Somehow after that we ended up all the mall, and ended up getting wax castings done of our hands.  Mine, in typical Kennedy fashion, is making quite a lewd gesture; while hers is holding a blue rose, while signing “I Love You” in American Sign Language.  They’re very cool, and I’m surprised at how cheap the damn things were.  The dead head hippie chick that took the castings was quite fun too.  I guess I’ll have to check out Third World again sometime, even though I’m sure last time I went there to deliver, they didn’t give me an acceptable tip.

But the surprise for the day is Danyale playing World of Warcraft.   She rolled a warrior a few days ago, and played for a few hours before she had to go.  The first thing she did today when we got home, is log on to my account, and play her character.  I wanted to watch a movie, and in fact had Titanic in mind, but watching her play and be happy is enough entertainment for me.  She’s been going at it for a good four hours now, and is still camped in front of my computer.

It’s even more entertaining when she dies, she gets kind of mad, and starts heading back to get her corpse. I remember when I first started playing games like these, and I would get almost to the point where I’d want to hit walls, and shatter keyboards when I died.  Those were much younger times, and over the last few years, I’ve got a lot better about those things.  Danyale doesn’t have that problem, and it seems that she’s really enjoying zoning out and just playing around in a fantasy world.  Perhaps she needs a little bit of fantasy play to make her feel a little better.  I remember there was a time where I needed such things myself, and I was about her age when I needed them.

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I’v switched back to EVE Online.  I played it before, but only for a few weeks during a 14 day trial Dustin hooked me up with back in the day.  But, I’m paying for it now.  And I’m happy with it at the moment—it serves its purpose as a time sink well.

Skills in EVE train in real time.  For example one of my skills will take two days to train, and another will take 17 days.  Seventeen days!  That’s a friggin’ long time!  But if I wait for that 17 days, I’ll be a bad ass mother fucker!

I originally was going to be a miner.   But mining is boring!  Industrial ships are boring, and make me want to stab my eyes out with a dull sharpie.  But kids, the real fun is in the big huge battleships.  Yes, big huge battleships to kill people with!  And I’ll have the hugest god damn ship, just give me time.

Instead of mining, I’m going to be a pirate.  I’m going to kill those idiots who wander too far off the beaten path, or ransom them instead of killing them.  Anyhow, it should be fun.  One of the most appealing thing about EVE, not only just its size, but it’s the ammount of social interation in the game.  And it’s almost totally player driven.   Armchair captains have carved empires out in space.  They fight anyone who enters their space, and pod kill them so they lose skills.

Anyhow, piracy does sound kind of entertaining at the moment.  Now when I ‘arrrgh’ I can really mean it

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Yesterday, Brad McQuiad, the creator of Vanguard, and President of Sigil Games made an announcement on a newly created Sony Online Entertainment forum.  This announcemnt basically confirmed the rumors circulating around the Vanguard sites that SOE would be forced to step in, and take over control of Sigil to get the game back on track.  In fact, SOE has a legal obligation to shareholders to do this, in the hope that they can recoup the investment they have already made towards the game.

Now, what hasn’t been made public is the extent of this ‘takeover’.   Will Sigil Games still exist as a company this time next month?  Or will SOE simply provide programming assistance to them, and hope that is enough?  These are the unanswered questions that everyone who play’s Vanguard wants to know.

Vanguard shipped early, due to lack of finances.   Essentially it was a sink or swim type of choice; either go broke trying to get the game ready, or release early with bugs and half-completed content.  Sigil Games chose the later.   This was the beginging of the end.

When release day for Vanguard came, I rushed to GameStop before work so I could get a copy.  All that night, all I could think about was getting home and trying this awesome game I had been waiting for, and counting the months til its release.   I wasn’t in any of the Beta tests, but I followed it from its website, and other game review sites.  Sigil promise us a world that none of us had seen since the original Everquest.

They promise a challenging game—a game that you could feel achomplisment in.  This was to be no World of Warcraft, for it was to be hardcore.  We were told of a massive world, with no teleportation systems, where you had to ride your horse or take a boat  to get to your end destination.  And most importantly, we were told that this would be just like the old Everquest, where we would try to kill the dragon fifteen times, and finally slay him, and feel so damn estatic when it happened.

None of it rang true.  It was all a lie.  Vanguard, which is build on the Unreal Engine, runs like crap! Anti-aliasing doesn’t exist on it.  My old Geforce 6800 Ultra video card barely gets 30 frames per second, and I have to have the graphics near low to get it to play.  But I could excuse poor graphics, and poor preformance, if only there was compelling content.

But there is none.  I fall through the world when walking on mountains.  I repeat the same quest over and over, killing the same 14 mobs for 3% of a level every nine minutes.  I’m forced to harvest plants and skin animals endlessly in the chance of a skill up.  There are dungeons I’ve walked into, at least I think they were supposed to be dungeons, where there was nothing.  No monsters, no loot, just emptiness.

All of this could be excused.  We were told to ‘keep the faith’ at all costs.  After the first month, when time for resubscription came up,  we were told that it was going to be a double xp weekend, to make up for bugs and losses.  Oh, and it’s going to start the day after you need to resubscribe! Sadly, it was a thinly veiled attempt to get more cash out of the community.  And we fell for it, even when bitching and pointing fingers.   We all kept playing.

I leveled up six levels that weekend.  I leveled up another four more the next weekend, when the same thing happened again, supposedly due to someone forgetting to send a mass e-mail out).  So we leveled faster than we planned on, thats fine, whatever, we can deal with that.   But we leveled too quickly, and found there wasn’t very much to do at higher levels, because none of the content had been finished.

There were tons of level 40′s in the same zone, killing everything that moved.  At least you saw people back then.  I would kill for a crowded zone now.  I’d kill for a group too.  Because of all the bugs that kept killing people, because of dying, and fighting back to your corpse, only to realize corpses were coded wrong, and you gained all your xp back fighting to your corpse, people left.  The world started to empty out.  Bad things happen when people can’t see that many other people on a game that’s four months old.

This last patch brought in another ‘wow-ification’.  Now that meaningful traveling on horseback and exploring the land was exchanged for rapid transit via a network.  All you had to do was visit each location one time, and you could return there at a later date.  It sounds exactly like…World of Warcraft.  And those people who wanted another WOW, they have another WOW.  I’m not one of those people.

I was Reconstructed.  I was in the top raiding guild on My Everquest server.  I meant something.  Everytime we killed something that we shouldn’t have been able to, I experienced a high.  I liked the challenge.  I liked sitting for hours in Kod’taz killing everthing that moved, just grinding alternate advancedment points.  In a way, I liked dying to some insane monster we tried to kill, and I remember fondly wiping the entire guild of 50 people when I screwed up.  Yes, 50 people died because of me, and six hours getting there were wasted.  But that’s what was cool about Everquest, and thats why Vanguard won’t furfil that high I once felt.

My subscription to Vanguard is up mid-month.  I’m  not so sure I’m going to keep playing. It might be best to vote with my money, pack up, and go else where.  I’ve been looking at EVE Online again lately.  I played the 14-day trial they offer, and despite Eve’s game mechanics being damn complicated and not user friendly at all, I remember it fondly.  EVE is one big huge server, not like the typical MMORPG where you have people divided up into 10 or twenty.  It also features more out-of-game conversation than Vanguard or EQ or anything else.  I’ve heard people say that the actual game of EVE is only 40% of the fun, the rest is on the forums.

And maybe thats what I need now.   Maybe I need a sense of community; a sense of belonging.  Hell, maybe I need another time sink.  Vanguard started out as a time sink I loved and enjoyed, but over the past few months, I despise it more and more.  Part of me really wants to see Sigil and ultimately SOE take a nose dive on it, just for the chaotic aspect of it.  But, I’ve invested 350 hours into Vanguard in four months, and thats alot of time to just throw away.

So what do I do?  Stay with the shitty game, or go to the cool ass Sci-Fi with ship-to-ship combat one?  Decisions, decisions, decisions.

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I know it’s still a little rough around the edges, but Vanguard has been filling most of my free time. I wake up, pop online for a wee bit, shower, and head off to work. Then when I get home, the second or third thing I do when I enter the apartment, is load Vanguard. That’s how much I love this game!

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Today though, I mostly solo’ed.  I think I found a pretty good camp, with some named mobs that spawn every so often, so hopefully if I can sell these items that I got tonight for what I want, I should have 2 gold or so in a few days.   That should go a long, long way into helping me be ‘financially seccure’ in this game.

Playing as a ranger has been pretty badass.  For instance, yesterday I bought new swords, and my damage increased roughly 30%.  I can almost killl mobs with a bow before they get to me!  In group, I’m even more kick ass, as long as I have a tank who can hold agro for me.

Speaking of, there’s a lot of crappy tanks out there.   Some can’t hold agro, so we ping-pong back and forth until the mob is dead.  Others, like Everere, can’t tank.   I assembled a late night group to raid KE (a mid-teen level dungeon) and this warrior I found said he couldn’t tank in there.   So little, paper-ranger me, steps up, kills mobs, holds agro, and basically does a stellar job.

I really can’t wait to see what the end game of Vanguard will be like.  Hopefully there will be tons of interesting, challening stuff, and hopefully it’s completed.   I remember back in Everquest after Gates of Discord came out, hearing a rumor about a guild raid zoning in to this uber zone, and finding nothing but gray.   If you didn’t know, if you fell through the world in Everquest, you’d find yourself in a world with gray walls and floors.   Hopefully Sigil hasn’t cheated us like this.

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I’ve heard the sales for VG were below expectation, with some only 100k accounts being created. The goal for the release was 500,000. How this sub-par release will affect the game only reamains to be seen.

Off now to spend some quality time with Danyale, and some other company we have over, and maybe I’ll get an hour in later before I fall asleep.

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I joined a roleplaying group a few days, that’s roughly based on the old Star Wars RPG I used to play when I was a kid, and frankly, it’s a damn blast.  I’m actually a ‘good’ Jedi in this game.  Odd though, since usually when I play a Star Wars game, I tend to be very, very, very evil.

What happened tonight was amazing.   One of the other ‘jedi’ managed to get captured by the Sith, so me and three other Jedi waltz into a Sith temple to try to save him.   But we fail miserably.  Within 5 minutes, all of us are dead.

And since we’re dead, we really can’t play again for 48 hours.    So for the next two days, I really have nothing to do except read and clean up my house, while my computer idles unplayed.   I don’t think I’ve ever been this upset by a death in a game before.

I’m really having fun in this game, and although Vanguard comes out tomorrow, I don’t know if I’ll jump ship and play that quite yet.  From what I’ve been reading about Vanguard, it was rushed out and there’s still a plethora of bugs in the game.   I think I just might have to wait a few months more until they patch it enough to check it out.

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I really do miss the sense of community that I had in the original Everquest.  I miss being the bad-ass Mage with all the toys to envy, less powerful than only two others on a server.  I miss the constant raiding, the trash talking, the sense of accomplishment.  I never really felt that in WOW.

WOW, and EQII, were just basically diversions.  I mean, I maxed out two toon in WOW, had fun, made a handful of friends, but it just wasn’t the same as Everquest.   In Vanguard, I have the chance to start at the ground-floor of a new game, invest as much time and effort into it as I want, and hope that it can replace the original Everquest as the kick-ass-game-I-remember-so-much.

Vanguard comes out January 30th, which is only two weeks away.  I’m already counting down the days, and I think I might just ask for the 30th and the 31st off from work, so I can play a little bit .

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Sam and I talked about going to GameWorks up at Circle Center Mall a few days ago, so we decided today was as good as time as any to go. I was kind of worried, since I’m a little tight on cash this week after spending $150 on brakes and tools. But, I got some cash, put some gas in my car, picked up Sam, and we headed up there.

I haven’t been to GameWorks in a few years; in fact, the last time I went was with my aunt on my 18th birthday. I had fun there before, and thought it would be cool to go back up there, and hit the arcades like I used to do when I was a kid.

Well it turns out, that they have an ulimited play special, where for $20 you can play as many games as you want for 2 hours, and hand you a special card. Which isn’t bad, considering most of the games there cost $1.50-$3 a play. Hell, we raced in an Indy 500 simulator three times, that would have cost us $9 for about 5 minutes of play time. So, I think we got our fair value out of those cards.

The first game we played, was a game called Ranger Mission, which was a pretty damn cool shooter. I instantly got hooked, and ended up being pretty good at it. It’ amazing how ‘into the zone’ you can get on these games, and basically end up going on a virtual killing frezy. Anyhow, Sam and I ended up beating the game after a good 15 or 20 minutes—it’s a shame these shooters aren’t any longer than that. It was good for awhile though.

The real fun though was with racing games. There’s always something appealing about going head-to-head with a friend, and seeing how comes out on top with racing games. Against Sam though, I probably only managed a 50% win ratio. Still, the more reaslistic racing games were pretty damn cool. In real life, I’m shitty with a stick shift, but in games, I can shift like a pro. Now, if only I could manage that in real life, without stripping a clutch plate and killing the car….

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I’ve waited so long for this game, and despite a few bugs, it’s very worth it. So far, I’m about 27 hours in and like level 17. Essentially, I kick major ass! I’m a caster, with theif like skills…so I kill very quickly. The cool thing about this game is that NPCs level up with you, so its always a nailbiting event. I make it a habit to save about every 15 seconds . I can’t wait to play more…which I shall do now, and update a little wee bit more later!

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