| OMG WTF

This old commercial is gloriously moronic.

| And then there were two!

Nice! Well, hopefully we can pick up another AT member or three. Pump - yes, we'll use Google Hangout for chat, the battlemat will be a Google Doc, we'll use the diceroller I posted the other day and we should be good to go.

I bought... many books from that sale. I think my orgiastic Christmas money spending spree is finally at an end. :) I already had about half of the 3rd ed books, so I picked up the adventure books I didn't have already (for our campaign!) and I didn't have most of the location books either. The pdfs are on sale at drivethrurpg so I picked up the player's handbook from there as well. All I skipped were the Cathay books. I haven't been too impressed in the past by how they handle places outside of Barsaive, and those don't look like exceptions.

I've always really liked the cover art showing Parlainth, and was tempting to pick up a print because I'm trying to liven up the apartment a bit, but Jeebus, $65 is outrageous. Maybe next year.

Pump - I haven't had any queueing so far. The only waiting I had to do was the 12 hours or so it took to download the game. :) I'm on an RP-PVP server, Ajantha Tull or something I think, playing lightside. Let me know if you join the magic and we can team up! I leveled a Trooper to level 10, which is the point where you get a companion, pick up your subclass/talents, start getting crafting skills, and I think get a ship soon. It's a little bit of overload so I may go back and play one of the other classes' origin stories and see how they play.

They just fixed a bug that was pretty awesome. Anytime you were in combat, no matter whether you were fighting the mightiest boss or the wimpiest separatist, if you used the /dance command you suddenly became immune to injury. Dance your way to victory!

I'm down for some E-D next Saturday, count me in! Also thinking about Star Warps, but also want to make sure things have chillaxed enough so I'm not wasting none of my first month.

Bought a Kinect! I don't know why, but I'm super into Dance Central 2, so it's already justified itself. Interesting technology.

| Books!

Doh! Like waving crack in front of an addict. I already have the Gamemaster and Player Guides. I got those through Lulu (for extra full price) a while back. It still says 3rd ed, so I assume the Mongoose versions are the same. Butttt, I sees more bookzesss. My Presscioussss.

The 14th sounds like a plan, I shall endeavour to attend. Is this through the Google thingie?

The Star Wars game did pique my interest. Have the server waits settled down? I was thinking of maybe checking it out. Gonna make a gimped protocol droid character. I am RPG2. I am conversant in one languages.

| Paging all Pumpkins

Earthdawn book sale over at the Mongoose website! Everything's basically half off. Jeez, now that I'm looking at it I'm tempted to buy more books.

Fair enough! Yeah I wonder if this one will go F2P. I kind of think it won't for a while, I think the license is probably big enough that it and WoW will be the two subscription holdouts, for another year or two at least. It is stupid that you have to pay for the software and the sub fee, though.

Anyway, hasn't Blizzard been suffering a DDOS attack for over a year? That's what my twitter feed says.

But anyway who gives an eff about any MMO when we could be playing

MOTHA FUCKING EARTHDAWN, YO???

Let's do this. I built a battlemap in Google Docs that will totally be suitable, so no need for messing around with OpenRPG/MapTools etc. Also found a sweet community dice roller here, so I think we're good to go.

How does a week from Saturday (1/14) sound to people? Say, 2:00? I'm thinking of just running one "Prologue" fight, with some pre-gens, to kick the tires a bit before forcing everyone to roll up guys, and to test out this battlemat nonsense. Then we can make characters (I picked up the pdf of the player's guide) and start a real campaign!

| Blue Harvest

Star Wars not gonna happen for me, yo.

If I had another 24 hours in the day, I would heck of fire that bad boy up, but I just don't have the time anymore. :(

I am fairly committed to WoW, insofar as there is still SO MUCH for me to see and do in that game, not to mention I really like almost everything about it, I will be reserving my limited game time to the much maligned WoW.

Maybe when Star Wars goes free to play in 6 months I'll give it a go ;)

PVP's the only way to go! I'm on an rp-PVP server, playing a Republic trooper. Pew, pew, laz0rs! Only level 6 right now but I imagine I'll hit 10 sometime this week. Then I'll be seeing the "real" game since I think that's when you start hitting up the main hub zones.

Oh, not using Origin. Steam is one thing but I'm not interested in installing EA's crapware.

Did you pick a PVP server, because that's like the only way I'd play. Glad you like it! Do you have to login through Origin? If so, I'll friend you on there so you can see when I'm playing Battlefield! But for reals, I might get MMMotor if you think it's fun times. What level you at and what class/side?

| The Star Wars MMO is really fun.

Super fun. Super-duper fun! I really think you guys would like it.

They looked at what is awesome about WoW, appropriated that, looked at what is not so awesome, made that better, and then updated the graphics. The main improvement being how quest dialogues are fully voiced, with dialogue options. It's kind of a big deal because it really makes you feel like your character is part of the story. It feels like a single-player game within the MMO. Now I don't think the dialogue choices matter THAT much besides giving you lightside/darkside points, but it's still neat to be able to have that little bit of control over what your character does/says.

Other little neat things: when you talk to a quest-giver, it's private. You don't run into that WoW thing where you see an NPC saying to some random, "Hooray Smoxakahk420! You saved Dalaran from the pegasus!" Then you turn in the quest and he says "Hooray Frudo! You saved Dalaran from the pegasus!" They use instances a lot in little ways that work for the story.

Combat is fun! It's a nice change of pace to be getting into firefights instead of melees. (I'm not a Jedi though, presumably they go around lightsabering shit left and right.). Shooting everything with blasters and grenades is awesome! Things blow up nice. Combat is fast paced and super fun (a successful ported from WoW). I've only run into a couple of serious challenges so far, but I've learned to start using all my tools.

That said I haven't been off-planet, or done any multiplayer stuff yet (although it's supposed to be pretty solid). So I dunno if the awesome holds up past the starting planets but so far I gotta say, this is nice.

Only thing I don't like: they got a little lazy with the player races and they are all basically human-sized, human-shaped (easier to do the armor etc. that way). Feels a little weird not to be able to be a Greedo or an Admiral Ackbar. I mean come on, Hammerhead was my favorite action figure, I would totally be an Ithorian.

Happy New Year!

I spent my New Years weekend laid the fuck out with a horrible stomach virus I picked up from my visiting nephew. It affected him a lot worse, little guy. He was in bed for like 4 days miserable watching his sisters and us play and have fun. Then when he got better I got sick and it took me out for about 3 days. SUCKED.

Now I'm better, but goddamn, what a waste of a bunch of days off. I couldn't even play Stone Age. Set it up and got like 2 rounds in and then felt all dizzy and exhausted. That's not even a complicated game!

I'm still ready for a gift exchange! I hope somebody wants Quarriors, haha cuz I got you covered! ;)  (If not I'll find a use for it)

Our tentative wedding date is looking like June 3rd! We're still working out the details (we've got ALL the details to work out, really). Hopefully you'll all be able to make it to SoCal that weekend - once we get our stuff ironed out I'll reach out to you all individually. We're gonna go to Maui for our Honeymoon. It'll be my first trip to Hawaii, so I'm pretty excited. I'll have to visit Ryan if that's the island he lives on.

| Damn You, Temptress Internet

Happy New Year everyone! Hope it's filled with teabagging, Dirty Sanchezes and whatever all else you deviants enjoy. Alligator Fuckhouse, anyone?

Some decent stuff on Steam today -- Skyrim for $40. The new Deus Ex, which is supposed to be outstanding, is $16.99. Gonna hold off on it for now because I don't have time right now, but that game is definitely in my future. Man the first Deus Ex was good.

I did go a bit old-school and picked up a few older games from GOG.com for $2-3 each: the Ultima 7 collection, Might and Magic 7 (I didn't even know they made this many games in the series, but I read the reviews and this one's supposed to be quite good), and The Last Express, an really interesting adventure game I missed out on at the time.

For those who like their games old-school, yet completely free, this looks pretty cool. These guys created updated versions of Space Quest 2 and King's Quest 3. Free to download! Tons of unfair ways to perish!

Speaking of which, Dragon's Lair II is total bullshit. Even with the option on to tell you what to do at each move: total bullshit.

Enron, Rude and I didn't do our board game gift exchange yet (decided to make it a New Year's Gift Exchange). So if anyone wants to jump on in there, holler! Maybe someone who sold Agricola before could get it again. ;)