Big Trouble Indeed

Was tweeting some when I came across this from James Hong:

Can't wait to read the making of #BigTroubleinLittleChina https://t.co/4LRA9HLxMX @KimCatrall #30years #classic #lopan #memories

— James Hong (@TheJamesHong) May 11, 2016

Definitely want to get my hands on it. Really hope the remake isn't insulting.

Warcraft Fan Art

I've seen a number of exceptional fan renditions of game art. But never something like this...

hey twitterverse, thought I'd come share my latest @Warcraft fanart - a redesign of the badass Alexstrasza! pic.twitter.com/sS6izF665J
— Sam Hogg (@Zephyri) March 13, 2015

Vanity Pet Ladder, Continued

After a week I've somehow managed to maintain my lead on the dreaded Ravenlight. *snicker* Was chatting with her over the weekend. She hasn't had a chance to level new things so I've widened the gap further. In fact, thanks to almost 1000 Pet Charms I'm now up to 6th on the server.

That set of charms I used to level. Buying Mystery Bags ended up getting me nearly twice the number of levels Flawless Battle-Training Stones would have. Still have over 2000 charms left which I intend to use on Rare Stones. Warcraft Pets says I have 17 Poor, 23 Common, and 54 Uncommon Pets. Ninety-four stones will cost 1410 Charms. That will be a lot of clicking. *sigh* 

Once done all that's left is the leveling from daily rewards. Wonder where I will peak.

Laziness Reaps Additional Rewards

I never picked up XCom: Enemy Unknown. I loved the original X-COM: UFO Defense back in 1994. Played it for a number of years. Some nostalgic barrier kept me away from the new one. Then last week I caught Gopher playing it and it changed my mind. Captures a lot of the spirit of the original with fun twists. Added to my Steam wishlist, figured it might come up in the next Summer Sale.

Here it is one week later and *bam*. Got the eMail that it is 75% off this week plus it was added to my library for three days so I can play it for free first. Perfect! Then I looked at my next eMail from GMG…

WHAT?! *lol* Hilarious. I was meant to play this game; not going to fight it anymore. Needless to say I got the voting done immediately and am now downloading it…

As to the voting I didn't really feel qualified to speak up in most of the categories. There are so many games that I haven't played. So many that I haven't even heard of. Just went with the ones I knew in most cases:

Good times.

Still Denied Moore Pride

Looks like my Warcraft problems persist...

Still doing the same thing. Shows that message for twenty seconds then disappears. Haven't gotten any replies on my forum post. There's another post with players having the same problem that I've commented on. It has two blue notes but it's the usual front-line techs suggesting a modem reset.

Pretty frustrating when I can see friends on my Battle.Net list that are logged in and doing things. Blizzard's twitter response this morning didn't help:

Naturally I had to respond and I even got a response back:

Not sure what is happening on Mal'Ganis specifically. Makes me wonder how their issues are tracked. And if one solution can help address other similar issues. Sure happy I don't work on the Blizzard Infrastructure Team but sure not happy I can't play the game. *snicker*

No You Will Not Proudmoore!

Would like to get some leveling done and a few of the Brewfest quests, but no!

Really annoying how the client doesn't say anything; it just tries for twenty seconds then gives up. I was annoyed enough to make a nuisance of myself. Posted on the forums then tweeted at Customer Service. Even tweeted another general bit of crying…

Ugh. Can log onto some #Warcraft servers but not the one I want. Client waits 20sec then gives up. :( http://t.co/x5nOpkVf6X
— Aenara (@aegamer) October 3, 2014

My Fishou

Had a Mage Dominate daily quest to do last night. Noticed AJ Sacher mention a deck that had worked well for him on the ladder. Hadn't heard about it but apparently TheFishou had some EU fun with it. Naturally I didn't bother looking up what it was supposed to do, I just tried to build it the best I could then headed on over to ranked play:

Sadly I'm missing a core card—Bloodmage Thalnos. It has spell power, death rattle, and card draw! *sigh* For now I'm subbing Haunted Creeper. Novice Engineer and Kobold Geomancer might also work. Stupid Legendaries. Crazy mage deck overall though. No Flamestrike! No Polymorph! No ... et cetera.

Anyway. With all the low cost cards it was obviously aggro. I'm still awkward with aggro since I like to keep the board clear; this made for good practice. Took eight games to win my five so that's an okay ratio. Biggest problem was a Priest who had every damn taunt in the game, early to mid, so I conceded. Came up against a ZooLock and a HandLock—destroyed them both. Fun deck.

Maybe ArcheAge in my Old Age

Just watched Kripparrian ramble on about why he won't be playing ArcheAge. He did research about how the game works which makes me feel good about passing on it. Right before release they changed they way Labor Potions worked—adding a Pay-to-Win element. I agree with Krip in that once a company makes this kind of decision there will be more bad decisions around the corner.

For me it was a little more basic than that. Land ownership is core to the game and it requires either a massive amount of effort or $50. That tells me it's not free-to-play. So removing the cooldowns on Labor Potions plus making crafting require more Labor Points didn't surprise me.

Crafting itself was the next deterrent for me. While detailed and complex normally creates a rich experience, to me it all seemed tedious. And if I'm bored with crafting I would be missing out on a large chunk of the game. Not like I could anyway… since I won't pay $50 I couldn't even own land anyway. Public plots? Yeah right.

The final "meh" for me is the PvP requirements. Too often I enjoy doing things on my own. And being forced into PvP even in leveling situations is not appealing. It really sealed the whole "This Game Isn't For Aenara" thing.

Which is too bad. They did do a number of things right. The class design is incredibly flexible and interesting. They have gliders. Their dynamic events aren't terribly interesting or original, but they do add spice. The UI was tolerable. And I have a couple of MMO friends that I never get to game with anymore who are playing it. *sigh*

Oh well. Maybe the next one.

Caved In

I have plenty of game clients: Steam, Battle.Net, Glyph, and Capsule. Everyone hates EA so I resolved to never bother with Origin until today...

And what finally convinced me? Free stuff. As usual I got suckered in by nostalgia...

So yeah. Wing Commander III of all things. And one more way for EA to dig at me.

It's a Bumpy Rebirth

Definitely a rough start. Peppered throughout the leveling and questing are instanced encounters. There are so many people leveling that the instance manager, "Duty Manager", has been crashing. They've taken the servers down twice for emergency maintenance to no avail.

They are posting things. There was a Tweet a few minutes ago:

Yet when you click on the link it gives you:

So yeah. It's feeling like an unofficial fifth beta at the moment. Would really like to at least get a chocobo mount yet that requires a number of instances... *sigh*

Still won't be subbing at this point. Considering cancelling the pre-order. Maybe it will be more ready in a month. Or maybe a bulk of people will be done with the lower levels so it's easier to get going.

MapTools Still Not Smiling

The group I play with recently upgraded to MapTools 1.3.b89. Naturally the GM didn't mention this beforehand so when I tried to connect I got a version error. I quickly downloaded the binaries and replaced the entire folder. Everything seemed fine until I used some of my macros. Everytime a variable was used it would repeat all text found inside a DIV before that variable. Using a TWF Rogue means a ton of variables so each attack spammed a wall of text.

It was like the client was being launched in a diag mode or something. Remembered there was a fix for this yet couldn't remember what it was. Couldn't find the right words in Google so ended up browsing the RPTools forums manually. Thankfully I found the answer in the Macros section: disable the Insert Smilies option in the MapTool Preferences (Interactions tab, Chat box). *sigh* Would be nice it they'd fix that. I miss the emoticons. If I knew Java I'd fix it myself.

While I'm making note of that fix I might as well include the custom launch command I use too:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre7\bin\javaw" -Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true -Xmx1024M -Xss3m -jar maptool-1.3.b89.jar run

Sim til Emergence

Read a pretty good blog on simulation coding. I remember writing my own Life decades ago. Need to do that again as a mod or something.

Beautiful Rocks

Couple of days ago I noticed an upload on the Nexus entitled "Superior Rock Textures - Hiqh Quality HD 2K and 1K replacers." Seems like every play session there's some point where I notice how blocky and poorly textured the rocks are in numerous places. Was amazed at how good this plugin is! I only have a 1gb GTS 450 so I usually defer to 1k textures. And in my case both worked equally well.

Yet I immediately noticed they react poorly with however Skyrim renders water—creating an excessive shine thats especially visible at night but even during the day. They're such a terrific improvement I was loathe to leave any negative comments. So I took the time to phrase my findings constructively. Checking back a few minutes ago I was pleasantly surprised to find my name mentioned and a fix in place…

Going to go check it out now!

Your Penis Offends Me Greatly

The anonymity of the Internet makes it the last, great bastion of ignorance, bigotry, and petulance. Sure there are good things out there but the bad's got the same sanctuary. For instance there's a mod less than 24-hours old called Schlongs of Skyrim…

Naturally my comment isn't feedback germain to the mod itself, but rather my annoyance with other comments. There is an utter dearth of mods that give any attention to male actors or resources compared to the female explosion. So I feel motivated to use strong words in defense of whatever it released.

Hackle-raising aside it's appears to be quite an achievement as it adds new Havok'able parts without require new animation. Should be very compatible. And fun! *snicker*

Something Might Be On Fire

Looks the Xbox ONE fever has pitched. The specs appear to be substantial enough and there are a number of promises being made. See what happens. Just not on the Official website...

Another Switches

Just read a tweet from the RIFT people... they're going free-to-play on June 12. Paid for a number of months where I never bothered to log in so it's unlikely that I will play now. The hype around player-built home-spaces in the Storm Legion xpac did sound interesting. Hrm. Maybe?

Almost Done in There

Fairly productive week. Got the first nine bosses down on Wednesday, and Thursday with Tortos and Durumu being the only bother. Managed to get Iron Quon down tonight along with the Twin Consorts. This means we'll have a good four hours or so on Lei Shen tomorrow. Should be no problem. *snicker* The kills bumped us into 2nd on the server:

Iron Quon was kind enough to drop Shoulders of the Crackling Vanquisher so I now have the 2pc going. Might have to find a transmog that works with the shoulders… that tongue is pretty amusing:

Brought me up four iLevels so now I'm back in the top 10:

Good times!

WoWProgress and Invisibility

We're working on the damn turtle tonight. Tried a few pulls last night. Some people had to leave last night so I filled in on the shaman. Was good to get a look at the fight but damn. The exact words of the healer on the first pull: "Is this for real?" We all got a laugh but damn. Going to take some coordination.

I'm sure our competitors are working on it too. Yet for now we're still at #3 on the server. The raid leader is going to have monk and paladin tanks for now. Says he'll get me in on the hydra.

Poked around for some ePeen only to find disappointment. For some reason my DK has disappeared from the rankings:

My in-game character sheet shows me at iLevel 504, which would mean I'm the 6th most geared DK on the server. The web portal also shows me at 504. Not sure what I can do but I will explore options! I want my name up there, dammit!! While it still can be…

Soule Symphony No. 1

Had no idea one man was behind so much of the music that's driven many of the games I have enjoyed. Thankfully an article I caught on Kotaku informed me. Really hope his KickStarter goes well.

Kalimdor Today, the World Next Week

I gave up on Minfernal around Christmas time. Figured it's been long enough that the camp might be less intense. So with today's restart I decided to get the three farmers in different shared realms into position.

Was tuning my macro so figured there was something wrong when it beeped. But it was not wrong! Swooped down on a spawn before the reset!! Naturally I was worried that the servers would hiccup before I finished but my insane luck held…

Wanted to call him Server Restart but the name was "reserved" or something. Tried a few variants until one worked.

This was truly fortuitous. With the Qiraji Guardling becoming available next week, I should be able to get Kalimdor Safari done which completes World Safari and gets me the Zookeeper title.