Gaming: Back to Civilization

Sid Meier's Civilization V was released recently, and although I'm not the world's biggest fan of the series, sometimes boredom causes you to make leaps of faith.  I very, very nearly got the digital deluxe version, but I didn't see how I could justify spending an extra ten dollars on a game I wasn't sure I'd enjoy for very long just for an extra cultural leader character.  And as convoluted as that sentence is, if you haven't played the game it'll be really hard for me to make it any clearer.

In any case, they've improved the game tremendously.  I still feel like an idiot when I play, because it beats me every freaking time, but at least now I'm having some fun while all this is going on.  Civilization IV was on sale while they were building up to the release date, so I gave IV a go (it was ridiculously low-priced, like $10) to guage what my interest in V would be, and I didn't like it very much.  Four seemed boring.  But for some reason, five is maintaining my interest.  You're closer in on the action, for one thing, although you can pull back to get an overview if you want.  It's amazing what that little difference can do.

I've also been slowly making my way through all the episodes of Left 4 Dead on the PC.  Steam recently had a sale, selling both L4D and L4D2 at a ridiculously low package price, and although I've played through the first one on the Xbox 360, it was insane to spend $60 for the second one in the 360 format, when I could buy both L4D games for $10 on Steam.  Yes, you read that price correctly.  I don't know why people keep crying that consoles are going to kill PC gaming... with price differences as big as those for the content, consoles aren't taking over any time soon.

Gaming: Bright Falls Tourism Board

I finally got around to returning some not-being-played titles to Gamefly.  And what showed up in my mailbox?  Alan Wake.  (The limited edition is on extreme sale right now... OMG, get it while you can!  I did.  I'm itching to get the soundtrack on my iPod.)

Normally, I'm a zombie girl... but "the taken" can give zombies a real run for their money.  Even with the lights in full-on brightness mode in the living room, this game can make you jump, but won't cause you sleepless nights.  The game very fluidly takes you from novice to expert without overly annoying tutorials.  The monsters are spooky without being garishly bloody, and the plot is well-written even if the ending is ambiguous.  Well, it's a game about a writer... one would hope the plot was given more than one trip through the word-processor.

I've finished it once in Normal difficulty.  I'm currently going back to clean up some achievements before heading into Hard and Nightmare territory.  So far, I'm not chafing at re-playing material I've already covered, so I would concede that it has re-play value.

Plus, there's so much that's satisfying about wielding a flashlight as a weapon.

Once my purchased copy gets here, my rental copy will be headed back to the Gamefly warehouse.  Give it a try.

Gaming: LoTRO A-Go-Go

I've been playing the new, micro-transaction enabled version of LoTRO for about a week now.  It's had some rough patches (pun intended) and an influx of annoying kiddies, but mostly it's been a good experience.  Not great, just good.

The addition of instances that are available no matter where you are in the world, through the skirmish system, is a big plus.  You no longer have to get your group of people organized, troop them out to a remote location, and hope you don't end up dying and have to walk all the way back.  Now, it's group, click and go.  The dead re-materialize in the instance.  I cannot tell you how much of a time-saver that is.

The points system is a little wonky.  I wouldn't trust my cash with it yet.  The points, also, do not go very far.  $50 will get you 5000 points (thank goodness mine were free) but things like a permanent Fate stat increase costs 1500 points.  To save up my 500 free points per month for all the stat increases available, it'd take me a year and a half.  The first time I logged in, I got bonus points for each month I logged in over the summer, plus points for all the deeds I'd already completed with my characters.  It totaled up to about 6700 points and after a few permanent instant-teleport maps to places I go frequently, and a couple of stat increases, that is almost gone.

As far as aesthetics, the new buttons on the login screen and the shop interface are overly large, and garishly done.  The world is almost as beautiful as ever, and fitting for the Middle Earth setting with the exception of some new buttons advertising purchasable perks, but then you go to the shop and BAM!  You're jolted out of the serene world by an advertising-heavy shop front.

And that "Restore Morale" button up top?  I'm afraid to check how much *that* costs.  Talk about a crutch for poor players with more money than sense...  Ugh.

But of course, I'll continue to play.  It's been free for me to play for the last three years, more or less, so unless it becomes impossible for me to play properly with all the extra load placed on the servers, I'll be sticking with it.  I'm just not sure whether I could recommend it to friends.

Gaming: Buying Used Games is NOT Evil

I don't know how many of you follow the online comic strip, Penny Arcade, or keep your ear to the ground for the latest game-industry gossip.  For all I know, the only people who follow my blog are cooks and knitters who find my gaming posts boring.  But as a knitter, cook, and gamer, I follow all these things with more than a little interest.  So bear with me.  Gaming is making an appearance...

Today's Penny Arcade strip and news article tackles the subject of buying used games, and dissects a statement made by THQ's creative director Cory Ledesma.  Apparently, everyone I've listed above thinks that buying a used game somehow cheats everyone involved.  Since a good portion of my blog deals with how to tighten up your budget for something as necessary as FOOD, you can imagine how I feel about spending the full price for a game.

Here's the thing... buying a used game, no matter if it's from a chain store like Game Stop, eBay, or Gamefly, is not the act of someone trying to actively cheat the system.  There's piracy for that sort of thing.  Buying a game used is like two kids going to the corner store and pooling their money to buy a game.  You pay half, your buddy pays half, and you both get to play.  In the used game market, these two "buddies" never meet each other, but the principal is the same.  They're splitting the cost to buy a game that might otherwise never get purchased because the parties involved couldn't afford it any other way.

Yes.  Might never get purchased... that's what I said. 

If the consumer goes into a store to buy a game, which do you think he or she will buy... one they can get a portion of the value back on when they've completed it, or another game at the same, ridiculously high price that they'll have to throw away when they have no use for it any more?  And the person who buys all of their games used?  They'll never want to pay that ridiculously high MSRP either.  So that's one copy of the game that never gets purchased, and two consumers who will never experience your product.  They'll never rent it from Gamefly, because the game has been crippled for that market too.

So basically, Mr. Ledesma, when you snub the portion of the gaming community that buys used games, you're basically saying "If you can't afford our game at full price, I have no interest in having you as a customer".  And that basically tells me you're no better than those snooty shopgirls on Rodeo drive in "Pretty Woman".

Big mistake.  Huge.  I'm off to go shopping now...

Gaming: Secret Project

Mother... seriously, I tried contacting you two different ways on your birthday and no dice.  So HAPPY BIRTHDAY again.  Hopefully you get that one.

I'm still LotRO-ing, but I'm also taking part in an Alpha/Beta project that I can't talk about.  No, seriously, I can't.  Lets just say the company behind this product I was Alpha testing, and now Beta testing, has so much money that they could squash me like a bug if I break the non-disclosure agreement.

So you're stuck hearing about LotRO.

Our little family kinship had a goal this past week to max out everyone's crafting skills, and it was amazing how the three of us pulled together and got it mostly done.  There was a lot of running around, gathering ore and hides, and a lot of standing at workbenches and forges.  A few characters didn't complete their Supreme tiers, but we got a lot accomplished, despite the fact that Monkey Pants had band camp (and yes, there was a lot of eye rolling in the house about that) for two hours a day all last week.

This week's goal is to choose one character and increase their reputation with one of the in-game factions, whether it's the Elves of Rivendell, the Men of Bree, or what-have-you.  The gang seems less enthusiastic about this goal.  Personally, all my characters that needed to get into places that required reputation have maxed theirs already, but I was willing to gather mathoms and sashes to help my guys out.  MP is in a "don't feel like playing" mood this week, and Barronius likes doing his own thing, so we're pretty much just doing free-play anyway.

Edited to add:  I just heard a ridiculous statistic... over 500 games are scheduled for release between now and the end of the year.  AUGH!  Game companies are dooming themselves, trying to grab a piece of the Christmas dollar.  KNOCK IT OFF!  Really, you think anyone can pick *your* game out in that insane amount of noise?  Get real.

Gaming: House of the Black Swamp

Barronius and his fancy helmet

We're still going all out in LotRO.  This week our small kinship managed to get the game money together for a modest kinship house in the Shire.  All the house-related items we've had stowed in the bank for the past three years (have we had memberships for that long already?) have been put in the house, creating a decorator's nightmare of eccentricity.

Kinship house exterior

My Sabertooth trophy and a pesky doormouse and his cheese.

A breakfast table I crafted in the main hall.

Sinister Keg... drink from it and you end up in a random location with no pants.

 I forget how I got the Sinister Keg.  I believe it was for completing a quest for the Inn League.  I do remember that when I drank from it, it was the first time I'd ever been in snowy Forochel. 

My Room

Main Hall

The Kinship house has two sections, so you can decorate the walls, floors, and music separately for those two sections.  I wish it was a room-by-room so I could have my personal colors and theme music in my room only.  Ah well.

Gaming: Still in the Shire

The family is still on its LotRO kick. (That's Lord of the Rings Online for the newcomers) so far we have started new characters on the Landroval server and taken them to level 11 strictly through questing as a family.  In fact, those specific characters are intended only for use when we're all together.... no side-questing solo.  Little monkey pants finds questing "boring" and would much rather stand in the Inn and play music, but we manage to get a bit done each weekend.

Right now, I am switching between all my characters on LotRO and playing a couple of single-player games... in fact, I'm farming Mint leaves on Silverlode while typing this.  Farming is SO boring... but the best money-maker.  Once I'm done with my daily crop-gathering, it's off to play Dawn of Discovery or possibly some rare gaming time on the Xbox 360.  Since MP co-opted my rental copy of Scribblenauts the DS is pretty much out of the picture.

As a Kinship (Guild) on LotRO, we don't have many lofty goals.  Levelling our characters to the next crafting-tool tier, earning enough gold to purchase and sustain a Kinship house, experiencing some of the content that we simply cannot experience as solo players... that's pretty much it.  So we're not getting the best raid and PvP gear... we don't really care about those areas of the game anyway.  We just like being immersed in Middle-Earth surroundings.  And that's okay... sometimes the cool, leafy surroundings of the Shire or Rivendell is preferable to the 100+ degree heat of east Texas.

Gaming: Ambition

So, last Wednesday my pre-order of "Sims 3: Ambitions" arrived... just in time to delay my progress on a knit-along.  But I digress.  I've been playing it for a week now, so I have some thoughts.

Fans in the Sims community have been asking to go to work with their sims since way back when Will Wright put out the original Sims.  I know, because I was there.  (Sorry, every once in a while a "Clue" line slips in out of nowhere)  Anyhoo, with "Ambitions" you can now do that... sort of.  Instead of following your guy or gal around from his cubicle to the coffee station to the restroom in an office environment (which, lets face it, would be a lot of fun if you could do the "Fight" option with your clone of the annoying guy you work with) you have five professions to choose from, and there are set tasks you do around town.  I've only done three of the five:  Inventor, Architectural Design, and I'm halfway through the Private detective.  The Firefighter also looks to be a mission around town sort of job, but the tattoo artist could be stationary.  We'll see.

This expansion pack is proving very entertaining, and a real breath of fresh air for the Sims 3.  Once I get done trying all the new profession options, we'll see if it continues to hold my interest.  For right now though it is very engaging.

My only problem with it is that it seems to be a bit on the buggy side.  I had a second-generation daughter who was my architect test run, and she somehow got bugged in two ways.  One, she was always disgusted by spoiled food, even though she had nothing in her "pockets" and nothing in the house.  Even when she went on a job.  And it read a steady ten minutes no matter where I took her.  I finally had to delete her family and start over, even though my plan was to take each generation through one of the new professions.  Two, her portfolio stopped updating, no matter how many pictures I took of new renovations she completed for her work.  Scrounging up clients was also a pain.

But despite these problems I'm enjoying the expansion a great deal.

Gaming: El Presidente

There was no leftover steak yesterday.  Bummer.

My mornings have been consumed with completing the campaign on Tropico 3, still.  My little banana-republic sim-citizens are surprisingly demanding and difficult to please.  Try saving $500,000 in the treasury when you can't even build tier-2 industry buildings for the first twenty years!  Oy.

I have very little of the campaign left to complete, but I still have not tried any of the user-created challenges yet.  I did glance through the list yesterday, and they look promising.  The only problem I have with the game is when I'm broke and waiting for a ship to come in and get paid, I might as well be knitting at my computer.  I suppose some people follow their little citizens around, watching their daily little lives, but I'm not that voyeuristic.

Gaming: The Cake is a Lie... err, the candles are lying.

Sometimes I feel like I fell through a portal, and my life has flashed away past me in an endless loop.  Happy 42nd Birthday to me!  I expected to wake up knowing the answers to life, the universe, and everything, but I don't.  Maybe my towel is broken.  And now between this blog and my family, I've gotten all the usefulness out of that "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" joke I'm ever going to get.  And if you don't get the title or the first line of this post, then run, don't walk, to get yourself a copy of Orange Box or the stand-alone version of "Portal".  Really.

Not much in gaming this week, since I'm trying to clear the decks.  Yes, I finally managed to get my hands on "Bioshock 2" but I won't crack the plastic on that bad boy until I finish "Bioshock" to my satisfaction.  Yes, I'm an Xbox 360 Achievements whore, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

I've also gotten distracted by life and the joys of a couple of casual games, mostly "A Kingdom for Keflings".  It's a $9 XBL Arcade game that uses your console avatar as your game character.  You're a giant helping some little Keflings build their village back up to its former glory.  Seeing my knit-hatted little me running around gathering wood and stone and building buildings is surprisingly entertaining.

I'd stay and chat more, but before I can enjoy my birthday, I have to go back to the dentist and get my stitches out.  Joy.

Gaming: Dragon Age Continues

So not too long ago, I bored all of you with my endless gushing over Dragon Age: Origins.  Well, there was an expansion pack, Dragon Age: Awakening, and so far it's a good one.  I still have to play "mash the ESC key" over and over because I can read the dialogue faster than the voice actors can speak it, but as an RPG, it's still solid.  You can import your characters from the first segment, or start fresh.  Any weapons I was carrying that had runes installed were emptied of the runes, but otherwise I had all my gear after the import.

The game also remembered that my imported character had married Alistair, who was now King of Esteldin.  There was some smoochy talk at the end of a cut scene and some dialogue options that supported this status.  I won't give away much of the plot, but it seems interesting so far.

I have not played it all the way through, so I can't tell if the expansion has enough entertainment hours in it to justify the hefty price, but so far the quality of the voice acting and encounters is just as solid as the base game.  I recommend it.

Gaming: Moodlets

Well I got sucked back into the distraction that is "The Sims 3".  Delete a family and start a new one and it's amazing how much more interesting it gets when you only have $40 a day coming in.

"World Adventures" was really a clever, well-executed expansion pack.  For someone like me, who cut her teeth on logic puzzles, the tombs in the distant lands provide a decent diversion.  I only wish there were more of them, and that they reset for subsequent generations.  Although I suppose once Indiana Jonesette has fully explored a tomb and sprung the trap, there's nobody left to push that big boulder allllllll the way back to the top.

And now that I've re-learned the whole "romance-a-sim" thing, getting married is easy.  The trick is to get it done in 90 sim days if your lifespans are set to the normal speed.  I mean, heck, a girl can barely top out her career in that time, much less make time for a boyfriend.

In other gaming news, Steam recently had a sale on "Star Trek: Online" so I bought my husband the digital deluxe version as a gift.  They've released their first batch of new content, titled "Season 1".  It includes perks for lifetime subscribers, like a title and access to a lifetime only area on starbases.  I'm not exactly sure why I should be thrilled by this.  It's not like I go into the game to *chat*.  However, I did join the "Totally Rad Fleet", a group of guys who are fans of the "Totally Rad Show", a weekly podcast that's pretty much a movie/gamer geekfest that I totally love.  The fans seem to comprise a decent fleet, but so far I haven't needed their aid for anything.  The game is pretty solo-able.

Next week I hope to be talking to you about Bioshock 2.  Although I think I'm buying a coffee table (finally!!!) out of my allowance so it might be tight.  We'll see.

Gaming: I miss free *stuff on Wendesdays

* means there used to be a different S-word there.

A long time ago, over ten years in fact, there was a very pleasant company called "Maxis".  And working there was one of the Mozarts of our time, a man named Will Wright.  He had this little idea for a game that would be like a miniature dollhouse, an architect's model, and his previous creation, SimCity, all rolled into one.

That, my friends, was The Sims.

The past two weeks I have been absorbed in playing "The Sims 3".  I just woke up one day and said to myself, "You know, I paid a crap-ton of money for this game, the expansions, and the stuff from the EA store... I should really play it more."  So I did.  And before I knew it, the day was over and I was feeling like my 11 year old daughter, not quite wanting to go to bed just yet.

The Sims, and its sequels, have changed a lot over the past decade.  Most notably was the departure of Will Wright to work on Spore, the move from Maxis to EA (Electronic Arts), and the move from quarterly releases of "Stuff Packs" on disks to a micro-transaction nightmare of content releases on the EA store.

Some simmers are not paying attention, but in these economic times, some people have noticed... we're getting charged a heck of a lot for content we used to get for free, or at the very least, much more cheaply.  For example, in The Sims 2, you would pay $19.95 for a "Stuff Pack" which was usually themed, and would include four rooms stuffed with new furniture, new clothes, and sometimes if you were lucky, a new NPC to visit, like Santa or Baby New Year.  During the days of "The Sims 2" they'd have "Free Stuff Wednesdays" which usually meant a new wallpaper for your PC desktop, but would sometimes be a game item, like a potted plant or wallpaper for your Sim home.

Well those days are long gone.

Now, you buy "Points" for getting items from the Sims 3 store.  What will $19.95 get you?  Well, you're not going to find a great sale on points at Amazon, let me tell you.  And now, it's either $10, $20, or $40 points packages.... you get 100 points for every dollar.  That's not so bad.  What's bad is that now, in order to get the same amount of items you'd get on a PERMANENT CD, you'd have to pay over $50.  If you wanted to get all the sets available on the store?  $350!  Fortunately, I only like about half the items.  However, I'm not getting sucked into their micro-transaction crapola.  I bought the "High End Loft Stuff" pack, because it came on a CD, and I'm satisfied with the amount of content I got with it.  Also, it's gadgety stuff, which I'm  into in real life, so... it's a cool pack for me.

I miss the old days.  I miss the times when they'd give us some cute little thing once a week, for FREE.  Not just because I like getting free crap, but because it was like a little thoughtful gift from a friend, every week.

Now they just seem like greedy, money-hungry bastards.  It's like I used to have this great and thoughtful friend, but now they have a substance-abuse problem and they're constantly wanting to sleep on my couch and borrow money.  I may have to go the tough-love route and kick them out until they sober up.

Which is going to be difficult since they just released the expansion to "Dragon Age".  *sigh*

Gaming: I Got Nothin'

Gaming has been a steady, uneventful stream of NCAA 2010, Star Trek: Online (which is getting better by the week, folks), and casual games.  I did discover two casual gems though, purely by accident through Amazon "Suggestions"... Liong: Dragon Dance and Liong: Lost Amulets.  They kind of take Majongg and turn it on its ear, making the matching a race against time.  I like it.  Regular Majongg can put me to sleep at times, but I can play Liong all day... long.  Almost slipped a pun in there.

I also stumbled across a little time-management hootenanny called "Tourist Trap".  It's a basic wait-for-resources build-fest with a twist.  While the game is fun, and its kitschy humor is amusing, the *waiting* is horrible.  Even with random fires and the occasional damaged building thrown in, it's the kind of game you need to keep a good book on hand while you wait for the dollars to roll in.

Meanwhile, I have decided what I'm going to do next week when I can finally fall off the non-knitting wagon... beaded knitting.  That is, after I finish that cursed cardigan.  More on that tomorrow.

Gaming: Bejewelled Collector's Edition?

There's this new thing in the world of casual gaming sites that I really wish hadn't caught on... "Collector's Edition" casual games.  While the normal prices of these games are $2.99 to $6.99, a "collector's edition" will cost a whopping $19.99.  What do you get with this extra content?  About the same level of extras as you would get with a collector's edition of a DVD... crap, and more of it.  A strategy guide (which I'd never use, cause what's the point?), comics, fluff, etc.

Now, if these weren't casual games, or if the price were something more reasonable, like say $12, then maybe it would be acceptable.  But $13 to $17 extra for that crap?  Forget it.  This ranks right up there with the independant game developer that made it impossible to complete their game unless you had the update patch, but they ONLY patched it for people who bought it directly through their site.  Nice.  Way to show the love.

Speaking of bonehead game publisher moves, have you heard about the new digital rights management scheme Ubisoft is pulling?  Fellow blogger Bill Harris over at Dubious Quality did a two-part article about it yesterday... give it a read.  Basically, new Ubisoft games have to be connected to the internet at ALL TIMES, otherwise you are booted out of the game.

This may not sound too bad to some of you, if you are permanently connected to the internet anyway through Broadband Cable.  It was not so long ago, however, that I lived in upstate Minnesota where the only connection to the internet was long-distance DIALUP.  Period.  The population simply isn't dense enough up there to support having a local number, and the distances too far for cable.  I've been away from my home town for ten years, but when I visited last summer, I know DSL was an expensive alternative.  And still no cable.

I'm sure this is an isolated set of circumstances, but I don't like the idea of a game publisher telling me when and how often I need to use my internet service.

When the economy is bad, and you're not making enough money, it's easy to blame an outside force for your woes... games piracy is not why you're losing money, Ubisoft.  Things suck all over.  But for you it particularly sucks because you keep treating your paying customers like thieves, and we're not happy about it. 

You know, Joss Whedon gave away all three parts of his indie effort, Doctor Horrible, for FREE over the internet, and he STILL made enough money to pay everything off and then some?  You know why?  People love him.  They love him, they love his work, and they loved that show in particular.  They felt that his efforts deserved compensation, and more than that, they felt this kind of work needed to be supported and encouraged.  What does that have to do with you, Ubisoft?  Hmm.  You tell me.

Gaming: Neighbors stealing cable

So I published my blog yesterday at about 7:30, went to the bus stop with my daughter, and returned at about 8:00.  The internet was down.  My cable TV was also a fuzzy, red and snowy mess.  I could not get on the internet all day.

Considering how much I complain about people getting away from their roots, losing the self-sufficiency of our pioneering anscestors, you'd think that I wouldn't find this a terrible inconvenience.  With one of my knitting/spinning/wire-wrapping hands on the injured list, though, I was finding it VERY inconvenient.  I couldn't email my husband to stop for bread on the way home.  When I needed a clarification on a beading technique I was having problems with, I couldn't look up a tutorial online.  And I had horrible visions of a customer placing an order that I would never see because I couldn't get to my email.

Well, obviously it's back up again.  The main tap into the apartment complex was eroded, and the repair guy swapped it out and everything was dandy.  I found out in the course of things, though, that my downstairs neighbor was stealing cable.  It makes me wonder if he switched things around down there to make his stealing more convenient, because to go from great to crappy in the space of a half-hour seems suspicious.  No matter.  They slam their door all the time anyway.

Anyhoo, I WAS playing a lot of Star Trek: Online up until this debacle.  Yesterday it was a lot of Plants vs. Zombies while I waited.  I still have plans to get Bioshock 2, but possibly not next payday since I have my eye on some metalsmithing tools, and they are pricey.  I think I need to learn to be a machinist so I can make these tools to sell, instead of busting my ass on jewelry and fiber.  $46 for a 4x4 inch square bench block?  It's a completely smooth square!  You don't even want to know what they're charging for a dapping block with mirror-finish depressions for doming sheet metals.

So that's the state of my gaming life this week.  TMI?

Gaming: Grows on You

Windows 7 has been relatively painless to use.  There's been some aggravation with figuring out workgroups and sharing with the (as yet) non-W7 computers in the house, but other than that it's been a breeze.  As a result of the expensive purchase, though, my ability to purchase casual games and the latest releases (Bioshock 2, stay alive and I will find yooooou) has been curtailed.

That, and some nasty cold/flu that has kept me sleeping for three days straight, and I don't have a lot to report.

Before I collapsed, though, I was still giving Star Trek: Online (STO) a shot.  Then, in what must have been a moment of delirium, I purchased the lifetime subscription, making me even more short on funds.  Strangely, I have been enjoying the game much more, especially since I made Lt. Commander (a level 11 equivalent) and was able to purchase my first chosen vessel, a science ship with what trimmings I could afford.  I don't even mind the space battles anymore, though I prefer the away missions.

Other than STO, I've been re-hashing old games or trying in vain to get a jackpot on Pogo.com.  Hey, who couldn't use $4,999.99?  Especially if I'm taking it from Electronic Arts, who now owns the casual gaming site.  Don't get me started on what they've done; suffice it to say I nearly didn't purchase Sims 3 after the debacle that was Spore.

Gaming: It's getting bad out there...

When I used to work at a little medical equipment refurbishing firm called Comdisco (yes, that really was the name, and no, John Travolta never visited) they used to give us the Monday after the Superbowl off every year.  Can you tell it was a mostly-male workplace?  At least it wasn't like the conference I went to for Radio Shack managers where they threw hot peppers at the audience and the guys waved them around like penises while the three women in the audience rolled our eyes.  But I digress... I took Monday off because after a weekend of chips and dip, I felt I wouldn't have much to contribute in the food arena.

As far as gaming, I haven't done much new either.  With my purchase of the Windows 7 upgrade, I pretty much had to stick with what games I already have.  Not that there's a lot of choices on the market at the moment.

I've been sticking with Star Trek Online, Lord of the Rings Online, and the ever-changing array of complete-them-in-one-day casual games on Big Fish Games.

STO has improved, somewhat, since the beta and headstart ended.  Windows 7 helped my machine's performance in that regard too... by fully utilizing the 4G of RAM, which XP never could do properly, things run smoother.  This is also probably helped by the new video card.  Whatever the reason, I've reached Lieutenant 7 with my joined Trill character, and once I figured out to turn off dynamic lighting, I stopped crashing on ground missions.

The new skirmish play mode on LoTRO is fun and fulfilling even if you only have twenty minutes to play.  It's a shame you have to play PvE to get past the tutorial for it and access it, though, since my favorite character is currently in Moria, and that place is seriously kicking my ass.  Do you know how long it would take me to travel, in real-world time, to get someplace better?  Forty-five minutes.  I'm not kidding.  These days, I hardly want to play forty-five minutes straight, much less watch my gal on the back of the horse while I do nothing but knit.

Other than those two, it's been "Vacation Mogul" on Big Fish Games, one of those time-management building games.  Whoopie.  I really contribute very little to society, don't I?  :P

Tomorrow... my knitting.  Or lack of change thereof.

Gaming: Virtual Buffet

This week I have been taking sips and slurps from several different games... mostly because my knitting has become my obsession again.

Star Trek Online had a patch last week, and it changed some things for the better.  They opened up some PvP arenas which helped a lot, mostly because you can choose between ship battles and ground battles, AND choose between co-operative PvP and combative.  It's still not the ratio I'd like, but I suppose it's their beta test, we're just playing in it.

I've been struggling to re-do all the levels in Farm Frenzy 3: American Pie at Gold status.  I swear these people build a few levels that simply cannot be completed in time just to tick me off.

Other than that, I've mostly been trying out a few of the games I got on Steam at bargain prices over the holidays.  I'm sad that it took me this long to try Prototype, as it's really a neat game.  I think I would have enjoyed it more on the 360, but you can't beat getting it at less than $10.  I think Steam went insane, it's the only explaination.  Prototype is similar in some ways to Darkness, a game that I blazed through on the 360 and even started to play a second time through, which is rare for me.  I'm not liking Prototype's controls on the PC though.  I think a controller would be helpful.

I'm also expecting delivery of my new video card today.  My old ATI HD3650 died (its processor fan suddenly stopped working) so I am hobbling along on an Nvidia card hubby had laying around.  I was amazed that Star Trek online (STO) would even work on it.  Prototype gave me a huge, pink blur the first time around.  It pained me to have to install new drivers for a card that is going to be removed in a few days.

We are also preparing for the move to Windows 7.  My daughter is not keen on the idea, but I'm looking forward to having a feature that will limit her computer time to a time of day of my choosing.  It might make bedtime less... argumentative?

Back on topic, STO finishes Beta today at 6pm, and the servers will be down until the "Head Start" event begins on Friday.  It will go live shortly after.

Gaming: Not So Much

Well, I'm not as thrilled with "Star Trek Online" as I wanted to be. It's not that it doesn't capture the flavor of Trek... it does, and quite accurately. The problem is that it is 99% a flight sim with lasers and photon torpedos.

Have I mentioned I hate flight sims?

I would be much happier if it was even %50 flight sim and %50 away team missions, but so far beaming down to the planet is very, very rare. And it sucks.

I guess that my problem with flight sims and dogfighting games is that I have to put the majority of my concentration into flying my plane, ship, or whathaveyou. So much effort, just to keep the enemy in the crosshairs. Then I keep having to remember which button fires the weapon, how to route more power to the shields, all this while turning loop-de-loops. I'm sure the guy fans just LOVE this.

Me, I'd rather be running diplomatic missions.

Maybe as I level my ship won't feel like a sluggish drunkard to steer, but right now I'm hate hate HATING it. And no, a joystick controller won't help, assuming they're enabled. I tried that with Star Wars Galaxies and it just made my flying a different kind of complex.

Sigh. Well, at least I won't have to figure out where to come up with $240 for a lifetime subscription.