May 2009 Entries
Another week, another show:
Van Hemlock Podcast (Ep 53): Too Teppo To Handle!
Indeed, a guest on the show this week; Matt of Limited Edition fame who took some time out of a busy Saturday lunchtime to join us to natter a bit about MMOs and gaming in general. Always nice to not have to solely listen to the Cohost droning on for an hour and if anything Matt has played even more MMOs than I have, and several that I've never gotten round to look at, including Chronicles of Spellborn and Priates of the Burning Sea. Good to get a bit...
So yes, there is the distinct possibility that a small degree of Free Realms might be happening in the long dark hours of the soul, between midnight and dawn. Its a harmless enough form of self-flagellation and I can control it! Seems I'm not alone in my shameful dirty furtive late night forays, and SOE have now proudly announced the Two Million subscribers customers members users registrants mark in a somewhat startlingly short time from launch. Well done there.
Despite being told not to, I figured I might analyse the game a bit; I'm a blogger, it's that or a picture of...
PvP Night this week in the Tuesday N00b Club, and rather than the usual two teams of our own guild beating on each other in the guild hall, I thought it might be fun to try Alliance Battles instead, which was probably ill-advised, thinking about it. That's the one with the three teams of four, versus their three teams of four and while your own team of four can be hand-picked and carefully balanced, you have no idea who the other eight are going to be, making overall coordination quite difficult. That still doesn't stop the occasional Pocket Rommel...
Our ongoing assault on The Shadows of Angmar saw a welcome leap forward last night, with the hapless band of Hobbington Crescent managing to complete Book IV and almost without realising it, plough right into Book V and get several chapters into that too. We'd been off the narrative trail a bit over these last few weeks, and it was nice to push onward with what I'm regarding as the Main Point of the whole adventure; the cleverly interwoven tale that is The Other Lord of the Rings, which as far as I'm able to make out, is...
A slightly sinister email in the inbox the other day, from CCP, who are doing their best to remove any excuse I might have about why I am not currently playing EVE Online:
"Our records indicate that the above character has a balance of 300 Million ISK or more. As part of our sixth anniversary celebration, we would like to extend a one-day reactivation offer to you so that you may have the opportunity to turn that ISK into game time using the ingame PLEX system. Simply log into Account Management and claim your 24 hour reactivation time."
And above that was...
Here we are again with another show, and back to the usual format of us talking for far too long about games news and our own gaming.
Van Hemlock Podcast (Ep 52): Not Seeing The Fornost for the Trees
A bit of an overrun there, at 1h 30m, but we were enjoying ourselves which is the main thing!
Toward the end, talk inevitably turns to the Eurovision Song Contest 2009, which by now has already happened. I found myself in the always awkward situation of having to explain what the entire spectacle was about to Americans last night, never an easy task,...
An excellent excursion with the Tuesday N00b Club last night, where it all went to plan, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and we Got The Job Done. Not that every week isn't like that of course, but it all seemed to flow quite well yesterday.
We went and had a crack at Arachni's Haunt, a two-level Eye of the North dungeon on the Tarnished Coast, which has a very spider-ish theme, all webs, eg sacks, pop-up and drop-down ambushes and a squad of hopped-up Asuras led by Commander Hixx. The whole place is rife with Aliens in-jokes including a flaming Asuran Staff...
As The Producer rather snippily points out, being too busy is no excuse, or something, so here goes with a change to the format here, and an attempt to see if I can get away from the whole 'A Blog Post Is A Thing Of Great Craftsmanship' mindset I seem to have which dictates that I can't even think about a post unless I have three hours to do so. Speed blogging then: somewhere between the Tweets and the Dissertations, there must be a happy medium. Here goes then...
I'm still doing these, of course:
Van Hemlock Podcast (Ep 51): Live from...