A Gaming Diary
PC
World of Warcraft
Nov 6th
My God! How much did the level twenty talents cost?!?
I’m really starting to feel broke now.
I read a web site that said my wind serpent was one of the very few bad pets in the game, so I got rid of it. Tried a few new pets, before deciding for some reason that it would be fun to tame a level three spider and level it up into something useful. Which basically means I won’t have a useful pet for a long, long time, which is a bit of a disadvantage, really.
Oh, and it took me thirty-six hours to get up to level twenty. That’s thirty-six hours in… has it been two weeks yet? I don’t think so. What makes it so compulsive? I wish I could tell.
World of Warcraft
Nov 6th
Wind serpent’s called Tara now. Well, she is a kind of amber colour. Does fit. Sort of.
I’ve just down a load of quests, got to level nineteen and, indeed, halfway to twenty. Quests for my level seem to be getting thinner on the ground now, though, so I think I’m going to nip back to Silverpine for a bit and finish off a couple I’ve got there.
Once that’s done I might have to go back to The Crossroads and do some quests that don’t appeal until I get sent somewhere new. Trouble is, somewhere new is probably going to be contested territory, where I find out how annoying being on a PvP server is. It was quite annoying when I used to group and it was close to release, so most people were about my level.
Now I’m on a server where the majority of people seem to be level fifty and above and who don’t have any qualms about killing people thirty levels lower than them.
Gulp.
This is what I signed up for, though. Willingly and with eyes open.
World of Warcraft
Nov 5th
Won’t let me name my new wind serpent ‘Norma Jean’.
Invalid name.
Stupid game.
Dunno if I’ll keep her, anyway. She only eats bread and cheese, both of which cost money. Meat and fish eating pets are much easier to keep happy.
World of Warcraft
Nov 5th
My first taste of PvP since starting again.
It involved me suddenly seeing a fireball flying towards me and dying in one hit.
Bit higher level than me, you see.
Still, I did my best.
World of Warcraft
Nov 5th
Lots of good stuff this evening. I made it up to level eighteen and Pooh got up to level seventeen. We went into contested territory for the first time and found a bear that was so high level the game wouldn’t even tell me what level it was. Pooh died. I ran. That’s what pets are for. Learnt some new skills that might come in handy. Made myself a new gun.
Trouble was, the gun cost me a lot of money. I found the parts I could, but I ended up having to buy some parts, including some expensive leather to complete it, which really wasn’t cheap. I guess I could have asked the guild for the leather, but I don’t want to leech. I can’t contribute anything yet, after all. Anyway, the new skills and the gun parts cost well over 1G and my previously healthy balance is now looking a lot lower than I’d like.
It occurs to me that I probably could have bought a new weapon that was better than the gun for half the price it ended up costing me, but I like making my own stuff. And I have to get my engineering skills up somehow.
World of Warcraft
Nov 2nd
Gah.
I’ve been opening ports and forwarding ports and shutting down virus scanners and all sorts, but I get disconnected everytime I go somewhere with more than about three other people in it. Orgrimmar, Undercity, even The Crossroads, just disconnect after disconnected after disconnected. It’s just taken me about forty-five minutes to get from the gate of Ogrimmar, to the windmaster in Orgrimmar, to the windmaster at The Crossroads, to the inn at The Crossroads. Sometimes I was being disconnected before I could even walk one step.
Gah.
Not much fun.
GT Legends Demo
Nov 2nd
First off, THE FUCKING FREE DOWNLOADABLE DEMO decided to install FUCKING HORRIBLE COPY PROTECTION SOFTWARE on to my PC, which required a reboot. Copy protection? On a demo? For fuck’s sake. PULL YOUR FUCKING HEADS OUT OF YOUR FUCKING ARSES, publishers. Oooh, I’m angry. Grrr.
Anyway, it was the same copy protection stuff as Space Rangers, as far as I can tell, so it’s not that big a deal with me. (Though, interestingly, my anti-virus software complained about being disabled when I rebooted and I had to go in and re-enable it. Hmm.)
Still not as scary as Sony Audio CDs.
But was the demo worth it? Well, no, not really. It’s a hardcore driving simulator or ‘unplayable’, as we used to say. Really, I just couldn’t keep the thing on the road. I tried all three cars. I did kind of like it, in an odd way, but the whole not being able to go round corners thing took some of the shine off it.
World of Warcraft
Nov 1st
Well, I thought I’d play it for an hour or so. My normal server seemed to be down, as did my alt servers, so I started a new alt on a completely new server.
So I now have an orc Shaman called Revdoc on Frostbiter.
Got him up to level three, but it took a while as everybody else seemed to be constructing alts on this server, so the low-level farming grounds were full of players and enemy corpses. Most of my time was spent waiting for respawns and trying to taf newly spawned creatures before any bloody hunters got in first.
First impressions are that Shamans seem pretty good, but it’s pretty much impossible to tell what a class is like that early. I’m wondering if I should create one on my normal server at some point and give it a good go. Seems like it might be possible to solo with one, though I’m never quite sure how easy it would be to solo without a pet.
World of Warcraft
Oct 31st
Well, I managed to complete one quest tonight, at least.
A trip to Ambermill to collect stuff from corpses. Died five or six times, but got it done.
My idea for this evening was to get a new pet. I tried a couple, but they were rubbish, so I’m back with Pooh.
(I did want to tame a lion… but I still don’t want to talk about that.)
World of Warcraft
Oct 31st
I have just had the single most annoying ninety minutes of my life.
I don’t want to talk about it.
But that lion was mine, damn it!
