Jehoshaphat

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, I had an overall game-plan for this weekend. I was going to just chill out and watch some hockey and basketball, maybe get some studying done, or maybe play some video games, or maybe just do nothing of value at all. Well of course nothing goes as planned, right? Best laid plans…

First, my wife was doing a school garage sale for her National Jr Honor Society kids, and while I knew I was going to help setup the event, I didn’t realize I was going to spend so much time there. The wife didn’t force me to stay most of the day, I just was bored at home and headed up and helped out. Here’s the problem, when I left in the morning it was cloudy and looked like it was going to rain. But in the mid-morning when I showed back up, the sun was out, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and I proceed to get sunburned really bad.

Also on Saturday, I decided to spend part of my stimulus check at the local EBGames. I picked up Boom Box and No More Heroes for the Wii. No More Heroes is a great game, it’s the video game version of Kill Bill. The main character is a d-bag, but hes a lovable d-bag. Boom Box is a great party game, alot like Jenga. It’s freaking awesome. The wife and I decided to spend a hundred dollars each out of the stimulus check and save the rest for bills and stuff. So I have about 40 dollars left to spend, I might wait for Mass Effect on the PC.

So Sunday rolls around. I got this great meal planned for dinner, going to grill out, make some potatoes, just a bunch of good stuff. Of course, as soon as I start up the grill the skies just open up with a torrent of rain and lightning. We decide to head out for dinner and basically end the night on that note. I didn’t get a chance to play Sins, TF2, or anymore Mythos.

Other than that, the weekend theme was playing a lot of Mythos, which is just a good game. I really enjoy playing it with Jah and CB, and hopefully Nick will actually install the game. We saw Firethorn around for awhile but didn’t hear anything from him after his quick visit. Considering the time it takes to clear a floor in that game, I don’t see him playing it that much. But maybe if we had a full group we could burn through the epic maps faster. Oh well…I’m looking forward to the next release for Mythos this week.

No Conan talk until later in the week…I want to see if Jah, CB, and Nick are going to get it.

So I created a new page on the blog a couple of weeks ago which will chronicle our summer vacation. This year we have decided to head up to New England and spend some time in the Boston, Maine, White Mountains area. As a history freak, the Boston visit really excites me but as a lover of beautiful places, the Arcadia National Park visit also excites me. Anyway you look at it, we are going to have a blast. The last couple of vacations we have done have been cruises so its going to be nice to go out and drive around to different places.

Oh, and anything is better than North Florida in the middle of summer. Nothing like having the sun 5 feet from your face!

So, I’ve been using Rhapsody for a couple of months now, and I’ve really enjoyed it. Between the wife and I, we have a huge song library now, something like a thousand songs. It’s a great service and really is quite simple to use, but I do have a complaint. I know, right, me, complaining about something, shocking!

I use the shuffle feature most of the time with my playlist. I have something like 400 songs on my playlist so it would led a person to believe they would never hear the same song they just heard 3 songs ago. FFS, how hard is it to write a good random number generator these days. Oh well, I guess its one of those things you have to deal with…overall Rhapsody is a solid product.

I played some more GTA 4 last night, moving to the next safe-house. I also tried to play some MP but I think something is wrong with my wireless network because I kept getting disconnected. Other than that, the game is a freaking blast. Also, I saw the preview of the next Gears of War and realized that I never beat that game all the way through. I did finish the game in Co-op but I skipped most of the middle of the game. I might throw that in for a couple of hours of alien killing fun. Also, I picked up Condemned for like 5 dollars at the local EB, I’ve heard/read that it is a great horror game. We shall see…

Conan launches this weekend, should be interesting to see how it goes…I read about a big guild that is forming one of the PvP servers that has something like 600 members. They plan on taking over each of the guild cities and basically dominate the server. And while I think that running a 600 member guild would be impossible, the way that these guys talked and wrote led me to believe that they could easily pull it off. And since it would only take 48 people to defend the city in a siege, they were quite confident in being able to defend all of the cities.

I remember in DAoC, when guilds could own Frontier forts and keeps, you could walk the Frontier and see the flags of the Albion Wolves flying at every keep. The Wolves were an alliance of about 15 guilds, of which I belonged to one, that had the goal of controlling every fort and relic keep it could. I remember the battles at the mile gates…that was best PvP I’ve been part of. Sure, it would boil down to zerg rushes but it was a blast to be defending against a zerg. Sometimes you would hold the line and the zerg would just crumble against the defense…or you would retreat back to the keep and a siege would begin. Good memories…

Sorry for the long delay…I really didn’t mean for that.

I got nothing major to talk about, the summer season seems to be starting here. Life starts to slow down in the south during the summer. Hot temperatures plus ungodly humidity leads people to stay indoors, go to the beach, or generally take it slow. And while its been crazy dry lately, hasn’t rain in awhile, the heat is really starting to kick in. This is always a tough time of the year for me. My wife, being a teacher, gets 3 months off of work, and gaming really starts to slow down. The clan, IJSMP, has fallen on hard times lately. No-one seems to be around much, just a few games of TF2 or CoD on the weeknights, the weekends are usually dead. I haven’t seen anyone on Xbox Live lately…everything seems to be drying up.

I had alot of stock in Age of Conan, and of course I’m sure I’ll end up playing it and grinding through an awful period of broken game-play. The clan seems to be wanting to play a PvP server, and since there are no factions on a PvP server, its just FFA, Free For All. I guess I don’t understand FFA servers. Sure, I would imagine that people would begin to police themselves, but the heart of an MMO for me is doing quests, enjoying the story of the world around you, and generally grinding through the content. The thought of having to continually watch my back or worry that I can grind quests solo just is lost on me.

I thought EVE had the whole FFA style down perfect. It had a built in system of bounties, where players could post rewards for griefers and general bad people. Conan doesn’t have any of that. Eve had zones built in a way that players owned them, policed them, set the rules, and governed over the pirates. There were tons of zones, Conan has 7 player run towns…serious 7. And I thought WoW really governed PvP servers the best. The world in which Warcraft was set was well, at war. So two factions were at each others thoughts. In the end, the whole FFA gameplay has me down.

Also, in the end, this time around I’m going to be more open to finding guilds to partner with, to possible join up with. I think back to WoW and wonder what would that game been to me if we didn’t join the Syndicate. Smitty still grinds away at content that I wish I could see…fuck him if he gets to meet the Lich King in battle. Seriously, Smitty, if you see the Lich King, I want to see lots of screenshots…Arthas was probably one of the top 5 characters in video game for me. The picture of him on the Frozen Throne with the Frostmourne is just plain cool.

Oh well, enough of this complaining, I’m going back to GTA 4, which might be the best game I’ve ever played. Half-Life and Civilization 2 are the co-reigning champs, but GTA 4 is coming out with some crazy body blows. It just brings a smile to my face.

I’ve had a surprising lack of focus for the last couple of weeks. I don’t know necessarily what is causing, but it’s really bad. I feel like I have a weird form of A.D.D. The medicine that I’m supposed to be taking for those other problems is supposed to improve things like focus. I haven’t been taking the medicine as of late because I really didn’t feel like I needed it anymore. I’m going to start taking it again and see if it doesn’t help with my concentration problems.

I played some more GTA last night, and I have to say that game really does rock. I know it’s getting alot of hype out in the gaming world, with a ton of perfect reviews, but I’m always alittle surprised when a game lives up to the hype. I don’t think I’ll go as far as to say it’s the best game ever (System Shock 2, Bioshock, Civ 2, and Half-Life can keep fighting that one out), but it’s well worth the 60 bucks I paid for it.

The Hornet’s have the unique ability to make old teams look REALLY old. Last night, they laid the wood to San Antonio. CP3 went off on the poor defending of Tony Parker, and when you get 12 points (5/5 shooting) from a guy like Mo Pete, your in trouble. I like the Hornet’s a lot, not only is a good story for New Orleans, it’s a good basketball story. They are carving up the old western conference, hopefully making some these teams change their teams around, like Dallas needing to whack Kidd and Dirk Nor(whatever).

I wish I could take a nap at work.

After a much needed weekend break and a change of plans, I finally got to do some beta testing of… Mythos. That’s right, you thought I was going to talk about Age of Conan didn’t yah? Well, ok, a quick note on Age of Conan, I did install it and go through the game on Saturday, and it’s an unpolished turd of a beta right now, but from everything I’ve read it should get better, they already have patched the beta client, and supposedly they are running a different client in the closed beta program. And while I take all of this things with a grain of salt, I’ll see if they bring their A game to the launch party. I’m going to withhold any judgment of the game until I see what they launch with in two weeks. (They better increase the mob respawn time.)

So onto the better of the two betas, Mythos. I’ve been pulling my hair out for the last 4 months trying to get someone to play this game, and I finally got Jah to install it and of course he liked it. And he convinced CB to give it a go and of course he liked it. So I joined them yesterday for two epic maps, which were epic. The game really shines with a couple of people playing it while you murder hundreds of mobs, and I do mean hundreds. Epic maps usually are packed with super-charged mobs that want to eat your face. The beta is going really good but it’s not without its problems, the UI needs alot of work and adding the ability to customize it some would be a huge improvement. The combat is a straight clone of Diablo, which isn’t a bad thing, and there is a good spread of classes. The most impressive aspects of the game is how stable it runs and how good the game looks. But seriously, improving the UI would be a HUGE plus…right now all the text/buttons are super small and it’s to figure out what is what. But I think Flagship has a winner with Mythos.

Other than some yard work and gaming, the most exciting part of the weekend was installing a new fan in the master bedroom and having the garage door break, near of which was enjoyable. We have a couple more light fixtures I want to replace to be complete with those improvements. I don’t know how much the garage door repair will cost, but hopefully not that much.

Over the next couple of days, I’m going to do a ton of house work and studying…so my time is going to be rather limited.