…this weekend, anyway. Champions Online is offering people a chance to try their game out for free, from 10am Friday through 10am Monday. If I weren’t already playing, I’d start.

Even with the bugs, imbalances, and graphics glitches, even with the inept proofreading and occasionally 7th-grade-level writing skills, they’ve built a game that’s an awful lot of fun to play. With a few months more polish and playtesting, it will be even better, but it’s worth a look today. Honestly, I’d pay the monthly fee just to play with the character designer; the fact that the combat system is dynamic and exciting is a bonus.

Speaking of the character designer…

[click the images for more views]

Feylost was never what you’d call a good faerie, but after she was exiled to Earth for defying the will of a prince, she became downright nasty, feeding on the misery of mortals. She confines her attention to the worst of humanity, leading society to consider her a hero, but prison doctors have been noticing a strange physical and mental degeneration among certain inmates, and one of them has started putting the pieces together.

[Everything about this character is built around my discovery of the Venomous Breath power, which in technical terms is a 50-foot-long, 90-degree cone attack that does toxic damage, but visually, it’s a stream of bile. I adjusted the colors to a delightfully vile strawberry, and gave her a flight power that wreaths her in pink flames. The wings actually work, and yes, they’re shiny metal that reflect the surroundings. She’s a vicious faerie butterfly who slaughters henchmen with her vomit.]

When last seen, The Cybernetic Librarian had undertaken the study of sorcery to restore her lost humanity. Along the way, she dabbled in darker powers, including raising the dead. As a result, her first attempt to recreate her real body didn’t work out quite as planned…

[I took the existing cyborg body and converted it to a normal human, correcting the proportions until she looked normal. Then I liked the results so much that I made a number of variants, including demonic, party dress (no screenshot yet), and NSFW “caged heat” costumes. The demonic body is more muscular than the rest, but the costume parts are a fair match for the original concept, preserving much of its look.]

After losing a third of her class in a gang-war crossfire, this Westside Junior High School English teacher put down her lesson plans and picked up a gun. And another gun. And grenades. And mines.

[Yes, that’s the TCL human body, the dollie I love to play dress-up with. RS is a munitions build, but where most people pick up the Assault Rifle and Gatling Gun powers, I went with both Frag and Smoke Grenades, added Killer Instinct and Regeneration to recover both energy and health in the middle of combat, and upgraded Two-Gun Mojo for the primary damage-dealer. Bodies go flying everywhere, and she’s rarely defeated in combat. She has the “caged heat” costume as well, but I only use it inside of mission instances; I like the Lingerie Avenger look as much as the next guy, but I don’t think it contributes to the atmosphere of the game to use it in public. There are enough of those outfits on display already.]