Metalord 2 Retires - Metalord 3 May Follow

Who is Metalord, you ask? Therein lies a story...

I used to play City of Heroes/City of Villains. My original City of Heroes character was Metatronic, an energy blaster. When I started playing City of Villains, I decided to make an evil version of Metatronic named Dark Meta.

But at some point, I decided to play a Mastermind character. In City of Villains, a Mastermind summoned henchmen to do his fighting for him. I decided to be a Robot Mastermind, and the name came to me: he was a Lord of Metal. A Metalord (which had the added bonus of being able to be read as Meta-Lord, thus continuing the Meta theme of my other characters).

Fast forward to last year. I can no longer afford to play City of Villains, but a friend of mine has asked me to join n honest-to-goodness roleplaying group, which I have not played in for years. So we start playing this game, based loosely on Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu rules (which means tangentially related to Chaosium's old Superworld game, but not so much). My character has some kind of electrical powers, as well as magnetic powers. He can manipulate metal with his mind, and can even levitate himself and fly as long as he is wearing metal. So I decide I should wear some sort of metal armor as my costume.

But what kind of name should I use? Well, I'm the master of metal, and I wear armor like a noble knight, or lord... So yeah, why not bust out Metalord again?

So for a little over a year, I played this crazy Californian of Chinese descent, a computer programmer with delusions of grandeur who ended up developing an attraction to women who were very bad for him. I battled aliens and clones and volcano men (against whom I killed their king, thereby becoming in my own mind the new king of the volcano men, although I never actually claimed the throne). I died and came back as a robot that could transform into an airplane and a submarine, then had my mind transferred into a new, genetically engineered body in the far future, before coming back (at the controls of a rather phallic spaceship) with my teammates to save the world from a demented brain on the dark side of the moon.

And in what was probably my favorite adventure, when we were thrown back into the Old West, I stood atop a flying submarine (it was my own magnetic powers flying it, natch) like freaking Captain Harlock, zapping laser-shooting pterodactyls out of the sky as we assaulted a mad scientist's secret base inside an invisible mountain. When the scientist tried to shoot his death ray from the side of the mountain, I magnetically wrenched it off its moorings and yanked it out, then said, "You know what? I've changed my mind. You can have it back," and flung the giant weapon back into his control room.

It made a big mess. Heh.

You hadda be there, right? The point is that last night, we played our last game with those characters, at least for a while. Cole Chen, Metalord, King of the Volcano Men, Transforming Robot, Ace Pilot and Space Chauffeur, Consort to the Red Queen, is retired for the nonce. We'll be starting up a new game with new characters soon, where I'll be playing a Scottish engineer with absolutely NO resemblance to a certain other Scottish engineer.

That is, if I play at all. I'm interviewing for another job today, and there's always the chance that they'll want me to work on Monday evenings. And given the fact that I haven't worked in months, I'm not in a position to be picky about shifts right now.

But we'll worry about that if and when it happens. In the meantime, you're looking up at the title of this post and saying, "Okay, I understand Metalord and Metalord 2, but who the hell is Metalord 3?"

Short answer: I joined Facebook a while back, and started playing a Facebook game called Superhero City. And showing extreme lack of imagination, when I built my character for that game, I ended up giving him silver skin and calling him Metalord as well. The game was fun at first, but has recently become ridiculously difficult. Recently, I just spent days fighting a fucking door over and over, trying to get through.

And not just any door, no. This door had agility, you see, so that it could dodge my attacks. And I mean, some fights it dodged every attack I attempted. That's one ridiculously agile door! And I understand that you could interpret it in a meta-game-rule sense that the door is not actually dodging the attacks, but that the dodged attacks represent attacks that just bounce off the armor without damaging it at all or something.

Which I could accept, if it weren't for the fact that the game presents the battles as little animated vignettes, with you and your opponent squaring off atop a moving train, or on a rooftop, or in a subway station, with my character throwing lightning blasts at a door that leaps nimbly out of the way! Seriously stupid, and even stupider for the fact that the battle was so ridiculously hard that I had to fight the damn door like ten or fifteen times before I killed it.

So even though I finally won the Great Door War, I think I'm pretty much done with Superhero City. I was already losing interest, and the door thing has really left a bad taste in my mouth.