From: malloy@crash.cts.com (Sean Malloy)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games
Subject: Re: Where is the CHAMPIONS?
Date: 28 Aug 92 04:59:35 GMT
Organization: CTS Network Services (crash, ctsnet), El Cajon, CA

In article <1992Aug25.200535.13670@sun44.synercom.hounix.org> medley@sun44.synercom.hounix.org (Bert Medley) writes:
>In article <1992Aug24.153935.1@ualr.edu> ajsmith@ualr.edu writes:
>>	I have, for a long time, played Champions the RPG. 
>>	So when last Christmas, I saw Champions release and price I naturally
>>jumped for joy. That was 8 months ago.
>>	So please, oh so wise men and women, fellow gamers, 
>>	What is the latest.
>
>Last month I asked ny store, Babbages, when it was due out and was told August.
>Since then I have been contacted by a beta tester and I suspect that September
>may be generous [Even though Babbages now has it rescheduled for September!].
>It should be out before Xmas is my guess, so hang in there with the rest of us!

According to the people at Hero Software, whom I talked to at the San Diego
Comic-Con where they had a table in the dealers' room with a computer
running a demo of the Champions program, their motto is "Christmas or
Homeless". Of course, they didn't say _which_ Christmas . . .  :-)

The game looks good, even though they had some of the features stubbed off
(the special effects, 'snappy patter', focus, and character mask sections
of the character costume screen, for example), and there were still a few
annoying little bugs in the play mechanics (being unable to _stop_ taking
Recoveries).

The character design 'spreadsheetoid' works just as described in the CGW
review; it could benefit from being able to either copy/paste Limitations
between powers or selecting a group of powers that would be receiving the
same Limitation (i.e., 'Only in Hero ID'); watching someone building a
character (admittedly, a rules screw -- 250 points consisting of an agent
poured into an OIF Independent suit of powered armor) for more than fifteen
minutes given the character sheet that he'd used to build the character on
paper, because he had to select the same Limitations for almost a dozen
different powers individually. If you're building a character for use in
the program, you are limited in the Vulnerabilities and Susceptibilities to
ones that occur in the game; a player with a knowledge of the various
Villains books can get a good idea of what they're going to face by
examining what's permitted. There are also some limitations in the
flexibility of the character design section; the program doesn't handle
characters with vehicles, Multiform, Duplication, or Summoning -- these are
too open-ended for a program that has to fit into 640K to handle.

For those players who don't want to go through the full-blown character
design process, there is a 'quick start' feature. You can select a
character from one of eight generic character types and see their abilities
tagged out on a set of bars for various qualities -- 'Strong', 'Tough',
'Fast', 'Skilled', etc. -- and then pick one of the qualities to be bumped
up a bit (i.e., pick the Brick and make him faster or tougher, choose the
Energy Blaster and make her more skilled or stronger).

The game play works well, and it is easy to pick up the commands without
having a manual. The only problems I noticed was that it was tough to pick
out a specific target in a closely packed mob of opponents, and if you are
fighting a closely packed group of people dressed alike, you can't tell
which one you're shooting/punching at. You have both bar graphs and numbers
telling you how you're doing on END, STN, and BOD, and the bars change
colors when they get low. The picture of your selected target has a border
indicating how undamaged your target appears to be.

During play, a traffic light warns you when your phase is coming up; if you
ignore a green light for about ten seconds, the program assumes that you're
defending and moves on, but you can do all the setup work (i.e., choosing
targets, deciding where to move, etc.) while everyone else is taking their
phases. When you sneak into an area with thugs in it, you get the option of
making a soliloquy, taken from your character design information.

When you go home, you have a 'bedroom' tricked up somewhat like the
inter-mission sections of Wing Commander I -- there are objects on the
screen that you select to take various actions: clicking on the reference
books makes your character do research, clicking on the TV set gets you
news reports, and clicking on the costume in the secret compartment behind
the swinging bookcase sends you out on patrol. You can't just go out on
patrol all the time; unless you have a Public ID, if you stay away from
your job too long, you'll get fired and lose your home, your car, etc.

Character interaction is, like the character design section, much as it was
described in CGW; you choose a general attitude, which will give you six
ways to get information from the person you are talking to; it's amusing to
watch the 'communication boxes' blow up when you guess wrong and push a
thug into clamming up.

The artwork that has been completed for the game looks really good, and the
people at Hero Software have been willing to take extra time to make sure
that a good program goes out, rather than a mediocre program goes out fast.
I look forward to seeing the announcement of the game's availability (so I
can take advantage of the $10 discount-if-you-order-from-Hero-Software
coupon I got during the Comic-Con.

-- 
Random sig #47:
 Sean Malloy        Navy Personnel R&D Center | If a vegetarian is someone who
                    San Diego, CA 92152-6800  | only eats vegetables, what's a
 malloy@nprdc.navy.mil        < different     | humanitarian?
 crash!malloy@nosc.navy.mil   < systems       |