The holidays are finally rounding up, and with it hopefully a little more time to write here on MmoQuests as well as NomadicGamer. I’ve settled into a semi routine with my gaming and I’m happy for that. What am I up to at the end of 2010? Nothing all that exciting, but I’ll list it in any case.
Rift – Today the 3rd Rift beta starts and runs until the 31st of December. Chances are if I were participating in it a lot of my time will be spent there.
EVE Online – I’m also three days away from flying an Orca – my dream hauler. I can’t afford one quite yet but I know that will come with time. I can’t wait to fly one of these. Ever since I got my hulk and saw my friend David flying on I’ve wanted to be able to fly myself.
WoW – I haven’t been playing in the Cataclysm zones (80+) all that much. Both my priest and my warlock are at a comfortable 82 and I’ve been working on their crafting skills as well as playing lower level alts on the opposite faction. I have been having a great time with the new quests in “vanilla” WoW. I just finished Redridge mountains on my paladin and I thought it was really well done, gained a few levels even though the quests were gray and worked up my enchanting skill. I’ve been enjoying the slow walk towards 85 and I mean it’s more like a crawl than a walk. I’ll get there eventually. I’ve unlocked and completed two dungeons (Throne of Tides and the one in Blackrock) which were quite fun. Healing PUGs is always stressful but I’ve enjoyed the challenge.
Sims 3 – This game continues to hold my attention in a big way. I wish there were less bugs would be one of my major complaints. It feels like EA just likes to push expansion packs out the door and rarely fixes any of the issues that they come up with, so it’s all about me dealing with bugs from a few expansions and packs that they’ve sold. I really enjoy and appreciate the amount of options we’re given in game, and though at times it feels a little “too real” for a video game there is enough humor to keep me trucking along finding out what happens next.
Neverwinter Nights 2 – This game was on sale at Steam for $10 including two expansion packs. I own NWN but haven’t played in ages, and while I have heard there was a lot of bugs at launch for NWN2 I decided why not, and picked it up. Still a few hours left to go on the patcher, but it should be a few hours of fun none the less.
As pictured above I also got a brand new Logitech G700 gaming mouse for Christmas, and so far I’m really liking it. The fit of the mouse is perfect to my hands, and unlike my previous razor, I can very easily hit the buttons and what’s more important to me – feel the buttons while I game. I found with the razor it was impossible for me to hit the buttons because they didn’t exactly stand out to me. I don’t want to fumble along the mouse or have to look down in order to hit them. Fully programmable with different profiles, I’ve already set one up for WoW. My attempts at learning WASD are going alright. I’ve completely unbound the arrow keys as movement keys in all of my games so that is at least forcing me to use them. I own a Steelseries merc keyboard which has a special gaming pad section on the far left that emulates the WASD keys as well as a few others. It’s not something I’m used to quite yet, but my right wrist is MUCH happier with the new set up.
How about all of my wonderful readers, get anything new and shiny for Christmas? Any new games on your horizon? Let me know in comments!
Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.
I found a cheap collector’s edition of Star Trek Online sitting on the shelf of my local game store. I’m not a hardcore Trek fan, but have watched a huge amount of the TV episodes spanning all the shows. Whilst the game has a reasonable fun factor I have not yet been really sucked into it enough to say that after the 30-day free subscription I will still be playing.
Other than that – it’s been EQ2 with my Shadowknight alt. that is currently at level 32 with 101 AA. With the XP boost thing going on I hit level 50 last night crafting as an armorer. I have also been finding EQ2 life more enjoyable since we got server merged into Oasis.
Dungeons and Dragons Online got a few hours of my time too. I have yet to find a game that offers a better rogue class experience than this game. I’m also a fan of the loot system where everybody gets a reward after completing a dungeon crawl.
As for the future, well for me it has to be Star Wars: The Old Republic. I absolutely love SW, and this could be the game to restore a hole left in my heart by SOE who managed to get it so wrong.
Other games on my Radar include: Dragon Age 2, Witcher 2, Diablo 3, Dues Ex 3.
I was pumped to hear that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim may be released around the end of 2011. I just hope that this time they get some better game testers before release, and I certainly wouldn’t employ anyone with Fallout New Vegas on their CV.
I’ve mainly been playing WoW, dinking around in the RIFT betas and occasionally logging in to AoC. I admire you for healing pugs!! I wish I could do that. I’m just too thin-skinned, so as much as a love healing, I won’t do it in a pug.
I’ve mainly been playing WoW, dinking around in the RIFT betas and occasionally logging in to AoC. I admire you for healing pugs!! I wish I could do that. I’m just too thin-skinned, so as much as a love healing, I won’t do it in a pug.
After finishing The Witcher AGAIN (3rd playthrough, I just love this game and can’t wait for Witcher 2 – Assassin of Kings in a few months!) I got myself Assassin’s Creed 2 on Steam. I just love strolling through 15th century Florence! The atmosphere is breathtakingly beautiful!
I picked up Darksiders and both Mass Effect games while on Steam sale, and I’m really looking forward to playing them. Just Cause 2 really helped me learn to use and love the wasd controls. I use a Logitech thumb trackball for my mousing though, so your mileage may vary.
Our family really doesn’t do presents anymore, but my Kinect came in November, and thanks to you, I went out and got all of the Sims 3 games and stuff packs. :) So those are some holiday gaming goodies I got for myself!
I don’t have a gaming mouse, but I love my wireless mouse to death. I use rechargeable batteries for it too, so the mouse never runs out of juice.
For Sims 3, are you using any of Twallan’s mods? (over at modthesims.com I think) I’m using his story progression, master controller, debugger, overwatch, and…no blur, heh. They allow you a lot more control over how things work in your game and help to fix a lot of the problems that EA can’t or won’t seem to fix. For example, the overwatch mod goes around each sim night and deletes all of the excess cars that got generated for the townies. On night, nearly 200 cars were deleted. Without the mod, the cars just keep building up and building up until the game just explodes. I also have the story progression mod set so that families don’t randomly move out of my town. You can also do things like reset lots and fix (most) invisible sims. You can do a lot of other stuff too, but I typically only use it for the gameplay issues since I like to build up my sims without using cheats.
Mine was a relatively boring gaming Christmas. My wife and I got new monitors (her a 23″, me a 24″), and a Move controller for the PS3. Other then that, everything else was utilitarian (a new HD to pair with my existing one for Raid 0 setup, a spare battery for my phone for PAX East, etc).