Heroic Distractions
November 9th, 2018
To start wrapping up my seemingly ceaseless pontification about the City, and the seemingly countless heroes I'd taken out for a test drive within, I thought I would go over a few of my second, third, and fourth string folks. People that I enjoyed playing in some capacity or another, but never really got into whole hog. Not like, you know, Crystalline or Hacks.
The first of these is Boo-Getty: Redneck Zombie! Someone who would have totally been a villain had the City of Villains been live when I first created him, Boo-Getty is another scrapper, like Dash Apostrophe. He was different, though, in that while Dash chopped people up and never ran out of gas, Boo punched people to death, and every waking moment he spent dispensing two-fisted justice was spent wheezing.
This is because, instead of having regeneration and a sharp implement of law and order, Boo-Getty had the dark melee and dark armor power sets. Both of which were notoriously hoggy on the endurance - that thing which lets you use your powers. But I had fun with him, and even got him up to level 50 over eight years on the Pinnacle servers. Yeah, he was a money-maker there for Banker Bob.
The next fellow on this list is Jingo Man, a neolithic conservative who received nuclear powers as a result of his tinkering with the radioactive innards of a smoke detector. Unlike Psychophant, Jingo is a defender whose atomic abilities were staggeringly offensive, so much so that villains came for him first when fights broke out. That's why you see him laid out there; 'defeated' was Jingo Man's default state.
I liked the ridiculous character, though, so I kept on with Jingo Man, playing him haphazardly while the game was live until he, too, managed to hit level 50 by sheer happenstance. This wouldn't have occurred if they hadn't fixed things so that you weren't penalized in experience quite so harshly each time you were beaten down by criminals. Maxing your Spandex ™ folks out got much easier over time, you see.
The last of these goofball folks was yet another scrapper, though I never managed to get all that far with her. Charlie Chicanery is one of the last heroes I built, in the 'Going Rogue' expansion of the game. She came from an alternate earth where all the heroes in the City were villains, all the villains in the City were heroes, and the adventures you had were a lot more morally ambiguous than before.
I probably would have gone far with Charlie had the plug not been unceremoniously pulled on the game. Thus, I never got past the awkward stage of low level head-cracking with this character. As it was, she tended to get beaten down as often as not, primarily because her particular powerset was big on flashy moves - which seemed like the time that the NPC opponents chose to hit you with knockback attacks.
Poor Charlie. Anyhow, I have a bunch more folks like this, naturally, which I could gibber about without stopping for months and months. But I don't have the best screenshots of them to reference, so I'd have to get a lot more descriptive about them to do so. And I'm nothing if not lazy, or at the very least, trying to flex those muscles elsewhere. But I hope you enjoyed a look at my heroes from the City.
Bonus nerdery: Charlie Chicanery written up for the nerd game I support on my nerd site. Complete with links to a four part story I wrote for him/her!
Installments in this series: 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14