Showing posts with label general. Show all posts
Showing posts with label general. Show all posts

Wednesday, 23 January 2008

Obligatory Catchup Post

So I've not posted in aaaaaaaaaaaaaaages.

I blame sunspots. That and just having an absolute ton of stuff happening; a show to stage manage, Christmas, moving back and forth to uni, and exams. Exams still aren't quite over, but I've got something I really want to comment on so, I thought I'd try and catch everything up.

Of the three games I can actively play (without setting up a new account or whatever), WoW is far and away my most active one. I now have my 70 mage slowly grinding up money for her epic flying mount, a nearly-20 hunter on the same server to help grind money for same (as leveling is more fun than grinding primals), a 41 druid on a different server to play with friends at uni, and a level 5 priest I'll get to in a moment.

I've not played City of Heroes in a while. The random instances using the same tilesets over and over and the slowness of leveling all just kinda conspire against me enjoying plain old leveling. When I was regularly playing with a group it was fun, but doing task forces (or whatever the villainous equivalent is) requires the grinding 10 levels to get to the minimum level each time, even if I do get a couple of levels out of each one.

I still log into Kingdom of Loathing regularly, even if I don't play all of my turns to their maximum effectiveness. I still listen to every podca- sorry, mp3 recording of their radio show that gets updated on an rss feed (and did even when I wasn't actively playing), but I expect that I'll get the spark of interest again when I start doing things in their hardercore mode, bad moon.

Guild Wars, well, I've beaten it. Well Factions anyway. And doing anything else just seems... flat, there's no objective there, even though theoretically there's plenty I could do. There're the end-game raids, the pvp, and getting perfect weapons and armour. But two of three require other people, which in GW tends to be a bad idea unless you know who you're with already, and the third is grinding. Lots. And solo if you want to get all the loot that drops.

Of non-MMOs, I'm in Ravenholme in Half Life 2 (yes, the original, and yes, for the first time) so that needs progressing. My Team Fortress 2 stats are lacking, although the LAN party I'm at this weekend should remedy that to an extent, I'm at the final boss (maybe) of Phantom Hourglass, and although D&D has been on hold over the holidays, I'm going to try to tie the remainder of that up fairly quickly, as a) I wrote myself into quite the corner, and 2) I want to play!


The main reason for updating this post is that my girlfriend now plays WoW, as a blood elf warlock, hence the level 5 priest listed earlier. After a couple of hours, we've got to level 5, and done the first few quests in Falconwing Square. Of course, I've been doing a lot of thinking after she said she wanted to play a warlock, perhaps too much, but I'm thinking shadow priest + warlock will be good for leveling, and then can convert to a good 2v2 arena team at 70. Careful selection of professions later, and we can be swimming in gold when we get there as well. I actually also have arena talent choices partially planned out.

Conclusion: I plan things too much, especially when its to avoid doing productive things!

Friday, 19 October 2007

Breaking the silence

Long time no see! (well, type, whatever. You know what I mean)

Hopefully this will be the start of more bloggage, but I thought I should update the (apparently) 4 or so people a day who read what I throw out here, even when I'm not posting!

To update everyone on whats been happening in my absence:

I completed Guild Wars: Factions, with the Tuesday n00b Club (check out the picture of me dancing!), the ending of which was both deliciously spoilery, and utterly predictable. Also, the final boss fight was ridiculous. Future game designers: if you want to know how not to design a boss, check out Shiro at the end of Factions. Your players will love you! Also, hopefully, I'll be getting Nightfall at some point, to play through that with a friend, although I don't really know when that'll happen. Looking forward to (probably) making corpses spring from the ground like daisies. Of course, last time I was going to pewpew people with my bow, but then got distracted by great big axes. So we'll have to see.

I'm also now subscribed to City of Heroes/Villains, primarily playing Villains side at the moment. More to come on the differences in a future post, once I've actually dabbled in all of the Hero archetypes. But at the moment, I'm a particularly purple Corrupter, harnessing the powers of darkness to summon all kinds of tentacled nastiness. Eww. And a giant zombie with super strength. And a ninja master. And a amnesiac dominator. And and and....

I also have frankly annoying cravings for WoW. Now the main reason for my disappearance from the tubes is my settling in at University (zomg, revealing stuff about myself!), and I didn't bring my disks with me, and downloading the client would take forever, and I don't have any of my mods here so I'd have to set them all up again.... but I really want to collect some of the new small pets (yay!), and the engineering flying mount, and the 2.3 patch looks like it'll just make the game a lot more fun again. Plus I want to beat up the bosses in Karazhan again (randomly), and so on and so forth. Perhaps a break has done me good to relieve me of the feeling of 'must grind primals raaargh', but I can't really justify the cost of two MMOs (Guild Wars wins bonus points here), and the time spent downloading the client, and the TBC stuff, and the rest of it.

Also, I'm about to start DMing a D&D game, which I'll probably post about to here. Its all gaming, and although this started as an MMO blog, I'm sure there's enough overlap that people will either not mind, or just skip the posts they don't like. The worrying thing is that I've never even played D&D before, let alone DMed. Nothing like jumping in at the deep end.

So my gaming life looks to be as busy as my social and work life has become, so I'll see if I can get a posting rhythm going again to keep you up to date on my gaming comings and goings, and hopefully be insightful about stuff.

nB: degree of insightfulness may vary.