A Gaming Diary
Archive for October, 2005
World of Warcraft
Oct 29th
Was meant to go to bed.
Played a Tauren druid up to level three instead.
This is bad.
World of Warcraft
Oct 29th
That’s a picture of me and Bob, my pet raptor.
I didn’t want a pet raptor. I reached level ten this evening and I took my taming quests and I was excited because I knew I wanted a tiger and I knew where tigers were. So I got a tiger. I wanted to call him ‘Nipple’, but that’s an invalid name according to the rules, so I called him ‘Invalid’. And I was pleased. I trained him to growl and I fed him some meat and then, just as I was about to log off for the night, he ran away.
No idea why, no warning. He’s just gone.
I didn’t want to be petless, so I ran out of the inn I was in, grabbed the nearest raptor and brought him home. Before I log back in I’ll have to read up on pets. The in-game help is normally very, well, helpful, but there doesn’t seem to be much explaining of this pet stuff.
I’m definitely doing to have to do some research here.
Doom RPG
Oct 27th
It’s Doom!
On my mobile phone!
But it’s an RPG!
Dungeon master meets Doom, kind of thing.
I’ve played it for ten minutes. I’ve put out fires, talked to some poeple, killed a zombie with an axe and killed a dog with the same axe. Good axe, clever axe.
Doesn’t seem very interesting so far, but we’ll see.
World of Warcraft
Oct 26th
Tried two different servers tonight and had problems on both.
Let’s play a game of ‘Spot The Fuck Up’, shall we?
Here’s Spinebreaker -
Pretty obvious there. Now on to Twilight’s Hammer -
Hmm, see the trouble in that one?
(I know I missed out 2 and 3. They exist but, bizarrely, they look okay on my PC but fucked in a browser. Tried both Firefox and Safari. And I’ve tried saving and uploading the images again. They only show the same problem as the first image, anyway.)
Spot the problem there? Look closely.
And this the same problem as 5 really, just more obvious.
World of Warcraft – great!
World of Warcraft
Oct 26th
It’s a good thing I’ve got the day off tomorrow.
I just started it again for a bit and… got lost in time. Suddenly it’s one in the morning.
I completed a couple of easy quests and died a lot trying to do a quest that I just don’t think I’m ready for yet. Not alone at any rate. And these newbie areas are amazingly empty on this server. I guess there aren’t that many new characters being created these days. I ran round a whole group of islands for ages and only saw one other person, who ame and went very quickly. In a way it’s quite nice, but it’s also nice to have a load of people around to take some of the heat.
I can’t defeat all those trolls alone!
I’d forgotten how beautiful the art design is while I was away. There’s a a group of shipwrecks near the orc starting area that’s just breathtaking. And running back into Ogrimmar at the end of the session was like coming home.
And even more like coming home when the auction house was empty of NPCs, which was followed by a disconnection message and an inability to get back into the game for five minutes. Ah, random outages, how I’ve missed you.
Gerplex, lovely undead level sixty man that he is, gave me some cash too get me started, so I’ve bid on some more bags in the auction house. The most annoying thing about WoW is the lack of inventory space.
Well, most annoying apart from corpse runs, possibly.
Oh, and I went trick or treating a couple of times and got a flimsy elf mask and some lollipops. Cool.
World of Warcraft
Oct 25th
I’m back, baby, I’m back.
On March 25th I logged into World of Warcraft for the last time… until today. Obviously. Otherwise this post wouldn’t be here.
My old character, Revenant, an undead warlock, was on a server long since abandoned, so I started a new character on Twilight’s Hammer. It’s a full server, so I really shouldn’t have, but that’s where the remains of my old guild are. And, as luck would have it, one of my best guild buddies was online when I whispered to him. So I was added to the guild (who are now called Shin Seiki Evangelion, whatever that means) and therefore had people to chat to as I did the newbie quests. Which is a good thing. A very good thing. Not that the game’s not fun, but it’s more fun when you’re chatting. I even had some people come over to say hello, which was nice.
Got my new orc hunter (as in an orc who’s a hunter, not someone who hunts orc) up to level six in about two and a half hours of play. Wasn’t power-levelling by any means, but that’s good enough for me.
Oh, and by the way, it took me an hour and a half from first putting the install CD into my PC to logging in to the actual game. An hour and a half! That included downloading a 243MB patch, too. WoW is not for people on dial-up.
Final Fantasy I
Oct 25th
A highly productive half hour bus ride. I found the guy who I was meant to give the Rosetta Stone to (more or less by accident) and I also found a landing spot near the town I thought it was impossible to get to in the airship. So now I’m on course again. No more wandering around randomly for a while!
And everybody levelled up.
Oh, and can just mention once more how utterly gorgeous the Micro’s screen is, please?
Final Fantasy I
Oct 25th
Played it on the Micro in bed last night.
Notable for two things -
1) In a darkened room the Micro’s screen was just too bright on the highest level, so I had to turn it down a couple of levels.
2) The sound out of the Micro isn’t nearly as bad as I expected it to be.
I got to a boss in the Lifespring Grotto I just could not beat. I tried a couple of times, but there wasn’t really anything I could do. If I ever replay the game I’m not going to start with a Thief. They’re just far to weak when it comes to the big fights.
I suppose I better go and see if I can find that last crystal. (Luckily, the game teleports you outside the dungeon when you die. Which is nice of it.) Oddly, it’s the third one I’ve not got, as shown on the pause screen. You think they’d list them in order. Strange.
King Kong Demo
Oct 24th
Got a free Xbox demo of this in post from the nice people at Ubisoft.
Chose the ‘Play As Jack’ option and dived in. My thought process went something like this -
Oh my God. Oh my fucking God. This is the best game in the world ever. I love this! I’m running away from a T-Rex and trying to distract it and it’s the best looking T-Rex in a game ever. I love this. This game is the best thing I’ve ev…
Oh, I’ve only been playing for a couple of minutes and now I’m playing as Kong.
This is pretty good, too, not as awesome as the first section, but good. Nice looking beat-up action, with a bit of jumping around. It’s good. Oooh, just jumped into a nice fight against a couple of…
Oh, now this bit’s over too.
How long was that in total? Seemed liked about five minutes.
I hate short demos. Especially when they’re that short and that fucking good.
Final Fantasy I
Oct 24th
So, on the bus this morning I opened up the SP and did a couple of levels of the Lifespring Grotto. Got a cool knife that steals health from enemies. Really doesn’t work well on the undead though. Ouch.
But then, at work, the postman came…
GAME BOY MICRO GET!
Famicom edition, if you’re interested. Looks gorgeous. Non-gaming-geeks in office also thought it looked good.
Couldn’t charge it, but it seemed to come with a little bit of charge, so after gazing at the lovely shiny metalness of it for a while I shoved the Final Fantasy cart in and turned it on.
The screen is lovely. Absolutely lovely. I was concerned at first that it would be too small, but some FF play has put paid to those fears. In fact, I think it’s easier to see the battle numbers flying by on the Micro than it is on the DS. Something to do with the smaller screen and the brightness and the general crispness of it, I suppose.
Anyway, I didn’t play it long. Just long enough to get to an annoying level with disappearing pathways. The Micro’s on charge now. Luckily it didn’t blow up when I plugged it in. Yes, I used a step down converter, but I was still worried.
Anyway, I need a good session or two on it, but the Micro certainly seems like a lovely piece of kit. I worked out that it’s my seventh Game Boy. Nintendo must love me.
