For those that like to make City of Heroes characters

City of Heroes Character Editor Up For Grabs
Take a crack at making your own superheroes, on the house.

City of Hero is launching in Asia. Yes, that's "Hero." The Korean language is allergic to plurals. Anyway, with the launch comes a whole new mini pantheon of Asian themed superheroes,
http://www.cityofheroes.com/news/archives/2006/01/city_of_hero_as.html
one of whom is making a point of crowding Statesman out of front row center in the region's title screen.

More importantly, with the release comes a nifty promo that pretty much everyone has been screaming for since the game first launched in the US more than a year ago. The game's asskickoriffic character editor
http://download.coh.co.kr/Client/CCC_Setup.exe
is up as a free download. Not only does it include all of the game's hundreds of costume options, but auras and capes are available for screwing around with from the start, which is spiff if you want to see how they're going to look on your guy before going to all the trouble of getting him to level 30.

The installer, like the editor itself is all defaulted to some kind of crazy moon language, but that shouldn't be a problem if you've ever used an installer before. The "next" buttons are in the same place you'd expect. If you're not afraid to d**k around with regedit there's also a handy tutorial floating around on how to force the software to speak English.

Why this wasn't done before and why it's still not publically available to other regions is really anyone's guess, though a CoH community rep has vaguely mentioned that there were legal issues with it before. Maybe it would help rope in new subscriptions by the nerdload, but it's conceivable that it might also mean losing those subscribers for whom the editor itself is the most enjoyable part of the game.

In any case, hey, free toy.

Be aware that the installer (by default at least) also adds the InstallShield Update Manager to your Windows startup, Start menu, and Control panel. Thankfully it's in English but, you guessed it, there's no seperate uninstall. Keep an eye out.