Tag Archives: City of Heroes

City of Heroes Freedom Weekend

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Friday:

The City of Heroes Freedom Player Summit weekend started early for about 30 of us players and a group of developers and other Paragon Studios folks.  The devs decided to have dinner at Trader Vic’s for the players that they later called the Freedom Focus Group, who made a visit to Paragon Studios back in May to hear about and playtest the new Free-to-Play version of the game.

I walked into the restaurant and found the group right away.  Andy ‘Zwillinger’ Belford, Community Relations Manager, spotted me and greeted me right away.  I saw a few other folks I recognized, and started to snap pics as more people walked in.

The group got seated, and I sat next to player ‘funnyhalo’ to my right, and across from Brian ‘Crosscheck’ Clayton, Executive Producer, and Hosun ‘Black Pebble’ Lee, Brand Manager.  After a few opening remarks by Andy, Brian, and a marketing guy from Logitech, we started on the appetizers and drinks.

While our dinner orders were taken, everyone started to ask questions about the game, like what we liked/disliked about the Freedom launch, how long have we been playing, what can we expect from Saturday’s summit, among other topics.

Dinner served, and conversation shifted to non-game topics, like sports, movies, television and the like.  At one point I spotted Texas Justice from the Justice server, and went up to greet him, where he greeted me with a ‘gnaw gnaw gnaw’.  Heh.


Texas Justice and Zwillinger

As dinner wound down, folks started to leave and a few of us stopped to check out the prototype items that the Logitech rep brought with him.  After chatting a bit with TonyV from Atlanta (he works for Coke), I left as the groups finally broke up for the evening.

Saturday:

As usual I got there WAY TOO EARLY but hung out, took pictures and chatted with other players/attendees as we waited for registration to open.  Once it did, the line moved pretty quickly.

It was nice to see folks who I’ve only met online or at previous CoH-related events.  After a while I met up with Dan and Michael, who I first met at the 2007 Meet-and-Greet at Dave and Busters.


Michael and Dan

We finally entered the main room where we sat and listened and watched the keynote address, though prior to starting I managed to blind the internet by taking a picture of the streaming video camera, with the flash on.  Ooops.

Before Q&A started Matt ‘Positron’ Miller had his hair Flowbee’d by the winner of an online contest, who was supposed to have his hair Flowbee’d, but he was bald.

The opening session ended, and Dan, Michael and I took off for lunch at Carl’s Jr.  We returned and Dan and I sat through the Power Sets and Abilities panel.  Cool stuff coming soon, including new powersets and tweaks to existing sets.

This was followed by the Art Attacks! panel, where Michael and I got to hear folks from the Art Department explain the process of adding elements to the game, from concept to release, like costumes, environments, giant monsters, and power sets.

The last panel Dan and I watched was the Endgame and Beyond panel, where I got a better understanding that even at level cap (50) the devs are still providing content for for players to play, and not necessary ‘leveling’, with other rewards for playing the high-level content.

There was a short break/reception prior to dinner, as the room was being set up, when drinks were served.  As dinner began, they held a raffle, and for once I didn’t win anything, though Dan won a new video card, and Jen, another player at our table won a gaming headset.


Raffle prizes

Dinner wound down and they set up the karaoke machine, which many folks took turns singing, with varying levels of proficiency.  Granted, there’s not enough alcohol in the world which would get me to do karaoke, as I told Texas Justice, TonyV and Ninus.


Karaoke begins!


Ninus trying to convince me to sing something.  Or dance.  Or to not gnaw his forehead.


Positron belting out a Neil Diamond tune

The bug I’ve been trying to fight off finally started to get to me, so I said my goodbyes and took off for home.  I got to listen to the second half of the Big Game, and heard Stanford score a couple of touchdowns as I made my way through the rainy highways.

All in all, it was a good weekend.  As I’ve said before, in addition to the game, the people have kept me playing City of Heroes.


Badge!


Weekend Recap

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Saturday:

Waited for a contractor to replace my existing electrical meter with one of the new SmartMeters.  Once the guy got here, it only took less than 5 minutes to replace it.

Had the SyFy channel’s Indiana Jones movie marathon on in the background as the day went on.

Ran some errands, including a stop at Best Buy to look for possible accessories for the new Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, which I’ve nicknamed ‘TARDIS’.  I ended up picking up a tablet sleeve from Target, in TARDIS blue.

Sunday:

Caught the second half of the Brazil-USA Women’s World Cup match, which was probably one of the best soccer games I’ve ever seen, with Team USA getting screwed by the refs but eventually tying the game in extra time after extended time, and then winning on penalty kicks.

Before and after the game I watched the early Harry Potter films on ABC Family.  It’s been 10 years since this series started, and the main characters look so young.  And smaller.

I logged into City of Heroes and ran a task force with a bunch of regulars.  And that was all the gaming I did this weekend.  Amazingly I didn’t log into either Star Trek Online, where they’ve started the latest weekly mission series, nor DC Universe Online, my current favorite MMO.

I managed to configure the FastStone Image Viewer to work on my Ubuntu netbook through Wine.  Now I should be able to convert photos during Comic-Con more efficiently, and without lugging my laptop with me.

On both days I spent a lot of time familiarizing myself with my tablet, trying out applications, surfing, and reading comics/books.  I’m very happy with my purchase, as it will take the place of my netbook for my everyday online access.

Speaking of which, I also spent a good deal of time on Google+.  I’m watching various conversations, some in real time, about various subjects, from Wil Wheaton and his beer brewing to Guy Kawasaki trying to install a Chrome extension to allow G+ posts to propagate to Facebook and Twitter.  The latter is happening in real time as I type this, with the developer of the extension interacting with Guy and others to try to fix the issues with the extension.

As you may have noticed, the links for Mr. Wheaton and Mr. Kawasaki are ‘public’ posts in Google+, meaning anyone can read them, not just Google+ users.  It’s giving me the idea of possibly blogging there myself, with this blog disappearing or simply acting as a pointer for the G+ blog.

I can be found at http://gplus.to/Pepsiman

I also watched the Giants-Mets games, which have become hard for me to choose to root for one team against the other.  The Giants won the series 2-1.

And that was the weekend.


Friday

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My main toon in City of Heroes is a… Blaster…

* * *

It wouldn’t be the Tech Week from Hell without one last problem at home, this time with my wireless print server!  Woohoo!

It wouldn’t print this morning, so I spent some time resetting and reconfiguring it, but I couldn’t wrap my head around why it still wasn’t working.

I went out for lunch, and after a couple of slices of magic cheese pizza and a visit to Best Buy to scope out possible replacement printers, I went home, and figured out how to login to the print server itself and reconfigured it for the new wireless network.  Now it works like a charm.


Saturday

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Morning:

Went to go see Rango, which I’ve been looking forward too since first hearing about it from a friend who worked on it at ILM.  I loved it.  Just as quirky as I expected, and the Western theme was very cool.  Highly recommended.

Afternoon:

Grabbed lunch from a Korean BBQ place at the mall, went home to eat, and bought/downloaded the soundtrack to Rango (Hans Zimmer?  Again?!?).

I finished up the NASCAR Nationwide Series race, won by Mark Martin, with Danica Patrick and Trevor Bayne finishing 4th and 5th, respectively.  I then decided to go out again to get my haircut and pick up a can of wood stain (more on that later).

Evening:

Finished up the ‘Cloaked Intentions’ weekly episodes with the finale, ‘Cutting the Cord’.  Very cool mission, both in space and on the planetary surface.  Screenshots later.

I played a bit of City of Heroes while finishing up Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Next, I used the wood stain on a few of my Warhammer 40K miniatures, as an experiment on washing/shading using a process called ‘dipping’.  In a nutshell, you dip the mini in the stain, and then shake off as much excess as you can, and the stain fills in and ‘washes out’ the mini, giving it a bit more of a realistic shade to it.

Behold:


Some unused command officer minis, stained


Unstained and stained, for comparison


Better shot of the officers

I think I may need to thin out the stain, somehow, or shake them off a little bit longer, so the stain doesn’t pool as much as in the shoulder pads on a few of these guys.