What You Play?

Somewhere in blogland a theme was suggested. A theme of I had no problem addressing. What am I playing this week? Two things and nothing new.

I am still plugging along in the World of Warcraft. Slowly and steadily my hoard of gold rises and hopefully soon I can go broke quenching my need for speed. The thrill of flying faster than a speeding bullet pulls at me quite incessantly. I got a lot of time in these past two days for various reasons and have made good progress, but the game still feels quite lonely. I still don't think i'll quit completely, it's only 13 bucks a month or so and it's nice to have it there waiting for me if I want it.

I have also been getting in some good gaming time on my PSP. I know a lot of people knock it, but I've never understood why. It has fun games, you can play it in the bathroom and you can watch porn on it. Whats the beef? At any rate recently I found my copy of Burnout Legends and loaded it up to fool around. I hadn't completely finished the game, I still had one crash event I needed to get a gold on, and a couple road rage and race events. Some of those road rage ones were really tough. It's quite hard to believe that "I" would have a problem with the road rage ones, but when you need to take out 8 cars per minute it's not easy.

I finally got all those done, only to realize this only technically takes me down to 89% complete with the game. Apparently I still need to do a couple signature takedowns, and several trophies. Some of these are easy such as get 2000 total takedowns or get 2 bus takedowns in a race. Both will come with time, right now I'm focusing on get 40 takedowns in a single race. I don't know why I care so much, it isn't as if I get a nice Gamer Score like on Xbox live for all my friends to see. I just like having a goal sometimes I guess.

In other news JaxJaggyWires got a new horse and buggy, and we demand a blog about it.

Tales of a (recovering?) W.o.W. addict.

I used to play World of Warcraft a lot. It didn't start off so bad, I'd play a couple hours a night, get some levels have some fun. It started to take away from some of my console gaming, which wasn't really a bad thing. I play video games a lot, so it wasn't like WoW was making me waste more time than I normally would, just that I'd be wasting it differently. It was something to keep me entertained through my long nights after work and was certainly enjoyable. It wouldn't be the top MMO on the market if it weren't fun.

My brother got me started on the game. I had only played one MMORPG game previously (Earth and Beyond) and didn't really stick that one out very long. But he had picked it up and it came with a free trial he passed along to me. He stayed long enough for me to get hooked before jumping servers and (I think) eventually quitting completely as did his friend who was the only other person I actually knew who played. I soldiered on, I had met people I enjoyed talking to and playing with so I didn't feel completely alone.

I wandered from guilds falling apart to raiding guilds to playing solo or with a friend. When my xbox360 broke and I was too lazy/annoyed to get it fixed WoW pretty much became my pastime. I would come home, log on, take a food break and log off around 6 or 7 am. I went on some raids, plowed through tons of dungeons made some gold and formed relationships with friends. I knew I would never be the elite of the wow world, but I was comfortable with my progression and always felt there was something left to do that I could accomplish.

I was really excited when the Burning Crusade expansion pack came out, but I started to play less. I had some guild drama that irked me and I lost some friends to play with. Also I met an awesome girl around the same time, which cut down on my playtime(probably not a bad thing.) I still log on sometimes when I get home, but I never seem to have quite the drive I used to. I almost never have the time for a full instance run, I've only been to two of the expansions dungeons once each, and they were the very first/easiest. I did finally manage to hit lvl 70 with my mage, but I'm slowly starting to wonder why I bother.

I'll never have Elite gear again, it's just not going to happen. I don't really care about pvping enough to make an arena team or grind honor. I've accepted the fact that I will never get my precious polymorph turtle spell from ZG. My guild is full of alts and unambitious people which is fine for me I guess, but not all the people in it as they keep slowly leaving for bigger and better things. Right now my only goal is to acquire enough gold to buy my epic flying mount. After that, I don't know what I'll have left to play for.

Wanna Play?

So I beat the next difficulty setting of G.R.A.W.2 Couple minor updates. I don't recall if I said it before but the campaign is pretty short. Jaxjaggywires said Act 2 was really long, and I suppose I somewhat agree, but I think it was compounded by the fact that Act3 takes less than 10 minutes. Also, while I'm fairly sure they weren't directly referencing Penny Arcade, I couldn't help but chuckle and think of a strip every time one of my teammates uttered the phrase Check the flower pot! I thought it was lame that they force you through the training each time you start a new game. Until I started over on uberhard last night. At one point I hit pause and noticed a skip training button. So thanks Tom Clancy!! I still need to try out some co-op goodness, but I should be available most of this weekend if anyone is down.

I also downloaded Castlevania:SOTN from xbox live marketplace last night. I was hoping for a bit more updated graphics, but its playable. I always wonder why I keep coming back to Castlevania games, but I do. I don't play all of them, I'm not some CV freak who must own every new title, and I almost always forget the main characters names. But when one comes easily available to me I tend to dive into it. Maybe it has something to do with the side scrolling platform, tho I actually enjoyed the n64 3d version, and maybe some others. Maybe it's the generic hack and slash with minor rpg elements that appeals to me. It's not the story, as I assure you I was mashing bushing furiously last night wishing I could skip it or scroll through faster. I will say however that the voice acting they put in seemed decent. At any rate I found myself playing this for at least an hour or two last night, and I will definitely plan on beating it and getting my hard earned 200 achievement points.

Thats the extent of my gaming for the week really. I still need to check out Rainbow Six and I might look at blockbuster for something to play because I haven't used my March coupon yet. Also for those who didn't know or may have forgot like me, the final season of Newsradio came out on DVD this week. Not the best season really, but at least it's closure. It was a great series though and if you've never seen it I demand you do so.