So, NCSoft reactivated everyone’s City of Heroes accounts for the weekend to give more people the opportunity to try out the new issue 10 content. They did this to us last year, if you recall.

Alas, the draw is too terribly strong. And having an upgraded computer since last year, I thought the experience might even be better. So, I reinstalled and reupdated. The patches to get to issue 10 only took roughly 2 hours to download, install, and apply. Not bad, considering I installed from the DVD which is about 5 issues behind.

Unfortunately, the experience is not all I remember it to be. It took forever just to log in. And then once I grabbed a character and attempted to jump into Paragon City, I crashed. Hard. Display drivers were apparently out of date. I got the drivers updated and was able to get into the city, but it was a slideshow of epic proportions. And twice the game locked up on me while I attempted to perform some trivial action, such as opening a door. It was horrendous.

I don’t fault the game at all, I’m sure it works wonderfully. It just has a nasty history of not working well with our IBM Thinkpad laptops. I don’t necessarily fault IBM, either. They make business laptops, not gaming rigs. No, I fault myself. I should really just stick to the Wii. Not too much longer until the hits start rolling. Then, I can rest easy with a Wiimote in hand. I’m just not cut out for keyboard/mouse gaming.