Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year

It’s the holidays so my writing will be incredibly sparse this last week of the year 2010, in large part because I’ll be drowning my sorrow over the continual lack of a flying car I was promised as a child.  That said, the gaming I am getting in has been a dash of EVE, a good helping of LoL, and a smattering of WAR. In WAR, I’ve been lucky enough to have a friend buy me a server transfer, and you can now find me playing my Shadow Warrior on Karak-Norn, under the name “Serprise Sechs”, sporting my newly-dyed Tron-colored outfit. Gorfang hasn’t been left behind entirely, I still have my Knight there, and there’s even that Blackguard gathering dust…

Lastly, this week, I have the PvP Rifts beta to look forward to, and am interested in seeing how all of that pans out. There has been oodles of chatter about this game all over the relevant gaming blogs. You can’t throw a pebble without hitting someone writing about this newest to come MMO. I know it has a lot of developers involved that have come from a LOT of development studios, and I’m interested to see what all those different gaming philosophies will produce, and if they can compete with the existing market in the polish department. I could talk about predictions on this game, and what I think in general of the game as a relative outsider till the cows come how, but I won’t. Because I am an outsider. After this week, I’ll see about giving you first-hand impressions instead of third-hand heresay.

In any event, I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas, and a joyous New Year to come.

Variety is a spice

This is my kind of variety.

I had a very relaxing weekend, and I think the primary reason for it was my relaxed gaming schedule. I’m usually pretty aggressive about getting some things done, or setting goals I want to achieve for the weekend to help make up for my lack of play time during the week. But this past weekend, I approached it very loosely, and floated around a bit. From consoles, to PC, to miniatures, I did everything and kept things interesting. Oh, and it was my first Father’s Day, so that felt odd, out-of-place, and like it should not have been an applicable holiday for me in the slightest. The whole “I’m a Daddy” thing still feels a bit surreal at times (6 months in, and me being responsible for another LIFE still strikes me as insane at times).

Two birds, one stone

This.

Thanks Syncaine.

MMO Trials

I mentioned some time back that I was going through trial accounts of a few various games, and that I wanted to see how some of them have come since I last played, or just what a game I had never looked at was like. What I was hoping for, was to come at these games like it was my first time, and think about how they portrayed themselves to a would-be newcomer with zero expectations. The three that I checked out were City of Heroes, Lord of the Rings Online, and EvE (EVE? what’s the correct capitalization with this damn game?). I choose each of these because I had differing levels of exposure to them all. CoH I had played on and off for a number of years, never getting over level 30, but had a ton of alts, as this game basically demands you to do so. LotRO I had given the trial a spin once a year or so back, and just couldn’t handle playing it, so I stopped before even getting to level 5. EvE I had never even set foot in, and was completely unaware of how the game worked other than it was a sandbox space MMO. So, with high hopes and an open mind, I set out on my trials.

I sense a disturbance

I try not to write about other games very often here. Even more so, I try not to write about games that I know basically nothing about. However, my random web-browsing brought me on an epic story, with ramifications for the genre, and online gaming in general that just astounded me. It was in the game EVE, and apparently, the Empire got destroyed by a Rebel Alliance.