What ho! So much for the whole extended sabbatical idea then. I did start out okay - being just a Normal Gamer, or a close approximation thereof, for at least a fortnight! But the little essays and diatribes and pontifications started growing once more, along with a need to tell someone about it all, whose eyes don't glaze over at the mention of orcs and internet spaceships. So after just over a month away, its back to it. Aren't you lucky? I'm sure I've remarked before that one of the reasons I do this stuff is that if I don't regularly braindump this nonsense, it all backs up and causes all sorts of problems. A kind of colonic of the psyche, which I lovingly share with anyone who accidentally misclicks the entry they did want on Google...
A reasonably restive month though, as it went, with me giving up City of Villains and/or Heroes in the end. Bad timing mostly; by all counts, they've done quite a bit to alleviate my own reason for hanging the thing up; the post L25 XP Grind of it all. Recent patches have apparently smoothed the level curve somewhat for those mid to upper ranges - a good move if you ask me. Alas, it proved to be a little bit too late for me, and just before that was all patched in, the damage had been done and I lost interest a bit. Fickle, fickle Van Hemlock!
I suspect I'll be back for another go sooner or later though; while somewhat repetitive over the longer term, the basics of thwacking large numbers of evil/good* minions with massively over-the-top powers of darkness/light* was, and remains, a lot of fun in short bursts, and the setting remains pretty unique to date.
Guild Wars continues, with us Tuesday N00bs carrying on, mostly out of force of habit, to meet up and rampage every Tuesday. This has mostly been us either picking away at some of the more arduous PvE titles, and working our favourite alts through the bits we'd already done, and documented here. We did finally take the big step though, and actually make a guild; 'The Tuesday N00b Club [Tue]' and even bought a guild hall!
This opens up a previously unknown (to me) aspect of the game, the intra-guild 'Scrimmage' friendly PvP 'knockabout' matches, which is about the nearest thing the game has to a straight "/duel" command, allowing me and my regular cohort to have impromptu deathmatches, in a variety of different settings, team make-ups and 'house rules'. More on that another time, but it really is an utterly different (and infinitely more pleasant) thing to the Random Arenas. Having tried a few games, it quickly becomes apparent just how much of my Mesmer skillbook is useless and/or wasted on just PvE alone. Look out for some more PvP focused dabblings in the Guild Wars category soon!
Second Life is still on the revised Current Monsters list. What can I say? It's a game that pays me to play it, which speaks volumes about my character, or lack thereof. I do have a few friends in there though, whom I'd miss if I left entirely. These friends aren't "Like Us" however, in that I'd have a hard time selling, say, EVE Online or Everquest 2 to them as replacement virtual worlds in which to spend their spare time. Different thing altogether. I've not built anything worthy of note in months though.
Still picking away at EVE Online. Low-sec life has proven to be both better and worse than Empire, for a variety of reasons, and my interests have changed again. I'm currently going through a Mercantile Phase in there now; I've pulled back to Empire and am keenly curious to learn (and profit by), all the more elaborate recent skills in the 'Trade' category; Wholesale, Procurement, Day Trading and such. Plenty of stuff to blog about there, so again, more later.
The big new addition since I saw you last, is Tabula Rasa. After years of anticipation, months of beta concerns, and weeks of post-release 'meh', I'd sort of lost interest in the whole thing and wandered off, as I do. Then I managed to somehow come at myself sideways while I wasn't looking while in a game shop and managed to ambush myself into buying a copy, quite without expectations, or fervour, or any kind of agenda at all - a true impulse buy.
Quite enj...
Actually, why don't I ramble at you about it in person?
The Van Hemlock Podcast: Ep1 - In Which Introductions Are Made, Some News Items Are Heckled Upon, A Blogger Ponders The Value Of Celebrity Game Devs, A Light Entertainer is Impersonated Badly, and A Frank Admission Is Made Concerning Duran Duran.
Yes, in a somewhat over enthusiastic spirit of "Everyone else is - how hard can it be?", myself and a close friend put heads to microphones and had a crack at this hip new Podcasting Craze that's sweeping the land!
We're both getting something useful out of it, I think. For me, its therapy. I've never been fond of the sound of my own voice, eschewing any kind of online voice chat while gaming. Perhaps this will help - a kind of Shock Therapy; I don't like speaking in public - how better to manage that, than by broadcasting to the entire goddamned interweb! Bonus Van Hemlock faction points if you can place my accent, because I sure can't!
On my co-host's part, I think this is providing an opportunity to actually use a great deal of the audio hardware and software that he's been accumulating for no previously apparent purpose, and also to teach himself a variety of audio editing and production skills. I just ramble into a mic - he's the one doing all the levels and filters and cutting and pasting and other knob-and-dial related producing. Head over to his blog with any technical questions or comments!
As mentioned, there's no real plan or schedule to this experiment, but we're sort of aiming at a more or less fortnightly effort of about an hour each time, and are more than happy to take suggestions for segments from you, dear reader listener, up to and including; "MY EARS! SHUDUPSHUDUPSHUDUP!"
I doubt the podcasting will replace the blog at all - they seem quite different sorts of thing to me, so look out for the usual kinds of gibberings here too. New slightly different logo! Same halfarsed whimsical posting!
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Ep 1 Music:
Karooshi - Life in a Tube
Wicked Allstars - Yesterday
Planet Boelex:
Diciassette Anni
I met a girl with butterfly wings
Swamp Gas
Beaver Tactics
Swamp Gas Pt 2
Solar Cycle - Galactic
Unknown Quantity - Mr Gelatine
All our music is grown from organically sustainable musicians who all seem to be selling their own stuff online. If you've ever felt that the RIAA is a somewhat sinister outfit, would like to hasten it's downfall legally, and quite like some of the esoteric types of music we've thrown into the podcast to mask our vacant foam head-flapping somewhat, then do have a look here, here and here, online stores that are happy for you to try before you buy, and pay pretty much all of the cash to the artists themselves.
All music is used under some kind of Creative Commons not-for-profit attribution type of licence thing. I'll have to find out which one for next time!