You can’t beat fighting trolls with hammers bigger than yourself.
Or your character, or avatar, or whatever. Anyway, Dwarf vs Troll.
Somehow my dwarf parried that hammer.
Category Archives: Games
Autumn updates
Wow, it’s December (by the time I finish and post this, although I thought about writing it at the start of November). Autumn turned up pretty quickly and then evaporated and turned into an early winter. There’s snow on the ground outside, and more in the air. Some parts of the country are really suffering but we’re not too bad around here. Time has flown by. Since I changed jobs at work I’ve been working harder than ever and have been much less interested in sitting behind the computer when I got home.
Speaking of which the new job is great, enjoying it much more than the last few years of the old one. Change is always scary but it’s working out okay so far. I’m lucky in that I’ve managed to hold onto my desk and so still sit with a great bunch of people from my previous team, and that’s made moving into the role a lot easier. I’m pretty sure they want rid of me but I have the window seat and I’m keeping it as long as I can!
We’re staying in Nottingham this year for Christmas and New Year, so we’re not doing the whole country wide 800 mile round-trip to our families. There are many reasons for that, but the greatest of them is that I want to have a nice, relaxing December where we don’t have to plan for two long trips, sort the cats, and squeeze the whole thing in around work and the holiday period. Frankly – if this weather keeps up it might have been a moot point anyway. Didn’t feel good telling our families, but we need a Christmas at home to recharge.
Just having a quick read back through my blog and it looks like I stopped posting The Guild episodes sometime around 6 or 7. In fact, I may not have even watched them after that – because really I haven’t been sitting in front of this computer much. I’ve been much more likely (as Grete will tell you) to be sitting in the lounge using the PS3 or the XBox. The gaming diary thing is out the window as well though, just don’t have the enthusiasm to play a game and then write an update about it each time, especially since playing a game for me might mean a good few hours before bed, and then straight to bed. On the subject of games, Fallout: New Vegas on the PS3. Good game for the most part, nice update to the franchise, shockingly buggy both code-wise (crashes, bad clipping, falling through scenery) and logically (dodgy dialog options, broken quests). A real shame and it’s totally killed any replayability for me (although I managed to actually finish the game despite the crashes every 3 hours or so).
We finally sorted out our sofas. They’ve been bugging us for ages, we can’t afford new ones but the old ones are ratty and the cats have pretty much destroyed the arm on one of them. We looked and looked for some huge throws to cover them but there wasn’t anything in the right size, so we ended up buying a bunch of small throws from Ikea and Grete made giant covers! This link http://twitpic.com/37f5wt points to the picture Grete tweeted. It doesn’t do them justice really, and while we still need to put the big sofa back together every week or so (the cushions slowly slide off), it’s a 1000% better than it was previously, and for a fraction of the cost of new ones.
We’ve bought new light fittings for the kitchen (simple ceiling roses with lamp shades) but haven’t gotten around yet to taking down the horrible 4-spotlight rail things in there at the moment. Because one of the previous house owners loved DIY but was shockingly bad at it, I’m nervous because you never know what you’ll find. Some of the things in the house truly terrify me and I wish I could afford to get it all fixed, but there you go.
Right, so ‘quick’ rambling Autumn update as if anyone cared. See you in December!
Back to The Lord of the Rings Online
Quite some time ago now, we purchased lifetime subs to Lord of the Rings Online so that we could still play without paying the monthly sub. At the time, the price was pretty good, it was a half price offer over the usual cost. Within a few weeks, it became clear why they had been on sale – as Turbine announced Lord of the Rings online would go free-to-play.
At around the same time we just sort of stopped playing. No clear decision to do so, we’d just done a lot of the stuff (this was after Mirkwood had been released), and a few toons, and although we’d not done everything (and in fact, were no where near to completing everything) it was getting a bit samey.
I suppose the good thing, was that we weren’t paying a monthly sub while not playing, but it still sucked a bit that we’d just spent quite a bit buying a lifetime subscription only to find the game was going free-to-play. As the weeks went on, it became clear that I would be prepared to play Lord of the Rings Online without paying a sub of some sort anyway.
There’s more detail here (although it says beta in the link, so it may go away) covering what you get for free and what you need to pay for, or have a sub covering. Killer features for me, believe it or not, are extra bags and the full set of traits. Ultimately, we worked out we’d only keep playing by paying the sub (which gets you the VIP access) anyway, and the lifetime sub (which also gives you VIP) works out cheaper eventually.
So anyway, time passes and the free-to-play stuff finally goes live along with a new ‘free’ area. Suddenly there’s new stuff to do again, so we’ve started logging in and it’s just as fun as I remember. The store is okay, I have to accept that it’s okay for people to buy faster XP, faster deeds, more stats because that’s how Turbine have chosen to fund development. If I want more content, and I do, then I accept that’s the price I have to pay.
But I won’t be buying those things myself – I’m restricting my purchases (with my thousands of free Turbine points) to cosmetic items such as hats, dance moves, juggling and emotes I’d been casually working towards but never achieved.
What was good, was seeing a lot of people in-game, and a few people talking about how they move from free-to-play to a subscription because they wanted the extra features – it sounded like a healthy conversation to me.
The new area is nice, it’s brighter than Mirkwood with a much happier feel (people I know dislike LOTRO because it’s so damn glum, and Mirkwood was glummer than anything before it). I can see future expansions between equally dark and glum, it’s the nature of the War, but it’s nice to get out somewhere bright for a change. We spent a few hours killing 20k elites at an appropriate level which is unusual for us, and we generally had a good time.
I feel the need to get my alts up to level 65 ready for the next level cap increase next year, and I really need to sit down and spend a lot of time working out traits, weapon legacies, skill sets and gear across all my toons. That spark seems to be back – and I guess games on the PS3/XBOX360 will have to take a back seat while I work through it.
Edit: Better link for European players on the VIP vs. Free-to-Play benefits. http://www.codemasters.com/lotro/freetoplay/info/
Gaming diary redux
So, I’ve decided to stick to simple categories instead of marking the diary posts as part of an article. So gaming diary posts are in that category and movie diary posts in their own. I’ve hacked the category page a little so that the post titles have the dates next to them (and they naturally show in reverse date order, newest first anyway).
That avoids any complexity, I can just name the posts after the game or film and let WordPress sort out the rest, but people can still see them in the right order as it were. The only other issue is that I’ll probably write any gaming diary posts a few days after the fact, so now I have to work out if I’ll post-date them to match when I played or not worry about it! I know, I know, I should just go with the flow.
Usual problem
So the gaming and movie diary stalled at the first hurdle, after the first updates. As usual, I get stuck up on the technical details and don’t just get on and do it and worry about them later. How do I write entries for the same games, but keep them sorted in the right way, do I include the date in the subject, or do I write one blog post per game and just keep adding to it over time. Is there some other option I should investigate, etc., etc.
All the thinking about it gets in the way of writing the posts, so maybe we’ll see what happens.
Defense Grid: The Awakening
I’m terrible at, but love, tower defense style games. I usually only play them on the PC (or sometimes the iPhone), but after playing the demo for Defense Grid: The Awakening on the XBox I stumped up the points for the full version. Spent a few hours playing it on Sunday, and it’s really quite engaging. So far, the levels have been easy enough to beat with only a few lost power cores at most, but challenging enough to keep me busy.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2
Picked this up cheaply on Saturday, and played an hour or so before friends turned up for Warhammer. Enjoyed the first one on the PS3, and playing this was on the XBox. Pretty similar experience, although it feels significantly more difficult. I can’t remember now if I played the first one on easy or not, but playing this was on normal was pretty tough going for me.
However, it was nice to see myself improving steadily on the missions and eventually beating them.
The Enemy Within – WFRP Campaign
This was about the fourth WFRP session, in the Enemy Within campaign. The gaming sessions are quite long (most of a day), so we get through quite a bit of the material each time. The PC’s having already finished Mistaken Identity and Shadows over Bögenhafen are just starting Death on the Reik.
To be frank, reading the Death on the Reik campaign is pretty hard work – it’s pretty non-linear and there’s a lot of stuff going on. To give it the best shot you really need to do a lot of preparation and understand the motivations of everyone involved. Have I done that? Not yet – I tried, a few times, to read through everything, but one or two things just don’t gel and I’m really struggling to make it all fit in my mind.
Luckily (for me, not for them), a couple of the players arrived a little later than expected on Saturday and we ended up not getting through much of the session, plus we were all distracted by real life. One of the problems of not playing often is when you do get together, you end up talking about a lot of non-game stuff.
Anyway, I think what we did was fun, hopefully the players enjoyed it, and I get longer to read the campaign again and try and resolve the things in my head that are causing it to feel broken.
Gaming and Movie Diary
A couple of folk I follow on Twitter write gaming diaries, where they talk about the games they’re playing / have played. Not reviews as such, but just an update on what they’re playing. I thought I might give it a shot with both games and films. I’ll start with the games I played over the weekend, and I think I’ll expand it to include more than just computer games. You’ll be able to find them in the regular blog posts, but they’ll also show up in the relevant section in the articles page.
You like to, move it!
Spent about two hours on Sunday playing Start the Party, a PS3 game which uses the Move controller (camera + motion sensitive controller). We had friends visiting on Saturday for some Warhammer FRP and they stayed over. Sunday, after breakfast, Grete convinced us all to give the game a shot (we’d played the demo, which was amusing, but not the full game with a bunch of people).
It’s pretty fun! We played a 5 round and a 10 round game. The rounds are either full ‘games’ or quick-fire mini-games, and there’s bonus and joker rounds to keep people interested (more on bonus rounds in a sec). The full games are stuff like painting in shapes (which eventually turn out to be pictures of something like a monkey), stabbing exploding coloured ‘things’ (hard to explain), shooting robots, cutting hair (hardest of all the games). The quick-fire rounds are made up of things such as catching pizza toppings, whacking moles, bouncing balls into nets, finding bugs (creepiest of all the games).
All of the games involve you (as seen by the camera) standing in the middle of the action wielding a different implement (hammer, pick-axe, pizza, magnifying glass, harpoon spear, bug-squisher, etc.)
If someone falls behind in terms of scores, they get a free bonus round where they can make a few extra points – which I thought was a nice touch and demonstrated where the game is targeted – people having a laugh – not competing for the best score in the world.
I have to say I was pretty sceptical at first, it was Sunday morning, we were tired, and I hate enforced fun, but the game won me over. Easy to get into, quick to play, light hearted and it kept us laughing for a couple of hours.