Man, how about that thing called Life?

Currently watching "Good Eats" doing tenderloins. Mmmmmmmm. Work has been crazy since Jan and we have a big upgrade this weekend that I get to work the first 9 hours of Saturday for (yes, the first ones). Supposed to go smoothly but that's still a lot of time and a particularly bad time of day for those of us who are human to stay awake.

Got a new pc, just need a new video card now. Still, I think I'll like this quad core, 6gb of ram, and hard drive that is 2x bigger than all my other storage for pc's combined (you could even add the ps3 in there!). Got Windows 7 Ultimate RC on it, no real judgement yet besides the fact that the way Start->Programs works now is lamer than heck. I installed AoC from scratch and it's not an option, although just Start followed by typing Age works. That and stupid restrictions like needing to run Station Launcher as Admin. Coulda sworn I turned off UAC, but maybe that was in Vista pre-upgrade. Need to figure that out. Also need to figure out how to get the old Control Panel back (assuming you can in Win7).

And now "Good Eats" is on to part 2 of their tenderloin hour. Mmmmmm. Hope this one includes either grilling or baking of said steaks.

Rollerderby was a good time, got a visit from MrB as well. My buddy's wife skates like a demon and her team was the only one we really enjoyed watching. Cousin's wedding went off without a hitch. And in a couple weeks it will once again be time for the Firemen's ball. Come on Summer and times where vacation is easier to come by. And maybe by the 4th of July, YaMB will have released their latest Christmas Extravaganza episode. There's a rumor the original lost eps9-22 are in the works for re-release but I'm guessing if they do come out, all references to Snapple will have been replaced with Pepsi Max, and there will be a new all digital cast member.

Anyways, I'll be trying to get to 30-35 in AoC after I get a new video card, and see if I can finally master a space profession in SWG only 4 years and 3+ months after I first bought the game. Maybe I'll finally have hardware to run it at above 10 fps in the cantina. They really need to get someone who knows how to optimize game engines already. Come on SOE, it's been 5 years and your game still doesn't perform as well as Age of Conan does on the same hardware. Chop Chop!

I'm back.

Been pretty busy, still pretty busy, but had the morning "off" for a upper-gi follow through, aka drink barium and pop rocks, and get xrays. Bout to head into work, but tonight is going to be 10 term missions on Mooftak and some Age of Conan. Woot. New link, I found: http://www.conankave.com/. Also looking forward to the next ep of YaMB. Any day now, I'm sure.

Recent Realization of Play Styles

While explaining my enjoyment in SWG vs enjoyment in AoC to people, I just realized that when I play Age of Conan, I play it sandbox style. Project Uncle Crom if you will (google project uncle owen). When I play, it is without concern for leveling, even though I do want to someday see the dungeons they have put in for mid-level and up (and experience the group play). I mainly enjoy sneaking around the wilderness (have a distaste for the towns), mining/harvesting, and occasionally sneaking past higher level wildlife. And occasional PVP is an added bonus. Somehow I've mostly been attacked by other players who are near my level, so I stand a fighting chance.

Regarding Mooftak's house of fail, everything but the fruit has been dropped off. Realized Mooftak needs to do the housing collection so that I can really decorate. Not really in the mood to do that right now, so I guess I'll try to complete the collections this weekend if I have any time at all, and decorate early next week. Until then, the house is on the eastern end of Yamborra, on Dantooine in the Shadowfire galaxy. See SWGPodcast for a waypoint to the town. *UPDATE* Waypoint: 5805, -4457 Dantooine (Shadowfire)

Somewhat disappointed in the Shadowfire forums as far as social-ness goes. Trying to get daily "Good morning Shadowfire" threads going but they go cold pretty fast. I'll keep on trying. That's about it for my random thoughts at the moment. Have a good one y'all.

Time

Why is it that in the morning when I'm at work, I'm all about wishing I could play my MMO's, but when I get off work, I can't summon the motivation to push "Launch"? This weekend isn't going to be very good either, at least until Sunday afternoon. On the plus side, I have friends coming to town. On the down side, I've been too lazy to clean so I can't even get an hour or two in before they get to town. Might have to spend my lunch break cleaning to give myself an extra half hour this evening.

Also, I suffer such a weakness for reading about games that I re-upped my Station Pass so I can check out Vanguard on my Shuttle and maybe even give EQ2 another shot. We'll see how that works out. Don't plan on changing from AoC to VG, and I still need to get back to levelling my SWG Commando and Trader on Shadowfire. Just have a desire to play Vanguard.

Regarding SWG, here's hoping there's a YaMB party this weekend. Mooftak Jones wants to dance. And check out Ewok Love. Any SWG'ers out there feel like taking 15-30 minutes to help me understand piloting a little more?

Weekend gaming (to steal a post title from every other blog out there)

Played Age of Conan for a couple hours this Saturday after transferring Amandara on Friday from Bloodspire to Cimmeria. Woke up in whatever area that is they drop you off in post transfer and just started doing new quests and exploration from there. At some point I'll need to return to Conarch's Valley to turn in some quests. For now I'm having fun running around harvesting and getting 5-8 fresh kills (I can't believe I keep getting owned by level 29 pigs). Still loving the barbarian class, as I was "ambushed" by 2 similar level people and was able to take them out without too much worry. Enough concern to enjoy the fight, not quite enough to stress out about it. Loving the graphics in the game still, as well as the exploration aspect. It really feels like I'm exploring.

At some point I need to play some more SWG and get Mooftak leveled a little more. I think I'm ready to do the Darklighter's cave quest. I think that would be a good way to start a couple hours of play due to the time limit and focus of "what needs to be done". I also realized this morning that all of Kernel's harvesters are no doubt destroyed due to my being sucked out of games for nearly 3 weeks now. I don't regret the loss of harvesters, just the resources that would have been in them.

Santa's pool league tonight, so unsure if I'll actually be able to play at all. Ironically we never play pool. Which was the reason I "joined" in the first place. Life sure is funny.

What a month

Worked 40 hours the weekend of 1/16-18 and then half a day on MLK even though the rest of my dept was off for the day. Then worked 24 hours on 1/20, and 12 more on 1/21 before finding out that my grandfather had passed away. My supervisor kindly stepped in to finish the upgrade that was going on (seperate from the weekend's work) and let me come home to be with family. During all this time I was having a flare up of a medical condition that I have and on the day I planned to return to Wisc, I took a turn for the worse and ended up going to the local hospital and getting admitted. Two days and 5 units of blood later, I'm feeling a lot better and the flare up's seem to have been stopped by some of the meds I was put on. Oh yeah, and I'm not <2 days away from death anymore like I was Monday. Woot meds! Going to take another day or two here to a) continue to be with family and b) make sure the flare ups don't come back, before I head back home. Gah, what a couple of weeks it has been.

On the upside (depending on your pov), having time to surf while laid up, I fell upon this picture from AoC and have decided that I need to get some time in on that this weekend. I am in the mood for spilling blood that isn't my own. Also, Jack Lalane juicer commercials are on some cable channel in N. Iowa just about every hour of the day.

Quick update

Been hitting SWG's Shadowfire pretty hard over break. Last half of Dec = nothin but stress, Jan looks to continue. Will update more later this week. Need to get back into AoC. Linky to SWG screenshots.

Pledge results

-Not sure how many of AoC (see xfire), almost to 25. Had fun doing some solo sneaking and random grouping.
-SWG, no clue how much time in SWG, but I got it running again and enjoyed myself.
-Did blog some stuff. More to come, thoughts on FCTS and such.
-No uploaded Screen shots :)

Between now and next Monday:
-Hit 28 in AoC
-upload more screenshots
-have more fun in SWG
-blog stuff

So far this weekend

Space PVP on Valcyn last night. Macbook Pro is really having issues running SWG since Ch11 came out, though I don't know if it's linked to that or not. An event of 3 15 minute rounds took 2.5 hours. Hrm, not a big fan of that.

Today I slept late, then ran errands, so I didn't get into AoC until 6pm or so. Hit level 23, ended up grouping with a guy I helped fight off attacking Vanir. We finished one of my quests, he shared one with me, we grouped with a level 33 guy to finish the shared, and along the way I got both 1/2 way to level 24 and 3/4 of several other quests I had. Should be able to solo those.

Along the way, I noticed that my shuttle pc is now showing video ram in dxdiag, which means SWG will let me play in a windowed mode. The shuttle is 3 years older than the MBP, has a prev gen vid card (X800XT vs MBP's X1600), and is using the same wireless mouse (I take it back and forth). Lag is not showing like it does on the MBP, although I'm still not impressed with SWG's performance on a machine that was built to play games 2.5 years after SWG was released.

Will start resizing screenshots for upload to Flickr and will update again tomorrow. Also, I added AoC friend Zangra's flickr photostream to my links.

Latest randomness

So I'm away from Age of Conan for a week. Kind of nice but I didn't get a chance to upload any screenshots before I left home. Hoping to be back on Sat and maybe I'll do it then.

I finally hit 20, got a big ol' battle axe. Figured out that mentoring in Tortage is pretty much useless for the lower level folks. I'll need to spend my next first moments of AoC retooling my toolbars to take advantage of new combos and such.

And on a completely unrelated note, I've found a new tv show to captivate me (I need to take a break from Firefly, having seen each episode prolly 100 times, though not recently, per aforementioned break). NCIS. Caught 3 episodes last Sat on USA. Good stories, good characters, good writing, and it actually makes me laugh. Been awhile. Besides The Office, I only really follow Rescue Me which won't re-air till Jan or Feb. Tonight is a new episode from season 6 on CBS, tomorrow is a marathon on USA.

And on a "podcasts I listen to" note, where the heck is Hyborian Herald #13? I'm jonesing pretty badly. I guess YaMB are recording 101 tonight. Considering how non-plussed I am about Hoth (granted I haven't been there but I have a 90 ent and a 14 smuggler, and you need 4 people to go to Hoth), I'll be interested to see what they have to say on the state of the game.

And on a pizza note, at some point I'll upload pictures of my double decker pizza from my phone and put it up for y'all to see. In the meantime, enjoy your turkey day if you celebrate it (and why would you turn down a chance to eat turkey, potatoes, stuffing, and gravy, do you hate all that is right and good in this world?).

I've yet to upload screenshots of my plains experience. Found a hill I wanted to get up but there were too many durn Yeti. Unbelievable amounts of Yeti. Deciding to go another way, I headed across the plains and found an abandoned camp with a gong. I rang the gong. Didn't seem like a good idea but my toon looks so good I just can't tell her no. Stupid girl. Two Hyperborean warriors ported in and kicked her pretty little rear before she could even get a good combo off.

Forgot to mention a couple of things that I found over the weekend. I enjoyed running from a Yeti who spotted me and caused me to de-cloak. He was level 41, me 17, so I ran and jumped off the mini-cliff into the river that was going by. Phew, saved by a lack of inhibitions. It was fun when I realized I might get to the river before I was killed and that escape was within my reach.

Inventory overflow. I completed the bat demon quest but my inventory was full so I couldn't turn it in. Except I could, I just couldn't get the loot or xp. Then lady Zan (possibly a trucker) told me of the inventory overflow. Cleaned out my inv of some things, claimed my loot and BAM, xp. Good xp, left me 3 points away from level 17.

I also love the Fresh Kills concept. I know EQ2 has vitality which is nice, but fresh kills combined with AoC's better levelling curve (better IMO) is just delicious. Also nice? The chat ui. I love all the options available when I right click. This is so much nicer than SOE's version (SWG and EQ2). EQ2 does have a great guild managment system though, so I'm hoping AoC matches their chat quality in the guild system as well.

*Update* played with MrBubble again last night. Will post tonight and upload screenshots.

Goodbye Tortage

Welp, I'll be dropping my Station Pass before long. Will play EQ2 over Thanksgiving probably, and maybe check out the holiday events, but for now I think I'll get my EQ2 fix through West Karana and other blogs. Age of Conan has taken possession of me.

My buddy and I have leveled from 5 to 17 completely by grouping (sometimes adding others) and killing crocs, gorillas, and others in the White Sands, and by doing quests in the Archeronian Ruins. Our battle against the bat demon was aided and made possible by a great group of people we happened to see running through the area and invited to our group. Standing atop the bat demon's ledge, there was just an amazing view. This game's visuals have hooked me in. Not just the style of graphics (EQ2 is amazing but the "feel" isn't right for me, isn't real), but the grand vistas. It was actually a screenshot in Cimmerian mountains that kept me coming back to any blog entry I could find about it, and finally prompted me to buy. Nothing on the AoC box captures me like the online mountain vistas I have seen. I'll upload screenshots I've taken later this week. Keep in mind I'm playing on a P4 3.4Ghz, 2gb ram, and an ATI X800XT. Not exactly current hardware (bought in Aug and Sept of 05).

The city of Tartania is beautiful but I had an urge to find mountians so I went to the area known as Lacheish Plains. Being a barbarian I had the advantage of stealth which became necessary when I crossed into an area with Yeti's. While running across the landscape trying to find the highest possible vantage points, I took a small fall and was de-stealthed. Taking advantage of the Yeti-less aspect of the immediate area, I started running to the next hill when I was set upon by two others, a level 17 and 18, some sort of melee classes (was too busy fighting to check). I was able to dispatch them both without making full use of my 2 step combos that I gained with level 17. What a rush. From "oh crap, I'm going to die" to "whoa, I just took that one out, and I still have 2/3's health" to "BRING IT ON SISTER!" to "aww man, I wanted to finish her off with the new combo". It was awesome. Since I lived, I bear no ill will towards them :) but instead instantly thought how special an element pvp adds to this huge world. Even if I had died, I would have been saddened at my reset in travel but since it was an even level ambush, it would have been ok, just "man, I wish my buddy would have been with me." 

This is why Age of Conan has captured me. The gameplay is something I enjoy (not just click auto attack and wait for specials to refresh), the graphic style is truly spectacular, and the lore background are just awesome. If only SWG could carry out the first part, and do slightly better on the second. Also, props to the Hyborian Herald (also a member of VirginWorlds), which is another thing that had me hooked. As with YaMB, I listened to it before I played the game, and while not even close to YaMB's style, he puts out a great podcast, and I eagerly await episode 13.

Anyways, that's all I have for now. Thanks to my buddy for giving me the social element, to my random group-mates (now on my friends list), to Funcom, and to Streamweaver for helping me find my gaming home. I haven't enjoyed a game (pc, xbox, 360, or ps3) this much since my days of QuakeWorld (thanks Muppet Clan), Half-Life (thank you freshmen year floormates), or Quake 3 (thanks Barker house foes). If you're on the RP-PVP serve Hyp, feel free to add Amandara to your friends list and look me up in game.

AoC Update

Ymir's pass is out and the new patch requires an update to DirectX. The link they provide didn't work for me (first you have to jump through hoops, then it fails to install). This link works (thanks forum poster aocmmo). Logged in to get some of my 20 Fresh Kills for the day. Needed about 4 to hit level 10 (in Archeron (sp?) ruins). Woot!

I should also add that even though I have an old pc (P4 3.4Ghz, 2Gb ram, ATI X800XT) and AoC is only getting between 12 and 20 fps, I've seldom noticed any hitching or fps problems. Compare that with SWG or EQ2 on my Macbook Pro (bootcamp, Core Duo 1.8Ghz, 1.5gb ram, ATI X1600) and it's impressive/ridiculous. If only the MBP had 30gb worth of HD space for bootcamp. My Thanksgiving week off (woot!) would be able to be filled w/ awesome AoC, but instead will be web surfing, maybe some SWG or EQ2, and other things not involving a PC. I've got a book I need to plow through anyways I guess.

Also, Metaplace's build mode looks way too intensive for someone as lazy as I. We'll see how that goes.

And in semi-related note-ish-ness (to the AoC topic), I love the commentary to Conan The Barbarian. You can't beat Arnold's observations. "Ha, I just hit that guy." Wow. Granted, they're not all like that, but 30-40% are. I do appreciate the commentary in general though (but I'm a fan of movie commentaries with directors and actors).

Happy to be /stuck with you (and holiday talk)

Last night, ran around with Mr. Bubble just outside the walls of Tortage, trying to complete "A Brother's Vengeance." We were 2 level 8 (and then 9) fools getting schooled by Picts. We're both Barbarians, so no heals = either quick win or certain death, especially if a 3rd Pict happens upon our battle. We finally made it near the quest goal Pict, tried to be clever and sneak around to the side, and we both got stuck between the rock ledge and a tree. /stuck never worked. For awhile I was able to loot some enemies, which was weird considering I was clicking on a Pict that was just out of range of hating me, clicking combos, and hoping he would come at me. The combo click seemed to loot something from somewhere. Unfortunately they were all loot pieces that were orange to me. Will probably give it a try again tonight. "Tune in tonight at 8EST to Beavis and Butthead in Tortage." Fools we are.

*Update* R2D2 we wish you a merry Christmas. Thank Yoda for Holiday Extravaganza episodes of YaMB. It's cold here in Wisc, but no snow that will stick yet. It's not even Thanksgiving and I'm jonesing for Christmas. Or maybe just snow and a holiday (come on Turkey day, hurry up and get here). Also, regarding snow, today is Snow Plow Driver Appreciation Day in Wisc, so of course it's raining.

Q:Why do you think I'm building this dam? A:Because you don't know that lava beats bricks.

That quest dude outside tortage is great but he needs to realize that Lava wins. That's how it rolls. Continued on with my new toon on Hyboria (female Cimmerian barbarian, woot!) and grouped up with a buddy for some levelling goodness. Ran some random quests, killed lots of crocs, panthers, and picts. Good times. Love the dual wielding. Didn't realize I could sell looted crap to anyone I can buy stuff from, good call B. Gonna do my best to hit 20 and escape Tortage by next week. Not sure my buddy will have time to group and level that much.

Going to try to figure out the deal with the Underhalls and maybe try doing White Sands as Epic. http://aoc.wikia.com FTW. Anyways, that's all for now.

Age of Conan

So all those concerns about Age of Conan not playing on my shuttle pc because a)it has an ATI X800XL (not exactly the latest and greatest) and b) DirectX thinks my card has no video ram (corroborated by EQ2 and SWG being kind of doggish). Oh yeah, and it's got a P4 (dual core but not a core 2 duo like the pimps have). Well, all those concerns were for naught, at least so far. Only have about 45 minutes in but it was smooth enough I didn't think about it. Not bad for 1680x1050 on a 4gen? old card. Guess I'll have to start taking screen shots to compare to people who are actually able to run it in high-res, and find out how to tell how many fps I'm getting. 

On a side note, Conan the Destroyer Collectors Edition doesn't scale up to 1080p like most dvds do. Don't recall having this problem last night w/ the Barbarian. Maybe it will just be the intro part. Laters.