Stolen Pixels #131: It Is a Silly Place

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Oct 6, 2009

Filed under: Column 45 comments

In this comic I describe the Snake Gulch area of Champions Online. Note that everything said about the place in the comic is true. I wasn’t exaggerating for comedic effect. It really is like that.

I think Snake Gulch is by far the weakest area of the game. (Disclaimer: I’ve only just now reached monster Island, so I can’t really comment on it or the rest of the level 30+ content, although they would have to be pretty bad to rival Snake Gulch.) I’ve already belabored the thematic problems (like trying to collect alimony from one robot cowboy to give to another) but it’s rough in just about every other area as well. The quests don’t make a lot of sense, even once you accept the premise of the robot cowboy theme park. The teaming is completely screwed, and it’s more or less random if individual quests can be shared and if you can actually cooperate on their individual goals or if you end up competing with your teammates for quest resources. It’s the only place in the game where I found myself grinding for drops.

Example: In one quest you have to collect seven tin stars from Sheriff’s Deputies, but they only seem to drop about half of the time, which means you need to fight about fourteen of them. Unless you’re in a group, in which case you seem to share those drops and you’ll end up fighting even more, thus punishing you for working together. And the game doesn’t warn you, but some deputies will never drop stars, ever. (Hint: As far as I can tell, only the roaming ones drop.) Once you (and every member of your team) have seven tin stars, you can go to the saloon and fight Sheriff Robo. I don’t remember what excuse the game offered for why we needed those stars first and we couldn’t just go right for Robo directly.

That’s just one quest. There are a lot of others that offer these sort of logic-defying annoyances and poorly justified contrivances.

But the real problem with Snake Gulch is the obnoxious layout. The gulch is a three-tier arena with high cliff walls. For heroes using super-speed and acrobatics, their only choice is to use the stairs. To go up one tier you have to navigate a three-story spiral staircase. And the stairs aren’t even next to each other, so that you’ll have to deal with mooks getting from one staircase to another:

co_snake_gulch.jpg

As an added bonus, there are “singing cowboys” in the area with a huge knockback sonic blast, and if you’re earthbound it’s really easy to get punted to the bottom and have to start the climb all over. As an added added bonus, there is a rock spire in the middle, and a couple of quests perched on top.

This is pretty much a worst-case scenario for anyone without vertical travel powers. At the very LEAST the stairs should have been a continuous ramp, and placed near each other without any mooks in between. Getting around the other areas of the game can be annoying with super speed, but Snake Gulch is a punishing time sink. I love the acrobatics travel power, but I’ll never use it because of Snake Gulch.

But even so: Who builds an amusement park in a hole? It’s all cliffs and no handrails. It’s smothering, claustrophobic, and actually undermines the premise that this place is either an amusement park or an old west town. It looks bad and is no fun and makes no sense and works against the intended fiction.

I’m pretty sure the annoying quests and glitches are being gradually fixed, and I’m willing to bet in a few more patches the place will play much better. But the travel issue is built into the structure of the place, and I can’t think of how it could be fixed without a massive art and design overhaul. A better solution would be to offer an alternate area with level 19-22 content so that people have another place to level in that range.

Usual disclaimer: Champions Online is huge fun. Snake Gulch is full of tribulations, but there is a lot of really fantastic content in the game that keeps me coming back. If you liked City of Heroes at all, it’s well worth checking out. It features the most solid and rewarding solo game I’ve ever seen in an MMO, so if you dig solo play you’re likely to find Champs Online to be really satisfying. I’m being hard on the game, but that’s more or less in my nature. It’s a freshly launched MMO and I’ve never played an MMO this close to launch.

 


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45 thoughts on “Stolen Pixels #131: It Is a Silly Place

  1. toasty says:

    Still ranting about this game, are you?

    I do find it interesting that you hate this place so much, yet love the rest of the game alot.

  2. B.J. says:

    Haven’t you ever seen the movie Westworld?

    1. Shamus says:

      B.J. I’ve heard about Westworld, but I don’t see what that has to do with Snake Gulch. I mean, I watched “Love Boat” once, but that doesn’t mean I want to fight crime on a cruise ship…

  3. J Greely says:

    My highest-level character just got the breadcrumb quest to go to Snake Gulch. Fortunately, I had already learned my lesson and given up on using non-flight travel powers. Too annoying for long-distance travel, and impossible to use to hunt for specific NPCs you need to defeat.

    My biggest problem in the game right now is the lighting. Some areas are so harshly lit that light colors are blown out to white, and I’ve had one warehouse mission where I kept walking into crates until I turned the brightness up to 150%. I’d love to show off how much fun I’m having with some nice screenshots, but there are huge areas where I can’t take nice screenshots. I get pictures of my characters by loading them into the character creator and cranking up the graphics options to the maximum.

    -j

  4. Chandler says:

    Your disclaimer was actually a much-needed shining beacon of hope.

    I’ve been playing City of Heroes for the past few months (when in reality I wanted to be playing Champs, but they don’t let you play for “free” yet). Your Experienced Points article put a serious damper on my hopes for the game being any semblance of “good” and “worth the money you put into it”.

    However, since you just said it’s fun (and especially for solo play), I’m going to end up trying it. I’m a long-time-reader-first-time-commenter, and I generally find your ideas of what makes a game “fun” match mine, so I’m “trusting” you here on Champs.

    Admittedly, the idea of non-epic level quests and missions (and instead these farcical jokes) make me disappointed about the game, since that’s normally a part I love about gaming and story lines.

    But yeah. Thanks for talking about the game. Cryptic Studios hasn’t paid you anything to promote it, have they? (Kidding)

  5. Ah Snake Gulch. Yeah I think you’ve summed it up. I’ve done it with an Acrobatics guy and soon I’m going to do it with a Tunnelling (a highly underrated travel power).

    If there was somewhere else to go when you hit level 19 oh yes I’d go there. But I think a Might based super tanker might find it easier.

  6. Sheer_FALACY says:

    So… is there any advantage to not taking flight? Because you make it sound like you just pick one of the above. And picking acrobatics sounds like something you do out of a) story dedication or b) masochism. Or both.

  7. Clint says:

    You made a spelling mistake in the comic: Second panel, where the guy says “It makes the pace more authentic!”. Pretty sure you meant to say “place”.

  8. Mazinja says:

    I… actually kinda liked Snake Gulch. It was goofy as hell, but I kinda liked it. I like dit more when I retconned my melee character to have Invulnerability and stopped DYING so much, but I had that issue in every zone :p

    I think its just the collector in me talking. I want all those toy robots :(

  9. Zerotime says:

    What he meant is that Monster Island is actually a peninsula.

  10. J Greely says:

    Chandler, rest assured that the game is a blast. Shamus is clearly giving the developers a little “tough love”, and, yeah, they need it. They’ve got an amazing character generator and a gorgeous action-packed combat system, but the map and quest design needs some work, some of the powers need to be rethought, and the graphics engine is still a work in progress.

    Besides, how can you not love a system that gives you twelve different types of thigh-high stockings for your female characters, plus a set of biking shorts with integrated fishnets? This may be the first MMO in history where no one asks why men play female characters…

    -j

  11. At GenCon in 2008, Cryptic Studios used the Snake Gulch area as their DEMO of the GAME!

    I remember scratching my head then thinking, “This is a really weird premise for a superhero game. And this level design SUCKS!”

    Good to know it wasn’t just me…

    Leslee

  12. Zed-F says:

    Snake Gulch was where my choice of store to pre-order from paid off in spades. I went with one of the stores that gave access to anti-grav boots. Now anti-grav boots aren’t really all that great most of the time… they are slow and there are limits on how you can acquire altitude with them. But they certainly can make it easier to get out of places like Snake Gulch when you’re using one of the ground-based travel powers.

    Incidentally, Acrobatics is good again once you are able to rank it up to 2 at level 20. You can typically jump out of places like Snake Gulch with few problems at that point, so long as you watch not to hit your head on things like overhanging ledges. Superspeed and Tunnelling still have altitude issues, of course.

  13. Tesh says:

    Am I the only one thinking someone with superspeed should be able to run up walls *at least* as well as the Prince of Persia?

  14. Heron says:

    I’m glad to hear it’s a good solo play MMO. I loved LotR Online – it has that epic fantasy atmosphere that makes the movies so great – but once you hit level 13 you suddenly can’t do quests alone anymore, and since I have better things to do than sit around in town yelling “LFG lvl 13 Dwarf fighter” until someone asks me to go with them, I ended up abandoning it altogether.

    It may be enough to get me to try CO. If I only play for a month, is it worth the $50?

  15. SharpeRifle says:

    “Incidentally, Acrobatics doesn’t suck as much once you are able to rank it up to 2 at level 20. ”

    There fixed that for you! ;-)

    Unfortunately in this game most of the “ground-contact” powers suffer if only because they often have to go through mobs the flight powers can avoid…except for tunneling I presume….which is supposed to be a ground based version of teleport. On the other hand…the extra xp for killing mobs would be great…IF we got much xp for mobs.

    Seriously…where’s my beating stick. Some devs need a beating for this crap. And then I’ll buy them lunch.
    Cause I love the combat in the game. The “everything else” just needs a liiiiitle work.

  16. Zed-F says:

    Actually I enjoy moving around the gameworld with my Acrobatics toon more than I do with my fliers. For starters, my acrobat feels more connected with the game world; the fliers simply move from quest objective to quest objective and fly over everything in between, but while this makes for faster questing it doesn’t do much for immersiveness IMHO. My acrobat feels more like she has her finger on the pulse of the city.

    Now yes my acrobat does have to worry more about aggro, but I’ve found with rank 2 acrobatics, it’s not a lot more. She can’t be completely oblivious to what mobs are around her and where she runs, but in most cases mob aggro isn’t a huge concern while travelling.

    And while she does have to fight more mobs, the experience does in fact add up — not just because she gets xp from the mobs themselves, but because she saves more civilians and gets more civilian missions too. For most of her career, she’s been doing quests 2 levels below her and has never run out of quests she could be doing. In contrast, my fliers constantly find themselves doing quests at or above their level, simply because they’ve not gotten nearly as much XP from patrolling.

    That said, there are still times when she needs to pull out those anti-grav boots, so it’s not all roses either. :)

  17. mark says:

    Shamus, I’m completely failing to parse your comment about “I Love Boat once” in comment 4. I feel like a defeated spambot. :(

    1. Shamus says:

      mark: Whoops. Fixed it.

  18. BlckDv says:

    Yeah; Snake Gulch was very weak, Doylo flew in from Canada, spent one afternoon of weekend play in the Gulch, and left confused and glad that since it was a pit he could forever more ignore it as a hole in the ground. I am sure I missed an untold number of Gulch quests, seeing as I kept hearing about Mechnon but never faced him or his direct lackeys, I just smashed their radio tower.

    Now, in contrast, I really love the setting of Stronghold (the prison) as well as most of Canada.

    As far as travel powers go; I have played toons at least into the teens with Acrobatics, Superjump, Swinging, Flight, Earth Flight, Teleport, Tunneling, and Rocketboots.

    My experience has been that the various flight powers (flight, earth flight, rocket boots) provide the most ease of transit and significant PvE benefit, the animations if you give a toon wings are well worth it.

    Tunneling was horribly bugged for me (may be fixed now) as any mob of Master Villain level or higher would still “see” me underground and cheerfully attack me while I could not fight back.

    Swinging is my current favorite; most of the benefits of flight, but a lot more fun to go from a to b. Commodore 64 has been known to waste several minutes en route to a mission just swinging around for fun.

    Teleport is very strong in PvP, and if you are okay with having to keep up button pressing, can functionally let you fly at high speed.

    Superjump is a lot of fun, but you can’t really “scout” with it, and you just have to accept that when you stop moving, you will usually be in a fight with whoever you landed next to. It does get enough height to avoid most barriers. However, over long distances, Superjump beats flight by a good bit of speed.

    Acrobatics is GREAT in PvP and the powerhouse, but Rank One is a harsh reality in the real world, too slow to beat the flyers to point X, not enough vertical to go in straight lines over obstacles.

  19. Shamus, eventually I’d like to see a compare/contrast between Champions Online and City of Heroes.

  20. MuonDecay says:

    The premise of Westworld was (at least partially) a wild west theme park populated by robot cowboys who gave it flavor and authenticity. The robot cowboys went bad.

    This is probably a case of derivative writing. Lifting someone else’s setting, and sloppily gluing it into their game with a liberal application of Schlock-Titeâ„¢

  21. *** Dave says:

    MuonDecay beat me to the description of “Westworld,” except to note that (a) it was an early Michael Crichton-written movie, and (b) Yul Brynner as the glitching homocidal robot gunslinger was absolutely kick-ass. “Draw …”

    Thank you, Zed-F, for the note about the anti-grav boots. My two top toons in CO are acrobatics, and I have AG boots from my pre-ofder. That may make my life MUCH easier. Or, at least, less difficult. I freaking love the movement with Acrobatics (esp. with a “beast” posture character), but vertical challenges have just killed me (sometimes literally). I already rerolled one Super-Speed character.

    Shamus, I’m loving the commentary, and chortling madly over it, though I, too, am enjoying CO a lot.

  22. Pickly says:

    Small nit on “no quest drops for everyone punishes working together.”

    Provided there are enough monsters to kill, there won’t be an advantage or disadvantage to grouping for these quests, since a group will presumably be able to defeat enemies much faster than an individual. (Relative to other types of quests, yes, groups are not as effective, but not relative to individual groups.)

    These posts are also reminding me of a number of reasons why I’ve come to hate/dislike a lot of MMO players and games so much. Certainly, all the different ways so many players are obsessed with “rewards” and “punishments” in these games is quite annoying (and seems to screw up these types of games a lot for different sorts of fun), and combined with the crazy investment in the game seems to contribute to a ton of whining.

  23. RudeMorgue says:

    The idea that the devs should level out the entire world to make it easy to use Superspeed or Acrobatics is nonsense. All of Snake Gulch is wheelchair-accessible already (as long as you don’t mind the hostile robots). How much do the devs have to pander to your laziness if you have voluntarily chosen one of the three or four (out of thirteen!) travel powers that aren’t basically just variations on flight?

    If you can’t stand actually running, then maybe Superspeed isn’t for you. Take Flight (it’s easy) or Teleportation (it’s easier). If you take Superspeed, try to bear in mind the fact that SUPERSPEED WILL NOT ALLOW YOU TO FLY. And that traversing a stepped box canyon on foot may be slightly more difficult than simply dropping out of the sky onto your quest mobs.

    Personally, I took Superspeed on my main character and I cannot stand any other movement power because they are all too slow and no fun.

    Even at level 1, I had no trouble navigating Snake Gulch using Superspeed. Most walls had nooks and crannies you could run up, and even if they didn’t, negotiating the stairs isn’t exactly tough. The route to the top of the rock spire in the center involved exactly two switchbacks and took me about five seconds to climb.

    Once you hit rank 2 with Superspeed, you can run right up all but the most vertical walls. You can whoosh past most mobs so fast they don’t even have time to aggro.

    When I first got to monster island, I took a tour of the entire place at ground level, and only died once when I rocketed into a mountain gorge and took a bath in hot lava. I was running right past mobs eleven levels out of my comfort zone so fast they rarely got in more than a single potshot.

    Don’t ask me how all those hikers got into Snake Gulch, though, considering the radioactive mutants, stealth-suited terrorists, ghosts, escaped supervillains, and Grond. They must have very good shoes.

    EDIT: Oh, and the “worst case scenario” for someone without vertical movement powers isn’t Snake Gulch — it’s if you run up to the top of stronghold and jump down into the fence-enclosed space on top of the mesa. There’s no way out other than switching map instances to beam yourself back to Greenskin.

    1. Shamus says:

      RudeMorgue: Nice Strawman combo. I never claimed the world should be “flat”. I never said super speed should let you fly. Implying that I’m “lazy” was also pretty childish.

      You claim you can run up walls, which I was never able to do, and which conflicts with your assertion that you took the stairs, and which ignores the fact that SG isn’t vertical walls: They actually overhang.

  24. Amarsir says:

    It’s still odd to me to see a MMO praised for its “solo play”, but you’re entirely correct in that it is CO’s strong point.

    And to my mind, the biggest differentiation between CO and CoH. Champions follows the quest model that just about everyone has followed since WoW did it. (Not that WoW invented it, the’re just the model everyone is copying.) CoH had the benefit of being designed before that, and by having to invent their own contact system I find that keeps the play radically different.

    I like teaming. I like casual, unpredictable pick-up teams that get to know each other for a little while. (And then split up after an hour or two – what are we, married?) That’s why CO didn’t do it for me. But if you like the solo aspect…

    What I’d like to see some commentary on (in one format or another) is the nemesis system or the single-server instance approach. Those are the more unique and thus more interesting aspects to me.

  25. Hipparchus says:

    Hey, Shamus, have you heard about Epic Mickey? Its a Disney liscened game made by Warren Spector. I know you like his other games and it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on this controversial new game.

  26. TSED says:

    Are you kidding? Acrobatics just walk next to the wall, jump, and slide up it. All the way up. Zoom, zoom, zoom. I can show you some time.

    It doesn’t work if the wall is 90 degrees angle or sharper, but anything less and it’s like a zip line to the sky. And you get a full height jump off the top of that, too.

    Acrobatics also lets you fight with an unnoticeable power cost increase (unlike most), while being able to pursue or flee very easily. Rank 2 acrobatics is VERY nice, and it’s much faster than flying.

    I have never used the stairs on my acrobatics toon.

    Totally agree about superspeed though. Ewww. Those poor, poor fools. (I am suddenly curious of you can stack superspeed and acrobatics… Mmm)

  27. TSED says:

    Oh, and that frigging tin star quest is definitely the worst quest in the game. I hateses it, I does. (Sorry for the extra post.)

  28. Daimbert says:

    @RudeMorgue

    Yes, why SHOULD the devs not make it exceptionally harder for someone who happens to take an available and iconic travel power (see “The Flash”) because it suits their character better? What were we thinking when we thought that since this was a game about creating superheroes we’d, y’know, be able to create a personalized character that was the superhero we wanted to be without being forced to experience extreme frustration in certain seemingly mandatory places? How could we have missed all those comics where Flash or Quicksilver or Captain America were incredibly limited and frustrated getting to and through small areas?

    Okay, okay, a bit of a rant, but do you see the point? If you give a travel power and then give the impression that in many areas it’s incredibly hard to actually use that power, you stop people from taking that power … except, character-wise, it’s an iconic power for a popular class of superhero. Some easy ways around that would be nice. And they may be there, but then the proper response is “You missed this” not “You’re lazy and should have taken flight”.

    Although, I’m really curious … do you actually HAVE to do this area, or is it something that you can do that locks you in once you start questing in it? Are there enough missions elsewhere at that level so that you can ignore this?

    1. Shamus says:

      Daimbert: There aren’t any other areas that offer content & quests for characters of that level. Of course, it’s probably POSSIBLE to skip it for some powergaming type who wants to take on +2 and +3 level quests, but that’s not the same thing, really.

  29. BlckDv says:

    @Daimbert

    I have managed to skip this area with one toon, and that toon was a beast of a solo build; max level regeneration, two self heals, crafted self heal items, three “radius” (as opposed to cone) AoE attacks, and an “equilibrium” (level it fills to out of combat) on energy (think rage in WoW) near a full tank. I would just land inside a group of three to four mobs and have them all dead in 6 seconds, 10 tops.. but fighting the higher level mobs from skipping the gultch I’d still be near dead. Rest up, swing to another group and repeat. Just watch out for pathers.

    That said, the Devs added a whole new chain of quests to Millennium City based off of the FBI Agent Kodiak fighting the New Purple Gang that are the same level as Snake Gultch, I have not played a toon across those levels since they were added, so the Gultch may be more optional now.

  30. Daimbert says:

    Ah, thanks. Then I’d say that that was the problem: there weren’t enough quests to make that one optional. And now that that’s becoming optional, these complaints will be able to go away.

  31. DKellis says:

    @Heron (#15): Right now, at this moment, the game is not worth a $50 purchase, especially if you only plan on playing for a month. (With frequent and consistent hard play, it’s possible to hit level cap in a month, or a couple of weeks. Critters give little XP, but quests give a lot.)

    It has potential, and your money will help the devs realize that potential. But right now, you will be paying to play an unfinished game in the hopes that it will be a better game tomorrow. (Or many tomorrows later.)

    And while I know that “every MMO is unfinished”, in this case this is obviously the case: several quests are bugged (taking Snake Gulch as an example, “Who’s the Fastest Gun in the West” appears to have no start point, leaving two Perks uncompletable), there are content gaps that may or may not hit you depending on what you do, plenty of artwork is missing or not being called, text is in dire need of proofing, or even just nonexistent… the list goes on.

    I’ve heard that MMOs all launch in unfinished states like this, which raises the question of why we all accept that MMOs all launch in unfinished states like this.

    The combat is fun. There are a lot of bits that I wish would get ported over to plenty of other MMOs (the Block mechanism, for one, although it might need refinement to make it more dynamic). The Crime Computer is a great idea, even if it doesn’t actually work as intended in the game itself.

    In all, the game has the potential to be great… but it isn’t anywhere near great now.

  32. Merle says:

    I am very surprised that super-speed in Champions Online doesn’t give any sort of stealth buff. It made the power feasible to take in City of Heroes, and honestly, it just makes sense – how often does the Flash need to worry about being bonked by a random thug as he runs past?

  33. Zed-F says:

    IIRC it does, but the bonus is small and stealth is too broken at the moment for it to matter.

  34. J Greely says:

    DKellis, WoW was actually in pretty good shape a month after launch. Lots of rapid changes, including an early nerf to fishing that we’re still suffering the consequences of, but overall a much more polished experience than usual. The great granddaddy of the genre, Ultima Online, was such a mess that they didn’t dare charge people to play for about six months.

    Why do MMOs launch late and buggy? Because the developers are burning through money so fast that they desperately need to show some revenue before the bank chains the doors shut. And when they do launch, everyone who was in the beta powerlevels to the max and starts whining about the server lag and lack of “endgame” content, while new players complain about the unpolished low-level quests and graphics glitches. And everything needs to be fixed at once.

    Most of that applies to offline games as well, but the added burden of maintaining a server farm, and taking all your customers offline during code and content updates (that always take longer than expected…) just ices the cake.

    -j

  35. RudeMorgue says:

    @Daimbert

    My point is: What is the point of having powers like superspeed if they don’t have any flavor at all?

    “That canyon’s going to be tough to navigate with your super speed, Fastguy!”

    “I know, but those mystery hikers need rescuing. I guess I’ll have to get creative!”

    I guess I just object to people ripping the game for something that has no logical alternative and isn’t even a problem once you actually learn to use the power. If you could run right up a mountain (which you almost can) and no mobs noticed you run by, what would the difference be between superspeed and flight? Should super jumping let you hover?

    @Merle

    There is a stealth component built into superspeed, of a sort: mobs have a small reaction time before they aggro on you. A superspeed character with a clear path can easily blow by mobs. I have never, not even once, run into a situation in which I wanted to pass through and could not due to mobs. It just doesn’t happen with superspeed (though it does sometimes with level 1 acrobatics — level 2 is as fast as level 1 superspeed).

    While I agree that the Sneak power version of stealth is currently pretty useless (mobs detect you at about the same range they’d aggro you anyway), superspeed’s is fine.

    Right now, I’m running another toon with acrobatics. So far, no problems with that one, either, if you keep moving and stay alert … as someone jumping around hostile territory kinda ought to be doing.

    Maybe I’m too generous to CO, having played Warhammer Online a year after release and found it to be much, much buggier than CO was on launch day, but I’m having a great time.

  36. DKellis says:

    One of the problems with travel powers is suppression. This is something that is not comic book-y, but instead firmly in the realm of game balancing.

    The gist of it is that if you are In Combat (which ranges from attacking someone to being attacked to merely stepping in a DoT field), your travel power goes back to the slowest version thereof. This is to prevent kiting enemies (which is comic book-y, but not really balanced).

    So all it takes is for one attack by an enemy critter to hit, and you are suddenly no longer zipping around. I don’t know how bad it is for Superspeed in CO. It’s not really that bad for Flight, since you’re high above the ground anyway, and Flight-removal powers aren’t that common. Superjump has had many complaints, because if you get hit at the top of your arc or thereabouts, you will take massive falling damage when you come down for no good reason.

    I think one of the advantages of Acrobatics is that it either doesn’t suppress, or doesn’t suppress that much.

  37. Zed-F says:

    Acrobats can get suppressed down to their first speed increment by enemy attacks, but it nevertheless is one of the best travel powers in that regard as it gets a relatively large fraction of its speed at the first speed increment, especially once you get up to Acrobatics 3. It also gets an advantage called Versatility that means you actually *gain* speed every time an enemy hits you (after first being knocked down to your first speed increment.)

    Superspeed is also similarly hard to suppress, though not quite as much so as acrobatics.

    Basic and fire flight are pretty middle-of-the-pack as far as acceleration goes. The various flying disc powers have worse acceleration and handling, and jet boots have the poorest acceleration of all. Jet boots and disks get a higher top speed to compensate, but I personally feel the acceleration handicap on those to be too nuisancesome for my taste.

  38. Andrew says:

    If they really wanted a quick fix for the super-speed characters getting around, they could put in some sort of turbo-jump-ramp at certain places that blasts you REALLY far through the air so you can quickly get to the next major point. I mean, Sonic is -the- guy for super speed, and his solution to tricky terrain is those spring things, so it’s not like its never been done before. I’m imagining more the super-ramps they had in the original Spyro game (entire levels were sometimes nothing but islands traversed via these ramps), but you get the idea.

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I'm <b>very</b> glad Darth Vader isn't my father.

You can make links like this:
I'm reading about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darth_Vader">Darth Vader</a> on Wikipedia!

You can quote someone like this:
Darth Vader said <blockquote>Luke, I am your father.</blockquote>

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