As its final release draws ever nearer m’colleague and I are allowing ourselves to become ever so slightly interested in Champions Online. Picture, if you will, Champions Online resting on the corner of the metaphorical office desk of our collective mind, with Zoso and myself seated on swivelling office chairs that represent our interest in the game. We would both now, perhaps, be twisted ever so slightly towards the game, with our hands still firmly on our computer keyboards and our faces directed straight at our monitors, but we are definitely now able to observe the vague form of the game’s packaging from out of the corner of our eye. One foot might be placed firmly to the side of the chair, poised and ready to launch us in a squeaky wobbly trajectory towards the game should its pull prove too much for us to resist.

As such we decided to engage the services of our industry mole to go behind the scenes at Cryptic Studios and dish the dirt. As moles are wont to do. He returned with a hastily snapped picture of a development board which listed many and varied powers. Some of the super variety, some less so. We present to you here the ones that were crossed out and therefore, we assume, will not make it into the final release of the game:

• The power to undo really tight knots in shoelaces.
• The supernatural ability to avoid damp sticky patches on the floor in the kitchen at night when barefoot.
• The ability to lick your own elbow.
• The travel power ‘Scooting backwards on an office chair propelled by one foot’.
• The mutant ability: levitate birds.
• The power to know immediately which is the right way round for a plain t-shirt with no label in the neck.
• The ability to never ladder tights.
• Supernatural resistance to semolina pudding.
• The ability to summon fifty starfish at will.
• The mutant ability: gigantic growth when in a confined space.
• The inhuman ability to sneeze with your eyes open.
• The power to cross one eye at a time
• The travel power ‘Running behind a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel and then pushing yourself up on the handlebar and free wheeling until you crash sideways into a large display of baked bean tins’.
• The power to toast bread at will.
• The mutant ability: launch a destructive beam of red laser fire from your genitals when you expose them.
• The ability to produce a really good paella out of thin air.
• The power to transform any person into Beryl Reid.
• The mutant ability: rapid fingernail regeneration.
• The ability to see clearly at night during the daytime.
• The uncanny talent to not smack your lips in disgust after licking a postage stamp or envelope.
• The power to walk up the down escalator.
• The mutant ability: spontaneously combust at will.
• The power to be faster than a tall building and able to leap speeding bullets in a single bound.
• The ability to breathe beer.
• The mutant ability: super speed when on slippery surfaces.
• The power to give everyone in a fifty foot radius the power to give everyone in a fifty foot radius the power to give everyone in a fifty foot radius etc.
• The preternatural ability to predict when somebody is on the other side of a solid door so that you don’t reach to open it only to have them open it first and you grab your chest and go “bwah!”.
• The mutant ability: indestructible body hair.
• The ability to eat soup that’s slightly too hot.
• The astonishing power to wear skin-tight latex with breasts smaller than watermelons.
• The power to shout incredibly quietly.
• Supernatural resistance to itchy underpants elastic.
• The ability to quote the average county score of any Middlesex batsman from 1952 to 1986.
• The mutant ability: prehensile penis.
• The group travel power ‘Running around in a snaking line of people to the tune of Yakety Sax’.
• The inhuman strength to open a really tight jar lid, but only if someone else has loosened it a bit first.