I work from home on Fridays. Always hard to actually get too work though. Spent the morning mostly reading email and poking restlessly at the bits of code and content I should be working on. Distracted by thought of Champions Online, the book I’ve been reading, the pile of compost in my driveway I need to finish moving to my garden in back, and wondering what to do for lunch.
I’ve resolved one of those issues so far: pizza minis for lunch.
In terms of Champions Online, when I logged back in Wednesday night I hemmed and hawed for a bit and ended up just playing my Might character a bit more. Finished off the Desert Disaster, got a chunk of the ways into the actual Desert missions and then wandered back to Millenium City to look around for a bit. Also did some PvP with him, or rather I competed in the ‘Hero Games’ as they call it.
At level 10 the first PvP mode gets unlocked UTC, or Ultimate Tournament of Champions, which when I tried it out was a five on five PvP match in what looked like the octagon from all of those UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) tv shows. The actual match is chaotic, frenetic, and a lot of fun. I’ll definately have to build a character just to do PvP with someday.
Thursday after work I decided to try something new and made a few new characters playing with the Darkness, Fire and Force powersets. Didn’t spend much time with Darkness yet, it looks to have cool stuff later on but I found the character costume I made for that character annoyed me quickly so I’ll have to delete him and try again later.
Fire I had fun with and got through the tutorial and most of the way through Canada. It isn’t so far quite the ‘uber-kick-ass’ that I’d seen people calling it, but also there was a balance patch the other day so that might be why. Still, it was fun and as I took a break for dinner last night I had just unlocked Fire Form and will have to go back and see how much of a buff it turns out to be.
Finally, I tried the Force powerset out. Back in the CoX days my favorite character was an Energy/Energy blaster named Kinetica. Lots of fun playing the character, the powers were great, the costume was fun. In CO the closest powerset to that is the Force powerset so I’ve been kind of hesitant a bit to try it out. On one hand it could be really awesome and a chance to sort of re-capture the fun playstyle I had in CoX, on the other hand it could have be a let-down and leave me feeling a bit more wistful then I would like. So far in playing with it I have been liking it, though I suspect I am in the end going to miss the snipe and energy torrent a little. But it is fun enough that I don’t think I’ll have a problem adjusting.
Sound a bit like a fan-boy, gushing about the game constantly, but honestly I have been having so much fun with the Open Beta of CO and have ran into so little that really has bugged me about the game I haven’t found cause to complain so far.
Other than that… Book I’ve been reading while on the bus for the last few days has been ‘Atlas Shrugged’ by Ayn Rand. It has been a surprisingly fun read and has told a surprisingly good story. Only about halfway through it so far, it is a dense enough narrative that I haven’t been tearing through it very quickly.
The other book I’ve been reading lately has been ‘Quicksilver’ by Neal Stephenson. It is the first book of his Baroque Cycle and I’ve had all three sitting on my shelf for a while, I just put off reading them when I first got them because I had wanted to wait for the entire series to be released and then somehow I forgot that the entire series had been released and never got to reading them.
Almost through snacking on pizza mini’s now, need to finish this up and try and get that compost moved onto my garden in back. Plan to log into CO some more later tonight and will probably take another powerset through the tutorial before switching back to one of my existing characters and getting them further into the game. Only about a week left in the Open Beta and I’d like to see some of the later zones before the Early Start and game release.