Well, I'm actually posting this Saturday afternoon and there's no cinema in it, so what you gonna do about it?

Excellent Articles Of The Week

Coyote at Ten Ton Hammer tries to offend everyone by telling it to them like it is in The DEATH of EverQuest II
Go, read it and tell me that in your heart of hearts you don't know that he's telling the truth. Plus he's got pink topped boobie ladies to reinforce the message.

More high brow maybe, but Raph Koster was off to Project Horseshoe, an invite only ubergeek head banging session, at which he gave a talk on Influences.  Once again, go, read, inwardly digest, then find a quiet corner to meditate in and think "how do we game the experience of the taste of a peach..."

Game News Of  The Week

Well they've been busy bunnies over at the SOE Temple Of Fun, what with expansions for EQ2 and further additions to the expertise trees in SWG...

EQ2 - A whole new race and a chuck off big island chock full of fairies, trolls and more sppiders than you can shake a sticky thing at. Honestly, what is it with game designers now? Is the default MOB a spider??  I almost miss the D&D days of "You are in a tunnel, there is a kobold ahead of *splat* ... you have killed a kobold for 1/2copper"

The fae race are amazing. I tried them in beta so know they can be tough little buggers, but even as a newblish toon in a newblish world with a whole bunch of newblies It Is FUN.  OK, some of the NPC voices I could live without, but hey....   (I'm guessing that it's bad of me to already be wishing that a rumbler is going to get Ami?)

This week I'm hoping to met up with a few friends ingame and go run some missions as a group. Should be fun...


SWG - Commando, Medic and FINALLY Spy expertise have been added and are not on test for Chapter 4 release.  I haven't tried comando and, tbh, I didn't see many commandoes running around in my brief foray onto TC. 

I tried Spy and, well, the best I can say is it's what we expected, enhanced stealth and general skills in ranged and melee, a bit of a heal and some armour boosts. Pretty much the same package as everyone else, just dressed in spylike garb.  I think one of the problems is that the devs tehmselves are still not quite sure what 'spy' does.

Currently we're the stealth/rogue/thief class you'd expect to find any an D&D descended RP ruleset but what we're meant to be doing is a bit less clear.  To be honest, you can be just as good a spy as a jedi if all you want to do is check out the oppositions deployment. I don't know... maybe it'll all become more clear if we get some spy missions..

Medic.. ah, now medic is another kettle of fish altogether.  Let me preface this by saying that I don't PvP, ever. It's just not my bag.  So, after an hour of PvPing in Restuss with a sane group I chalked up silly amounts of GCW points.  You know, the sort of group  that knows to stick near the medic so I can spam area heals and lob toxins out while the melee folk and the ranged folk do their thing and or spy runs out on 'snatch squad' missions to take down the reds flamerthrower.

I could ALMOST be tempted back for that.  But the again, I got bored after an hour and went off to hunt graul.


Other news...

Stillwaiting to try Roma Victor, Africa the MMORPG is still out there, PotBS feels like it's coming closer and, yay, I've been accepted into a LotRO kinship Marauders of Minhiriath which is peopled by the best bunch of players I have ever met in any game every, a whole horde of exSWG Rangers!