Apparently I've been gone long enough that SG felt like giving me three free months. So I'm back. How has everyone been? I've been busy as hell with school and work but its been good.
Nerd Cred++
As part of my continuing quest to increase my overall nerd knowledge and nerd appeal I've started what I feel like is a rather ambitious but rewarding project. I am reading all of the Nebula award winning novels in order. I've read a lot of Science Fiction but a significant portion of what I read is from newer authors so along the way I have missed a number of classic works and by doing this I hope to add a bit more focus to my reading list and get a chance to check out some of the amazing authors that are out there that I have heard great things about but never gotten around to checking out. I'm planning to include a few diversions along the path as it is warranted (reading sequels and such if I really enjoy a particular book) but I'm mostly plowing straight through. Turns out the local library has a woefully poor selection of SciFi so in a rare (for me at least) non-piracy move I am actually buying them all. Thus when I am done I will set them all up on a bookshelf so as to give people who come by one additional thing to nod politely at while they stifle a yawn. So here is a quick review of the ones I have read so far. I will try to avoid outright spoilers but a few tidbits of info will probably sneak in.
Dune by Frank Herbert
I mostly can't believe I had never read this before. It is everything its cracked it up to be. Its a beautifully detailed and realized world and the parts I found most interesting were all about the society that had formed so focused around water. Also the language they used was very well conveyed with strange and new words fitting into the flow very well without any need for additional explanation. This is a classic for a reason and I'm glad I got around to reading it. With such a fully realized world I was sorely tempted to check out some of the sequels but taking a diversion so soon into starting this project seemed unwise so those are all backburnered for now.
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
This book actually tied with the next one on the list (the only tie for best novel) and it was again a classic I had never read. It did not impress me as much as some of the other books on the list but it was well written and the gimmick of writing from the perspective of a retard who gradually becomes more intelligent due to scientific experimentation was not so much interesting as not as distracting as it could have been. I feel like that sort of gimmick is at this point overdone but I can only assume it was a bigger departure at the time. And at the very least it was done in such a way that did not detract from the overall whole. Good story, some interesting comments on how we view the mentally disabled as well as how they view themselves but just nothing about it really grabbed me. The best notion it forwarded was the idea that the greatest work we can do in science is that of increasing human intelligence through which other advances will flow naturally from those who have been thus advanced. I feel like its really only borderline science fiction but its definitely worth the read.
Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delaney
This review will contain a few light spoilers simply because I knew nothing about it going in but really enjoyed it and want to get other people interested as well.
When Delaney wrote this book he always intended for it to be published alongside another novella he had written called Empire Star and now that they've both been out for ages they finally released a version in that fashion. If you decide to read this I strongly recommend you pick that version up. Babel-17 was a little wandery but it touched upon some really fantastic ideas. I had never even heard of Delaney before I started this but I am really impressed by what he has done here. There were a lot of features that I feel like were developed further in other novels I have read that were written since this but it featured a lot of clever ideas that were set up almost in passing to demonstrate the futuristic nature of the setting. The main overall plot focuses around a code being used to orchestrate sabotage operations against the good faction by the bad faction (good and bad really do belong in quotes here, we are clearly intended to empathize overall with the faction that our characters are a part of but even they question just how different the other side really is and what the point of all this war and bloodshed is, they don't exactly get deeply into this concept but its there nonetheless). The code is proving incredibly difficult to break so they contact a famous poet with a highly advance knowledge of linguistics to try to help them. It eventually becomes clear the code is not a code but in fact an entirely different language which explains why they were not able to crack it. As she tries to learn more the really interesting stuff starts happening. Some pretty deep theoretical stuff about the nature of language, and what its meant to convey, and what its structure says about the people that use it, comes across gradually as she is journeying across space to try to find the next sabotage site in time to hear the language first hand and catch the nuances that are lost on the untrained observer. So among some pretty decent space battles and such there are some downright intriguing philosophical observations. And along the way we learn a lot more about just why this poet is so good at distilling languages down to their essence. The novel as a whole feels a tad unpolished (not surprising since it was early in his career) but its got some fantastic stuff in it. Its a decent page turner but a fantastic novel at making you think. Empire Star is paired with it since its purported to have been written by one of the minor characters in the novel who is a past friend of the main character. Its overall much more standard scifi adventure where the hero is on a small planet and sets off on a mission of great importance into space (I'm sure you can't think of any other stories like that at all) but again it delves into some deeper issues as it progresses about the nature of intelligence and the ability to think about things in different ways progressing from the simplex to the complex and eventually multiplex. Much more standard overall but again some great stuff thrown in. Both are really worth checking out. Also a sidenote, by reading Empire Star as well this officially marks my first diversion from the strict list.
Thats all I have read so far but I am in the middle of the next one and looking ahead at the list there are a bunch I am looking forward to reading or rereading and some I've never heard of but am hoping to be pleasantly surprised by.
As part of my continuing quest to increase my overall nerd knowledge and nerd appeal I've started what I feel like is a rather ambitious but rewarding project. I am reading all of the Nebula award winning novels in order. I've read a lot of Science Fiction but a significant portion of what I read is from newer authors so along the way I have missed a number of classic works and by doing this I hope to add a bit more focus to my reading list and get a chance to check out some of the amazing authors that are out there that I have heard great things about but never gotten around to checking out. I'm planning to include a few diversions along the path as it is warranted (reading sequels and such if I really enjoy a particular book) but I'm mostly plowing straight through. Turns out the local library has a woefully poor selection of SciFi so in a rare (for me at least) non-piracy move I am actually buying them all. Thus when I am done I will set them all up on a bookshelf so as to give people who come by one additional thing to nod politely at while they stifle a yawn. So here is a quick review of the ones I have read so far. I will try to avoid outright spoilers but a few tidbits of info will probably sneak in.
Dune by Frank Herbert
I mostly can't believe I had never read this before. It is everything its cracked it up to be. Its a beautifully detailed and realized world and the parts I found most interesting were all about the society that had formed so focused around water. Also the language they used was very well conveyed with strange and new words fitting into the flow very well without any need for additional explanation. This is a classic for a reason and I'm glad I got around to reading it. With such a fully realized world I was sorely tempted to check out some of the sequels but taking a diversion so soon into starting this project seemed unwise so those are all backburnered for now.
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
This book actually tied with the next one on the list (the only tie for best novel) and it was again a classic I had never read. It did not impress me as much as some of the other books on the list but it was well written and the gimmick of writing from the perspective of a retard who gradually becomes more intelligent due to scientific experimentation was not so much interesting as not as distracting as it could have been. I feel like that sort of gimmick is at this point overdone but I can only assume it was a bigger departure at the time. And at the very least it was done in such a way that did not detract from the overall whole. Good story, some interesting comments on how we view the mentally disabled as well as how they view themselves but just nothing about it really grabbed me. The best notion it forwarded was the idea that the greatest work we can do in science is that of increasing human intelligence through which other advances will flow naturally from those who have been thus advanced. I feel like its really only borderline science fiction but its definitely worth the read.
Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delaney
This review will contain a few light spoilers simply because I knew nothing about it going in but really enjoyed it and want to get other people interested as well.
When Delaney wrote this book he always intended for it to be published alongside another novella he had written called Empire Star and now that they've both been out for ages they finally released a version in that fashion. If you decide to read this I strongly recommend you pick that version up. Babel-17 was a little wandery but it touched upon some really fantastic ideas. I had never even heard of Delaney before I started this but I am really impressed by what he has done here. There were a lot of features that I feel like were developed further in other novels I have read that were written since this but it featured a lot of clever ideas that were set up almost in passing to demonstrate the futuristic nature of the setting. The main overall plot focuses around a code being used to orchestrate sabotage operations against the good faction by the bad faction (good and bad really do belong in quotes here, we are clearly intended to empathize overall with the faction that our characters are a part of but even they question just how different the other side really is and what the point of all this war and bloodshed is, they don't exactly get deeply into this concept but its there nonetheless). The code is proving incredibly difficult to break so they contact a famous poet with a highly advance knowledge of linguistics to try to help them. It eventually becomes clear the code is not a code but in fact an entirely different language which explains why they were not able to crack it. As she tries to learn more the really interesting stuff starts happening. Some pretty deep theoretical stuff about the nature of language, and what its meant to convey, and what its structure says about the people that use it, comes across gradually as she is journeying across space to try to find the next sabotage site in time to hear the language first hand and catch the nuances that are lost on the untrained observer. So among some pretty decent space battles and such there are some downright intriguing philosophical observations. And along the way we learn a lot more about just why this poet is so good at distilling languages down to their essence. The novel as a whole feels a tad unpolished (not surprising since it was early in his career) but its got some fantastic stuff in it. Its a decent page turner but a fantastic novel at making you think. Empire Star is paired with it since its purported to have been written by one of the minor characters in the novel who is a past friend of the main character. Its overall much more standard scifi adventure where the hero is on a small planet and sets off on a mission of great importance into space (I'm sure you can't think of any other stories like that at all) but again it delves into some deeper issues as it progresses about the nature of intelligence and the ability to think about things in different ways progressing from the simplex to the complex and eventually multiplex. Much more standard overall but again some great stuff thrown in. Both are really worth checking out. Also a sidenote, by reading Empire Star as well this officially marks my first diversion from the strict list.
Thats all I have read so far but I am in the middle of the next one and looking ahead at the list there are a bunch I am looking forward to reading or rereading and some I've never heard of but am hoping to be pleasantly surprised by.
I played Portal, this is my review of it.
This review will contain some spoilers.
Portal is basically perfect in every way. I loved absolutely everything about this game. The puzzles were all very innovative and they succeeded in a way that puzzles rarely do for me at least. They were challenging without being too frustrating. Every time I beat a level I felt good about it, like I had figured something. Each level has one or two minor problem solving leaps you had to make and each time I made that leap I felt satisfied for having done so. I have no idea how other people found the difficulty level but it was exactly right for me personally. Also I didn't spend large chunks of time stuck on any one spot as I frequently do. I would say I only really go stuck twice. Once in the after the main levels area I just plain could not figure out what to do next. Turns out it was just me missing something obvious but I was frustratingly stuck for a while. That one is on me. The other time was jumping between some platforms. The jump timing was overall just fine but this level was spaced so I had to time the jumps more perfectly than usual and I sucked at it. Like a lot. Like took me 30 tries to make the series of jumps a lot. But that moment was unique in that it was only time I was annoyed by the game. With all of these insanely complex puzzles featuring a unique set of moving through 3 dimensional space everything still came together right.
The physics of the game were down right amazing. The graphics were top notch and showed it off well but its the physics behind the game that really impresses me. The game is just so open ended in what you can do that it sort of blows me away and every crazy idea I thought of either worked or failed in an appropriate way. Frequently, the solutions involved a wait would this work? sort of approach basically encouraging thinking outside the box for the entirety of the game.
The story was fantastic. Obviously, I was familiar with aspects of the story simply from being a nerd but the actual delivery was so totally spot on that it felt new and exciting anyways. The voice work was fantastic and each of the machines that spoke had a unique personality to them that came out gradually. The overall pacing of the story was such that it flowed very naturally between the challenges into the escape. Hearing Still Alive sung by GLaDOS at the end was incredible as well. I've been a fan of Jonathon Coulton's work for quite a while and I've heard Still Alive but the emotional impact was even stronger with its placing in the game. The only emotional impact I apparently missed was from the Companion Cube. I tossed it in the incinerator without a second thought. Not sure why, just seemed like it was what I needed to do so might as well get about it. The little gun stands were awesome too. Well voiced, cleverly situated, everything. I am still unsure my run up and push them over strategy that I used on almost every single one was the best way to go about things but it worked. And more importantly I feel like other options might have worked as well. Also this game did something very well that few games manage. It felt real and self-consistent. Everything about the game made sense. I was flying through dimensional portals launching myself on to platforms but I at least felt like I knew why. The pacing of the new challenges was well done as well. Right when I was thinking, Ok when am I gonna get the portal gun I got the first half of it, and then right when I was thinking, Why don't I have the second half yet there it was. Oh and my favorite cake? Black forest cake. Yeah, this game was perfect for me in every way. The clinical simplicity of it combined with a dark hint that slowly grew, the simple yet subversive GLaDOS guiding me into danger but feeling bad about it. Oh and one of my absolute favorite parts was how short it was. I mean I was initially disappointed it ended so soon but it was completely correct for the pacing of the story. The story ran its course over a period of time and that period was how long they made the game. They didn't fill it in with mini-games or send you back and forth across large rooms to extend the time. It was meant to be short and they left it short. Oh and its autosaves were dead on too. I am a compulsive saver and so every time I accomplished something I would save. I stopped when I realized the game was automatically saving for me just as often. Me and Portal? We're like this. So many very right decisions were made when making this game and it shows.
Only complaint: I played for 4 5 hours straight when I first installed it and it made me motion sick. All that twirling and whirling and hopping and spinning? Blaraaaragh!
This review will contain some spoilers.
Portal is basically perfect in every way. I loved absolutely everything about this game. The puzzles were all very innovative and they succeeded in a way that puzzles rarely do for me at least. They were challenging without being too frustrating. Every time I beat a level I felt good about it, like I had figured something. Each level has one or two minor problem solving leaps you had to make and each time I made that leap I felt satisfied for having done so. I have no idea how other people found the difficulty level but it was exactly right for me personally. Also I didn't spend large chunks of time stuck on any one spot as I frequently do. I would say I only really go stuck twice. Once in the after the main levels area I just plain could not figure out what to do next. Turns out it was just me missing something obvious but I was frustratingly stuck for a while. That one is on me. The other time was jumping between some platforms. The jump timing was overall just fine but this level was spaced so I had to time the jumps more perfectly than usual and I sucked at it. Like a lot. Like took me 30 tries to make the series of jumps a lot. But that moment was unique in that it was only time I was annoyed by the game. With all of these insanely complex puzzles featuring a unique set of moving through 3 dimensional space everything still came together right.
The physics of the game were down right amazing. The graphics were top notch and showed it off well but its the physics behind the game that really impresses me. The game is just so open ended in what you can do that it sort of blows me away and every crazy idea I thought of either worked or failed in an appropriate way. Frequently, the solutions involved a wait would this work? sort of approach basically encouraging thinking outside the box for the entirety of the game.
The story was fantastic. Obviously, I was familiar with aspects of the story simply from being a nerd but the actual delivery was so totally spot on that it felt new and exciting anyways. The voice work was fantastic and each of the machines that spoke had a unique personality to them that came out gradually. The overall pacing of the story was such that it flowed very naturally between the challenges into the escape. Hearing Still Alive sung by GLaDOS at the end was incredible as well. I've been a fan of Jonathon Coulton's work for quite a while and I've heard Still Alive but the emotional impact was even stronger with its placing in the game. The only emotional impact I apparently missed was from the Companion Cube. I tossed it in the incinerator without a second thought. Not sure why, just seemed like it was what I needed to do so might as well get about it. The little gun stands were awesome too. Well voiced, cleverly situated, everything. I am still unsure my run up and push them over strategy that I used on almost every single one was the best way to go about things but it worked. And more importantly I feel like other options might have worked as well. Also this game did something very well that few games manage. It felt real and self-consistent. Everything about the game made sense. I was flying through dimensional portals launching myself on to platforms but I at least felt like I knew why. The pacing of the new challenges was well done as well. Right when I was thinking, Ok when am I gonna get the portal gun I got the first half of it, and then right when I was thinking, Why don't I have the second half yet there it was. Oh and my favorite cake? Black forest cake. Yeah, this game was perfect for me in every way. The clinical simplicity of it combined with a dark hint that slowly grew, the simple yet subversive GLaDOS guiding me into danger but feeling bad about it. Oh and one of my absolute favorite parts was how short it was. I mean I was initially disappointed it ended so soon but it was completely correct for the pacing of the story. The story ran its course over a period of time and that period was how long they made the game. They didn't fill it in with mini-games or send you back and forth across large rooms to extend the time. It was meant to be short and they left it short. Oh and its autosaves were dead on too. I am a compulsive saver and so every time I accomplished something I would save. I stopped when I realized the game was automatically saving for me just as often. Me and Portal? We're like this. So many very right decisions were made when making this game and it shows.
Only complaint: I played for 4 5 hours straight when I first installed it and it made me motion sick. All that twirling and whirling and hopping and spinning? Blaraaaragh!
I just finished playing through American McGee's Alice as part of my continuing quest to increase my overall nerd appeal and to reduce the number of times people say What really? You never played that? Any other games that would cause you to say those very words please let me know so we can avoid future awkwardness. Overall I enjoyed the game quite a bit. I like Alice and Wonderland and I read both it and Through the Looking Glass pretty recently so inclusion of certain slightly more obscure characters (the Duchess most notably) amused me greatly. The setting was fantastic, the visual feel of all the levels was fascinating and the asylum based level was actually genuinely unnerving. Admittedly, asylums creep me right the fuck out. I think its because I'm consistently concerned that all my little neuroses may in fact add up to some actual disorder with a long hard to pronounce name that requires a padded room. I feel like however this is one of many games that was probably a lot better when it came out then it is playing now. The whole its something familiar but DARK theme has been kind of done to death at this point and I feel like Alice was probably one of the earlier examples of it being done successfully. Also the gameplay retained a number of the nagging issues that have improved through the years. The detection for jumping was a tad off throughout the game. There is one section where you ride a leaf down a stream and I think I succeeded in jumping on to the leaf approximately 2% of the times I tried. In fact I found it easier to forgo the leaf all together and risk personal harm. I admit to being a bit of a compulsive save and restarter but after hitting quick load 35 times in under 3 minutes I get pretty freaking annoyed. The largest physics issue was in its ability to detect what sort of ledges it was appropriate for me to cling to. Making a harrowing jump grabbing on the edge and pulling myself up is a tried and true jumping puzzle mechanic but it would frequently attach me to ledges with things directly above them making it impossible to actually climb up or worse attach me to ledges that belonged to moving objects such that by the time I had pulled myself up the object was not in fact underneath me and I would fall to my death. Amusing for sure but not the 15th time in a row that it happens and I have to try the series of jumps again as a result. This one jumping puzzle was the worst. Three swinging pipes to jump between. Obscenely simple in general, a lot less simple with the slightly janky controls and a random dude shooting at me. I think a full 30% of my failed attempts at that one involved me pulling myself up onto the pipe that was 10 feet to my right and falling to my immediate doom. Another thing missing that is probably more a factor of the era than anything else was much in the way of bonus material. There were numerous secret areas to find which almost exclusively contained health power ups. Now I was playing on easy difficulty so these were almost totally useless to me but even if I weren't they are quite possibly the least exciting power up possible. There is a reason I enjoy collecting coins and such, it feels like I can never get enough of them. Discovering a cleverly hidden secret area and spending time to get there only to find something that literally does nothing for you is just not fun. A few cleverly hidden creatures from the novel that were not included would have been fantastic. Or some sort of unlockables or anything really. I don't particularly feel like I have any reason at all to play the game through again.
Overall though I really enjoyed it. I think its biggest success, and potentially what ended up being its biggest contribution to future gaming, was its sensational atmosphere. The Aliceness of the game permeated its entirety. The backgrounds, the music, the weapons, all of it felt unique to this specific game and added up to a pretty cool whole. The weapons especially were fantastic. Each of them had very specific uses and methodologies and I found myself switching weapons with far more regularity than I have in any other game I can think of. They were by and large based on children's toys that were transformed into fairly sinister weapons. I mean you start with the vorpal blade and its arguably the least cool or clever of them to give you some idea how nifty the rest are. The jacks were my personal favorite though I probably used the jack in the box bomb the most. Actually let me consider just how much I really did use all the weapons. I used the croquet mallet as basically my default weapon if I wasn't sure what I would be facing. Its basic attack was solid melee damage and its secondary attack was a solid ranged attack. Versatile and useful. The jacks did a very generous amount of damage and their primary attack had a nice fire and forget feature. You toss the set of jacks at an enemy and they bounce around it dealing damage as you bounce the little jack ball thing. So you could start an attack and then run out of range as they continue to deal damage. The jack in the box explodes after a set amount of time and with some practice and timing you could annihilate even fairly difficult enemies without taking a hit if you toss one just right and run and hide until it blows up (I am so courageous and not at all cheap). The ice wand was very good for pumping out consistent damage if you can afford to be up in someone's face, I used it a lot for boss battles until I got the Jabberwock's eyestaff. The eyestaff was tremendous damage that took a bit to warm up but then let out a consistent beam for a while. Had a long range and the large damage made it my go to weapon for the later boss fights. I didn't get the blunderbuss until the very end but I used it in the final boss fight. Pretty straightforward that one. The cards were thrown as a long range attack and you could put out some really good damage really fast at the cost of burning through your mana bar. I used this mostly for guys I couldn't get a good angle on otherwise or for if someone got too up in my face and I needed them dead fast. The demon dice were incredibly clever. You throw this set of dice out and it summons a demon to fight for you. I used this mostly whenever I was against two or more enemies to distract one of them. The demons were susceptible to friendly fire so I frequently blow them up with jack in the boxes and if you summoned them with no enemies around they would turn on you. The stopwatch stopped time. Basically no combat usage but necessary for a handful of puzzles. The vorpal blade is your basic I have no mana weapon and was sort of underwhelming for being the vorpal blade but still pretty decent. Yeah come to think of it I really liked the weapons. They did a great job with that. The overall story was basically exactly what I expected it to be but it was still satisfying. It could easily have been a lot darker (and it sounds like it got tamed down during/after production) but it remains interesting in its own right.
Alice was pretty damn fun and I think the vast majority of its flaws have way more to do with inherent lacks in gameplay that were prevalent at the time. An updated version could be fantastic and I'm pretty interested in checking out what American McGee is working on now. Apparently he is doing an episodic take on the Grimm fairy tales. I'll check it out at some point but for now I'm trying to mix things up for. Next up is Portal (seriously, you never played Portal? No, no I haven't) and then after that Demigod (the box looked flashy when I was in Best Buy). After that I am open to any and all suggestions.
Totally random aside that didn't fit in anywhere else: The single most unnerving part of the game to me was almost certainly a bug rather than a feature. There is this hedge maze type area and in it the bushes were constantly shifting just slightly every time you turned. I spent the entire level thinking something was right behind me. Every time I looked at them closely though the rearranged themselves in the sprites are hard to draw so they don't always look how we want them to ok? way that I am familiar with from a decade of disappearing walls and other graphical glitches. If it was deliberate then I am really impressed. If not, then well happy accident.
Overall though I really enjoyed it. I think its biggest success, and potentially what ended up being its biggest contribution to future gaming, was its sensational atmosphere. The Aliceness of the game permeated its entirety. The backgrounds, the music, the weapons, all of it felt unique to this specific game and added up to a pretty cool whole. The weapons especially were fantastic. Each of them had very specific uses and methodologies and I found myself switching weapons with far more regularity than I have in any other game I can think of. They were by and large based on children's toys that were transformed into fairly sinister weapons. I mean you start with the vorpal blade and its arguably the least cool or clever of them to give you some idea how nifty the rest are. The jacks were my personal favorite though I probably used the jack in the box bomb the most. Actually let me consider just how much I really did use all the weapons. I used the croquet mallet as basically my default weapon if I wasn't sure what I would be facing. Its basic attack was solid melee damage and its secondary attack was a solid ranged attack. Versatile and useful. The jacks did a very generous amount of damage and their primary attack had a nice fire and forget feature. You toss the set of jacks at an enemy and they bounce around it dealing damage as you bounce the little jack ball thing. So you could start an attack and then run out of range as they continue to deal damage. The jack in the box explodes after a set amount of time and with some practice and timing you could annihilate even fairly difficult enemies without taking a hit if you toss one just right and run and hide until it blows up (I am so courageous and not at all cheap). The ice wand was very good for pumping out consistent damage if you can afford to be up in someone's face, I used it a lot for boss battles until I got the Jabberwock's eyestaff. The eyestaff was tremendous damage that took a bit to warm up but then let out a consistent beam for a while. Had a long range and the large damage made it my go to weapon for the later boss fights. I didn't get the blunderbuss until the very end but I used it in the final boss fight. Pretty straightforward that one. The cards were thrown as a long range attack and you could put out some really good damage really fast at the cost of burning through your mana bar. I used this mostly for guys I couldn't get a good angle on otherwise or for if someone got too up in my face and I needed them dead fast. The demon dice were incredibly clever. You throw this set of dice out and it summons a demon to fight for you. I used this mostly whenever I was against two or more enemies to distract one of them. The demons were susceptible to friendly fire so I frequently blow them up with jack in the boxes and if you summoned them with no enemies around they would turn on you. The stopwatch stopped time. Basically no combat usage but necessary for a handful of puzzles. The vorpal blade is your basic I have no mana weapon and was sort of underwhelming for being the vorpal blade but still pretty decent. Yeah come to think of it I really liked the weapons. They did a great job with that. The overall story was basically exactly what I expected it to be but it was still satisfying. It could easily have been a lot darker (and it sounds like it got tamed down during/after production) but it remains interesting in its own right.
Alice was pretty damn fun and I think the vast majority of its flaws have way more to do with inherent lacks in gameplay that were prevalent at the time. An updated version could be fantastic and I'm pretty interested in checking out what American McGee is working on now. Apparently he is doing an episodic take on the Grimm fairy tales. I'll check it out at some point but for now I'm trying to mix things up for. Next up is Portal (seriously, you never played Portal? No, no I haven't) and then after that Demigod (the box looked flashy when I was in Best Buy). After that I am open to any and all suggestions.
Totally random aside that didn't fit in anywhere else: The single most unnerving part of the game to me was almost certainly a bug rather than a feature. There is this hedge maze type area and in it the bushes were constantly shifting just slightly every time you turned. I spent the entire level thinking something was right behind me. Every time I looked at them closely though the rearranged themselves in the sprites are hard to draw so they don't always look how we want them to ok? way that I am familiar with from a decade of disappearing walls and other graphical glitches. If it was deliberate then I am really impressed. If not, then well happy accident.
Now that I'm playing less WoW I have a ton of video gaming time that has been suddenly freed up. I'm looking to "legally acquire" a few games that I missed the first time around. I just finished up American McGee's Alice and I'll be writing up a review of sorts of it soon. Next up is Portal and after that is Demigod. I'm looking for input as to anything worth checking out. Especially anything that was really really good but widely overlooked. So let me know about the highly underrated hidden gems that I may have missed or just plain good games I should play. I've got the time.
Super long WoW related post cross posted from my other blog.
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World of Warcraft
Warning this blog entry is going to be very WoW intensive.
Note: Upon reading through a lot of this sounds really bitter and frankly thats sort of how I feel. I have put a lot of time, effort and money into this game so I'm very disappointed that my enjoyment of it has dropped off so drastically. shrug
I've been playing a lot less WoW recently and I'm not really missing it. I stopped the automatic renewal of my account, which technically means I canceled my WoW account but saying I canceled it feels likes I am overstating that fact. I haven't so much canceled it per se as set it up so that when my current time runs out I have to make a decision to keep playing and I'll decide for sure then if I'm still getting $15 a month out of it. When I was "canceling" my account it asked for my reason for cancellation. And to be honest I can't even begin to narrow it down to just one. WoW has so many facets to it and so many different ways you can enjoy the game its hard to say that I'm tired of all of it without getting into specific reasons why. So here is a list of many of the reasons I am enjoying WoW a lot less than I used to and why I may not be playing it soon when my account runs out.
Honestly the biggest reason WoW is less fun is because a lot of the people I know have quit playing. This is technically not Blizzard's fault that they quit playing but I feel like many of the same reasons that are making it likely I will quit led them to quit as well. I really like my guild and my guildmates and if it weren't for them I probably would have quit already but I know all of them through other games too so I'm leaning towards seeing them there instead of in WoW.
The raids this time around are kinda disappointing. I like the bit of Ulduar I have seen so far but it hasn't exactly blown me away. I raided a bit more seriously in the Burning Crusade and I enjoyed the raids there a whole lot more. Part of that probably has to do with when I started playing. By the time I hit 70 during TBC there were 8 raids currently available. A 9th came out while I was playing and I never even progressed far enough to enter it. In Wrath as it stands now there are 5 raids. However, some of them are, well, frustrating to say the least. Vault of Archavon is a PvP oriented raid and its for the most part pretty trivial. You go in and quickly get some gear and as long as the people you are with are ok at playing their class its basically a sure thing. The loot is way too good for how easy he is and its way too specific loot such that its possible for loot to drop that no one at all needs (tokens for classes you didn't bring with you) or loot that I personally am not excited about (PvP loot). Sartharion I actually for the most part enjoy. Its pretty cool killing a dragon and you can scale up the difficulty level by leaving more drakes up. Its infuriating that I still have yet to down Sarth with two drakes up but thats just a PUGing issue which I will get to more later. Malygos is a dick. Seriously, just a dick. Its a clever fight but it rolled out bugged. I'm not even sure if it is unbugged now and to be honest at this point I'm not clear what of the annoying bullshit moves in the fight are bugs versus which ones are just supposed to be hard. This has/had the potential to be a really fun fight but it just felt undertested. Also until Ulduar came out this was the hardest fight in the game so it wasn't easy to find groups for. Maly is the boss I most want to down personally right now but I just don't see it happening any time soon. Naxx on the other hand just blows. Having the premiere raid of a new expansion be an old raid thats just been retuned is pretty freaking lazy and well not that fun. I did not play WoW before TBC so I wasn't exactly running Naxx back in the day but I'm still frustrated on principle. Also Naxx is just plain really annoying. The place is pretty freaking huge to start with. Its got 15 bosses, none of which are skippable. The last boss of course has the best loot (can't really argue with that) and you have to kill 14 other guys with only ok loot in order to even fight him. Many of the fights are annoying and feature a lot of potential screwage. Thaddius is the MVP of the fuck Naxx team since its possible for one person being stupid to wipe the raid, and its possible for that one stupid person to keep wiping the raid until they learn to be smarter. Kel'Thuzad the big baddy himself is also a fight I find more infuriating than difficult. The first phase is basically trivial and lasts a few minutes. Just to make sure that it takes a longer time to get attempts in on him I suppose. During the actual fight a lot of rough stuff happens. Now I'm not saying the fight is too hard because its not, just that its really annoying. He mind controls people who then attack other people so you need to CC them in some way. Well usually two other things happen, 1) they don't get CCed and they put their daggers into the dick of a healer or 2) a hunter shoots them, a lot. Its not always a hunter mind you but it often is. Ice block is the bane of my existence. He freezes someone (and anyone within a certain range of them) and then you have about 3 seconds before they take more than their life total in damage. So if they do not receive at least one heal in that time they die. This infuriates me for multiple reasons, first of which is that I play a resto shammy. Resto shammies only have one instant heal and its a heal over time so its not necessarily enough to save them. Our main heal that we use is chain heal which heals one person and then jumps to people near them. If I cast it immediately after people get ice blocked it will heal them all and save everyone. If if takes me more than half a second to target the correct person and start casting it (and possibly stop casting whatever I was casting before) they all die. I can use a faster heal and save one person if its only one person hit by it but people aren't always super great at standing far enough apart and when it hits the melee its for sure going to be multiple people. Its just sort of a dick move and its particularly annoying to my particular class and role. So those are the raid options prior to Ulduar, one PvP raid that is a cakewalk, one dragon who is pretty fun but kinda quick and one clusterfuck of holy fucking Christ are we done yet. Oh and that clusterfuck is a retread. Oh and it never drops my boots, seriously how am I still wearing the same boots I got when I turned 80? Fucking hell.
Ulduar seems pretty ok so far. Some clever fights etc but man is it just not enough to hold my interest. First off its significantly harder (which is good) so its harder to find groups for. 10 man Ulduar which is easier to find groups for has almost nothing worth going after for me. I think I literally have 3 upgrades in the entire place. Now yes yes loot is not the only reason to raid etc. But for me its the biggest one. I like shinies, I want shinies, I try to get shinies. Ulduar 10 has a severe lack of shinies for me. Ulduar 25 has quite a few but no one seems to be running PUGs for it and I have no interest in running one myself right now. Plus some of the trash are just assholes. I don't have any particular dislike for Ulduar so much as its just not as good as it needed to be. I was pretty tired of WoW when I was waiting for Ulduar to hit and well so far its not making up for the rest of my issues.
Now there are all sort of other end game pursuits which could be taking up my WoW time when I'm not raiding and you know keeping me in the game interested and involved. They aren't and I'm gonna say why.
Professions: I have both Jewelcrafting and Herbing maxed on my shammy. Not the most synergistic set of professions but I enjoy them both in general. Herbing is more a way to make money than anything else and I do ok with it. I'm not exactly rolling in gold but I can acquire a bit pretty easily as needed. I'm not super fond of running around collecting digital herbs to make digital money but I'm fine with farming. Its not a favorite past time but I accept its part of the video game world and it makes sense etc etc. So no it doesn't excite me and I'm not like "oh wow I better log into WoW so I can have me a grand old time of flying around and picking herbs" but I'm not annoyed with it either. Jewelcrafting I am freaking pissed about. In Burning Crusade there were three ways to get the high end recipes. One was from increasing your reputation with factions, one was world drops and the other was instance drops. Reputation wasn't super hard to come by though it required a concerted effort (especially before they added them to SSO). Not every JC had all the reputation recipes but quite a few did. The world drops on the other hand were tough to acquire. Anyone could get them (JC or not) and then sell them for a pretty penny on the AH. In order for it to be profitable to buy a pattern you really had to cut a lot of that gem afterwards. I didn't like this and neither did a lot of people and Blizzard made an attempt to fix it in Wrath which we will get to. Instance drops were nice in that you had to run specific places to get the design. The ones from Sunwell were especially nice in that you could get some of the best loot in the game at the time and it was only available to JCs. In Wrath all that changed. The instance drops were no longer for actual gear you could use. They wanted to make it so no profession was a bunch better than any other so that people were picking professions they enjoyed rather than professions that gave them good loot. Now I know some people went to extremes dropping a profession they would rather have just to get a few more points but making every profession less powerful and less worth having in order to make them more "fun" just doesn't add up to me. They retained some profession exclusive stuff of course so the disparity still exists to some degree so it didn't really "fix" anything in my opinion but it did take away a percent of shinies from me. They eliminated most of the reputation patterns (and reputation gains from raids so far) and made the vast majority of them come either from heroic drops or dailies. The few reputation recipes were all with the major factions that weren't particularly hard to get rep for (except for Hodir who while not hard to get rep for sure does take ages). There are a handful of drops scattered throughout heroics but those were all guaranteed drops if you just kill the right boss so it didn't exactly take long before me and every other JC had them all. The vast majority of the patterns though were from the dailies. Every day you can do the JC daily which basically is kill some subset of guys until you get a thing. Combine the thing with some gems. Profit. Then you get a token from that. You can buy a pattern for 3 tokens. Now in TBC the main way to make a profit as a JC was to have a gem cut other people needed and cut those gems either for them directly for a tip or buy the raw gem, cut it, put it up on the AH. As such the people with the "best" gem cuts were in decently high demand. With the new system it takes 3 days to get the best gem cut, 3 more for the next best one and so on. As such within a few weeks basically everyone who had a character that was a JC had every important pattern. It completely crashed the market for gems and its very difficult to make money with JCing now. So their new system replaced an annoying world drop mechanic with a different mechanic that eliminates scarcity in a poor way. Then they added back in world drops for the recipes they forget to put in the first time. I'm not sure forgot is the right word but well they left them out and then decided oh hey we should add back in the worst part of what we had before so that our solution fixes nothing at all. Yeah. Oh and apparently they are making Dragon's Eyes color specific soon instead of prismatic. Just to you know make JC worse. Now I know a lot of people have a lot of complaints about how professions were handled in Wrath (I personally think enchanting got hit hardest) but JC is the profession that I have spent the most time with and enjoyed a lot and they messed it up pretty bad.
PvP: Death Knights and Paladins have ruined PvP for me. DKs are just OP. Sure they have been nerfed to fairly acceptable levels but for a while they were just curbstompingly OP. And no its not fun for me to have my face smashed in on my well geared character I have been building up for about a year by someone who just made their toon a few weeks ago. There have been volumes written on how overpowered DKs are so I won't get into it too much but it was seriously just not at all fun to fight against a DK for a while and it got to the point where it actually skewed PvP such that if the other side had more DKs they would probably win. Pallies just got a bit too much love in fixing ret and well I think every retadin took out his frustration at being weak for so long. Can't really blame 'em but hot damn was it annoying. Things have levelled out a bit but there are still some major lacks in PvP. Resilience just isn't cutting it enough and PvP was never my favorite thing to begin with so it doesn't take too much for me to not want to bother with it.
Wintergrasp: This area should be so amazing. Its got a lot of great elements, and epic battle for control of a keep between the warring factions. Unfortunately tenacity was obscenely mistuned for huge chunks of time and I swear every time I do Wintergrasp there is a new and different bug that has cropped up. The whole zone is buggy and laggy and well Blizzard is doing something about it. If by doing something about it you mean they reduced the daily rewards to weekly. I mean I suppose making the zone less desireable to be in does in fact reduce lag and improve performance but I'm pretty sure its the worst answer ever.
Arena: Fuck arena for all the times I got facerolled by DKs and fuck arena for class balance issues. Fuck arena for being a self feeding system where the best teams get the best gear making them more likely to stay the best teams. Fuck arena for being way too hyper competitive for me to stand much of a realistic chance in. And double fuck arena for having the coolest mount in the game as its super exclusive reward. Seriously look at this. That is really fucking cool and I will never ever ever get one because of how super exclusive they are making it. I had no issue with the netherdrakes because I could get my own slightly less cool netherdrakes but there is no other way to get a frostwyrm mount at all. Freaking lame.
Mounts: I'm pissed off about 4 other mounts also. I am an angry person apparently. One of them is more ironic than anything else. I've wanted the Attumen horse for a really long time. I just think its a really cool looking mount and I saw it drop one time and lost the roll by one point and since then I have been trying to get it. My wife has been helping me farm it and I have in turn been helping her farm one that she wants. The mount drops from Kara which is on a one week reset timer so once a week we head there. Before Ulduar came out and I was getting burned out on WoW my account expired for a bit and I didn't renew it right away. My wife is collecting mounts in general so she ran the instance without me since I would not be renewing my account before it would reset. Thats when it dropped. I have ran it for months hoping for it to drop and the one time I can't run it it drops. Its not the game's fault that RNG is swingy, I am not mad at my wife for getting lucky and getting it for herself but I am infuriated that I don't have the mount. I am no longer farming it just because it upsets me. Its something I really wanted but due to some bad luck no longer feel like pursuing. The other 3 mounts I am pissed about right now are the achievement mounts for the 10 and 25 man raids and the heroics. They removed the 10 and 25 man raids when Ulduar came out. They gave sufficient warning but it was still a surprise coming from their previous actions. I wanted to get one or both of these mounts. It wasn't a driving force in my life but it was something cool to work towards. Now that I can't I have even less reason to do the old raids. I have very little loot I can get out of them and now I don't even get anything if I do all the achievements. I just don't get how taking away reasons to play is a good idea for them. I would be a lot more likely to be trying to get these achieves if I got something for it. Same deal with the red proto drake for heroics. I haven't done a lot of the heroic achieves because I just can not beat Occulus. Its sort of absurd. The last fight you do from the back of a dragon which is actually really cool except for two things. 1) It ignores all of this great gear I have gotten since the first time I tried it. It is literally exactly as hard as it was the first time even though every other fight in the game is easier because I have gotten better gear and 2) The healer dragon SUCKS. In every fight you use a tank, some DPS and a healer. Its just the set up of the game. There are 3 dragon types you can choose for this fight and they fill those rolls. The healer dragon just isn't very good at all. In order to heal he has to syphon his own life force into someone else. Then he has to drain life off the bad dragon boss to recover it. Its slow, its inefficient, its difficult to target other dragons, its just plain annoying. I am sure that given the time and effort I could manage this fight but after two entire evenings of failing to kill a boss who according to their progression should be trivial to me I am no longer interested.
Addons: I use a number of addons to aid in my healing. Mostly because Blizzard's built in interface is completely awful for raid healing but also because I like to do things kinda my own way. Every time Blizzard adds a patch it tends to break the addons since they are developed by just random people and Blizzard makes no real effort not to do so. So this means every time there is a patch I need to go download new versions of a few different addons just to get the game back to the level of playability I am used to. Some however are no longer being updated so I have to make due without them. There is just something incredibly frustrating to me though about having to track down and install and set up 5 or 6 different things just to make WoW playable to me again. I mean we're not talking about addons I use because I like them, I'm talking about my healing addons which I basically need to raid (most raid leaders won't accept healers who don't have some sort of healing addon and with good reason) and which make it possible for me to cast my freaking totems. Seriously shaman totems are pretty poorly set up and so I have an addon to make them easy to cast. The most recent patch broke it so now I have to try to find another addon to use instead and I'm starting to just not care.
PUGs: I can't get into this without really going off but suffice it to say I hate morons and I hate morons even more when I am forced to group with them out of lack of other options.
There are so many little and big things annoying me about WoW right now and I'm just not sure its worth it to me anymore. Overall the whole of this expansion feels undertested and ill-conceived. A lot of good ideas don't seem to be playing out as expected and things which should be clever are just sort of annoying. Blizz all around seems to have dropped the ball on this one. </rant>
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World of Warcraft
Warning this blog entry is going to be very WoW intensive.
Note: Upon reading through a lot of this sounds really bitter and frankly thats sort of how I feel. I have put a lot of time, effort and money into this game so I'm very disappointed that my enjoyment of it has dropped off so drastically. shrug
I've been playing a lot less WoW recently and I'm not really missing it. I stopped the automatic renewal of my account, which technically means I canceled my WoW account but saying I canceled it feels likes I am overstating that fact. I haven't so much canceled it per se as set it up so that when my current time runs out I have to make a decision to keep playing and I'll decide for sure then if I'm still getting $15 a month out of it. When I was "canceling" my account it asked for my reason for cancellation. And to be honest I can't even begin to narrow it down to just one. WoW has so many facets to it and so many different ways you can enjoy the game its hard to say that I'm tired of all of it without getting into specific reasons why. So here is a list of many of the reasons I am enjoying WoW a lot less than I used to and why I may not be playing it soon when my account runs out.
Honestly the biggest reason WoW is less fun is because a lot of the people I know have quit playing. This is technically not Blizzard's fault that they quit playing but I feel like many of the same reasons that are making it likely I will quit led them to quit as well. I really like my guild and my guildmates and if it weren't for them I probably would have quit already but I know all of them through other games too so I'm leaning towards seeing them there instead of in WoW.
The raids this time around are kinda disappointing. I like the bit of Ulduar I have seen so far but it hasn't exactly blown me away. I raided a bit more seriously in the Burning Crusade and I enjoyed the raids there a whole lot more. Part of that probably has to do with when I started playing. By the time I hit 70 during TBC there were 8 raids currently available. A 9th came out while I was playing and I never even progressed far enough to enter it. In Wrath as it stands now there are 5 raids. However, some of them are, well, frustrating to say the least. Vault of Archavon is a PvP oriented raid and its for the most part pretty trivial. You go in and quickly get some gear and as long as the people you are with are ok at playing their class its basically a sure thing. The loot is way too good for how easy he is and its way too specific loot such that its possible for loot to drop that no one at all needs (tokens for classes you didn't bring with you) or loot that I personally am not excited about (PvP loot). Sartharion I actually for the most part enjoy. Its pretty cool killing a dragon and you can scale up the difficulty level by leaving more drakes up. Its infuriating that I still have yet to down Sarth with two drakes up but thats just a PUGing issue which I will get to more later. Malygos is a dick. Seriously, just a dick. Its a clever fight but it rolled out bugged. I'm not even sure if it is unbugged now and to be honest at this point I'm not clear what of the annoying bullshit moves in the fight are bugs versus which ones are just supposed to be hard. This has/had the potential to be a really fun fight but it just felt undertested. Also until Ulduar came out this was the hardest fight in the game so it wasn't easy to find groups for. Maly is the boss I most want to down personally right now but I just don't see it happening any time soon. Naxx on the other hand just blows. Having the premiere raid of a new expansion be an old raid thats just been retuned is pretty freaking lazy and well not that fun. I did not play WoW before TBC so I wasn't exactly running Naxx back in the day but I'm still frustrated on principle. Also Naxx is just plain really annoying. The place is pretty freaking huge to start with. Its got 15 bosses, none of which are skippable. The last boss of course has the best loot (can't really argue with that) and you have to kill 14 other guys with only ok loot in order to even fight him. Many of the fights are annoying and feature a lot of potential screwage. Thaddius is the MVP of the fuck Naxx team since its possible for one person being stupid to wipe the raid, and its possible for that one stupid person to keep wiping the raid until they learn to be smarter. Kel'Thuzad the big baddy himself is also a fight I find more infuriating than difficult. The first phase is basically trivial and lasts a few minutes. Just to make sure that it takes a longer time to get attempts in on him I suppose. During the actual fight a lot of rough stuff happens. Now I'm not saying the fight is too hard because its not, just that its really annoying. He mind controls people who then attack other people so you need to CC them in some way. Well usually two other things happen, 1) they don't get CCed and they put their daggers into the dick of a healer or 2) a hunter shoots them, a lot. Its not always a hunter mind you but it often is. Ice block is the bane of my existence. He freezes someone (and anyone within a certain range of them) and then you have about 3 seconds before they take more than their life total in damage. So if they do not receive at least one heal in that time they die. This infuriates me for multiple reasons, first of which is that I play a resto shammy. Resto shammies only have one instant heal and its a heal over time so its not necessarily enough to save them. Our main heal that we use is chain heal which heals one person and then jumps to people near them. If I cast it immediately after people get ice blocked it will heal them all and save everyone. If if takes me more than half a second to target the correct person and start casting it (and possibly stop casting whatever I was casting before) they all die. I can use a faster heal and save one person if its only one person hit by it but people aren't always super great at standing far enough apart and when it hits the melee its for sure going to be multiple people. Its just sort of a dick move and its particularly annoying to my particular class and role. So those are the raid options prior to Ulduar, one PvP raid that is a cakewalk, one dragon who is pretty fun but kinda quick and one clusterfuck of holy fucking Christ are we done yet. Oh and that clusterfuck is a retread. Oh and it never drops my boots, seriously how am I still wearing the same boots I got when I turned 80? Fucking hell.
Ulduar seems pretty ok so far. Some clever fights etc but man is it just not enough to hold my interest. First off its significantly harder (which is good) so its harder to find groups for. 10 man Ulduar which is easier to find groups for has almost nothing worth going after for me. I think I literally have 3 upgrades in the entire place. Now yes yes loot is not the only reason to raid etc. But for me its the biggest one. I like shinies, I want shinies, I try to get shinies. Ulduar 10 has a severe lack of shinies for me. Ulduar 25 has quite a few but no one seems to be running PUGs for it and I have no interest in running one myself right now. Plus some of the trash are just assholes. I don't have any particular dislike for Ulduar so much as its just not as good as it needed to be. I was pretty tired of WoW when I was waiting for Ulduar to hit and well so far its not making up for the rest of my issues.
Now there are all sort of other end game pursuits which could be taking up my WoW time when I'm not raiding and you know keeping me in the game interested and involved. They aren't and I'm gonna say why.
Professions: I have both Jewelcrafting and Herbing maxed on my shammy. Not the most synergistic set of professions but I enjoy them both in general. Herbing is more a way to make money than anything else and I do ok with it. I'm not exactly rolling in gold but I can acquire a bit pretty easily as needed. I'm not super fond of running around collecting digital herbs to make digital money but I'm fine with farming. Its not a favorite past time but I accept its part of the video game world and it makes sense etc etc. So no it doesn't excite me and I'm not like "oh wow I better log into WoW so I can have me a grand old time of flying around and picking herbs" but I'm not annoyed with it either. Jewelcrafting I am freaking pissed about. In Burning Crusade there were three ways to get the high end recipes. One was from increasing your reputation with factions, one was world drops and the other was instance drops. Reputation wasn't super hard to come by though it required a concerted effort (especially before they added them to SSO). Not every JC had all the reputation recipes but quite a few did. The world drops on the other hand were tough to acquire. Anyone could get them (JC or not) and then sell them for a pretty penny on the AH. In order for it to be profitable to buy a pattern you really had to cut a lot of that gem afterwards. I didn't like this and neither did a lot of people and Blizzard made an attempt to fix it in Wrath which we will get to. Instance drops were nice in that you had to run specific places to get the design. The ones from Sunwell were especially nice in that you could get some of the best loot in the game at the time and it was only available to JCs. In Wrath all that changed. The instance drops were no longer for actual gear you could use. They wanted to make it so no profession was a bunch better than any other so that people were picking professions they enjoyed rather than professions that gave them good loot. Now I know some people went to extremes dropping a profession they would rather have just to get a few more points but making every profession less powerful and less worth having in order to make them more "fun" just doesn't add up to me. They retained some profession exclusive stuff of course so the disparity still exists to some degree so it didn't really "fix" anything in my opinion but it did take away a percent of shinies from me. They eliminated most of the reputation patterns (and reputation gains from raids so far) and made the vast majority of them come either from heroic drops or dailies. The few reputation recipes were all with the major factions that weren't particularly hard to get rep for (except for Hodir who while not hard to get rep for sure does take ages). There are a handful of drops scattered throughout heroics but those were all guaranteed drops if you just kill the right boss so it didn't exactly take long before me and every other JC had them all. The vast majority of the patterns though were from the dailies. Every day you can do the JC daily which basically is kill some subset of guys until you get a thing. Combine the thing with some gems. Profit. Then you get a token from that. You can buy a pattern for 3 tokens. Now in TBC the main way to make a profit as a JC was to have a gem cut other people needed and cut those gems either for them directly for a tip or buy the raw gem, cut it, put it up on the AH. As such the people with the "best" gem cuts were in decently high demand. With the new system it takes 3 days to get the best gem cut, 3 more for the next best one and so on. As such within a few weeks basically everyone who had a character that was a JC had every important pattern. It completely crashed the market for gems and its very difficult to make money with JCing now. So their new system replaced an annoying world drop mechanic with a different mechanic that eliminates scarcity in a poor way. Then they added back in world drops for the recipes they forget to put in the first time. I'm not sure forgot is the right word but well they left them out and then decided oh hey we should add back in the worst part of what we had before so that our solution fixes nothing at all. Yeah. Oh and apparently they are making Dragon's Eyes color specific soon instead of prismatic. Just to you know make JC worse. Now I know a lot of people have a lot of complaints about how professions were handled in Wrath (I personally think enchanting got hit hardest) but JC is the profession that I have spent the most time with and enjoyed a lot and they messed it up pretty bad.
PvP: Death Knights and Paladins have ruined PvP for me. DKs are just OP. Sure they have been nerfed to fairly acceptable levels but for a while they were just curbstompingly OP. And no its not fun for me to have my face smashed in on my well geared character I have been building up for about a year by someone who just made their toon a few weeks ago. There have been volumes written on how overpowered DKs are so I won't get into it too much but it was seriously just not at all fun to fight against a DK for a while and it got to the point where it actually skewed PvP such that if the other side had more DKs they would probably win. Pallies just got a bit too much love in fixing ret and well I think every retadin took out his frustration at being weak for so long. Can't really blame 'em but hot damn was it annoying. Things have levelled out a bit but there are still some major lacks in PvP. Resilience just isn't cutting it enough and PvP was never my favorite thing to begin with so it doesn't take too much for me to not want to bother with it.
Wintergrasp: This area should be so amazing. Its got a lot of great elements, and epic battle for control of a keep between the warring factions. Unfortunately tenacity was obscenely mistuned for huge chunks of time and I swear every time I do Wintergrasp there is a new and different bug that has cropped up. The whole zone is buggy and laggy and well Blizzard is doing something about it. If by doing something about it you mean they reduced the daily rewards to weekly. I mean I suppose making the zone less desireable to be in does in fact reduce lag and improve performance but I'm pretty sure its the worst answer ever.
Arena: Fuck arena for all the times I got facerolled by DKs and fuck arena for class balance issues. Fuck arena for being a self feeding system where the best teams get the best gear making them more likely to stay the best teams. Fuck arena for being way too hyper competitive for me to stand much of a realistic chance in. And double fuck arena for having the coolest mount in the game as its super exclusive reward. Seriously look at this. That is really fucking cool and I will never ever ever get one because of how super exclusive they are making it. I had no issue with the netherdrakes because I could get my own slightly less cool netherdrakes but there is no other way to get a frostwyrm mount at all. Freaking lame.
Mounts: I'm pissed off about 4 other mounts also. I am an angry person apparently. One of them is more ironic than anything else. I've wanted the Attumen horse for a really long time. I just think its a really cool looking mount and I saw it drop one time and lost the roll by one point and since then I have been trying to get it. My wife has been helping me farm it and I have in turn been helping her farm one that she wants. The mount drops from Kara which is on a one week reset timer so once a week we head there. Before Ulduar came out and I was getting burned out on WoW my account expired for a bit and I didn't renew it right away. My wife is collecting mounts in general so she ran the instance without me since I would not be renewing my account before it would reset. Thats when it dropped. I have ran it for months hoping for it to drop and the one time I can't run it it drops. Its not the game's fault that RNG is swingy, I am not mad at my wife for getting lucky and getting it for herself but I am infuriated that I don't have the mount. I am no longer farming it just because it upsets me. Its something I really wanted but due to some bad luck no longer feel like pursuing. The other 3 mounts I am pissed about right now are the achievement mounts for the 10 and 25 man raids and the heroics. They removed the 10 and 25 man raids when Ulduar came out. They gave sufficient warning but it was still a surprise coming from their previous actions. I wanted to get one or both of these mounts. It wasn't a driving force in my life but it was something cool to work towards. Now that I can't I have even less reason to do the old raids. I have very little loot I can get out of them and now I don't even get anything if I do all the achievements. I just don't get how taking away reasons to play is a good idea for them. I would be a lot more likely to be trying to get these achieves if I got something for it. Same deal with the red proto drake for heroics. I haven't done a lot of the heroic achieves because I just can not beat Occulus. Its sort of absurd. The last fight you do from the back of a dragon which is actually really cool except for two things. 1) It ignores all of this great gear I have gotten since the first time I tried it. It is literally exactly as hard as it was the first time even though every other fight in the game is easier because I have gotten better gear and 2) The healer dragon SUCKS. In every fight you use a tank, some DPS and a healer. Its just the set up of the game. There are 3 dragon types you can choose for this fight and they fill those rolls. The healer dragon just isn't very good at all. In order to heal he has to syphon his own life force into someone else. Then he has to drain life off the bad dragon boss to recover it. Its slow, its inefficient, its difficult to target other dragons, its just plain annoying. I am sure that given the time and effort I could manage this fight but after two entire evenings of failing to kill a boss who according to their progression should be trivial to me I am no longer interested.
Addons: I use a number of addons to aid in my healing. Mostly because Blizzard's built in interface is completely awful for raid healing but also because I like to do things kinda my own way. Every time Blizzard adds a patch it tends to break the addons since they are developed by just random people and Blizzard makes no real effort not to do so. So this means every time there is a patch I need to go download new versions of a few different addons just to get the game back to the level of playability I am used to. Some however are no longer being updated so I have to make due without them. There is just something incredibly frustrating to me though about having to track down and install and set up 5 or 6 different things just to make WoW playable to me again. I mean we're not talking about addons I use because I like them, I'm talking about my healing addons which I basically need to raid (most raid leaders won't accept healers who don't have some sort of healing addon and with good reason) and which make it possible for me to cast my freaking totems. Seriously shaman totems are pretty poorly set up and so I have an addon to make them easy to cast. The most recent patch broke it so now I have to try to find another addon to use instead and I'm starting to just not care.
PUGs: I can't get into this without really going off but suffice it to say I hate morons and I hate morons even more when I am forced to group with them out of lack of other options.
There are so many little and big things annoying me about WoW right now and I'm just not sure its worth it to me anymore. Overall the whole of this expansion feels undertested and ill-conceived. A lot of good ideas don't seem to be playing out as expected and things which should be clever are just sort of annoying. Blizz all around seems to have dropped the ball on this one. </rant>
Its my birthday. Gifts are accepted in the form of Visa, Mastercard, and full frontal nudity.
I'm gonna try to blog. I've never been any good at it (mostly because I find my own life intolerably dull for the most part) but I'm gonna try to write up some of the stories and viewpoints I hear myself telling others the most often (or keeping to myself). I try very hard not to talk about politics until I know people well because I'm frankly an anarchist. I truly believe that the world would be a better place with no government at all. The problem is we can't picture it. If today government just went away the looting would start immediately and it wouldn't stop until we'd nuked ourselves into oblivion. People have spent so long controlled that heaps of them have lost the ability to control themselves and think for themselves. I think we should immediately get rid of all the total bullshit laws and let people live like that for a while and remember what personal freedom and decision-making are like. Let restaurants decide for themselves if people can smoke in them or not. Let people use drugs if they want to. For fuck's sake its not even legal to drive without a seat belt on in a ton of states. If people want to get thrown from a vehicle during an accident its their damn choice. There are tons of examples of people who survived accidents only because they weren't wearing a seat belt. Now in my opinion I think seat belts save more lives then they end and I personally wear mine all the time but not because its the law but because I think its the smart thing to do. I'm a rebel like that. I'm rambling an awful lot for my first real entry in any sort of blog in what is probably 4 years but I'm sick of it all. Our culture, economy and entire country is imploding around us and people are just starting to notice. Anyways maybe I'll actually write something focused next time but hey at least I actually updated it.
Well its been a while but I'm back. The biggest news for me is that I got married 
Other than that I'm busy as hell working two jobs to make ends meet. Time to poke around and see whats new around here.
Other than that I'm busy as hell working two jobs to make ends meet. Time to poke around and see whats new around here.
