Mid-week doldroms

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Evenings sure do go by quickly during the week, don’t they? I feel like I’m just settling down for some gaming and its time for bed. That’s not literally true, but it feels that way.

Which gets me to my point of not having done much that’s blog-worthy. I played some Persona 3, having gotten re-enthused about it both by playing Megaten and by the glowing reviews of Persona 4 that are going around. P3 is proving to be a difficult game to jump back into…so many things that I no longer understand. So I play a bit, read a bit, back and forth, and slowly its coming back to me. I just really don’t want to start over from scratch.

I also updated the Beta That Shall Not Be Named and started playing it, but its one of these games that causes every fan in my system to kick into over-drive until it sounds like a vacuum cleaner is running inside my case (Warhammer does this at times, too). I don’t know for sure that its bad for the machine, but it is certainly annoying and I’m not willing to risk my system to beta-test. 🙁

Then I updated Dream of Mirror Online, once again inspired by Tipa. I knew I’d played it before but couldn’t remember which of the many Free2Play MMOs it was. Once I got in, it all came back to me. This game starts out simple to the point of dull. Get a quest, open the map, click on the quest location on the map. Your avatar runs there on auto-pilot. Click the baddie and wait until its dead. Open the map, click on the quest-giver to return to him. Turn in quest. Repeat.

I’m sure it gets more interesting at higher levels but last night I got to exactly where I got the last time…out of the starter areas and into Eversun City. It was hard to get enthused about going back the first time, but reading Tipa’s posts gives me hope.

So all-in-all, I got nothing accomplished last night. Reading about the RMT in EQ2 took a lot of time, granted. But I need to focus on choosing ONE game for a given weeknight rather than flathering around between several.

I captured a monument site in Nile Online and started harvesting Limestone for the monument itself (which will take about 5 days at the rate I’m going now).

The baby guinea pig is settling in nicely, starting to play in her house (pushing toys around, running laps, etc) and not being so freaked out when held.

More Rune-Keeping

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Last night I put a bit more time into my LOTRO Rune-Keeper, as well as reading up a bit about them. It’s an interesting class in that it feels flawed in the early levels, but if I’m understanding things right it gets a lot more flexible higher up.

I’ved died several times and I haven’t gotten to level 10 yet. Generally getting the “Undying” title at level 10 is pretty easy in LOTRO (I think they call it Undying, forgive me if I’m wrong) but not with this Rune-Keeper. The problem is how ‘locked in’ you get to one type of actions.

You see, your melee abilities are all but non-existent, so you need to use spells to kill anything. And the more you use spells, the farther your ‘needle’ moves towards doing damage, which is fine as long as everything is going swimmingly. But if you get an add or two and need heals (and you will, since all you’re wearing is cloth armor) it takes a LONG time to move that needle back the other way to the healing side of the gauge, and by the time it gets there, you’ve fallen in battle.

Now if you’re cautious, you can cast a HoT on yourself, and throw down a healing rune, before every battle. I fear I’ve spent too much time as a Champion though, and I tended to cut corners on those activities unless I know I’m going to pull multiples. So probably 50% of my problem is me rushing.

All *that* said, from my reading it sounds like higher levels get you skills that move the needle pretty quickly to neutral, allowing you to start healing a lot more quickly (at least “weak” heals until you build up healing mojo). It sounds like it’s going to be a pretty interesting class once it gets all its abilities, and by interesting I mean ‘challenging’ (but in a good way).

I’m looking forward to putting more time into this guy. I may end up nuking my Minstrel, who I’ve never gotten past level 11. It’s nice that Turbine gave us 2 more character slots with the Moria Expansion, but I’d still like a couple more. Ideally I think we should have enough slots to have one of each character on a given server. Anyway, my Minstrel is my armorer and I need to get my RuneKeeper up to spec in crafting before I nuke anyone.

More guinea pigs

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Sorry for the lack of posting today. Was feeling rather under the weather and not up to writing.

Which is the prefect excuse for more guinea pig pictures! Which I know most of my gaming readers will roll their eyes at, but I did get a couple of requests for pictures of the two older girls.

Here’s the old girl, Isis, helping Angela play Everquest 2. She’s pretty happy to hang out in her “Cuddly Cup” (the actual name of them, I’m not being cute) getting scritches and being in the midst of things. Look up “nosy” on Wikipedia and you’re likely to find a picture of Isis.

Here she is on duty, making sure no wild carrots sneak into the house unchallenged. Isis and Mimi live in separate cages because Mimi’s youthful exuberance drives Isis crazy. We leave the doors and tops of the ‘cages’ open and the girls show no inclination to ever want to make an escape. They seem to really like their “houses” and are happy to go back to them after playtime.

I don’t have many good pics of Mimi because she never sits still. But here she is, pausing for an instant before continuing to squirm around in circles in *her* “Cuddly Cup” (separate but equal, these girls.) Mimi will be two in later winter, Isis is about four. So far Mimi hasn’t really showed signs of slowing down, but Isis is fairly sedate.

One of our favorite “games” is tug-of-war with this chewing stick of hers. She shows no interest in this stick unless I’m holding it. When she sees that, she gets very focused on pulling it out of my hand, after which she promptly drops it and ignores it. My considerable paunch is her favorite place to perch while playing this game…luckily I’m an extreme sloucher or she’d slide off!

First taste of LOTRO RuneKeeper

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I’ve been doing my best to resist rolling another LOTRO character since I have a passel of them in their teens and only one over 30. But the Runekeeper’s combat/healing system intrigued me, at least on paper. I’ve never been able to stick with a traditional healing class… I just don’t seem to have the mindset for it. But I thought maybe the Runekeeper would be different.

So tonight I caved.

I spent so much time creating him that I didn’t get to actually play much. But what’s really weird is that he has no weapon, except his rune. So when he melees (which isn’t very effective and isn’t something he should be doing) he’s just swinging this brick-like rune around. Really odd.

At the puny level of 3, I’m thinking this is going to be a pretty group-centric character, but we’ll see. I have 1 HoT, 1 DoT that stacks but takes a long time to cast, and a couple of DD lightning spells so far. It takes a long time to kill stuff, which makes him feel a lot like a healer.

Obviously level 3 is insignificant insofar as getting a feel for a class. But I just had to share the weird brick-fighting technique. I’ll play him more sometime over the next few days and see what happens after he gets to the teens.

At this point my characters are “born” with almost a full bag of freebie stuff! 4 cloaks, 3 Moria Coins, a Bree Steed Receipt, a decorative piece of armor and a ring of agility!

A bit more City of Heroes

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I hadn’t planned to play more City of Heroes this morning, but I was looking at the update notes and was curious about the new “Shield” powers. I logged in and created a throw-away character to check them out. Something about the character creation tool in CoH always brings out my inner 13 year old. My ‘real’ characters are male but when I’m experimenting I inevitably end up with a large-breasted hottie female character.

So here she is. The shield doesn’t even show until she gets in combat, which is a bit of a shame.

Anyway, I logged into my “main” after than, and set up a second “Build” to see how that worked. I couldn’t figure out a way to change your archetype, though (I don’t think you can but I’m not 100% positive) so couldn’t take Shields on him. It was still kind of fun to build a level 13 character from scratch, but I think the “multiple builds” thing is really intended for higher level characters, since my two builds aren’t all that different. One has Combat Jumping and the other had Hover but otherwise they’re pretty similar.

I did some ‘standard’ missions today, and they were fun but I started to remember how dull it got running through the same run-down buildings over and over again, or the same caves. But then I spotted a building on fire, and ran to help put it out. You get a Fire Extinguisher temporary power, and the patches of flame have “Hit Points” that you knock down with shots for the Extinguisher. I jumped into a team and we put out the fire, which was different and kind of fun.

I may even play a bit more today, and I can see subscribing at some point in the future, but probably not for a long period. But $15 to play around in CoH for a month sounds like a decent deal to me.

City of Heroes welcomes back ex-residents

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To celebrate the release of City of Heroes Issue 13 , NCSoft has reactivated all old City of Heroes accounts for this weekend only. Of course my wandering eye couldn’t resist.

Let me start by saying that the NCSoft Launcher pretty much rocks. I fired it up, clicked a button and the entire City of Heroes client installed on my system. No hassles whatsoever. And why oh why don’t they come out with a Station Pass-style bundle subscription? They’ve got 7 games to offer now, with Aion and Champions Online in-coming, and Tabula Rasa sadly exiting. It just seems like a bundled sub might save TR, making it a “value add” title. They could just leave a small team to work on it slowly. I’m guessing obviously, but I figure that’s how Sony gets away with keeping Everquest Online Adventures and Planetside running.

Anyway, back to City of Heroes. My most recently played character hadn’t been played for 481 days, so I was rusty as hell. The last time I jumped in (also on a freebie weekend) a friend of mine had given me a lot of advice on my forum, and so I went and re-read all that. But having been away so long, I’m not sure how much of the cool stuff I found was part of Issue 13 and how much has been around for a while.

I had a new contact when I logged in, and so I went to speak to him. He started a long story-based series of quests surrounding a cure for The Lost (those warped people with the tv sets on their heads). Maybe I was lucky, or maybe the quest scales, but it was just the right level for me (my character was only level 10 when I started, 12 by the end of the day) and was really fun and interesting. Much more interesting than I remember quests being back in the day. I got some Merit Points for completing the chain, though I doubt I got enough to do much with.

I also went through the Invention tutorials, which I’d never done before, and made myself some nifty enhancements. I found some places where Heroes and Villains fight together against the Rikti, though you have to be level 35 to get involved with that.

It struck me how funny it was (in retrospect) for Funcom to talk about Age of Conan’s active combat as some revolutionary system, because my CoH character fights the same way my AoC character did, with ‘arc-based’ melee attacks that require positioning in order to hit the max number of baddies, and no auto-attack.

A couple systems that I do know are new are “Day Jobs” and a “Leveling Pact.” The former is a system whereby if you log out in certain places, your character will go to a day job and earn some kind of bonus when you play again. So log out in a Police Station and you get bonus experience when next you play. Log out in a hospital and you’ll get a health regeneration buff. That kind of thing.

“Leveling Pact” is something I’ve never seen before. You make a pact between your character and a friend’s character, and those two characters will always remain the same level. So if one of you plays every night and the other plays twice a week, you’ll still be the same level when the less frequent player does get a chance to log in. Kinda neat.

There’s lots more new things in Issue 13 and you can read all the details at the official site.

*sigh* Another fine game. It was great to get a chance to see how far City of Heroes has come, and I’ll add it to the “would like to play again some time” pile, but that pile is getting darned big at this point.

New member of the family

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Cavia Porcellus. The common guinea pig. Lab animals, elementary school class pet. *yawn*

I remember smirking as Angela would tell me tales of her pig, Isis. I mean, they’re just large rodents, right? Then I met her and it took about 5 minutes before I was charmed forever. Once Angela and I were living together, I doted on that pig. Then came the day we were in the pet store and a little black and white lady came running to the glass of her cage and peered out at us. Our eyes met, my willpower crumbled, and that’s how Artemis (Mimi for short) came into our home. She got her name from the arrow-shaped markings on her head (Artemis was goddess of the hunt).

Friday, it happened again. I was at the shop at lunch, getting some supplies, and when I spied this darling little creature. I went back to work and couldn’t get her out of my mind. Angela and I chatted via IM, and we decided that taking care of three pigs isn’t much harder than two, and Isis is getting on in years. We didn’t want Mimi left all alone when Isis inevitable crosses the “Rainbow Bridge” (we hope that time is still years off; Isis is only middle-aged in pig terms, but her health isn’t as good as it should be). So after work, I went back to the store, frantic that she would’ve gone to some other home, but there she was, stretching and winking at me. Angela figures she was born not to long before Thanksgiving, so we named her Pomona (technically goddess of fruit trees, but we’re using the name in a more liberal, harvest goddess sense). Short name, Mona.

So Mona joins Isis and Mimi in our happy household of people and pigs. She’s settling in nicely…last night she gorged herself on alfalfa and timothy hay. Today she’s had a few treats and some cuddles. She’s still freaked about being held, but not *too* freaked. She’s in quarantine for a few weeks so hasn’t yet met her goddess sisters, but I’m sure she hears them. Particularly Mimi, who always answers my query of “Want some peppers, Mimi?” with loud shrieks of delight.

I remember having guinea pigs as a kid, but looking back, they weren’t very well cared for (though I had no idea at the time). As an adult, taking proper care of them, these little critters flourish and really get a chance to show off their very distinct personalities. They bring us great joy and are a constant source of amusement, and really they’re a snap to take care of. There’s no greater source of stress relief than having a guinea pig in your lap, purring contently as you pet her.

The Story behind IGE (MMO gold sellers)

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Did you know that much-reviled IGE was formed by former child-actor Brock Pierce? I sure didn’t.

Wired has a lengthy article on how the company came to be. Get comfortable; this is clearly an article from the print mag moved to the web and it goes on for a while. But I found it darned interesting.

The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire

Gotrek & Felix: The Second Omnibus

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I stayed up much too late last night finishing Gotrek & Felix: The Second Omnibus by William King.

Honestly, I don’t have a real lot to say about it. If you haven’t read any of the Gotrek & Felix books, then you should start with Omnibus 1 (or one of the stand alone volumes, but these Omnibus re-issues are a great value). If you have read that and enjoyed it, stop reading and go order Omnibus 2. King just gets better and better the further along he goes.

All three books in the collection (Beastslayer, Dragonslayer and Vampireslayer) are full novels (the early books were collections of short stories and novellas) each of which stands alone nicely but strung together they form a continuous narrative of the adventures of our two heroes, one-time poet and scholar Felix, and gruff, death-wish driven Slayer Gotrek. The cast of characters broadens quite a bit in these books though, making them feel like a richer experience. King even finds room for some romance-driven subplots, and even Gotrek starts to show some signs of humanity by the end (and is self-aware of this fact, grumbling about spending too much time around humans).

A broader cast of characters lets King dispose of a few here and there as well, which alleviates the one weakness of a series with character names in the titles. We pretty much know that neither Gotrek nor Felix is going to fall in battle, given that there are more books to read!

I have to admit I came in to these books with pretty low-expectations given that they are based on a game. And at first my expectations were met: fun stuff, but with not a lot of meat to them. But that feeling faded away back in the midst of Omnibus 1, and the three books in this volume are great fantasy that could stand up against any non-licensed sword & sorcery fantasy novels. It doesn’t matter if you know what Warhammer is; if you love a good fantasy adventure yarn, the Gotrek & Felix books are for you.

Friday is for crafting

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There’s something about Friday nights that make them perfect EQ2 Crafting. I get home, tired and cranky from a long week, but feeling the relief that is a few days away from the salt mines. Crafting in EQ2 is … soothing. But it takes a good amount of time. I don’t do a lot of it on most weeknights because I always have that vague time pressure of “a few free hours, then bed and back to work”. And by Saturday I’m ready for a bit more action than crafting provides.

So yeah, Friday is for crafting.

The new Shadow Odyssey expansion adds Crafter Quests starting at level 50, so I’ve been pushing my Alchemist lately. Tonight I took him from level 43 to level 46 before his Vitality gave out (and I’m too stubborn to use a character that is out of vitality when I have so many other options). About haflway through the night I idly mentioned that he had 4 Achievement points not spent (he is also a level 28 Swashbuckler, but hasn’t unsheathed a weapon in years). Angela pointed out that there are new Shadow Achievements that relate to tradeskilling. I looked and sure enough, there’s one for harvesting and another for crafting. I put all 4 points into the latter and now my Alchemist is making an extra 8% Crafting Experience. Sweet!

So many good games to play. Really it is an embarrassment of riches.