Super-grouping is lovely.

My obsession with City of Heroes continues. I've been playing almost daily for a couple of months now, and have my main character up to almost level 23. I have an alt at 15 as well, and some lower-level characters that I will come back to eventually.

I'm enjoying the game in multiple ways. First, of course, it's fun to play a superhero. I just plain enjoy flying around the city and beating up bad guys. Second, the costume tool is great fun -- the addition of a tailor and additional costume slots in the first content update was a terrific idea, since it lets you go back and change your look or create an all-new one, instead of being stuck with your original look forever. Third, the storylines of the game are rather entertaining -- you're saving the city from various menaces, or stopping bad guys, and what initially seems quite simple turns out to be more complex. I can't say much more without spoiling some of the fun, but I will say that the Clockwork automatons are not quite so purely technological as they seem. And that's just one example.

The main enjoyment I'm getting out of it, though, is the interaction with others. First of all, my wife is playing. It's been a while since we played together, and I really like it. We used to play a fair amount of Diablo II together, but since I played more than she did, we rarely had characters at the same level, which made it hard to team up effectively. City of Heroes solves that with Sidekicking, which is a great idea -- one player can "mentor" another, and as long as the two are close together, the sidekick plays as though they are just one level below the mentor. Hit points, damage, defense -- everything increases.

Second, I'm in a supergroup that's active and full of people I like chatting with and playing with. It's loosely based on the Straight Dope Message Board, so it's full of adults. It's like a small community, and I really like that feeling.

Third, I've been meeting some cool people. Not only the incidental meetings with heroes on the street, but teaming up with people who are no longer strangers to me. My wife and I have been playing with another couple, from a different superteam, who turn out to live not far from us at all -- they're in Stillwater MN, which is about half an hour from where we live in Maplewood. Small world. We wound up in a team with the other couple (Mordil and SunViolet), another married couple (Purple.Passion and Crushing Blow) and a seventh member, a woman whose husband didn't have any characters in the right level range. We were a sidekick away from having an all-married-couple team.

Been a while.

I've been playing a lot of City of Heroes, as part of the C.E.C.I.L. superteam. It's a bunch of Straight Dope Message Board folks (and one or two others), and we have a fairly active forum and picture site. It's strange -- I feel like I'm finally becoming an active Internet denizen, after years of helping to make it happen in the background.

I'm starting to think about making a public blog -- that is, one linked to my name rather than my alias. I'd have to treat it a bit differently, since my work places some restrictions on what I can say. Gee, that sounds bad. It's not that my employer limits me -- rather, it's that I feel a sense of professional responsibility for what I say, if that makes sense. I am aware of my responsibility as an employee of the company (and a manager, and a stockholder) to separate my personal life from my professional life.

Things would probably be easier if I was a consultant. And I might make more money. But then I'd have to find work and bill people, and I hate doing both of those things. So I think I'll stay where I am.

More later...

City of Heroes beta ended last night.

The finale was a big invasion by the Rikti, the alien bad guys whose initial invasion created the current state of the CoH world (that is, super-bad guys all over).

It was pretty cool. There were some hiccups -- a bug prevented some of the Rikti from fighting, and there were more players (I think 60,000) than the devs could handle -- but it was fun to stand with the other heroes of the city and wait for the aliens to come.

There were some very cool suggestions on some of the fora for improvements next time. One in particular that I agreed with was a change in the location of the event. The way it went was that the aliens spawned from portals around the center points of each of the zones where they invaded. This is pretty sensible. However, the suggest I rather liked was that the aliens start in some entrance point -- like coming out of the train terminals or through the gates between sections of the city or from portals located at the peripherals -- and make for the center point. That would have been fun, trying to defend areas of the city against invaders moving over the ground instead of jumping on the spawns as they came out.

I'm excited about playing for real. I'll have to see if I can find a group to hook up with. My two best superhero buddies are not playing, so I don't have built-in pals. At least, they're not playing yet. :)

Update on the MMORPG front.

World of Warcraft is quite addictive. It's similar to Diablo II, in that there is almost always something that you're doing that has an imminent reward. It also combines social interaction -- grouping is very helpful and fun -- and limited safe areas.

All in all, not a game you can play for five minutes or have in the background when you're doing something like folding laundry.

I've been playing with the Lounging Lurkers, a guild formed from the Lurker Lounge web site. It's a D2 analysis site, which appeals to me as both a D2 fan and a rules geek. So there's a degree of minor legend status associated with the folks in the guild, and it's quite fun to play with them.

On the other hand we have City of Heroes, the superhero MMORPG. I've been anticipating this for some time now, and since I pre-ordered, I'm guaranteed an invite to the beta by April 7th. So I'll want to be playing that.

And I can't keep up with one MMO, let alone two, what with the fulltime job and the kids and all.

Gee, nice problem to have -- which cool free game do I want to play? Of course, COH stops being free in a couple of weeks when it ships, but the first month is a sunk cost at this point.

Ars Technica.

Okay, signed up for Ars Technica. It's kind of interesting that I've decided to subscribe to a couple of boards. I think I'll be committing more time to them as a result.

I also checked and found that the Morrowind4Kids site is up. I feel rather proud, although my part in making it happen was rather small -- I just contributed the setup fee for the hosting. I like the feeling of having supported a cool project, though.

In case you're wondering what MW4K is, it's a mod for Morrowind, which is one of my alltime favorite games.

Hmmm, feeling rather rambly today, so I think I'll take a stab at a list of my alltime favorite game, or at least those I can remember off the top of my head.

Not in order, because that would take too long...

Sam & Max: Freelance Police - Hit the Road
Fallout
Baldur's Gate
Diablo II
The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind
The Elder Scrolls: Arena
Doom
Quake
Quake II
System Shock
System Shock 2

Still feeling chatty, apparently.

I signed up for a subscription to the Straight Dope message boards. It's all of $4.95 for a year, and is something that I enjoy. I've been lurking there since 2000, so I guess it was time to get active.

I find the amount of agonizing over the decision to charge a subscription fee to be pretty amazing. There's a fair amount of "the Internet is supposed to be free!" nonsense, which I find tiring. Regardless of your take on whether information itself is or should be free, or whether you're interested in sharing your opinions in a free forum, the simple fact is that the act of hosting a forum costs money. And when that forum gets a lot of traffic, it costs a lot of money. You (or the Chicago Reader, in this instance) need to decide whether you want to continue losing money or not. And if you decide not to lose money, then you need to either shut it down or find a way to generate revenue.

This simple process seems to elude a fair number of people, though.

Ah well.

It occurs to me that the only external link to this blog is in my signature on SDMB, so there's a significant possibility of circular reference.

So, I'm off to add my blog link to other signatures. And to give some money to Ars Technica while I'm at it, as long as I'm giving money to web sites I frequent.

Wow, two updates in less than a month. I must be feeling chatty.

Today's obsession is World of Warcraft. MMORPG goodness. Highly relevant newspost and cartoon at Penny Arcade.

My short take:

Dang, this is addictive fun. As can be expected from the fine folks at Blizzard, it's very very well done. Look for it to be a major smash in late fall or so.

Been a while since I updated.

Latest news in the Lab is the Iriver IHP-120. Man, this is a neat toy. It's a 20GB hard drive, USB-capable, which can play back MP3, OGG, WMA and WAV files. Yeah, it's an MP3 player, but it's a lot more than that.

I was trying to decide between this and the Ipod. I went with the Iriver for the battery life and the compatibility with WMA. I'm very happy with the choice.

Battery life has been outstanding. Yesterday I started at 8am with full charge, and spent the whole day with it on. Active listening was about 4 or 5 hours, including an hour in the car (Belkin Tunecast II transmitter turns the jukebox into a car accessory!). I went to about 50% charge at the end of the day -- somewhere around 9pm. I did have it off for a couple of hours over dinner, but still -- I got a good 8 hours of active time on half the battery (assuming the display is semi-accurate).

And it has a nice remote with LCD display and good controls.

I'm a happy guy.

I have about 9 gig of music loaded. That's somewhere around 100 albums, mostly in the best quality WMA files I can create.

In other news, check out MusicPlasma: http://www.musicplasma.com/

Hm. Wonder how this works?

This is just an initial post to see what it looks like.

Might as well include a link.

Homestar Runner is back up!