Gee... I forgot to make some posts...

Well, I recently reviewed my blog, and realized how much information I have missed entering over the intervening months of my absence of posting.

I can't say I am the best at blogging, I have this massive tendency to wander away from posting unless I see the blog every day, as I did when I used to raid with the Argonauts and my blog was still a part of GuildPortal.

So, I suppose the best way to start would be with the ending of TeamFail, or the sort of ending.

Seminole, the linkshell holder, left the game for a while. Sparkplug moved to Vegas, and Emeryk started frequenting other shells. Sukoti quit. Most of the others have drifted away, since the LS lacked a guiding force. It's now another empty shell in my collection.

With TeamFail empty, I moved full-time into Coast2Coast. The linkshell is not quite the one I need in terms on online times. Sadly, most of the big events are PST. However, as seems to be my lot in this game, I've made close friends with some of the GMT crowd that inhabits the shell during those quiet hours in the morning EST. This will be the second close-knit group of friends I'll have had the pleasure of knowing, the first being Pulsy, Mojava, Moftzu, and utterly cute couple of Phanty and Brero. A part of me really wants to enquire what my old close friends from Europe have in the way of linkshells, because combining these old knowledgeable souls from my past could really help the new gen of friends I have.

Jiriki, Fireballhikari, Leeka and Draiko are all close friends, and appear to have been for some time. I'm closest to Jiri and Fire, since we wind up dragging each other into adventures, very much like I used to do with Pulsy and the gang.

It does make the shell more cozy to have such nice people, although it's a far cry from the wild and raucus comments in TeamFail. I have to say, Coast2Coast come closest to the communal feel of OrderOfTheTaru. It makes me miss my leadership role there, and my old friends from it.

As for my in-game progress, I still have not merited my BST, or purchased all the uber gear I want for it. In the end, I made the decision that placing so much money and effort into a job I originally chose for fun and relaxation was a wasted effort. I would never be able to do the damage I desired as BST. And I would just be lolBST in comparison to Arce, just feeding Gods TP to kill our tanks with.

So I turned to level SAM, reaching 58, but found invites drying up as I approached 60. Bored of soloing SAM slowly, I tried to find a way to get THF to 75. In the end, after a couple short parties and a lot of Campaign, I clawed my way to 69. Frustrated, I abandoned THF for now. It helped that I begged an LS member to join their party as a replacement twice and they rejected me.

During all this, I've finally begun completing some of the many undone things for Pawk. Thanks to Shin, Arce, Jeheritt, Wesleydimple, and Fireballhikari, I now own the dunce cap of accuracy known as the Optical Hat. And thanks to Zalim, Kagenoshi, Ionian, Avatarend, and Ellenzar, I am now a Private Second Class Mercenary and have begun moving through CoP missions together as a sort of static. I don't want to call it a static and jinx it, but we meet every other Sunday when I'm off work to clear missions towards the ultimate goal of Sea access.

The part that makes me ill though is leaving behind Bratia and Anyka. I wanted them to come with me on these missions, but I know Bratia doesn't have the same level of interest in Sea. I don't know about Anyka's interest in Sea, or if she even knows really what Sea access implies. End game is not something I've really talked with her about, aside from mentions of Dynamis and Sky events. Eventually I'll just have to straight out ask her about it. For now, she's level 70, and has defeated Maat. Her cooking is 99, far outstripping any craft I've done.

Beyond that, I've been leveling with Bratia, oddly her WHM is slowly approaching level 50 WHM, and her MNK has now made it to 70. My previous post covers my other major activity on the game so far.

I'll try to post more often from here on out. I doubt that will hold true, but who knows!

Gettin' me sum book lernin'

So I'm a mage again.

I know, you're shocked. By you, I mean the fictitious you that reads this blog on any form of regular basis.

In recent months I've been spending time leveling THF (acheiving 69), SAM (reaching 58), and farming for the eventual equipment that I will "need" for endgame. However, SCH has slowly but surely taken over more and more of my time. I can't help it, the job is fascinating to me.

I started leveling SCH pre-Level Sync as a healer for one of Bratia's melee jobs. I can't recall which, to be honest. I found the job to be more or less a gimped WHM. However, as time went on, I duo'd it with my wife's BLM, and solo'd it as well. I began to see the possibilities of the job.

This morning, I hit 55, and I am wishing this job was available 5 years ago when I started. For those unfamiliar with the job, it's similar to RDM in that it borrows the spells from White and Black Magic schools already in existance. Two places where it deviates are what makes the job so unique, and sometimes frustrating.

The first is that it lacks many of the standard debuffs and buffs. This means no Paralyze or Slow, no Haste or Refresh, and no AoE spells of either school. They do receive Protect/Shell up to tier 4, as well as status removals (more on that in a minute), but instead they receive unique buffs and debuffs.

You see, SCH is the answer for the cries of adding a Geomancer to the game. Geomancers, in previous incarnations, used the elements around them to cause damage and status effects. Since they did not want to replace WHM or RDM with unique debuffs replicating the effects of the standard spells, they instead gave SCHs Helixes and Storms.

Helixes are a DoT effect that weakens a mob to an element. Storms create a localized weather effect on a friendly player, activating any latent weather effect equipment they are wearing.

To be honest, I have not seen too much effect in relation to these abilities. I've yet to level into my first Helix, and the Storms don't do much for me yet, since I lack the Elemental Obis and since the spell to guarantee effectiveness of a storm, Klimaform, is not really that useful yet.

No, the power comes from the second difference: The reliance on the Grimoire of Magic.

That's the conceit of how SCH works. They use their book of magic to cast their spells. But, that's not all it does. The book can be used to enhance the spells they cast. Here's where SCH gets interesting. They can turn many single target spells into AoE spells, lower the cost of spells, reduce their cast and recast times, or increase the power of their spells.

These effects can also be stacked, as well as combined with other job abilities like Divine Seal and Elemental Seal.

Yea, it's pretty damned awesome. It's even more so when you add into that the ability of these effects to be applied to spells reserved for self-targetting (Stoneskin and Phalanx most notably).

It has honestly left me torn as to how to proceed with gearing up for endgame. Do I save for all the awesome melee gear I'll want for SAM & THF, or do I leave behind meleeing for now to refocus on mage gear once again? It will be a question to face as my small fortune slowly creeps near 1 million gil...

Memories - The Rough Cut

So I was digging through some old DVDs I burned, and found a collection of early videos I thought I had lost. I compiled some into a video and posted it on YouTube.

Since there is some stories behind the videos, I figured I'd post about it here, and link it in the description.

The first part is the very first recording I ever made. It lagged me so much that I had to stop recording and adjust my settings on FRAPs.

The second recording was a group of my old friends as lowbies just being silly on the Selbina ferry.

The third is my first and last party in the Dunes. In one party, Bratia and I went from I think level 12 to 20. Raexn, my old THF friend, was puller in the party, it was when we first met!

The next is a random fishing expedition, just tossed that in. Notice the lack of hunters and the mini game.

The following clip was the original LS I joined with, RPGElite, and the leader, Dstln, was leaving ; ; Miss those guys.

The Halloween parade comes next, it was such a totally random thing. I started walking down Lower Jeuno with Bratia on follow. And people started following us. Soon we had this huge parade going.

The last video segment is when my static completed GK3. Not such a big accomplishment these days, but we did it as a static, all 6 of us. It was rough, being too low to kill the NMs. And this was pre-despawn days, so if you caught aggro, it trained to the zone.

Funniest part was Ohtar misunderstood where to go, and wound up on the stairs, missing the ??? completely. We had to rescue him from up there, slowly tractoring him down while dodging mobs.

Ahh... the memories...

Fable II review

So, after all the ultra negativity of the past couple posts, let's move onto an actually good experience! Fable II!

Well, I have to admit Fable II is awesome, it's far from perfect. I know, I dare blaspheme that the game is less than a perfect 10 score some places have given it. I at least have reasons why it's only an 8 or a 9 in my book.

First, the combat is largely unchanged. You can still mash the attack button and forget blocking or counter. There's no point, since I rarely, if ever, was hurt by melee strikes. The addition of guns was pretty damn sweet, and once you lay hands on one of the legendary blunderbuss (this game's shotgun), you can just mow enemies down with little effort. I will touch on the Will (magic) "improvements" in a bit.

Secondly, the game is riddle with bugs. Horrible, unforgivable bugs. Some are kind of funny, but most are horribly annoying. My least favorite is the "wife leaves you" bug. Randomly, even if you maintain good relations with your in-game spouse, they can just up and take off. Or your child in game can go all autistic and stop talking, which also prevented me from getting one quest for the longest damn time. Beating the game got rid of the bug, but still, not cool.

I've also had these weird loading errors with two copies of the game now. When opening the start-initiated menu, the game spins down and stops working altogether. Again, unforgivable bugs.

Thirdly, The Will system is horrible! Magic was marginally useful at best in Fable. Again, the combat system thrived on mindless sword striking. The only uses for Will in that game were Will-based puzzles, healing, and the occasional useful spell in a boss fight. Well now you can't heal yourself, there's no Will meter, and to cast higher level spells you need to charge them by holding the will button down.

Gone is the ability to equip sets of spells, you now have to choose which Will power goes in what level. Also annoying is that you can select AoE or single target, but only by using the controller stick. Point at a mob, single target. Leave it alone, AoE. Often I found myself teleporting instead of freezing time because I would tap the stick after releasing the button only to find out it counted the stick movement as targetting.

It's annoying, and really the only powers you will use ever are Raise Dead for evening odds, Time Control for slowing time and teleporting, and the fire-based one which works well in one fight.

Point number 4: Controls are sloppy! The game introduces this arc meter that you need to use on occasion to hold emotes or to do certain mini-games. However, the trick is that the game fails to keep pace with the controller's every command. There were times I know I hit the button in time, the meter would reflect that, but the game would say no, that was wrong. Same thing for combat as well.

Last negative: No more real boss fights. The boss fights were all jokes, if they could be called boss fights at all. The only difference between the boss and a regular mob was that the boss had more hit points and occasionally an on-screen life bar.

But now, with all those negatives out there, why did I like it?

For one, the story is awesome and as funny as the original. The world is well-made with NPCs again giving large amounts of entertainment by just being there. The quests are quirky and have original twists to them.

What's also awesome is that now almost every major quest has a good and evil decision. This makes being evil worthwhile and possible. Gone are the days of getting good guy points for destroying monsters in the field (however, killing citizens earns you massive evil points).

And while the ending is sort of lame in my opinion, it leaves the door open for a sequel or added content from Lionhead.

Overall the game was a great, addictive game, it just could have benefited from some more time in testing and perhaps with a better magic system.

Steam can blow me

For those who don't know what it is, Steam is a platform for game distribution, update, and most importantly, Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Now I'm not normally a fan of shooters, at all, but I bought the Orange Box for PC. I mainly got it for Portal. I played and completed the game without much incident. So, considering I had these other games I could play, I decided to try them out. I began to enjoy playing Half-Life 2. However, it's been a massive pain in my ass. Every other day, it says "The game is currently unavailable." I've run the gambit of fixes, and yet it keeps returning. Now, it just no longer plays at all.

Oddly enough, this is an OFFLINE game...

I've put in a ticket to their support team, demanding a fix or a refund.

Why I have grown to hate Spore

When I first started playing Spore, I have to admit I was addicted to it quickly. The game is one big toy for the most part. It starts by you evolving from a single cell organism and goes onward from there to being a creature, to a tribe of creatures, to a civilization, and finally to going into space.

At each stage, you see new challenges added. At first, it's a giant game of Pac-Man. Avoid the nasties, each food, and grow. As you grow, you get to build onto your creature, adding weapons and other items. Then, you make land fall, and redesign your critter into a land dwelling animal. Now you have new challenges. You need to eat to live, and you need to either befriend or conquer all the other races on the planet.

With that done, you move to tribe mode. Now you no longer control just one of your creatures but a whole tribe. You manage your resources, and again befriend or conquer the other tribes to be dominant.

The civilization mode is very similar to tribe mode, but now on a global scale. To this point, you micromanage less, macro-manage more. In the Creature stage, you need to manually get food, in Tribe, you can order others to do it, and in Civ mode, there's no need at all to do it. Simply claim a resource and move on.

Then the wheels fall off the game once you reach space.

In every other mode, you do not need to struggle for resources. If you are smart, and plan well, you can focus on the goal of the stage. The same is not true in space mode. In Civ mode, you begin using money as your "points" to purchase new items (in other stages, it's DNA and food). Now, you can max out your cash, which is only 999,999 Spore bucks, a very small amount in space where some items cost upwards of 3 million spore bucks... but it doesn't carry into the Space stage.

Strike 1.

Now, in order to make money, which is needed for everything you do in space mode, you need to manually run around to make it. You need to do missions, manually pick up and sell spice by locating the best price for it, or conquer other planets and collect the money dropped from space ships and destroyed cities.

Strike 2.

The final, and absolutely most annoying thing in space: Ultra-micromanagement. Often the game will throw "random" events at you. "Random" is in quotes because it's not really random. The game basically penalizes you for moving forward in the game. Spend enough time away from one part of your empire, you will find them crying out for your help. Wage war on someone, and suddenly they will attack you in the middle of you attacking them. And instead of being able to let you planet fight back or arm them to defend themselves, you often need to return to fight off the invaders.

Now, if that wasn't annoying enough, you have to remember the goal of the game is to reach the center of the universe. So you have to leave your home galaxy. You must move inward. So that means as you try to get closer to the center, you must repeatedly return home to manually care for disasters going on in your home system.

And, if THAT wasn't a big enough pain, the entire center of the galaxy is controlled by a hostile alien race known as the Grox, and if you do ONE THING wrong, they will go to war against you, making it virtually impossible to reach the center of the galaxy, since you need to conquer their vast empire to bypass them.

And, if THAT RIGHT THERE isn't horrible enough... the closer you get to the center, the slower it gets. Throughout space mode, you buy upgrades for how far you can fly. except... all of that gets taken away, so now you will eventually be unable to reach the center through certain routes, which winds up making you run even more to try to complete the game.

STEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIKE THREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

Even longer time, no blog!

Wow.

Yea, totally forgot about this blog. Not like I have another or anything.

I just tend to play games more than I blog.

Shut up, so do you, you're just here because there's maintenance probably.

Anyway, time for more catch-up!

Finally got Beastmaster to level 75. Don't even ask how long it took. But now I use it to own NMs left and right. Got to love the ability to do stuff solo on a social-based co-operative game.

So, once I dinged 75... Kinda felt lost as to what to do. Didn't feel like meriting, mainly because it would mean avoiding what I need to do, which is get money in game to pimp out BST so it can replace my BLM in sky events...

...

Yea, I know, lolBST. In Sky. Shut it. Last night I saved our claim on Despot. Everyone was dying in our little 6-man group. I held it off long enough for Ara to get back up and hold it after it killed me. lolBST THAT!

Back to what to do after BST. I decided to level something else.

I know, you're shocked. Stunned. Pawk avoiding farming? And meriting? Impossible!

... So now my SMN is 42...

I got my Haku eyes as well, so now I have pop items for two NMs I'll never get to kill! Kidding. When Shin gets back I'm so totally doing that mob. I will beg him to go. I will sell my first born to him in exchange.

I picked up the expensive ingame item too: The Tidal Talisman. Look, a picture!



Expensive, yes. Cool, undoubtedly. And that pearl is not WoA, mainly because I am no longer active in WoA. A friend broke off and made a new shell, TeamFail. I know, name is SO appropriate. It's the rudest linkshell on the server I swear. We're so awful to each other. But all in good fun. I still haven't hung out much in C2C, but then I tend to play when both shells are not there. Like normally now.

I so hope you appreciate me taking time off my busy day to come here.

I could be farming... or meriting or...

Maybe I'll go for a walk instead.

...

Yea, that made me laugh too.

Protectron is going well. This week on, week off thing, it pretty much rules. Oh, and to mr. anon who is from there, Hi! No idea how you got here either. Not like it would be hard to figure out which person I am there. Just ask people if they play Final Fantasy XI.

It was the same at Dell too. I was alone as a FFXI player there, same will be true for there.

So, there you have it. In a nutshell I guess. Maybe I'll post here more often now.

...

Yea, no... we both know I'll be back in like a month with another of this long-ass posts. See you then!