Tag: games

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#50

So at this moment, my mother and step-father are in Alaska on a cruise. As a part of this trip, my mom is making a special pilgrimage to Juneau, which will be the last of the 50 state capitals she’s visited in her life, and the only one that my father never made it to.

My brother just made an offer on a house. I’m so proud.

As for myself, life continues on. As is the recent tradition, it’s been six months so it’s time for me to have another boss. I’m still doing the same job as the last year and a half, but now they did a little re-org.

I finally rectified a shortcoming in my life and I purchased Okami for the Wii. I’m probably about 2/3rds of the way through if my item list is any indication and it’s everything people have said it was. I also picked up (i.e. downloaded via Steam) the Secret of Monkey Island remake. As I’m getting further in, things are seeming less and less familiar, I either played it once through way back when and replayed only the first bit, or I never finished it at all. Admitting this possibility probably loses me some nerd points.

The summer game drought is still going strong for me, with Shadow Complex coming out tomorrow and then an explosion in September. Hopefully I can finish Okami and Dragon Warrior V DS soon, and I’d like to finish my second playthrough of FF12 as well, seeing as how I bought a PS2 slim pretty much for the purpose of playing it again. (Although my library of PS2 games is full of reasons).

The WoW expansion news is starting to get exciting — I bought the DirecTV PPV to watch Blizzcon. I just hope that it doesn’t come out anywhere near FFXIV, because that would be a strain on my free time….

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[Title]

[Obligatory “I’m not dead, I’m just bored” post]

Got my Powerbook back, with no cost to me. Yay AppleCare.

We had to mail off our XBox 360, stupid red rings of death. So no DMC4 for Hung and no Lost Odyssey for me (which I haven’t even bought because it came out after the rings showed up). We did, of course, get Smash Bros. I keep forgetting to look up the friend code when I’m at home, though.

I finally used up my 7 day trial of Lord of the Rings Online. It took a bit to get into it, but I think it could have been a game I could play, if I knew anyone else who played and I had the free time to do so. It has a system that is dangerous for obsessive compulsive collectors: the Deed system. They’re like quests in WoW that you don’t have to sign up for, and when you’re done you get a slight upgrade to your character; cosmetic or functional. So you have to go around and do things like kill 60 spiders in the Bree-lands or visit all nine ruins in the Shire, or use a certain ability 350 times, and each one is tracked separately. It’s a smart way to keep people playing and to give them a real incentive to do things instead of just grinding through monsters for experience points. All in all, though, the game felt like a less-polished version of WoW, but with hobbits.

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Updates to previous week

Yeah, I could have made this post a while ago, but it took a lull in my work to get me to post it.

Our second attempt at Karazhan was even more of a success than our first. We not only beat Moroes, but managed to down the Maiden of Virtue as well. And I got my first piece of epic lewtz, a.k.a. healing leather that I’ll rarely use.

I started consolidating Azalyn, the other FFXI account I own now, with my own. The first thing was taking his mule of random stacks of stuff that drops off monsters and sending the stuff to my own mule of random stacks of stuff that drops off monsters and taking anything that made a full stack of 12 and mailing it to the proper city’s mule to sell it on the auction house. I managed to actually fit almost everything from his mule into my own after sending the stacks to sell away, because we had mostly the same stuff. Second is going through his armor and finding anything he had that I didn’t (which there is some small amount, most of them on Azalyn proper) and selling/giving away the rest that’s duplicated. This is slower, as a lot of the gear is random stuff for low levels (sub-20) that doesn’t sell often.

I thought I had the bird outside the window problem licked. Then I was informed that there is a nest above my window that may be the reason why I’m having a problem. But then, yesterday morning I managed to actually catch the bird in the act. It’s not flying into the window and bumping it on the way to the nest like I might have thought. No, it’s just being a stupid bird and repeatedly running into the window. I can only imagine the thought process it goes through as it sees something interesting, flies into an INVISIBLE BARRIER *BONK* loses its bearings, flies back to the tree branch, blinks, then sees something interesting, flies into an INVISIBLE BARRIER *BONK*… etc. All the meantime, I’m inside wishing I had an exterior-mounted BB gun turret or something.

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And now the gaming-type update

So I’m still barely playing FFXI. After following ‘s example, I’m buying up Moat Carp for my Lu Shang’s Fishing rod instead of catching them all. It gives me something to spend my gil on that feels worth it instead of minorly incremental and inefficient. Also, let his FFXI account expire, so I finally bit the bullet and transferred it over to my name and billing information. So I now own two FFXI accounts officially. I need to go about transferring my mules over to that account to aid in equipment exchange.

Our WoW guild tried Karazhan for the first time last week. For a first attempt with a less than optimal setup (three rogues ftw) we managed to down Attumen on the first try. We wiped a few times on Moroes due to crowd control issues, and that was that. We all managed to get to Friendly with The Violet Eye, so yay to new tanking ring. My gear should still be in my tanking gear unless I log in tonight and forget to swap it back. Until 2.1 hits I’m actually close to optimal bear gear. Then all of a sudden the raiding gear gets a boost and there’s better gear that I’ll never see because we don’t have 25 people to raid with and all is back to normal in the MMO world.

The Xbox fairy delivered an Xbox 360 to the house. This confused us more than made us happy, as we weren’t really expecting it and now we have to get games for it or something. So I’ll likely be getting FFXI (just because I get free gamerpoints and I don’t have to activate the account on it) and Guitar Hero 2. ‘Cause Gears of War don’t interest me. Then again, someone else in the house might buy GoW…

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Okay so yeah… almost a month, huh? Oops. Let’s see if I can remember all of the things that have happened since then.

I just bought my plane tickets and membership for Dragon*con, after skipping last year. My return flight is on a 767, which will mark the first time in a very long time I’ll be flying in an airplane with two aisles.

I hit level 70 on Werehamster, just in time to get nerfed to all heck and back. I had respecced feral for leveling with the intention of going back to restoration when I was done questing, but it seems like the guild has needed me more as a tank than as a healer. (We only have one level 70 Warrior, but at least 2 Priests and 3 Druids if I remember correctly.) I’m still playing a bit more than usual, but I’m guessing the second honeymoon will wear off once I finish all the easy solo quests, possibly once I farm up an epic flying mount.

FFXI has taken a back seat for the moment, although I’m still logging in for HNMLS and Assault/Mission stuff. The recent update actually shows that Square Enix cares about gilselling, and the recent missions have been very entertaining.

Work is chugging along. I got my contract extended the final 3 months, but after that it’ll be one year and I’ll have to find a permanent position or move on. There’s the possibility of a budget investment into the group, so I could end up staying, but in a month or two I’m going to have to start looking around again possibly.

When I got back from Indiana, there was snow on the hills here in California. This isn’t unusual, it happens maybe once every season. But what was unusual is that it stayed there for a week. Of course, here we are three weeks later and it was hot enough that I had to start opening up windows in the house. (Not hot enough to warrant A/C yet, though.)

I hate it when I’m away from the computer and I have a thought and think “I should make an LJ post about this” but then forget about it.

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Update of the gamey variety

So, not much has happened in real life, same old same old. I guess I cleaned my room, that’s sort of momentous for anyone who’s seen my room recently.

FFXI: I held off on saying it because I wanted to make sure it’d stick, but I’m now in an HNMLS again. They’re mostly EST folks, though, so that makes doing stuff with them haphazard. I’ve already fought Tiamat twice, though. That was certainly being tossed into the deep end. Tomorrow we’re doing Jailer of Love, so that will also be “fun” (if I can make it home in time).

WoW: I actually logged into WoW last night, I went and transferred my druid main (Werehamster) from Elune to Uldum. Now I can play with and . So of course, I’m just in there trying to get my addons and everything working, having just respecced to Feral, I get dragged to UBRS and main tank. “fun”

KoL: I don’t know if I mentioned it, but a few months ago I started playing Kingdom of Loathing. It’s good for a quick distraction while I eat lunch. I did a full run through, ascended once, and just ascended again in Hardcore. Hardcore is sort of frustrating at the start, because I have so few turns. I guess that’s a good thing, so I get done with them faster. I’m assuming it gets faster once I start getting a few Hardcore Permanent skills, because I hear tales of long-time veterans of KoL finishing HC runs in 4 days. If I can get it down to two weeks or so, I’ll be happy. Then I can try a Hardcore Oxygenarian Turtle Tamer for a Plexiglass Pith Helmet. Mmmm…. helmet.

FFXII: 12 days to go!

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Patch day!

So, what have I been up to? Let’s see the last time I updated… oh besides the animal crossing post… wait, never mind I’ve pretty much been playing video games all day long.

I got Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time out of the way. Now I have the unholy combination of FFXI, WoW, Dragon Quest 8, and Animal Crossing to sink my time in to. Out of the four of those, only DQ8 has a conceivable ending, and that’s probably a good 70 hours away. The rest I could keep dumping more and more and more into and keep having more to do.

However, my honeymoon with WoW may soon be ending. It’s been fun, but mostly because I’ve been able to do things by myself. Every time I try doing things with other people, a) things go less smoothly b) things get more hectic and c) people die more often. And currently, my quest log has 10/16 quests that are (Elite)… which means I have to do them with other people. I’ve been working on various other things, I got fishing to 225 and started the uncap quest and got cooking to 300. But right as I did that, I was able to connect FFXI to the update server…

Today’s FFXI update is a very significant one. It fixed some very major things:
FFXI rambling again…

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Falling blocks.

As I mentioned in passing before, I bought Meteos for the Nintendo DS. It’s scarily addictive, and for the entirety of AX, and a bit after, I would see falling blocks whenever I closed my eyes. I’d recommend it to anyone I know who owns a DS. Oh, wait… that’s none of you.

Did a bit of shopping today, ended up at Fry’s and saw someone I knew there. I was also briefly at Sunnyvale Golfland and saw someone I knew there, too. Didn’t see anyone else at the other places though.

After listening to waaaay too much radio advertising, I can officially say that the marketing gimmick of “Verb one, Verb two, Repeat” is now old. I declare it so.