Captain_Photon

There are two problems with Nemesis Carabiniers. First, their name is spelled wrong. There's no such word as "Carabineir". In French military parlance, whence most of the Nemesis Army's unit type names come, it's Carabinier. (The Italian military police are still called the Carabinieri to this day.)

That's not the big problem, though; it's just an irritating typo. The big problem is that they're not carbineers. Carbineers are called carbineers because they carry carbines - that is, shorter rifles than those employed by the rest of their army. The rifle Nemesis Carabineirs (sic) carry is bloody massive. Nemesis Armigers and Chasseurs carry something that could be considered a carbine by the standards of the Nemesis arsenal, but that gigantic war trombone the Carbs carry, not so much.

Solution: Fix the spelling of "Carabinier", then swap the assignment of the name to the Nemesis troops now called Armigers. Now you've got carbineers carrying what look like carbines, other soldiers whose name doesn't imply any particular type of weapon carrying the war trombone, the names are spelled right, and Napoleonic military pedants the world over are happy.

I like it the way it is now. It makes soloing much less sisyphean than it was in the old days.

Now that Halloween is over and the Halloween costumes have been put away for another year, I decided to put together a sort of one-stop pass in review for the various styles of the character I'm playing most at the moment, the valiant Torch of Victory. I agonized for a while over whether to put it here or in Roleplaying, but eventually I decided, eh, it's got pictures, that's multimedia enough.


Name: The Torch of Victory
Archetype: Scrapper
Origin: Natural
Primary: Martial Arts
Secondary: Willpower
Travel: Flight
Ancillary: Blaze Mastery
Favorite flypose: 2
Likes: Punching evil in the middle of its face, exploration, dim sum
Dislikes: The Lost City of Oranbega, zombie vomit, people thinking that Captain Castillo is her archenemy
Particularly enjoys punching: Arachnos Wolf Spiders
In the: Junk

"It's not that I'm fearless. I'm just stronger than fear."

Notes: Rachael "Ricki" Tregaskis, better known as the Torch of Victory, used to be Captain Neutrino's flame-throwing sidekick. Stripped of all but a faint echo of her mutant command of flame by an Arachnos experiment, but incredibly stubborn, she found herself only reaffirmed in her heroic vocation by this misfortune. She learned to punch villains instead of throwing fire at them, and discovered to her surprise and delight that, though harder work, this approach is somehow more personally rewarding.

Yes, that means I had her ancillary pool picked out at level 1. She's named, by the way, for the late Richard Tregaskis, an American war correspondent and author whose most famous book is his World War II memoir, Guadalcanal Diary. Tregaskis also wrote a novel based on his WWII experiences, Stronger than Fear, whence comes Torchy's motto.

Current standard costume assortment:


Halloween 2011 special costume assortment:

Hey guys - on the off chance that alternate-animation customization ever spreads to the Power Pools, how about this for a Flurry option: The old "kick kick kickety kick" version of Storm Kick. Sure, it's too long and really annoying when you miss, which is why it went away in the Martial Arts power set ages ago, but that makes it just perfect for Flurry!

I've noticed that NPCs in newer content can count to one and tell which gender my characters are when they have to speak to/about me, which is a nice change from the older missions where speaking NPCs constantly refer to my solo heroes and heroines in the plural ("Captain Photon? Take 'em out!"). I'd like to see that logic pushed to the aforementioned older content, because particularly now that it's been fixed, that old problem is even more glaring and annoying than it used to be (and it was pretty annoying before).

From whom are they supposed to be emanating, those pained grunts and stifled screams that accompany NPC Blood Widows' Claws attacks? It's a male voice, so unless Arachnos is really up to something shady with that program, it's presumably not the Widows themselves. The only other interpretation that makes any sense is that they're supposed to be coming from my character in response to being cut, which is not only obnoxious godmoding, but also pretty much nonsense if I'm playing a female character, the AutoCooler 5000, or what have you.

Suggestion: 86 those sound effects. It's been a long time since I played Clawdacious, but I don't remember his regular PC Claws attacks making those sounds. Maybe you could just use those.

Speaking of, why are my mid-level contacts' mission streams still likely to dead-end with "of course, you'll need three friends to help you disable the bombs" missions? That mission design is so Jack Emmert. Let's clean out the database, shall we?

Darn. When they went back to mining the really obscure Fleming short story titles for Quantum of Solace, I dared hope that the next one would be The Hildebrand Rarity.

This could work if it's subtle and fadey, like the Runes one (not unsubtle and irrtating like the Bats one).

Also: /e boomboxoverhead (alternately invoked with /e sayanything)

The sad part is, you didn't have to make the thread eligible for instant destruction. As the title implies, this is a classic comic book art trick that has nothing to do with the competition. And I would love a Kirby Kosmic Krackle combat aura.

Man, somebody else grabbed Captain Photon over there, like, instantly. It's like domain camping.