Champions Online is still fun, though some of the Monster Island quests got a little stale. Several of the new quest lines were truly irritating in that they basically meant going to a map, exploring it, going back to your contact, and then heading back to the exact same map again and basically doing it over again with maybe a couple new glowies to click. The old existing content is still good, but the new content is… Meh.

The Blood Moon event coming up in CO is a bit… Hrmph… Tried it on the test server and the best thing I can say about it is that I am glad the event has at least a week left to be worked on before it goes Live.

Still looking forward to the STO (Star Trek Online) beta starting, been watching a lot of Deep Space 9 in the last couple of weeks to get back up to speed on my Trek-fu. Watching “You Are Cordially Invited” in season 6 right now, the marriage of Worf and Dax, where the male members of the cast take part in a Klingon bachelor party which turns out to be less of a bachelor party and more of a four day torture session.

Looking forward to “In The Pale Moonlight” which is several discs further into this season and which was always one of my favorite episodes.

Mid-term for the class I am taking is on Tuesday. Been sick for the last couple of days so not studied as much as I would like, also missed my Thursday class which was supposed to have been the review before the mid-term. So at this point not expecting to do as well on the test as I would like to do. Blegh.

It really wouldn’t be that bad if the instructor was just better prepared. He is an amusing fellow, full of stories and anecdotes meant to make the material more interesting. Except he doesn’t know the actual text we are using very well. On top of which he hasn’t actually looked at the problems we are supposed to be solving in class so it is often up to us (the students) to walk him (the instructor) through finding all the information needed to solve the problems.

Not fun.

Had meant to do a yard sale today. Get rid of some of the crap I have laying around the house that I never use anymore. Except it rained today. I actually am rather glad it rained, it feels like Fall might finally be here, but it is messing up my plans somewhat. Eh… C’est la vie.

Champions Online continues to be a mix of fun and perplexitude. Fun to play but every so often I run into a game dynamic that makes me go, “Er.. Wha?” and I am once more left wondering what the testers in the Closed Beta were actually doing for feedback since I have a hard time imagining this not having other people questioning the logic involved.

Still, as much as I say that, it is a very fun game. Lots more variety in the ways to build your character, the Southwest Desert is simply the best designed zone I have seen in a MMO both in terms of the layout of the areas within it and some of the actual fun variety of missions and tasks.

The game is getting a lot of bad press at the moment from the fanbase. Their own stupid fault really. They should have known better then to roll out a sweeping balance patch on launch day without having it tested first. Big patch, then a day later opening the public test server up. Definately the wrong order to do things in.

Finished the first book in the “Soldier’s Son” series the other night (“Shaman’s Crossing” by Robin Hobb). It was a good read, but didn’t feel like a great one to me. Still, if you have been a fan of the other series that Robin Hobb has written you will like it. I found the narrative viewpoint a little disorienting myself and the story itself just didn’t seem as interesing or uniquely engaging as the previous books by the author.

About mid-way through the second book now and it has continued to be a good series but I am loosing hope that it’ll be a great one by the end. Still, I do again recommend it to fans of the author or of the fantasy genre (specifically the ‘young boy coming of age’ sub-set of fantasy). Just I won’t be pushing it on all of my friends, whether they are fantasy fans or not.

Aside from watching that I spent a good chunk of time doing laundry and dishes and playing Champions Online.

Trying to decide if I need to buy more clothes or not. I tend to hate clothes shopping but I figure that if I buy a couple more outfits to wear around town for work then I might be able to push laundry back to a once-a-week thing instead of twice-a-week. Yes, the argument that ‘more clothes = less time doing laundry’ may very well be what it takes for me to go clothes shopping this year…

In Champions Online I have three characters I am playing mostly right now: Steel Crane (MA:Unarmed), Kinetica (Force Blast + some TK), Nightborn (Darkness + Sorcery). All have been fun and the game is just very impressive looking.

The Head Start event has been something of a disappointment though. The End of Beta with the giant robots was great, but the Head Start has had this Qularr (alien bug monsters) invasion event which seems a bit buggy. Enemies spawning in mid-air and being half dead from falling, NPCs killing them before the PCs get too, and some random weird sudden-death despawns.

A disappointment, but aside from that silly event the launch has been smooth as silk. No problems logging in or playing at all. Actually starting to think I need a second alarm clock so I have one to beep and tell me when I need to go to bed so I can get enough sleep to actually wake up when the other beeps to tell me I have to get up.

Not sure which to play today. All have been fun so far, I have another I have made (Electricity blast) that I haven’t really played yet. Still pondering making an Archery or an Ice (Chilljoy) or a Might (Protector One) or a Telekinetic or a Power Armor or a Gadgetry or a Twin Blades character…

So many cool powers, so much to try.

I like autumn.

As for my other current obsession… The CO ‘Head Start’ begins at 10am tomorrow. I have a pre-order from the right sort of store (the one that offered the pre-orders with the fun goodies) so I’ll be able to play as soon as the servers come up. Will be an interesting rush as that happens, seeing how many people will be on right away and how freakishly over-crowded the tutorial zones will be.

On another CO note, I started a wiki to record all of the stuff I have found in game. I did one for CoX ages back, but I stopped maintaining that one after I left the game and it disappeared to the nether realms of my HDD a while back when swapping hosting services for my website.

The game launches officially on the 1st, or next Tuesday. Which also happens to be the day I start a certification course. 9am to noon, twice a week from then until the third week of December. Gyah… Not sure what to expect of it yet. I imagine that because of the subject matter it’ll swing one of two ways: very interesting or boring to the point that I find myself longing for the peace of the grave.

Been watching Warehouse 13 for the last couple of nights off of On Demand (I have ComCast for my cable provider…). I missed the first few episodes of the show but from what I’ve seen so far it looks kind of fun. I hope it lasts. It just feels like a show with a niche audience. Still, best to enjoy the show while it lasts rather then mourn what the future may bring it.

Speaking of shows with niche audiences… I really need to look online sometime and see if I can find the last few episodes of Pushing Daisies. There were three episodes that didn’t originally air when the shows final season sort of ended abruptly that were supposed to have been aired at a much later date but I must have missed them. Well, the later date was back about eight months ago…

On one hand, I rather miss Pushing Daisies as it was quirky and fun. On the other hand, the creator of the show went back to writing for Heroes and I think he likely single-handedly saved the second half of last season.

Anyways, I need to make dinner, water my lawn (stupid hot weather…), and then likely work on my wiki a bit more before I turn in early so as to make sure I am up in time for the servers to come up.

Okay, not communicating too well. Too sleepy. Stayed up late the last few nights to play the CO Open Beta.

Yesterday I got my Force character through the Desert entirely and that took it to 14 and moved them on to Millennium City to start quests there. Today I logged in and thought I’d get my Munitions character though the Canada missions and have two people for M.City.

Uh… Didn’t quite work out. They lowered exp rates in the overnight patch and what should have taken me from 9-14 instead got me barely into level 12. So my Munitions character ended up doing the Canada and the Desert missions and that got it to 14 and on to the big city.

Millennium City, by the way, is both gorgeous looking and huge. So big, no zoning between sections, it actually feels like it could be a real full-size city. But with the exp nerf I haven’t had much luck doing anything there. I quickly ran through all the level 14 missions, and the level 15 missions and now I am looking at the level 16s and not sure I can survive them as I am only halfway through level 14 exp’wise.

Hoping they come up with a better adjustment for character advancement rate and exp hand-outs before the game goes live. I really don’t want to have to spend too much time grinding just to be able to survive missions.

Other than that, I watched the most recent two episodes of Eureka that I had sitting on my DVR. Fun show, pretty good season so far. The show has never been one that I really felt rushed too see, but has always been one I enjoyed watching. At least they have a better sponsor and product placement this season. The car they have been pimping in some shots is far less annoying that the Degree deodorant from last season (I think it was Degree, I forget now which brand it was). Still, I have to wonder how the Sheriff’s love life will go this season. The last time they tried to have him date someone else it was the dry cleaning lady in season 2 I think and she just disappeared between seasons without any mention in season 3. Tess though is a more interesting character so it’ll be interesting to see how things happen from here on out.

ANyays, need sleep now. Badly. End of beta event is tomorrow in CO. Of course, I have to be across town doing some work tomorrow. Just need to get work done quickly so I can get back home and have time to enjoy fighting giant robots.

So I bought a laptop today.

Okay, there was actually a fair amount of thought put into doing this. For starters I looked at the price of parting out a new PC and the pain of assembling it (done so many times in the past, I have the scars on my fingers from getting sliced in the process to prove it). After doing that I looked into getting an Alienware desktop (expensive, but likely worth it (though the idea of it being ‘worth it’ might just be the bragging rights on the insane specs it would have)). But most of my options would involve shipping and time to assemble and really I just wanted a new PC now.

So I bought a laptop.

It actually turned out to be a hell of a lot cheaper than I expected (honestly, a bit less than half of what I had been prepared to spend) but it still specs out to be a pretty nice gaming rig. Not the high-end insane beast of a PC I was looking at from Alienware (which would cost almost 7x what I spent on this) but a good gaming machine that should play pretty much any game out on the market right now and look damned good doing it.

Or, to put it another way, it can run Champions Online with all of the graphics settings turn all the way up.

Took me about two hours after getting it hope to get everything patched and updated. Took me another hour to get CO to download and install. Meanwhile the laptop was running very quietly, and while it blew a lot of hot air out of it’s cooling vent it itself didn’t get anywhere near as hot as laptops I have used in the past (such as the mac book I remember using once which would have melted the skin off of your legs and sterlized you permanently if you actually tried to hold it in your lap).

After having played the game at the minimum graphics settings for the last few days the changes are… Well… I don’t want to say orgasmic but… You know… Suddenly the whole world was brighter (except where the process rendered shadows made it darker), everything had more texture to it and you could see the cloth in peoples costumes wrinkle and flex as they moved, when stuff blew up there was bits flying everywhere, it was like playing a whole new game.

Made a new character with ice powers to play around with the character creator now that I could actually see what I was doing in it (before a lot of it was just flat-toned blurs) and the details on things in it is very impressive. Took screenshots of my various characters I had already made to show off and picked a couple shots from what I was playing tonight (choose two that weren’t too busy with explosions and debris to see the details of the landscape) to display how pretty the game is.

Didn’t do much with my ice guy as I teamed up with @Bllurr again to go through the Crisis in Canada missions. Have to say that while I think the Canada zone might be better looking the missions aren’t as fully fleshed out. When you finish in the Desert you get a cut scene of being welcomed on your survival of the mission but there didn’t seem to be a similar experience in Canada. Plus, the boss fight just felt a lot weaker than the Desert one (though that may have been because our two characters togethor put out a ton of damage very fast). Still, it was a lot of fun to team up for a bit and nice to see the Canada zone proper at last.

About to crash for the night, but here are the screenshots:

I’ve resolved one of those issues so far: pizza minis for lunch.

In terms of Champions Online, when I logged back in Wednesday night I hemmed and hawed for a bit and ended up just playing my Might character a bit more. Finished off the Desert Disaster, got a chunk of the ways into the actual Desert missions and then wandered back to Millenium City to look around for a bit. Also did some PvP with him, or rather I competed in the ‘Hero Games’ as they call it.

At level 10 the first PvP mode gets unlocked UTC, or Ultimate Tournament of Champions, which when I tried it out was a five on five PvP match in what looked like the octagon from all of those UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) tv shows. The actual match is chaotic, frenetic, and a lot of fun. I’ll definately have to build a character just to do PvP with someday.

Thursday after work I decided to try something new and made a few new characters playing with the Darkness, Fire and Force powersets. Didn’t spend much time with Darkness yet, it looks to have cool stuff later on but I found the character costume I made for that character annoyed me quickly so I’ll have to delete him and try again later.

Fire I had fun with and got through the tutorial and most of the way through Canada. It isn’t so far quite the ‘uber-kick-ass’ that I’d seen people calling it, but also there was a balance patch the other day so that might be why. Still, it was fun and as I took a break for dinner last night I had just unlocked Fire Form and will have to go back and see how much of a buff it turns out to be.

Finally, I tried the Force powerset out. Back in the CoX days my favorite character was an Energy/Energy blaster named Kinetica. Lots of fun playing the character, the powers were great, the costume was fun. In CO the closest powerset to that is the Force powerset so I’ve been kind of hesitant a bit to try it out. On one hand it could be really awesome and a chance to sort of re-capture the fun playstyle I had in CoX, on the other hand it could have be a let-down and leave me feeling a bit more wistful then I would like. So far in playing with it I have been liking it, though I suspect I am in the end going to miss the snipe and energy torrent a little. But it is fun enough that I don’t think I’ll have a problem adjusting.

Sound a bit like a fan-boy, gushing about the game constantly, but honestly I have been having so much fun with the Open Beta of CO and have ran into so little that really has bugged me about the game I haven’t found cause to complain so far.

Other than that… Book I’ve been reading while on the bus for the last few days has been ‘Atlas Shrugged’ by Ayn Rand. It has been a surprisingly fun read and has told a surprisingly good story. Only about halfway through it so far, it is a dense enough narrative that I haven’t been tearing through it very quickly.

The other book I’ve been reading lately has been ‘Quicksilver’ by Neal Stephenson. It is the first book of his Baroque Cycle and I’ve had all three sitting on my shelf for a while, I just put off reading them when I first got them because I had wanted to wait for the entire series to be released and then somehow I forgot that the entire series had been released and never got to reading them.

Almost through snacking on pizza mini’s now, need to finish this up and try and get that compost moved onto my garden in back. Plan to log into CO some more later tonight and will probably take another powerset through the tutorial before switching back to one of my existing characters and getting them further into the game. Only about a week left in the Open Beta and I’d like to see some of the later zones before the Early Start and game release.

So I pre-ordered Persona for the PSP while I was there (looking forward to that, I played it on the PS1 ages ago but the translation rather stank and big chunks of the game had apparently not even been included in the US version of it) and also picked up a XBox 360 controller that wasn’t wireless.

I wanted to try out how the CO controls work with it and after running through the tutorial again (this time with a Sorcery powerset character) I have to say that it was pretty slick. Very smooth game play, had a lot easier time with the camera using the Right Stick than I had had with the mouse on my earlier playthroughs. It just felt very good and very fun. Kind of like when I used to be on a caffiene / sleep-deprivation buzz while playing CoX and felt the need to jump on everything and run around while playing my Blaster. Had no real benefit there, but in CO it matters a bit more it seems and is just really fun to do.

On the downside, still not sure entirely what all the buttons do and doing the ‘Interact’ with the up on the D-Pad is a little wonky. Basically if you have more than one choice of item to interact with (an NPC to talk to standing next to a baricade you can pick up) I kept ending up in this state where I was just swapping between choosing which one to interact with and I haven’t figured out yet how to select one. Instead I’ve been either just clicking on the one I wanted with the mouse or moving my character around until I was in a position where there was only one choice to interact with and then it works fine.

Sure there is a more elegant way of doing it but given this is the Open Beta still and I don’t have a manual explaining the controls I am just having to make do.

While the controller was fun, I didn’t really like the Sorcery powerset much. The energy builder was find (Eldritch Bolts) but the starter power (Eldritch Blast if I remember right) was kind of annoying. You could tap it for a wholly unimpressive attack or hold it down to charge it with as much energy as you have and fire a much more impressive attack (often one-shotting or coming close to one-shotting minions). But something about it just didn’t appeal to me. After the fun smackdowns in Might and the sheer silly awesomeness of Munitions I found Sorcery a little flat.

Likely it gets better later and I’ll go back and try it more later but right now there are still so many powersets I haven’t tried or even really seen yet that it just isn’t keeping my attention for the moment.

Going to go back and play some more later tonight. Not sure if I’ll talk my Might/PA character (Protector Bot 1) out and finish the Desert Disaster, or my Munitions character (Miss Wolf) to finish the Crisis in Canada.