Tenzhi

If there's one thing this community is good at, it's over-reacting.

That's what I was put in the mind of.

It's the sort of game model that I'd prefer. I like being able to directly tinker with stats and equipment, and I like some of the community mods that inevitably arise for offline games, and I like the option to exclusively just hook up with a few friends. The "massively" part of MMORPGs has never appealed to me.

I may try it, and if the character selection includes certain characters and the gameplay holds up I might even find myself inclined to continue playing it. But I haven't kept up with it. I prefer to make my own characters, of course, but given that I play games like Ultimate Alliance and Arkham City I'm not going to completely snub a game for lack of character creation... it'll have to try harder in the gameplay department to keep me for any length of time, though.

I didn't really post messages. Indeed, many of the BBS I went to didn't really have obvious message boards, but rather just filedumps and online games like Lord of the Red Dragon and Cripplesmash. Of course, text based interfaces can make for cumbersome navigation.

It was designed for PC with incidental preparations for potential console porting, but that fell through early on and they even released a message about how the controller functionality in the game was not going to be officially supported. Believe me, I wished it was the other way around during Beta. Most of the control issues I have with the game stem from the fact that the very much PC-based controls don't play as nicely with a controller as they should.

Did I say I like it, or did I just note that it was a common mechanic (I actually don't honestly recall, though I'd think the latter was the case)? I like the graphical effects for some of the power-enhanced blocks, but I find it's not effective enough at negating holds and in any case I have always preferred passive defenses. That's why I was so annoyed when they changed Instant Healing to a click in this game.

I don't *hate* the blocking mechanic, either. I just don't find it to be some alien concept that I can't tolerate. And I haven't had any technical issues hampering my use of it, not even back in Beta when my computer and internet connection were inferior to my current setup. Indeed, I'd have to say that I've had more issues with click abilities lagging in this game than I've had with blocking in ChO.

Without players there is no game; without a game there are no players... So make sure all your bases are covered and hate both.

Is there a free trial yet? As much as I hated the first game, I certainly wouldn't blindly throw money at its sequel just to try it.

He'd only do it if the chameleon circuit were repaired and the TARDIS could become an ice cream truck.

I said "action games" and that's precisely what I meant. "Console games" would be inaccurate, and not just because the artificial division the effete elite try to maintain between PC gaming and console gaming is becoming more meaningless by the moment, but because the mechanic extends to arcade gaming and various bits of shareware one would download off of BBSs back before the WWW was the place everyone got their kicks.

Heck, nerds have tried to implement manual blocking in P&P RPGs in numerous ways over the years - it's only natural they would endeavor to work it into their electronic hobbies as well.

Odd, from Saturday to Monday (during which the double XP was conveniently available) I put in at least 24 hours of gaming without server disconnects, and the only technical issues I had was twice when I alt-tabbed away from the character creation and tried to come back all it would give me was a black screen with the mouse cursor so I had to End Task.

Perfection is nigh impossible where humans are concerned.

I don't need inspiration, I need just the right traditional kung fu outfit. With long sleeves and those horizontal laces/frog buttons down the front. And preferably a contrasting border. It's unfortunate, because between the various textures and sliders I can get his face pretty close in this game (with bigger eyebrows that don't meet in the middle and a lip-slider to thin the lips a bit it would be nearly perfect).

Quite deliberate. I almost went with "Just Some Tosser" but I was able to come up with a simple outfit I liked that incorporated a front-and-back T-shaped emblem. I have a gun-using, tunneling shark-man called Speeding Bulette that I have yet to re-train with the new setup. In CoH I had a dual pistols minotaur called Bullshoot. Sometimes I pick names purely to amuse myself.

Indeed, and you can Undo your power selections for free at that point. Which is useful because the power selection list for your second power during creation doesn't give you all the options. I made a character called Tosser who was going to have entirely thrown-weapon/batarang attacks, but it didn't have the charge-up batarang throw available during creation so I had to undo the power I selected and pick the one I actually wanted in the Powerhouse.

I knew I should've gone with 'huge mech guy'...

I was irritated by the apparent lack of a decent kung fu top (or even a gi with sleeves) while I was trying to recreate Tenzhi. I believe that may be why I didn't already have a version of him in the game.

Blocking is a pretty common mechanic among action games. CoH was never action-y enough for a superhero game to me.

Pretty much. The problem I was running into was that Blocking didn't negate the Hold, but rather just allowed you to keep moving while you held the block waiting for the hold effect to wear off. If I released block before the hold wore off I was immediately having to shake off the hold. And he would often shoot the hold again before it wore off, meanwhile the missile volleys were doing a fair chunk of damage even when blocked.

In the original tutorial he gets taken out of the fight early and you were left to face Black Scorpion alone but there weren't any reinforcements. On the plus side, at least he only tells you to 'disable ALL the beacons' once - he used to repeat it incessantly.

I had to recover several times when I played through this new streamlined tutorial for the first time (at least once because the pop-up that was telling me about blocking or something prevented me from blocking until I made it go away), which I never had to do before. He didn't get back any HP between my defeats, though, so I eventually wore him down. You used to get equipment in the tutorial, and it seems to me like the encounter at the end is balanced towards you having the gear.

Most acts of villainy naturally require being at least slightly not right in the head.

Heh. They even had him "Shoot the Dog" solely to prove just how nasty he was. Indeed, they went out of their way to make the not-quite-a-dog very dog-like beforehand just for that purpose.