One of the games we’ve been chattering about is StarCraft 2 and a couple of the other people have been doing league 3v3 play. Had been invited to join them to make it 4v4 but I passed as my SC skills weren’t quite up to par (imho) to be a good part of their team. So I’ve been playing a bit more of the campaign (which really has nothing to do with multi-player tactics) and some multi-player matches against the AI. Still not sure my macro/micro skills are back up to par yet but getting better.

DDO has my human monk leveling slowly up, but also just started a warforged wizard/rogue. Very much a ‘flavor of the month’ build but it looks to be pretty solid for solo’ing and I can finally get all those damned secret doors my monk could spot but not search for due to shitty seach skills and not enough skill points. Game remains fun, ended up joining a guild over there to have people to chat with and the group looks to be pretty fun.

Just bought Borderlands this past week. Ended up then playing it for 6 straight hours before realizing it was 2am and I needed to sleep. Very fun, well designed content where the bits are just the right size that they don’t drag on for too long and you never realize how much time you are spending on them. Going to do some co-op this weekend with some of the IRC crowd I think. Will be interesting to see how it fares in multi-player play.

Did the first of the ‘feature episodes’ last night in STO. “Cold Call” I believe the name of it was. Did it on Advanced difficulty because I didn’t think to change it before I went into the mission. If I’d realized there was so much ground combat in it, I may have as I find the balance on ground combat is a little off (bridge officer AI not being smart enough to remove themselves from AoE effects or to seek cover without being told) though I find space combat on Advanced to be almost too easy. That said, this mission was a nice change of pace. The Breen made for an interesting new enemy to fight, though the bosses AoE attack was a little harsh as it was able to one-hit KO four of my bridge officers at once. The space portion turned out to be a surprisingly good challenge on Advanced. First time in a long time that I did a space battle on any difficulty that I actually felt challenged with. Kind of wish I could replay just the space portions of it. The next feature episode either came out today at noon time or comes out tomorrow at noon.

Other than that, working towards a Dark Sun campaign for 4E D&D. Should be interesting to see how it goes. Trying out some home rules with it to get it feeling more like the 2E setting in terms of character power vs world difficulty. Also using the old 2E books to get the game actually feeling like Dark Sun’s gritty dangerous dark world on the brink of collapse again and not 4E’s goofy mix of Conan’esque sword-and-sorcery meeting Al-Qadim arabian nights.

Will write more about that later, for now I am off back to either SC2 or some more Borderlands. Will decide while I go to get a coke.

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.

With that said, the bits I have played have been pretty fun and pretty interesting and since it is Free-2-Play now I am likely to leave it installed on my computer for some time to come for when I want a change of pace.

Kind of a pity it never caught on better than it did, also kind of wonder about the thought processes of the people working at Turbine. They go from DDO (a MMO largely constrained by the D&D 3.5 rpg) to making LOTRO (a MMO very constrained by the Tolkien setting).

Someday Turbine will sit down to make a MMO that they can freely design and explore and be creative and original about and with all of the experience they’ve gotten so far I expect it’ll be pretty impressive.