turning point in this beta was when I finally joined a super hero team (which is pretty much a guild). Our leader (Captain Paragon) sensed the Rikti (alien) invasion was near. He knew where all of the aliens were supposed to land so he led the way. Some of us lost him cause the others were running really fast. He told us to take the monorail to AP3. I was like, wtf is that? He kept on saying, Just use your map. Well, even though this guy was only at level 3, he was a true leader. He went back to his lost comrades and led us to the monorail station.
At AP3, the Captian told us to wait in front of City Hall for about 10 min. We heard a weird siren the spaceship has arrived. The sky went from a calming light blue to waves of purple, green, and blue. Hell, it was like the Apocalypse or Independence Day (the movie lol). I went underneath the ship to get some good screenshots, which you can find at the bottom of this page. I said to Captain Paragon, Im only a level 2 blaster. He responded, Dont worry. JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL! Damn, I felt like a loser, but I was having a good time being one :-)
After a few minutes, the invasion began. It was magical. It was probably one of those one-in-a-lifetime experiences (well, in a video game lol). My character was just standing below the spaceship and a green beam zapped me. I lost 24 hits points. The aliens started fighting us. Our team and other teams joined forces to fight these scumbags. Those thugs (theyre mostly black, Mexican, or rednecks) are nothing compared to the Rikti. It took about 100 heroes and 10-15 minutes to kill this one alien. It was just INSANE.
After a couple of huge battles, my teammates started quitting. I quit to so I could take a shower. When I logged on again, the invasion was pretty much over, but there were still some buggers scattered around the place. Going near a group of them is complete suicide.
I think, to end the invasion, the admins froze all the aliens, with a caption saying: The Rikti are taking a break from the invasion for the time being.
I started to get bored again. So I went to Ms. Libertys place where a lot of heroes were hanging out. I accidentally played rock-paper-scissors with someone. We had a time. Both of us had paper. There was this one guy there named Hex. He received the label Rikti Killer for killing a lot of the aliens. I told him that I took some good pics of his character and he asked me to send them to his email address. He seemed like a good guy, but I used a crappy email address to send them to him, just incase.
Standing around doing nothings was getting boring, so I went around the city killing thugs. Some guy named Milinium helped me kill this really tough group. I just said, nice and he invited me into his team (just the two of us). For the last 20 minutes of the beta, we raced all over the city looking for those scumbags. When there were two minutes left, I screamed NOOOOOOO! I wanted to reach level 5 just before the beta ends. I only needed to kill 1 one more group. Even if I did, it would be too late. I would still have to race to Ms. Liberty. As I was running to another alley, a window popped up saying: The server has lost connection.
That was it. The beta was over. Well, it was fun while it lasted. This game is really fun, but its pretty much a beat em up MMO (massive multiplayer online) game. It doesnt have as much depth as Everquest or Final Fantasy XI, yet I have a feeling a lot of people will buy this game.
Evaluation:
Graphics: 8.5
Control: 7.5
Sound: 8.0
Gameplay: 8.4
Replay Value: 8.0
Overall: 8.6 (not an average)
Final Thoughts:
I had a blast with the beta, but this game might get boring in the long run.
Note: I'll attach screenshots once I have the chance to compress them.
April 23, 2004
Damn, this was a total surprise. I signed up for City of Heroes Beta, er, a couple days late. Thats why I told Jamie that its no use signing up at the time. Yesterday, write before I took my last road class for drivers ed, I received an email from plaync.com, inviting me to take part in the demo. Its just a shame that the beta servers closed last night at 11:00 PM, 11:09 PM to be exact.
When I got home, after the class, I verified my account and added the beta to my games on the account (its my only game on the account because Im too poor to pay for MMO games). Then, it asks you to create a message board account. Well, I decided not to. That was a big mistake. Without this message board account, I cant download the beta. So it took me forever to find the right message board to sign up for. Finally, after about 30 min of browsing around, there was a link to the board in the email that had the link to the beta download. At last, I was able to download and install it.
20 minutes of downloading, installing, and updating has flown by. Now, Im ready to create a character. If you are at least somewhat artistic or imaginative, you would definitely have a blast with the character creator. You can make your hero a male, female, small, huge, medium, etc. The customization is endless. During the beta, I didnt 2 identical heroes, EVER. Well, I saw 2 Black Mambas (Uma Thurmans character for those who have been living under a rock) but they only had the same yellow and black-striped jumpsuit, which is very easy to recreate. Their faces were both quite different.
I had so much fun creating my character. It took my about 30-45 minutes. First, I tried recreating Mast Chief from Halo, then I tried making my character look like me, but that would limit my creative output. Thus, I decided to combine the likes of Master Chief and some Dragonball Z influences lol. The result is The FatStrat. Yeah, its not a special name, but I JUST WANTED TO PLAY. You can even write a bio on you character so people can read it in-game. Damn, I wish I got a screenshot of one guys bio, It was sooo funny yet quite disturbing: The (insert name here I forgot his sn): I have an 18 inch e-penis so watch out! I might poke your eye out. After reading that, I ran away, far away.
You start out by going through a boring tutorial mode called Outbreak. I almost decided to uninstall the beta. You cant fight anyone! All you do is run around doing errands. After a couple of errands, you are sent to one of two places: Ms. Libertys area (she levels you up when you get enough experience points) or some alley full of thugs. I went to Ms. Libertys place.
To get experience, you have to either do missions, kill thugs, or just use some of you super powers for a long time (e.g. using your speed sprinting or rest powers). I believe the missions are rather filler. For every mission I did, I was sent to a warehouse to destroy all the robots there. They were all a piece of cake.
Combat is the primary aspect of this game. On the bottom right of your screen, theres a tray that contains several circles. In those circles are your powers and abilities. You can improve these abilities by collecting enhancements, which are dropped by various enemies. To fight someone (it must be a bad guy), you just click the enemy, and a fiery-color square would surround him, indicating that hes your target. You can hit Tab to switch your target, but doing so is quite faulty. You would end up targeting someone down the street instead of the thug right in front of you. After finding your target, you just click one of the circles with power or ability to fight. After using one of these, its circle would shrink and fade. It would get larger as the power recharges. Some powers recharge slower, others faster.
Movement is pretty much like a first-person shooter, using the WASD keys, but instead of using the A and D keys for strafing to the left and right, theyre for moving to the left or right. This control scheme is kind of similar to KoTOR (Knights of the Old Republic). One major gripe about the controls is moving the camera. You have to hold down the right mouse button and move it to look. Looking up and down is inverted. I hate using inverted look on PC games. With console games, such as Halo, I prefer inverted.
The graphics in CoH are beautiful on all high settings. Every pixel of your character is a visual delight. The beautifully designed buildings immerse you into this superhero world. Your enemies names are color coded, showing if how much stronger or weaker they are compared to you. This is a pretty neat idea. I had to lower my resolution and some settings when a lot more people joined the server. There is massive slowdown when youre in wide, open areas with a lot of people, but inside buildings, I get 60-70 fps.
Having covered the technical aspects of this game, lets move onto the actual experience. When I started playing, I thought this game was a steaming pile of ****. The inverted look annoyed me, but I got use to it after a while. I started having more fun as I progressed. Fighting thugs is a lot of fun, but some of them can be pretty tough. I died a lot, which resulted in a lot of debt (money is called influence), but I really didnt notice.
My turning point in this beta was when I finally joined a super hero team (which is pretty much a guild). Our leader (Captain Paragon) sensed the Rikti (alien) invasion was near. He knew where all of the aliens were supposed to land so he led the way. Some of us lost him cause the others were running really fast. He told us to take the monorail to AP3. I was like, wtf is that? He kept on saying, Just use your map. Well, even though this guy was only at level 3, he was a true leader. He went back to his lost comrades and led us to the monorail station.
At AP3, the Captian told us to wait in front of City Hall for about 10 min. We heard a weird siren the spaceship has arrived. The sky went from a calming light blue to waves of purple, green, and blue. Hell, it was like the Apocalypse or Independence Day (the movie lol). I went underneath the ship to get some good screenshots, which you can find at the bottom of this page. I said to Captain Paragon, Im only a level 2 blaster. He responded, Dont worry. JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL! Damn, I felt like a loser, but I was having a good time being one :-)
After a few minutes, the invasion began. It was magical. It was probably one of those one-in-a-lifetime experiences (well, in a video game lol). My character was just standing below the spaceship and a green beam zapped me. I lost 24 hits points. The aliens started fighting us. Our team and other teams joined forces to fight these scumbags. Those thugs (theyre mostly black, Mexican, or rednecks) are nothing compared to the Rikti. It took about 100 heroes and 10-15 minutes to kill this one alien. It was just INSANE.
After a couple of huge battles, my teammates started quitting. I quit to so I could take a shower. When I logged on again, the invasion was pretty much over, but there were still some buggers scattered around the place. Going near a group of them is complete suicide.
I think, to end the invasion, the admins froze all the aliens, with a caption saying: The Rikti are taking a break from the invasion for the time being.
I started to get bored again. So I went to Ms. Libertys place where a lot of heroes were hanging out. I accidentally played rock-paper-scissors with someone. We had a time. Both of us had paper. There was this one guy there named Hex. He received the label Rikti Killer for killing a lot of the aliens. I told him that I took some good pics of his character and he asked me to send them to his email address. He seemed like a good guy, but I used a crappy email address to send them to him, just incase.
Standing around doing nothings was getting boring, so I went around the city killing thugs. Some guy named Milinium helped me kill this really tough group. I just said, nice and he invited me into his team (just the two of us). For the last 20 minutes of the beta, we raced all over the city looking for those scumbags. When there were two minutes left, I screamed NOOOOOOO! I wanted to reach level 5 just before the beta ends. I only needed to kill 1 one more group. Even if I did, it would be too late. I would still have to race to Ms. Liberty. As I was running to another alley, a window popped up saying: The server has lost connection.
That was it. The beta was over. Well, it was fun while it lasted. This game is really fun, but its pretty much a beat em up MMO (massive multiplayer online) game. It doesnt have as much depth as Everquest or Final Fantasy XI, yet I have a feeling a lot of people will buy this game.
Evaluation:
Graphics: 8.5
Control: 7.5
Sound: 8.0
Gameplay: 8.4
Replay Value: 8.0
Overall: 8.6 (not an average)
Final Thoughts:
I had a blast with the beta, but this game might get boring in the long run.
Note: I'll attach screenshots once I have the chance to compress them.
If your wondering if its me or not, I was dressed in Orange, had colored glasses on, big guy. Hmm...don't really know how to prove...oh yea, I have this of me. 
