There's an odd plot hole where Blue Blaze learns the man who just walked out of the room was the bomber, but instead of just walking through the door and capturing him, BB ignores the man and speeds off to the next mine the bomber had threatened.
Second plot hole: Even though Blue Blaze's speedster has unlimited speed, Barko (a terrible name for a villain, by the way) somehow gets ahead of him on the way to the mine. Does Barko have a speedster with even more unlimited speed?
Blue Blaze's Raise power might still be active from earlier, allowing him to catch a heavy boulder. If the boulder missed him then he didn't need to lift it, but if it hit, I'm hesitant to let the Raise power thwart it...and yet...I have to admit that the Raise powers are currently of limited utility except when you need to lift something heavy, and that's seldom going to be important during combat. This warrants more thought.
Next Barko shoots out one of BB's car's tires and makes him swerve, but a skill check helps BB regain control. So how does Barko follow that? He sics two dogs on BB. BB chokes the dogs to death. Not cool, BB!
Barko has a pair of ice guns that put BB in a block of ice. Hold Person with flavor text? BB is only faking so he can get taken to Barko's hideout, which is sound strategy, or would be if he didn't let Barko leave, just so he can chase him to the next mine. If he really wanted to stop the mine attack, he could have just knocked Barko out sooner. At the mine, BB punches out two thugs working for Barko first before taking out Barko, following the Hideouts & Hoodlums rules about taking out underlings before you go after the main bad guy (just like in the H&H play-by-post game I'm running now!).
The next story is Taxi Taylor and His Wonder Car. It's your typical story of a mechanic who invents a car that can do anything, tries to gift it to the U.S. government, he gets laughed at, out of spite, he keeps the car without even showing them what it does, he becomes a taxi driver with the car that can do anything, until he just happens to overhear spies in his backseat one day. So what is "anything"? It can intercept radio messages, like most radios can. It can transform into a plane, though it isn't the first car-plane in comics. It can also transform into a sub - also not the first car-sub in comics. It can fire "contra-magnetic electric rays" that can neutralize magnetic mines, and now we're finally in new mad science territory.
The German spies are called Swastikans, by the way - perhaps the most obvious stand-in for the word Nazi ever in a comic book.
Oh, the wonder car has 6" steel plates all around it, so acetylene torches can't cut through it. That's a difficult game mechanic to rationalize because armor normally only makes something harder to hit, not more resistant to energy attacks. Perhaps this is special steel plating that confers fire resistance.
Taylor isn't reluctant to cut air hoses and kill underwater Nazis.
Back to mad science, the wonder car can emit gas bubbles underwater that cause enormous suction, enough to pull a ship underwater. That is also hard to rationalize with game mechanics. Maybe some kind of wrecking things?
The wonder car has a collapsible ladder that can project out of the top of the car. There is a belt and rope attached to a winch that will automatically reel back in in two minutes. There is a trampoline-like net that pops out of a hatch in the top of the car, and I don't even know how Taylor activated that before falling towards the car. The car also has two revolving chemical water jets for putting out fires. Taylor even has a fireman's hat in his car, just in case he has to put out fires.
There is a nice trap in the spies' HQ. When the wall safe is touched, electricity causes one's hand to be stuck to it. Raising the stakes of the trap is that the building is on fire and a temperature-sensitive bomb (controlled by a thermometer) is rigged to go off nearby. Taylor takes maybe 2-7 damage from being pulled away from the electrified safe, but is still only lightly injured.
Next up is The Invisible Man Known As Dr. Gade. When I first read this story a few years ago I graded it with an A. Will it hold up as well this time?
In his origin story, Gade is working in front of an open furnace in his lab when an assassin comes up behind him and pushes him in. Now I'm interested in giving assassins a backstab ability so they can increase their damage from behind, but then transfer those points of damage into pushing.
Soaked in chemicals he was pushed into, and then set on fire, the strange reactions transform him into a ...magic-user? Because what he demonstrates when he comes out is is Invisibility and Resist Fire. Well, not normal Invisibility, because Gade is still invisible after punching and grappling, so it must be Improved Invisibility.
Gade is not a live and let live kind of guy. Just for trying to kill him, Gade knocks the thug/assassin from earlier out a 40th floor window. As the two guys who hired the assassin wait to shoot Gade once he becomes visible, he forces one of them to shoot the other by moving the man's hand. That's not something the game mechanics of H&H is really set up for, and I'd be inclined to say that the Editor rolled to hit Gade, but rolled so badly that he accepted the player's suggestion that the bullet hit an unintended target.
Although Gade is angry for being initially given his powers, apparently they were only temporary and wouldn't have lasted, so Gade had, between scenes, invented a ray that bathes him with the same energy and renews his powers. For some reason that's not clear to me, he can't turn visible easily on his own, but he's wearing some kind of a belt or harness with a button on it and when he presses it, the device...maybe dampens the energy field that render Gade invisible?
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