Via visits Veeshan's Peak

Well Friday and Saturday night Via Solara ventured into Veeshan's Peak for the very first time. We were able to defeat Kluzen the Protector (1-Pull), Elder Ekron (2-Pulls) and Druushk (3-Pulls). Huge Congratulations to Lyssette, Mariska and Shaides who earned Mythical Weapons.

It was very encouraging to see that we could take on a new zone with such success. There were a few times we lost players due to crashes to character select. The zone seems to have a few bugs to it. But overall I had a blast. I look forward to visiting the zone again. Hopefully looking for a Mythical weapon of my own.

EQ2 update

Well since returning to EQ2, I've been having a blast. I set goals to level at least 2 of my characters to 80 by the end of the summer and possibly a 3rd. These goals have fallen behind somewhat because of a particularly busy last 2 weeks at work.

Corwin should finally make level 80 either this week or most likely next week.

I started my collection of shards for the heroic armor set. Only 34'ish shards to go.

This week I run my first event since moving to Via Solara. I'm leading a brave group into the Scion of Ice on Thursday.

I've started to research what I need to do for the Guardian Epic and Mythical. It shouldn't take too long to get the Epic, but the Mythical may take a bit longer.

Happy belated 4th of July everyone.

Origins Gamefair 2009

Origins, is a gaming convention held each year in Columbus Ohio that primarily caters to Pen & Paper RPG's, Boardgames, Miniature games and Tradable Card games.

Due to R/L commitments I was only able to go on Saturday. Unfortunately no games for me this year. I did get to walk the vendor hall to see what was around. Lots of discounts on old RPG's and even some miniatures. Nothing really caught my eye though. But I did pick up a Chuck Norris joke book. :D

My son an I did get to check out the Battletech pods. If you don't know what these are, they are a pod that you sit in with a speed control on your left and a joy stick on your right. You are totally enclosed as if you were in the cockpit of a mech. You battle other players, there was probably a dozen pods at the show. Even though the graphics are highly outdated it's a very fun game.

The attendance at the con was probably down from last year, but not by a large amount. Hopefully next year I will be able to schedule some time to actually play some games.

Rock Band: The Beatles

Wow this looks to be a must get for me, even though I have Guitar Hero: World Tour. I'm a huge Beatles fan and rumors have it that I can use my GH:WT instuments with this! Here's their cinamatic trailer.

Star Wars: The Old Republic Cinamatic Trailer

Wow beautifully done trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Back in EQ2 and having a blast!

I re-subscribed to EQ2 and am having fun. I joined my guild for a Protector's Realm raid on Friday and it was a total blast! Something that LOTRO never really produced for me.

Thinking of betraying my Guardian to Beserker. Still mulling that over.

Should be some good times ahead!

New System (Update)

Well I received the parts for my new system on Thursday, May 21st. Put everything together and installed Vista Home Premium 64. Initially I had issues with those evil "Blue Screens of Death".

But after checking online I found that some other people were having trouble getting the memory I bought to work at 1333 on other boards. The solution was to turn them down a notch to 1066. I did this and haven't had any memory issues since. This could be an issue with the memory or an issue with the MB itself.

Here's the main guts of the system:

AMD Phenom II X4 810 2.6GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Processor
EVGA 512-P3-N841-AR GeForce 8800GTS (G92) 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)
GIGABYTE GA-MA770T-UD3P AM3 AMD 770 ATX AMD Motherboard

So far, I've played LOTRO and CoD: World at War. Both performed flawlessly. LOTRO at maximum settings was getting 45-60 FPS. While I didn't get the FPS while playing CoD, at maximum there were no problems and the game ran very smoothly.

I'll install more games and test out the performance. But overall I am very happy.

Turbine's unannounced MMO?

I've been seeing mumblings online that Turbine, Inc. the developer of Asheron's Call, Dungeon and Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online has been secretly working on a yet unannounced MMO.

While there is no information on what the MMO will be about, a few things have surfaced.

In Jan. '09 there was a job listing on the Turbine site for a micro-transaction and e-commerce manager. When the community of their current MMO's started to balk at the idea that micro-transactions would be used in their current MMO's, Sapience, a LOTRO community manager, replied;

"We know the recent job listing has caused a bit of a stir, but please be aware that this posting is for an unannounced future project."

Source: ShackNews

Odds are this MMO will be developed for the console market. According to an interview with Adam Mersky, Director of Communcations at Turbine, from Aug. '08;

"We’re looking at creating, hopefully, the first MMO that really works. Right now we’re looking at if for the 360 and the PS3…We’re not going to rush to be first so-to-speak, but clearly we’re leading the way. We’ll ship something when it’s ready, and when it’s something that’s going to work on the platform. Clearly there are a lot of hurdles. We’ve been working for awhile, plowing through the majority of them, and we’ve got a lot of work still to do."

Source: Destructoid

Could Turbine be bringing one of their existing MMO's to the console or are they starting something totally new? Could we see an Asheron's Call or LOTRO on the 360 or PS3? I'll keep an eye out for future information on this project.

Star Wars: The Old Republic (Update)

Well the people at Bioware have put out more information on their upcoming MMO. So far I really like where they are going with this. Here's a little bit about the worlds they are developing.

http://www.swtor.com/media/vidcasts/devdispatch002

System Update.

Well it looks like one of my 7950 GX2's went south on my system. After taking it out and running with a single card, my system seems a little more stable. I took 1GB of the RAM out earlier as a memtest showed errors after a crash. Later this week I may put it back in and test it again.

I ordered my new rig Saturday from Newegg.com and I should get it by the end of the week. It's not top of the line, but it should perform better than my last system. Here are some highlights of what I got.

AMD Phenom II X4 810 2.6GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Processor
EVGA 512-P3-N841-AR GeForce 8800GTS (G92) 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)
GIGABYTE GA-MA770T-UD3P AM3 AMD 770 ATX AMD Motherboard

There's room to upgrade this system later on to a faster CPU and more memory. The video card is a little outdated, but should perform better than my old setup.

I'll update my blog after I get everything running.

On a side note I've installed Windows 7 on a VMWare image for testing. So far it looks fairly nice, but with my limited RAM, it's causing some issues. I'm hoping to give a review of it in the coming months. I may even try to load it on the new system.

Computer Woes

Well it looks like my outdated PC is going to need some work. Blue Screens of death started cropping up and it appears that some of my memory may have went south. Hard drive is running hot, which may be contributing to my system issues.

Time to clean out all the dust bunnies and look into replacing whatever has gone bad.

LOTRO is going well, I actually hooked up with a few members of Explorers of Legend and have joined the guild they are in. The guild is named Explorers of MiddleEarth and they seem like nice people.

Sons of Numenor

Well after jumping back into my MMO habit, this time LOTRO, I've been mostly solo'ing and slowly getting tired of not having any human interaction.

Having researched a number of guilds on the Landroval sever, I've finally found a group of players that seem to be active and are very friendly. The Sons of Numenor is a casual guild that is rather young, but growing quickly.

Benjimir, the leader of the kinship, posted an advert in chat one night when I was out trying to complete a quest. He was very friendly when I inquired about their website and I quickly left it at that until the next day when I could do a little research.

So far, everyone seems very nice and I expect to make their kinship my home for the forseeable future.

I've added their website link to the Online Addictions links on the left side of the page.

LOTRO Update

Been playing LOTRO a bit more. The graphics and atmosphere of the game is really excellent! At night the stars are spectacular and during the day the clouds are very life-like.

At first I tried out the new Rune Keeper class (mage class), this class was fairly fun to play and even with the light armor I didn't get beat up too bad. Decent DPS with some decent healing capabilities make this a good class to play, at least up to 12th level where I decided to check out the Hunter class. I expect that the combination of DPS and healing makes this class an asset to any group.

The Hunter class is pure DPS and I'm having a blast with my him. When solo'ing most of the mobs are near death or dead by the time they get to me. This makes the light armor not a problem as the mobs are quickly dead before they can take you down. Sometime after 10th level the class gets the skill to use medium armor. I expect that this will come in handy as I level and run into tougher opponents.

Last night, I finally got into my first group. I was blindly invited into a group of 3-4 people in Chetwood last night. At first I was a bit sceptical about the group as they were talking much. I asked what was up and stated I was game to do just about anything as I didn't know my way around much. After killing some wolves and bandits, it was suggested that we hit the borrow downs to kill some undead. I've wandered into this area before while exploring and was awestruck when the atmosphere changed to very ominous and dark.

Unfortunately I had to log before going with the group. My daughter needed to do some school work on my computer. By the end of the night my hunter made 11th or 12th level and I had a blast with the group.

Been busy

Work has been pretty busy, started working with our support staff and it has kept me crazy busy. Were now starting to port some of our 16 bit apps to 32 bit and a few VB6 apps to .Net. All is good.

I expect to start playing more LOTRO shortly. Been neglecting my addiction for some time now. :)

Now that Spring is here, I have gotten my Honda Rebel serviced and am waiting for warmer weather to start driving it daily.

Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

I just found the game on G4TV.com. Looks dark and lots of action. It's a FPS that's coming out for the PC, Xbox 360, PS3. It's definately on my watch list. Enjoy the trailer.

Farewell EQ2, Hello LOTRO

I've been playing EQ2 off/on (mostly on) since it came out in 2004. And it has been a very fun and exciting ride. I've met many people in game that I consider friends and will miss adventuring with them.

I've hung up my EQ2 boots for now as I cannot bring myself to log in. I'm severely burnt out on EQ2 and have decided to give LOTRO another try.

When I first tries LOTRO (2007), I exclusively solo'd. Solo'ing can only keep me interested in a game for a very short while and I quickly gave up on it. This time around I plan on finding a large casual guild on a high population server.

An online friend suggested that I try using xfire to keep in touch with them and I'll definately look into doing so.

Happy hunting all and I hope to see people in game.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Many, including myself, are eagerly awaiting Bioware's highly anticipated MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic (SW:TOR). Bioware had a huge success with the Neverwinter Nights series and the Knights of the Old Republic series, but this is their first attempt at a MMORPG.

Many players of the Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) MMO are very excited to see what Bioware and Lucas Arts have planned. SWG is set during the Galactic Civil War between the Empire and the Rebels. SW:TOR is set 3,000 years before the rise of Darth Vader, a time when the struggle between the Sith and the Jedi is front stage.

Your choices and actions in the game will steer your character towards the dark or light side and affect how your game progresses.

An added, and very interesting, feature of SW:TOR is the ability to have companion non-player characters that will add a new dimension to MMO's. These NPC's add to the story arc and allow you to experience a richer world.

Personally I am very excited about this MMO and I hope that Bioware can deliver a game that will live up to the expectations of the fanbase. This game has a huge potential and many cannot wait to get started.

Sorry I couldn't find a way to turn off the autoplay. :(
Video Documentary #1 to wet your lips. Enjoy!

Asheron's Call 2 dies again

Turbine, Inc maker of the Asheron's Call series of MMORPG's issued a cease and desist order to Lost Company late last year. Lost Company was in the process of creating emulation software that would allow fans of Asheron's Call 2 to once again visit the world of Dereth in AC2.

This effectively halts their efforts and I expect that no futher work will be done. It's very sad day for AC2 fans that were looking forward to this.

From: www.lost-company.info

We have received a Cease and Desist order from Turbine. All progress is being halted on the Emu until further notice. We are looking into our legal recourse. Turbine is doing what it feels is necessary to protect their own interests. We disagree and feel that this emu is in their best interest. Please refrain from starting a flame war until you hear from us!

Notice: All links to downloadable stuff and the emu are disabled from now. You can still use the forums for discussion.

Thanks,

Your Pelops Dev Team!

My Belated review of Age of Conan.

Well I picked up Age of Conan when it was release last year. I played if off and on for a couple weeks. So this just scratches the surface of the game.

Observations:
1. Having made several characters, trying out the different classes, the classes seemed fairly well balanced for PvE. Granted I didn't get a very far into the game to comment if this is the case at higher levels. But overall each class was interesting and fun enough.
2. Quests are pretty lack luster. Nothing that really sets them above the quests in any other game. From my limited experience, most of your exp was gained by questing.
3. Combat was different from most MMO's and reminded me somewhat of the combat system in Dungeons and Dragons Online. To me this was a plus for the game. Often combat becomes very dull and a burden in most games.
4. The player base seemed a bit offstandish and not as outgoing and friendly. This made it difficult to get groups and enjoy the game. To me a game is only as good as the people you play with. The guild I joined was a bit disorganized and I never got the invite to the guild in game.

Overall the game has potential and even though I have cancelled my account, I consider possibility of re-subscribing as generally good.