I haven't been playing DDO as much as I'd like, and that's due in part to two things: My friends can't get on as often as I'd like, and honestly, I'm not that good. I try real hard, but I miss some things. But What the hell. I've been playing Fable too, which I'm enjoying the hells out of. Evil Warrior Mage, that's me. I find that if you use a healthy mix of all your skills, you can manage to slash and burn your way through pretty well. What else. Veronica Mars Rocks. Weeds seems cool, downloading it right now. It's Showtime, so I'm hoping for the occasional gratuitous nudity. I may have won $50,000. Heh... and I may have inherited the earth in Jesus's long lost will. And Buddah tells me that in my next life I will get to experience what it means to be a dolphin, or maybe even - a unicorn.

I Love Videogames. But honestly I'm not the kind of gamer goes out and gets new games the DAY they come our, with a couple exeptions, Halo 2 being primary among them. That was a fun day. But anyway I'm playing GTA: SA right now, and DDO and DDR, and Jade Empire, Mercenaries... etc. I'm not playing anything new. Why? Simple... I'm poor. I would love to own an HD TV and an Xbox360, or be ready to buy a PS3 when it comes out... (provided it has enough good games that I want to play.) But right now I can't afford it. I have other things to spend money on, like school and food and rent and all of that important stuff. But I love to enjoy the games I do play. Someday I'll play the new stuff too. Then I'll have to catch up on Live points.

Yep, I just got into the head start event for DDO, and things are looking better than ever for the sleepy little town. This time I've decided to go with a Wizard, but there will be more different classes in my future I believe. I'll get back to that another time.

Well, now that the Nondisclosure ban has been lifted I can talk a little about my time in the Massivly Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, Dugeons and Dragons Online: Stromreach. Here are my impressions so far. First of all the amount of quests so far seems a little lean, which means that everyone does the same quests. It's a little difficult to have a unique experience when you only have a few quests to choose from at each level. Of course each quest can be done multiple times, and at multiple levels, but to be honest, since nothing changes, it doesn't seem all that fun. However, that said it's a great D&D experience. If you're familiar at all with tabletop RPGs, DDO is a great port. Every class has a specific set of skills that come in handy at different times. The most usefull skills are the ability to kick creatures asses, and heal, it seems. That makes fighters and clerics the two essentials of every group. Then of course you have sneaking, picking locks, and disarming traps, which makes rogues quite valuable as well. Occasionaly you come across runes that can only be used by high intelligence characters, so if you rogue doesn't have enough you'll need to have a wizard. Now of course you have other classes that are similar, but with differences. Rangers, for example, make good fighters but they can also tame animals for a time, and use some kinds of magic at later levels. Paladins are also good "tanks" and have some healing properties at later levels. Barbarians are far tougher than the average fighter, but less skilled. And sorcerers can do magic like wizards, but while they can cast spells more often, they have far fewer to choose from. My experience is that soloing is possible, and even necessary at the lowest levels, but grouping is definately easier, and just as productive. Treasure chests give treasure of apporximately the same value to each character. I'd hears somewhere that chests are supposed to give special treasure specificaly for your character, presumably based on the types of weapoon you typicaly use. It DOES give each person their own treasure, kinda like autosplit, but not exactly. When you have a balanced party, just about anything is possible. You can handle any problems, and complete all the optional objectives in the quest. So. Personaly I like it. The missions are fun, and entertaining, as well as rewarding. It's almost like the experience you get for finishing them is only the icing on the cake. The optional objectves force you to think a bit, and getting the mission done is great. Level design so far is really incredible, even though everything happens in this one little city of Stormreach, its sewers, warehouses, and dungeons and catacombs. Some levels are quite the same, styleisticaly, but most are very inovative and use secrets and hidden doors etc to spice things up. All in all, it's very interesting. I am thus far impressed, but I'll have to hold off judgement until I've played the real thing.

Ah X-mas. The wonderful time of year when you get something you can't get any other time of the year.

Gift Cards!

This year I spent one of mine on Burnout Revenge and spent a few hours locked in a state of permanant road rage. I have to say it, the graphical and technical improvements, as well as the achevement system are much improved from the previous versions of the game. I'm very much impressed. I'll have to have some more of that later. But for now I have to go to work and serve The Man.

Okay. I've reached LVL 27, even though I don't play as often as I'd like. So far I've come up with a system of picking a region and doing a whole bunch of quests there until I hit a level where I can go onto another region and not get whacked. Right now I'm in Ashenvale, and doing various things, like looking for Splintertree supplies, and killing Satyrs and Befouled Water Elementals, etc, so on and so forth. I also spent some time recently in the Stonetalon Mountains. Yeah, it's a nice place to visit, but I don't think I'd want to live there. The Barrens had been my stomping grounds up to this point, but now I think my time there is done... at least until it's time to go to Thousand Needles.

Yeah, I'm a junkie. I'd tried EQ for a while, and nothing ever really... stuck. You know what I mean, the whole experience was shallow and unfulfilling. Run out. Kill monsters. Gain Exp. Level up. Buy better stuff with which to kill more monsters. Repeat, ad nauseum.

But a while ago a friend let me use his 10 day trial of WOW. This marketing strategy is, in my opinion, the BEST idea ever. If not for this I probably never would have paid for the game, and never would have realized what I was missing. Now I know.

So today I was at Wal-Mart looking for a way to go spend some money. Hm. All of the sudden I see "Gamespot's 1994 Game of the Year" staring me in the face for only $39.98. Yeah, okay that was fun, I'll get that. I got almost to level 20 in just 10 days, so f'shure. Lemme just pop up this vein here and get the needle ready. MMMMMmmmmyeah. Woo. Ah. Hmmmmmm. Oooooooooyeaaaaaaah.