Oh anguish of indecision!

Loyal readers* may recall me opining that I would not be buying City of Heroes, the MMORPG of Superheroic Action. I've been content with Battlefield: 1942. And COH has characters with levels, who have to gain experience, and then can buy additional powers, or enhance existing ones, and fight progressively more difficult foes as they gain in power. Sounds like too much of a time sink for the return, given my on again, off again playing style (I'll obsess for a while, then drift away, lather, rinse, repeat).

One of the things I like about BF1942 is that it lacks experience points and levels and all the characters are functionally identical, aside from equipment. Sure, Villy Vonka (to name one online buddy I play with/against) will kick my ass all day everyday without breaking a sweat. He's got countless more hours of time logged in the game than I'll ever have, and he's hell on wheels playing--the Engineer class (single-shot rifle, grenades, mines and explosive packs for blowing things up and setting traps) in particular, as that's his favorite. But he pwns me right, left and center because he's just better at the game than I am. But he doesn't have a higher-level character. He doesn't have better stats, or more powers, or more or better weapons. He just kicks ass 'cause he's that good.

And I like that. Mostly. It means that a victory is due to real skill and luck, not to having better stuff or a better character. It also means that a novice player can hop onto a server and play on an equal footing with everyone else. On the other hand, it means that if I'm getting trounced over and over and over again, it's because I suck. That's not so much fun. But it's the cold, hard truth.

But. But, but, but. There's a long thread on COH on the Hero Games forum. aikon is posting about his adventures with the game. And now, dammit, I'm tempted. It sounds like it's very BF1942-like in that you can get on the server and play hard for a couple of hours, then sign off again. And apparently they've got a "sidekick" system that lets newbies or otherwise low-level characters hang around with higher-level characters and fight on a par with them, so if Larry has a 20th level superhero, Moe's 3rd level superhero can fight alongside him as effectively an 18th level superhero, so they both have fun. No deathmatch for Moe, no boring cakewalk villains for Larry.

Dammit. I don't need another timesink. To say nothing of monthly online charges.

But...it sounds like it could be fun.


*well, reader anyhow (hi, snippy, my love!)

Decision: Averted!

I drove up to CompUSA this evening, intent on possibly, maybe buying some memory and a new graphics card for my computer. Alas, I left the specs on my motherboard at home, so I wasn't entirely confident of what I needed in the way of memory cards. The guy at CompUSA was sure, based on what I remembered, but...I decided to hold off. Also, my motherboard can handle 2GB of RAM (currently it's limping along on 256MB (which seemed like a hell of a lot when I bought it), but the biggest memory cards they had would have given me only a total of 1GB if I used all the slots. I can probably do better at Fry's.

I looked at graphics cards, too. I'm somewhat limited in my choices by my use of Win98SE as an OS, but dammit--I don't like ME, 2000 or XP.* Eventually--like, on my next new system--I'm gonna have to bite the bullet. But not yet. I'd like a new graphics card, but from what I've heard a big boost in RAM will produce a far bigger improvement in my gaming experience than a new graphics card, so if it comes to a choice of one or the other instead of both, I'm going to buy the memory expansions.

Still not sure about COH, though. It could be fun, but...I dunno. Will I really enjoy it? And even if I do, will I play it all that much?

*Yeah, yeah. I could go with Apple (yeah, right). Or Linux. I tried Linux. Tain't nearly as user friendly as I expected, and frankly, I didn't feel like spending the time to figure out how to do things that I had long ago mastered in Windows.