Decisions, Decisions

One Ring and I finally got around to replacing our desktop PC, which had some parts at least 5 years old and the newest drives and chips no less than 3 years old. Needless to say, the difference was immediately noticable in terms of speed, graphics, and memory space. I dumped most of my old hard drive onto the new one, and it barely registered! Then again, considering the old hard drive was roughly 1/20th the size of the new one, I shouldn't be surprised.

So now I have all this space and power just hanging around. And what do I want to do? Buy games, of course!

In a burst of geekiness, I have been re-reading many of my old graphic novels (I would be reading the original comic books, but those I gave to a young member of one of my churches - they weren't worth anything more than sentimental value. Anyway, as I mentioned in my last post, I was surprised to see that Champions, an old pen and paper superhero role playing game that brought me hours of enjoyment as a kid, was making its way to the net. It debuts on September 1st.

After doing a little checking around, I found a second superhero online game already running - City of Heroes. So now it's a matter of doing research and finding out which one is the best value and will offer the best experience.

The irritating thing is that both charge a monthly subscription fee to pay for customer support and upgrades to the game. It looks like City of Heroes runs around $15 / month, while Champions hasn't listed any pay scale, save for a $60 for a 6 month subscription and $250 for a lifetime subscription.

Add to that the cost of purchasing the game itself. City of Heroes has been out for five years or so, and has come out with several expansion modules. Each one contains the original game in addition to the new content. The latest one, City of Heroes: Architect Edition, is available on Amazon for $20 (and $19.99 at Best Buy), and is probably cheaper elsewhere. The architect spin is that you get a program that allows you to build and upload missions to the game. Champions is currently available for pre-order on Amazon for $46.99 (and at Best Buy for $49.99), and there is talk in some of the forums that players will have to pay for things like changing the name of their character and adding bits and pieces of costuming.

So if I go with playing an online superhero game, which does sound fun at the moment, I'll probably go with City of Heroes, unless Champions changes its pricing structure and loses the nickel and dime routine.

Has anyone out there played either game? I'm curious to know if it's worth it.

And yes, I do know that there are several pirate MMO games out there. Disney (obviously) has a Pirates of the Caribbean game out, and there is also the Pirates of the Burning Seas, just to name two. But I'm thinking of moving in a different direction at the moment.