City of Dress-Up

Accompanied by John Walker's gothy, reluctant healer Nitefall, we were quite the team. Hardened COH veterans would doubtless scoff at the impracticalities of a group consisting of two blasters, a tanker and a Defender, but, really, it wasn't about how well we played. It was about playing how we wanted to play, and looking exactly how we wanted to look as we did so. Nothing else offers that. Sure, we made appreciative noises when one of the others, fresh out of the Tailor shop (that you can alter your costume at any point is just one more sign of COH's unprecedented player expression) asked "how d'you like my new shoulder armour?", or displayed the new secondary costume they'd unlocked at level 20. We didn't care, of course. All each of us really thought about was how we looked ourselves, forever stopping to pose for vanity screenshots mid-fight.

I lost count of the number of times I left the others waiting for me outside a mission entrance while I faffed around in the Tailor, obsessively adding minor tweaks to The Entomologist. "Er, I got lost. With you in a sec!" I'd lie. "Didn't you have a spiked collar on earlier?" they'd ask when I finally arrived. In truth, I wasn't completely happy with the Entomologist until around level 18 or so.

His basic physique was, however, what I wanted to achieve, enabled beautifully by COH's still-unparalleled character editor. Bulging Hulk muscles, midnight-black skin, a ludicrous giant robot arm, and tight red briefs. And only four foot tall. He was my unrepentant love of the archetypal Marvel superhero, filtered through my inability to take anything entirely seriously. He was ridiculous, he was oddly cute, and best of all, his tiny stature meant the footstep sound effect played twice as fast as everyone else's when he ran.

The character editor, especially in the expanded form it takes these days, offers a vast array of possibilities. After the immediate choice between Male, Female and the ever-hilarious Huge, you alter individual scales - jaw size, waist, leg length - and battle against the game's admittedly poor facial graphics to create what's, at least, the silhouette you're after. Then you play dress-up. Look closely and carefully and you can spot the sets - robot, gangster, martial artist - but if you've got even the slightest spark of imagination, you mix and match.

There are two key mistakes the vast majority of new players make with the editor. The first is they go in with a specific interest - they want to be the Spider-Man, they want to be the Batman. So, they make the Spider-Man, they make the Batman, or at least as close as the editor allows, and as far as every other player is concerned, they look wretched and stupid. Plus, they'll doubtless be booted out of the game if a GM catches wind of them. If you want to be Wolverine, play an X-Men game. You come to Paragon City to let your geekiest imagination run wild, not to copy someone else.

The second mistake is greed. When you make your first character, you'll almost inevitably feel you have to choose one of every option - got to have a belt, got to have shoulder armour, got to have sunglasses, and spikes on the gloves and a tail and wings and a pirate hook on one hand, and oh, the kitchen super-sink. Then you can overlay a pattern or colour blend onto each piece - and you will, because you can. Which means you end up with some hideously spiky, incoherent psychedelic-Celtic-android that looks like a parent accidentally drove over their kid's box full of Transformers and glued them all back together into one misshapen mass.