Dub's Playlist of the Week.

My playlist this week is going to be kind of short. The week has been dominated with Warhammer Online. I understand that Civ V was released this week and I do plan to play more of it, but WAR has really sunk its teeth into me. There was a little tiny bit of Bad Company 2 and Jolly Rover sprinkled in, but it's been all about WAR.

Greatest Invention of the 21st Century.

Some people say that the iPhone has been the greatest invention of this generation. I'm not sure about that, but I am sure that the greatest invention of the 21st century has been the Razer Naga Gaming Mouse.

Now I've known about this mouse for quite some time, but had little interest in actually buying one. That was until I mentioned on Twitter about being a mouse clicker in Warhammer Online. It was like a light bulb went off in my head as I said to myself 'self, isn't there a mouse that is suppose to help with that?'. And indeed there is.

What you have to understand is I have been using a Logitech Trackball mouse for over a decade. Not the same mouse of course, but it has been a trackball mouse. I have tried to migrate back to a regular mouse a few times over the years, but I just couldn't get accustomed to the feel of them. So when I went to Best Buy to pick up the Razer I had asked about the return policy. I didn't want to spend all this money on something that may or may not work for me.

But it doesn't matter now because I love my new mouse! Not only does it feel great and is comparable to how I felt with a trackball, it also has made WAR that much more fun. I won't lie, it has been a challenge, but it hasn't been as hard of a transition as I thought it would. I've even used the Razer in Bad Company 2 and did well, that's a great thing for somebody like me who had been tracking it as long as I have.

Is the Razer Naga needed? Not really, I did just fine in FPS games and in MMO's in general. The main reason for the purchase was for the 12 buttons on the side of the mouse. I have tried to be a keyboard clicker, and it just doesn't work for me. I would spend more time looking at the keyboard to make sure I was hitting the right keys. Where the Razer was needed was in PvP. I am tired of just being mediocre, I want to be somewhat competitive, and the Razer Naga is doing that for me. Is the Razer perfect? That depends really. There is still the occasional confusion as to which button I am pressing, but the majority of the time it works perfectly for me. The best thing about the Razer is it allows me to focus on watching the screen. It really has improved my experience in oRvR in WAR, and I do think it's helping me improve as a pvper.

Dub's Playlist of the Week.

I haven't done one of these in awhile, so I figured it was time for another. My playlist has been dominated primarily by two games over the past month: Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Warhammer Online. There has been the occasional other game like Jolly Rover and Napoleon Total War thrown in there, but according to Raptr those other two have been the games of choice.

More F2P goodness!

Remember that time when I was excited about the Everquest 2 Extended, and how I went on and on about it? Well, as time went on and more information about the pricing came out the excitement kind of died a bit. It also didn't help that I jumped head first in Warhammer Online again. I would actually attribute the lack of EQ2X play time more to WAR than anything else, I'm just so addicted to PvP in that game.

But enough about that, I wanted to talk about something else. You see, if I just wet myself at the EQ2X announcement, then I totally crapped my pants at the announcement of Pirates of the Burning Sea going F2P. Around May of last year I bought PotBS on sale for only five bucks from GoGamer.com. I actually had six weeks of free play because I also signed up for the 14 day free trial, smart thinking eh!

I had a blast playing the game, even talked one friend into at least trying the game for two weeks. The problem was that Champions Online and Aion were right around the corner, and I was still subbed to Age of Conan as well. So I never actually subbed after my free time was over because those other two games I was going to be writing a review for and knew I wouldn't have much time. As much fun as I was having, I never quite felt that PotBS was worth a fifteen dollar monthly sub. Don't get me wrong, the game has awesome ship to ship combat, something I haven't been able to find in an offline single-player game.

Regardless of whatever MMO I may be playing at the time, I am most definitely going to be playing PotBS, and you should too!

Sport the WAAAGH...

My MMO of choice the past month has been WAR, and boy has it been fun, most of the time. I am a PvE carebear at heart and generally stink at any sort of PvP in MMO's. So when I initially came back last month, I created an Engineer on the Iron Rock server and instantly went back to the Dwarf T1 starter area. So for about six levels I just quested and ran a few Public Quests while waiting for scenarios to pop.

Then one day I had this idea that I would go ahead and check out the Empire vs Chaos T1 oRvR, cause with all the free accounts there has to be some PvP going. Let me tell ya, after that night my way of playing WAR changed. It was as if the rain had stopped, the clouds had opened and a ray of sunlight hit me in the face, all the while angels where playing music as if to tell me 'Now this is how you play the game!'. From that point on I logged in, joined an open warband and proceeded to blast Destro into tiny bits.

That was all well and good, till I hit T2 with the Engineer. At this moment he sits idle waiting for me to just take my punishment like a man, cause everyone knows starting out in a new Tier is like having your face kicked in repeatedly, eventually it will stop, I hope. I did have two other characters already in T2, my Chosen on Badlands and the Black Orc on Volkmar. Well I remember when I used to own face back with the Chosen, I'll just dust him off and give it a go.

That didn't last very long. I know I am not playing this class correctly, but it's really discouraging to get creamed as a heavy armored bringer of death. So I decided that I would mess around with the Orc; that turned out to be a great decision. It was a bit rough at first, but eventually I got the hang of the Black Orc and started wreaking shop in T2.

But once again, that was all well and good till I hit T3 with the Orc. T3 on Volkmar is a mixed bag so far. Last night was probably the best night in my young T3 days. We had a full warband take a keep and some BO's and get the elf lands to flip to Destro. I will say one thing, the renown xp is nice. But again, being on the beggining end of the tier, I am easy picken's for high level Order.

Regardless, I am still enjoying WAR, I look forward to going home after work every night and logging in, evern if it's for an hour or two.

LOTRO F2P this Friday.

So apparently on September 10th, Lord of the Rings in its F2P incarnation goes live here in the US. No offense to Blue Kae or anyone else who may love LOTRO but I could really care less. If you were not a paying subscriber or lifetimer before the F2P announcement, then there is absolutely nothing in the F2P version that will draw you in other than the price. Let me put it another way - going F2P is not going to make LOTRO any better.

I predict that there will be a large number of players from the levels of 1 and say 24, but once players will be required to start shelling out money to continue questing those numbers will drop. But this is me being jaded, I am sure there are a number of players looking forward to this and I hope that it's successful, but I highly doubt that you will find me in the world of Middle Earth.

How I feel about F2P LOTRO.

What I am looking forward to in September!

Well September is here, and that means we should start seeing a lot more games being released for the holiday season. I thought I would share the few games that I am looking forward to playing this month!

1) NHL 11 for PS3.

Since I no longer have a working Xbox, I will need to satisfy my console thirst on the PS3. Not a bad thing, but I have become comfortable with the Xbox controller when it comes to my hockey games, so hopefully there is little difference between the two. The Be a Pro mode was what I played most last season, and this years mode looks even better. I also would like to get into online play once again; I did very little last season because of a few tweaks to the controls that I felt made playing online to difficult as a Defenseman. NHL 11 comes out on Sept. 7th, I will be paying off my preorder this weekend to insure I receive one.

2) Civilization V for the PC.

What can I say, I have loved the Civ series since I was introduced to Civ II. What I do know is that I will most likely be losing sleep because I can always just play one more turn! Civ V releases on Sept. 21st, so I better get as much sleep as I can till then.

3) Dead Rising 2 for PC.

I wrote Dead Rising 2 off when I Xbox fried. But then I learned it was PS3 as well and I suddenly was interested. But the other day I noticed that Steam has the PC version for preorder, and now I am excited. I loved the first game and number two looks to be just as awesome. The fact that Capcom is releasing this for the PC makes me the most happiest of all. It will be Games for Windows Live which I love for two reasons - achievements and controller support! The zombie beheadings will begin Sept. 28th, can't wait.

A few notibles that have already been released that I am still looking to get are - Singularity and Mafia 2 for the PC. With WAR taking up my evenings at the moment and the other three games coming this month, I have no idea if I would even have the time to play these two games. Man it's a great time to be a PC gamer!

FFXIV slowness.

Not long ago I complained about the downloading and patching of Runes of Magic. Well I think the Final Fantasy XIV beta has got that beat. When I went to bed last night I was at roughly 50%, when I got up this morning it was nearly finished at 99.5%. It would seem that Square Enix went with a P2P type download system, like WoW's patcher, and it's awfully slow. Good news is tonight we here in North America should be able to get codes to play in beta, so hopefully all this painfully slow downloading and patching will be worth it.

UPDATE: It took I don't remember how many times to download the updates, but after four attempts to install said updates, I have given up for now. Each time the updating process would error out at 99%, the last time my anti-virus went nuts which caused the updating to fail. So I decided to uninstall the client I have for now and maybe in a day or two I will be able to get myself a code and a new client.