I never played Galaxies all that much - I think I played my 30 free days, went "Man this is crap!" and bailed. Sony occasionally sends me "Come play our games!" mail from time to time.

My first serious MMORPG was City of Heroes - a game less concerned with grinding levels as it was delivering a kick ass Superhero experience. Beyond that, I played Old Republic for 6 months - a game that had LOADS of potential and is fun as hell, but then when I had all of my character names taken away twice from server merges, I gave up. I'd play, but the free to play model is so hamstrung, I can't stand it - and there's no way I'm paying for a game that likes to screw my characters like that.

So I'm MMORPG free at the moment.

Man... I miss City of Heroes. My wife and I played for most of the time the game was live, running a roleplaying supergroup on Virtue for some time. We left a couple times, but always came back, and stayed right until NCsoft shut the servers down. We made some great friends there, many of which have stood the test of time and remain close with us today.

I lost some good names through server merges on SWTOR. I haven't played in a couple years, but I hope I haven't lost Darth Evil, wielder of the Pinksaber. *laughs*

Poking at old wounds here. I loved CoH/CoV. Such a shame it couldn't be revived. Maybe one day.

I never played Galaxies all that much - I think I played my 30 free days, went "Man this is crap!" and bailed. Sony occasionally sends me "Come play our games!" mail from time to time.

My first serious MMORPG was City of Heroes - a game less concerned with grinding levels as it was delivering a kick ass Superhero experience. Beyond that, I played Old Republic for 6 months - a game that had LOADS of potential and is fun as hell, but then when I had all of my character names taken away twice from server merges, I gave up. I'd play, but the free to play model is so hamstrung, I can't stand it - and there's no way I'm paying for a game that likes to screw my characters like that.

So I'm MMORPG free at the moment.

Man... I miss City of Heroes. My wife and I played for most of the time the game was live, running a roleplaying supergroup on Virtue for some time. We left a couple times, but always came back, and stayed right until NCsoft shut the servers down. We made some great friends there, many of which have stood the test of time and remain close with us today.

I lost some good names through server merges on SWTOR. I haven't played in a couple years, but I hope I haven't lost Darth Evil, wielder of the Pinksaber. *laughs*

Poking at old wounds here. I loved CoH/CoV. Such a shame it couldn't be revived. Maybe one day.

No kidding. CoH/V was my first MMO and had a blast playing it. I'd spend much of my in-game time sitting at the tailor shop designing costumes. Because of what NCSuck did to a loyal player base and employees making the game, I will never again spend one cent on any of their products.

I feel the same about them. Best game and players as far as I am concerned. Used to have about a hundred characters. Acfew I played regularly at 50+. Tanks and masterminds were favorites. I played around with so many concepts from fantasy to sci-fi as well as superhero fare.

Ah how I miss it.

Ha. Me too, Desslok.

I kicked around as Bushido Brother for several months on "City of Heroes" - the only MMORPG I could stand. And even then, I lost interest around month # 4 or 5...

Please please please tell me that Bushido Brother was a 70's Blaxploitation Samurai with a HUGE afro!

Something like this:

I'm a big fan of blaxploitation and kung fu flicks of the 70s... So, yes, while Bushido Brother's name was derived from Undercover Brother? Jim Kelly was very much an influence on the look and feel.

BB was a 6'5" light-skinned brother with a huge afro and soul patch. He also wore gold shades, a gray "wife-beater"/tank top, black karate pants, black boots, and carried a katana. His travel power was "jump." His primary power was "katana." And his defensive power was "super reflexes." He was a scrapper.

He was TONS of fun to play.

Edit: Oh, and his motto? "Funkify your life!"

I feel the same about them. Best game and players as far as I am concerned. Used to have about a hundred characters. Acfew I played regularly at 50+. Tanks and masterminds were favorites. I played around with so many concepts from fantasy to sci-fi as well as superhero fare.

Ah how I miss it.

I had more fun coming up with costumes and concepts as I did playing the game (which was crazy fun, too). The chartacter creator was second to none - from Super Sentai characters to Batmen to just all sorts of crazy stuff, I would spend hours fiddling about with a concept before actually setting out to play.

I loved Scarlet Arrow, my defender archery character. She made it all the way to 50 and never got a travel power! I was proud of that fact! Her back story was that she was an Olympic contender, poised for greatness - when someone outted her on her one superpower, the ability to hover. Otherwise she was completely natural and 100% non-meta, but that was enough to bounce her from the team. She was just a bit bitter after that.

One of my other favorites was Chill Out Woman, an ice tanker who had amnesia. She got her name from wandering (naked) the streets of paragon city asking strangers if she knew who she was. Eventually someone said "Chill out, woman" and thus the name stuck (good thing he didnt say "Drop dead, crazy bitch")

And then there was Great Beyond, my first best love of the game - a Fire/Ice blaster, my first level 50. She didnt have a weird backstory or anything, but I charted her journey to 50 with a comic book series (well, the covers, at least).

This'll be kind of long, so I'll spoiler it for you guys as to not kill the thread:

And yeah, I was doing my best to channel Stan Lee and Jack Kirby there with my sensationalist covers.

Whoops - almost broke the forums! Here's part two:

Cool. Wish I'd taken more pics myself.

Me too, amigo. You guys got me feelin' all nostalgic...

Ok I went searching and found a handful of pics from my CoH/CoV days. All I could find.

The first is my first character back when they first started up.

Although later when i could have completely alternate looks he morphed into something more organic.

Spyked Turtle is down in front in case it isn't obvious. He was a spikes/regen scrapper. A friend of mine had an artist make this for us.

Here's a couple more. Hyenadon and the Mad Dryad.

Couple of the best were later characters. ORCA Prime a Invulnerability/energy melee tanker and Lillith the Succubus a demon/healing mastermind. Wish I'd saved the pics of them but I lost them to a system crash a year or so ago.

I've got a whole lot of pics, but yeah, I was a bit of a costume junkie. My main character started out as "Omega Extreme", changed his name to "Mr. Protagonist", and eventually took on the moniker "Hero Prime". (The first name change happened before there was a paid service to change character names. I actually had a friend report the name "Omega Extreme" as a trademark. And it was! There's a brand of dog food that uses the name.)

These are from his Omega Extreme days.

The transition to Mr. Protagonist, including his "Mystery Man" outfit.

As Hero Prime.

Hero Prime's penultimate costume.

My wife and I even went so far as to "cast" real actors in the roles of our characters. Sort of a What if we made a movie...? thing. Here's what we came up with. (My characters in this post; my wife's in the next.)

Henry Cavill playing Michael Mars (Hero Prime). Despite the fact that Prime was my Superman analog, I had selected Cavill to play him before he was announced for Man of Steel.

Jewell Staite playing Chrysler "Kris" Lane (Gadgette).

Abe Hiroshi as Zen Kajii (Mr. Zen).

Hugo Weaving as Nigel Kaine (Lore).

Chow Yun Fat playing Kai Keller (Psi Monk).

Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Nigel Kaine's niece, Tember Kaine (Summerfall).

Anthony Hopkins playing Templeton Montebank III (Steamshot).

A younger Hayden Panettiere playing Zoe Brightstar.

Mukai Osamu as Zen Toshiro (Zen Force).

And my wife's toons:

Katheryn Winnick playing Lexi Lucas (Fiera Arcane).

Virginia Hey as Jade Keller (Jade Ohm) - married to Kai Keller.

Fujiwara Norika as Jetta Yoshiyoto (Kaijitsu).

Tessa Allen as Vagary Keller (Little Miss Vagary) - adopted daughter of Kai and Jade Keller.

Josh Hutchinson as Bobby Fraley (Bobby Thistle).

Kay Pannabaker as Persimmon Monahan (Persnickety).

Ali Larter as Winsome Blue.

Then we had duos.

First are Rhyme and Reason...

Emma Stone playing December McKenzie (Rhyme), my wife's half of the duo.

Chris Pine as Simon Alexander (Reason) - my half.

Then there were the duos of look-alike characters.

Famke Jannsen as Amelia Black (Pleasure) and Agatha Black (Pain). (Villains, obviously!)

And the ones we had the most fun with...

Kristen Bell playing a number of duos, from two characters named Emma Fields, to two called Ella Fields, and other Fields pairs. (We used a text trick to give them names that look the same, even if one of them at a capital I in the last name rather than a lowercase L.)

Geeze, some of those are uncanny in their likenesses! You do (well, did) good work!

Since everyone is posting their characters, here's a couple of mine. This is Scarlet Arrow, not using her travel power:

This is Malachite Fist, a tanker who was a office worker at the Terra Volta reactor until one of the daily Bad Guy attacks struck and she got caught in an exploding atomic pile. And as these things turned out, she was green and strong instead of killed.

Chill Out Woman, atop City Hall:

This is One-Hit Wonder, a Kung Fu Scrapper who was seriously injured in the Rikti War and rebuilt with state of the art cybernetic Kung-Fu-ness.

And now, the bad guys! This is Overfiend, a deposed Banana Republic dictator who came to Paragon City to build a power base and retake his home. He was the Rage Brute, the one who got stronger the more he punched things.

And lastly, Thornbloom, my favorite badguy. She was a Plant Mastermind who totally stole a page from HK-47's playbook, calling everyone meatbag and generally wanting to exterminate all mammals she came across.

There's some more good guys and bad guys on my hard drive somewhere, but I'll have to find them. . . . .

Found a couple more!

Here is Crazy Ivan, a Radiation Blaster programed and brainwashed by Brezhnev to kill Jimmy Carter. However his cryogenic transport tube was misplaced for 40 years, and he never reached his target. Revived well after the cold war was over, he decided to stay in the USA and be a superhero.

And then there's Schrodinger's Catgirl, a katana scrapper. Her origin was written out as a professor giving a probability lecture to his students, putting a cat in a box and saying about the odds of the cat being dead and the odds of the cat being alive - and one student raises his hand and goes "What's the odds of it spontaneously changing into a cat girl?"

meow?

This thread got hijacked and everyone seems to be ok with it...

This is good...

If you don't like EotE because you need Jedi, play Force and Destiny. Thank you, bye.

SO bummed I didn't hang onto my SWG screenshots...

Speaking of action figures. . . . .

DIIIIVE, MY HAWK-MEN!!!!!

(Subtitle: it's the new Flash Gordon action figures from Big Bang Pow!, featuring Flash, Prince Vultan, Princess Aura, Emperor Ming, and Prince Barin)

COMPATIBLE!

(Image from WEG SWRPG 2E showing Vader with a character that looks totally like Ming)

Speaking of action figures. . . . .

DIIIIVE, MY HAWK-MEN!!!!!

(Subtitle: it's the new Flash Gordon action figures from Big Bang Pow!, featuring Flash, Prince Vultan, Princess Aura, Emperor Ming, and Prince Barin)

FLASH AHHH, AHHH, HE'LL SAVE EVERYONE OF US.

Memories, haven't thought about that movie in years, tried to get my son to watch it and he looked at me like I was nuts.

Total camp but I love it. Especially the soundtrack by Queen.

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