The Franco-Taiwanese Alliance

Ryan and I beat Gears of War (on Hardcore) on Saturday.  It was pretty satisfying to finally get through it, after five or so short and hard-to-plan sessions.  Co-op gaming is so much harder when you live two hours apart!  But it was worth it… all the chainsawing, all the active reloading, the sniping and the shotgunning, all the shoulder-clapping and walking-it-off… for a good, solid manly nod at the end.  Ugggghhhh.  I don’t think I’m going to venture much into Insane difficulty, unless I’m feeling really bored and masochistic one of these days… I’m completely sure that I’ll get creamed.

Alice and I have been playing Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance on the trusty PS2 lately, courtesy of Eric.  Yet ANOTHER dungeon crawling RPG to get through.  I love playing games with her, though, so it’s worth every moment of slogging through thousands and thousands of enemies for experience and loot.  Hit points!  Mana!  We haven’t been playing much WoW, what with the past couple of weeks containing many, many other activities, but it’s still on the chopping block.  She’s currently playing around with her Troll hunter, Mariel, at level 12.

Also on the action RPG front, Game Night with the guys tonight went off with only a minor networking hitch on my end.  Titan Quest: Immortal Throne is serving us very well, and we snagged another handful of levels tonight and finished off the first act at around level 18 or 19.  I honestly don’t remember, mostly because our post-game debriefing was dominated by oohing and ahhing over the super-powerful artifact that we’d managed to craft, and wondering how to decide who’d get to use it.  My character, She-Legolas, would love to have it, but she two-shots most things as it is, so a huge damage boost, which is the artifact’s main benefit, would only be adding fuel to an already roaring bonfire.

I need to get through Dark Messiah.  I need to get through it so that I can get to work on all the other tons of games that I have to finish playing.  I have yet to even finish FFXII, and have been meaning to do so for four months now.  That, combined with other as-yet-untouched pieces like Neverwinter Nights 2 and SSX Blur,  unfinished jaunts like Need for Speed Carbon and Contact, and eager beginnings like Twilight Princess, and I’ve got work to do… to top it off, I borrowed Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2, and God Hand from Ryan and Dani.  It just never ends!  But I have a terrible habit of not finishing games, losing patience with them and whatnot, and dammit, I need to break that for good.

The night started well, with Ryan, Andy and I all ready to go at around 6:30PM.  Brandon was out due to a meeting for work that he got roped into, so it was just the three of us.  We spent a good chunk of time on our usual aimless discussion about what the hell to play (Note to self: advance preparation!), and finally settled on good ol’ Warcraft 3 again.  Once in our Battle.net channel, we decided to go with Defense of the Ancients, instead of a normal skirmish.

It’s probably worth noting that I suck at DotA.  Precise timing and micromanagement are not my strong points, and both skills are heavily required in DotA, as much or more so as plain WC3.  Not only this, I’m not very familiar with the game or the custom heroes involved, meaning that I have very little information to go on to win the large-scale rock-paper-scissors battle of hero matching.

Ryan stuck with the Dwarven Sniper for all the games we played, and did fine.  He usually got the most kills of the three of us, due to the Sniper’s long-range, high-damage, single-target Ultimate.  I didn’t really keep much track of Andy, and all I know is that he played Rikimaru during the last game.  I started out with Lifestealer, since I remembered him being cheap goodness before (fast attacks + life stealing).  But in the first game, I got annihilated over and over by the AI hero I was facing… The Oblivion.  So, of course, from then on I used The Oblivion.  We won one match like that, but then for our third and final, we went up against the bitch from hell… Luna Moonfang, the Moon Rider.  She spanked me like I was a naked executive at an out-of-town whorehouse, over, and over, and over.  “Frustrating” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

After our ignominious defeat in that game, Andy had to leave to minister to a friend, which left Ryan and I… with no idea what to play next.  We had tried for weeks, unsuccessfully, to get a full game of Supreme Commander in, and we finally succeeded last week.  I guess it had left me sated for the moment (damn, SupCom gets epic!), because I didn’t feel like playing it anymore.  Then, between grocery runs being necessary, installations taking forever, and patch downloads taking several times forever, the rest of the night was whittled away by the decision to go for Battlefield 2142… self-pwnage approved.

The last scab on my hand fell off last night, meaning that except for the fact that there are two large patches on my palm where the skin is two layers less thick than on the rest of my hand, I am pretty much healed.  Well, that and the fact that my shoulders and wrist are still giving me shit.  Okay, okay, guys, I promise I’ll never crash again!

I’ve been spending a fair chunk of my time working on a temp job that Brandon was good enough to hook me up with.  It’s a pretty sweet deal… highish part-time hours (or more if I want it) at a higher pay rate than I got at my previous crap job, and the best part is that I can work from home, as well as any time during the day that I want to.  Thanks, B!

In gaming news,  Alice and I have returned to Azeroth after a month-long absence.  I thought she’d be itching to play our existing low-20s characters, but instead we started a pair of Night Elves, a priest for her and a druid for me.  To be fair, I was engaged in an epic battle in Supreme Commander when she wanted to start playing–hey, Ryan and I must hold off the forces of Supreme AI, for great justice!–so she started the priest on her own.  Anyway, druids certainly aren’t shamans, but I’m enjoying my return to the hybrid lifestyle.  I still miss my Tauren shaman on Silvermoon (now moved and still not played)!  Spells, buffs, healing, whacking things with big sticks… all in the name of protecting my priest, who insists on being a tank. 

On the chopping block today:

• Work
• Gym with Alice
• Twilight Princess

I should be doing significant things with my brain, my words, and my time.  I could be writing about Serbian elections, or the impossibility of reconciling love and practicality, or even about Oscar nominations.

Instead, all I want to do is play Bookworm Adventures.

Since reinstating my World of Warcraft account in December, after about a year and a half away from the game, I’ve mostly been having semi-nightly sessions of an hour or so each with Alice.  She’s somewhat in love with the game, helped a bit by the pets you can get: she’s a dwarf hunter, and currently has a bear pet (”Pooh”), as well as switching between a little kitten and a prairie chicken from the secret chicken quest as non-combat pets.  While we play, she’s always cooing at Pooh, telling him what a good bear he is whenever he kills something… etc.  It’s absolutely adorable.

Anyway, most of my playtime has been with her.  She’s got her female dwarf hunter (marksmanship), and I’ve got a male gnome mage (fire spec), both 17 right now.  Today I spent a couple of hours while she’s been in class on catching my “main” up a bit.  She’s a human rogue (assassination), and I’ve spent very little time with her, compared to how much I used to play before I quit the first time.  Mainly I just bounce around with her any time I have a hankering for some grinding, pounding out quests, nabbing loot, and collecting herbs and leather to mail off to the other two characters.  I’d forgotten how enjoyable it was to just do some mindless grinding.  WoW, I’m glad you’re back in my life, even if it’s in a limited manner!