Day 210-- saying goodbye to some old friends
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
I knew their lives would end.
Not die, mind you. Something worse, maybe. My finger hovered--shook slightly--over the button, the button that would finish it. I pressed it.
And I deleted my subscription to City of Heroes, a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG, the worse acronym ever). You play these games on the computer, on the Internet even, with thousands of people. And this one is based around superheroes. Whatever.
I've played the game since, well, since it came out in the summer of 2004. I remember going to the mall with Joel Mason after the Bible study at Afton's house; we went into Electronic Boutique and without any second guessing I bought it.
I created my first hero, Rayford Cage, a lovable bookseller-turned-crimefighter. Then came E. Hemingway, cryogenetically-frozen author-turned-mercenary. (Don't ask about the logistics of that.) Then came Agoraphobic Man, with the strength to bend steel and the nerves to not leave the house. And then the Ghost of Siskel, who gave two thumbs down to crime. And then American Apollo, archer with a heart of gold. And a bunch of other guys.
I joined a supergroup, a gang of players that can build a base and work together. I advanced Rayford as far as you can. I bought City of Villains, a companion game that works in tandem with CoH, creating a slew of villains to play (the Plagiarist! Manic Depressive Man! Roger Ebert! the Pesticidist! Malpractice Man!). And most of all, I had a lot of fun.
But the problem--like most all massively multiblahblah games, CoH requires a subscription fee. In the long run, it adds up. You pay monthly. It's not a great amount, but it's still money. And, considering that I had rarely played since January, I thought, "Huh, should I be paying?"
The answer came when I realized that I wanted to move. The price tag was a little bit more expensive this time around, so a few financial things needed to be tweaked. My basic phone plan has become more basic. I'm going to try to pay off some of the smaller bills with the savings bonds I've held onto since I was a child. City of Heroes was the last thing I pulled the plug on, and just in time: it was right before the next billing cycle.
Seeya Ray. It was great helping you beat up hoodlums and proto-Nazi robots for a few years. Maybe we'll meet again. Just maybe.
posted, with grace and poise, by Jason @ 4/03/2007 10:28:00 PM,
2 Comments:
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At 8:21 AM,
Al said...
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I wish I could have met these good old friends. They sound like quite the posse.
Here's to bittersweet endings and sad goodbyes... -
At 7:36 PM,
Buddy Chamberlain said...
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:_(
(and other l33t expressions of sadness)
