July 2009 Entries
Para-gons, para-gons, rah rah rah!
The first dress rehearsal of a very ambitious and frankly quite dubious project in Guild Wars this week, the 'Parateam of Win Hard Mode Marathon'. If this isn't a gimmick team, I don't know what is, but the basic premise seems to be that the whole Tuesday N00b Club rolls up Paragon characters in a spare slot and attempt to single-class steamroller the entire Nightfall Campaign in Hard Mode. In any other game, this would be madness; such flagrant defiance of the classic Tank-Healer-DPS composition should get you nailed to the floor the first time...
It's one with a special guest!
Van Hemlock (ep61): feat. Shawn Schuster!
Some News Rumination and What Were Playing types stuffs, with Shawn sometimes getting a word in edgeways!
Shawn can more usually be found doing all sorts of newsroom shouting at Massively.com, and by extension hosting Massively Speaking, as well as surviving the apocalypse on Through the Aftermath, and even has a blog here!
It's nearly time for the great Van Hemlock Summer Roadshow 2009! Mostly because the Producer's studio is now so full of junk that its getting difficult to even enter the room, we'll be out and about doing on location podcasts...
As extensively rambled about in the previous podcast, I’ve been playing Rappelz for a fortnight, among other things. I should probably have been logging my hours, but I’d guess at 10-12 hours of play over the fortnight, mostly Sunday Afternoons and Wednesday Evenings, with the odd half hour elsewhere. I’ll dredge up the old format for another season.
You can have a go yourselves here:
Rappelz: Epic VI Prologue: Navislamia: Downloads (1.4GB)
It’s entirely free to play, and wants merely an email address. It hopes you will spend money on gPotatos at a later date though!
High Priest Emmanuel always meant well, but attempts...
A pleasingly round number up there, and no end in sight:
Van Hemlock (Ep 60): Jumpgate and Rapellz
Some news, as is customary, and our first report-back session of the new on-air Operation Cheapseats. I was playing gPotato's Rappelz, which can be found here:
Rappelz
And Jon's fortnight consisted of the original Jumpgate by Netdevil, which can be found here:
Jumpgate
(My own previous thoughts from early 2006 are here: Op Cheapseats: Jumpgate, but I'm sure Jon will elaborate on his own more recent visit over on www.chimpsinspace.com soon.)
I'll do a proper Op Cheapseats style post further expanding on my thoughts about Rappelz shortly, but the...
19:10 Log in. 'Empire Need' says Vanu, so pick my VS Engineering specialist. (Eng, CE, Fortif. Eng) Only on for a bit, so pick Instant Action. Am spawned to a heavy base defence already underway at Tech Plant Seth, on Solsar.
19:12 TR have the western Air Tower and are all over the ridges W, SW and S, with snipers, strikers (tracking anti-veh rocket launcher) and those sodding great robots with tank cannons for arms. Adjoining base tower, E, is still friendly. Our courtyard is still unbreached but the wall tops are dangerous now and all the wall turrets are toast....
Some people just don't know how to shut up, it seems. More here! Van Hemlock (Ep 59): Not Expecting The Spanish Inquisition More meanderings through the news and an assortment of games, and then a somewhat hectic interrogation session, as exhibiting a staggering amount of laziness, I ask you the listener to ask me and Jon a Twitter Question, with anarchic results. Shocking! Join us for a massively overrun 'hour' of banter, ill-considered opinion and unadulterated nerd obsession!
The Other Fellowship Of The Ring made some welcome progress this week, managing to finally deal with our old nemesis from a few weeks back, Nazgul #7, or possibly #5 - they all look the same to me. Vol 1, Book 5, Chapter 8 was probably the most difficult encounter so far and took two goes in the end, with the increasingly common early 'Recon Wipe' damping our initial spirits a bit.
Clearly a bit of SERIOUS BUSINESS, we ended up pulling out all the stops for the ultimately successful run and it involved a large number of consumables; shield spikes...
Another self-promotional podcast-type post, with another podcast link on it:
Van Hemlock (ep58): Cheapseats
With some news and a whole new feature to replace the Topic Bit!
Speaking for myself, I do worry that I've become a bit comfortable in my online gaming, with my three main choices (Guild Wars, City of Heroes, Lord of the Rings Online) becoming very fixed things which I don't see myself getting bored with any time soon. Not that there is anything essentially wrong with being a loyal repeat customer of a service you like and enjoy - quite the reverse in fact! But it would be dishonest...