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My first day in City of Heroes I saw Santa and Mrs. Claus underneath the statue of Atlas outside City Hall. I considered this to be an encouraging sign.
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Dr. Haas, that handsome devil, unenthusiastically ponders his new court-ordered career as a good guy.
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At level 14, you get access to "travel powers" -- Flight, Super-Speed, Super Jumping, and Teleportation. Urd got there first and I gave her Flight. Hooray for slipping the surly bonds of earth and whatnot!
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Flight lets you go anywhere at will, except for the top couple stories of the largest skyscrapers. It's great for plinking away at helplessly ground-bound villains too. In other games they ban you for doing that; in CoH it's encouraged.
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"The City. My The City. Tell me where it hurts!"
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Mega-Pope is all about the heavenly backlighting, yo. Somebody please smack me.
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Ms. Seabrook looks enigmatic. Well, it's hard for her to look any other way, realistically.
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Those damn kids today, you can almost sense him thinking.
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The man's name? Mega-Einstein.
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Winter Storm hikes through Steel Canyon. Yeah, in Paragon City they pretty much roll up the streets at 8:30 PM.
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Winter Storm poses for the camera in front of Hero Corps HQ in Galaxy City.
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The man's name? Farout Man. Admit it, you laughed.
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CoH came with plenty of "flex" emotes out of the box. They had their priorities straight.
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Ms. Seabrook again. Isn't she cool?
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A nice closeup of Urd. I'm kind of hoping the extreme darkness of this image is just due to my monitor's gamma being screwed up.
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Over on Victory server, Ms. Seabrook poses with my friend's character Nanako Date, psychopathic magical girl.
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The man's name? The Eyesore. It's easy to create ugly heroes, but you have to try really hard to achieve this level of hideousness.
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The grungy slums of King's Row.
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Faultline is a "hazard zone," areas of the city that have endured a disaster of some sort and have been largely abandoned to the criminal element. It's one of the most dramatic areas in the game, for certain. Urd's different outfit is her supergroup colors -- you can join a supergroup with other players and get a special color scheme you can switch to at will.
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Johnny Bravo!
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A typically colorful crowd around the trainer in Steel Canyon.
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Metal Curse means business.
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I honestly don't remember this guy's name, but he's pretty cool-looking, don't you agree?
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An all-female squad in Steel Canyon.
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Waiting for an elevator.
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The giant subway token in King's Row!
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Boomtown, another hazard zone and a grim place indeed.
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Office space.
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A pickup group in Boomtown.
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Red Nina ponders her beloved country, two hundred years later. Off in front of her is the famous Magic Sewer Entrance.
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To be honest, Boomtown is actually kind of depressing. I tried not to spend much time there unless I had to.
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"That's right! Fifteen years from now my ridiculous phone will be in a museum!"
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The first free expansion to the game added boomboxes and dance emotes. Every training area and monorail stop in Paragon City immediately became an impromptu rave for the next few weeks. Whether or not you disapproved of this depended on exactly how much of a humorless dork you were.
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Sunrise in Independence Port.
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Once Winter Storm reached Level 20, I got to feeling adventurous and rode the secondary monorail line around to see all of the high-level zones. This is Founders' Falls, a truly gorgeous location full of canals and old-world architecture -- which makes no sense as Paragon City is supposed to be in Rhode Island, but never mind -- and resident NPC Numina.
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Meow.
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Expiration Date gazes into the setting sun and wishes he'd just thrown that milk away, dammit.
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Mmm, lobster.
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Mecha-Marx and Super-Lenin lead Glorious People's Revolutionary Rave #673.
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A tragic-looking girl robot. Awwww. There, there.
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Babbage is the sub-boss for one of the Task Forces, a lengthy series of interconnected story missions. Looks mean, doesn't he?
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Pah. Wimp.
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Dr. Vahzilok, the guy responsible for all those annoying zombies you have to fight in the low levels of the game. It strikes me as not exactly being in the spirit of things that he attacks you with machine guns and grenade launchers as opposed to, you know, zombie stuff.
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The size of your hero can be cranked down to about three feet tall. This is Ms. Mosquito.
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Okay, what the heck is this all about? I mean, come on.
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Winter Storm's awesome Glacier Armor (secondary costume.)
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U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
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I repeat: the Glacier Armor is awesome.
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Seen on Talos Island near the monorail stop. I believe this is the Eyesore's big brother.
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Um, I don't think they ended up getting quite as much traffic on the freeways in Skyway City as they were expecting.
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Once I got my bearings around the mid-level zones of the game, I chose Talos Island as my new general base of operations, not least because of attractively realistic-looking areas like this.
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Brickstown, a high-level zone; that's the Zigursky Prison in the background. I ended up frequently jetting through Brickstown because it's an elegant shortcut from one end of Independence Port to the other: duck through the southern exit from IP into Brickstown, cross the Mashu Bridge to the monorail stop, take the monorail back to IP and find yourself in the northern part. Quick and easy -- just don't stop to talk to any of the Crey security people along the way unless you want to go to the hospital instead.
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The hazard zone of Terra Volta.
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Nightlife, or what passes for it, in Steel Canyon.
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Kids come running for the great taste of... fascism... um... let's just skip this one.
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Awwww! He's adorable, yes he is!
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Hey, that's my car!
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I mentioned that Talos Island is very pretty, right?
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