My MMO round up.

It seems like a couple of months ago I was claiming that I am done with MMO's for the time being. Since then I re-subbed to LOTRO with their special three month rate and bought both Final Fantasy XIV and DCUO. I don't know why I subbed to LOTRO, I guess I was hoping that something would grab me the way it did about a year ago.

FFXIV was more of an experiment, and for about two weeks it was the only game I could think about. I loved the combat, the game looks fantastic, and the armory system was awesome and probably one of the more original ideas I have seen in a MMO lately. So why am I not playing the game now? Well I advanced as far as I could on my own. I liked the crafting meta game, but the lack of a decent recipe book and the over reliance on a player economy is what killed the fun for me. FFXIV is full of weird design choices, but for those two weeks it was the best thing ever!

As of today I have played DCUO twice for about four hours. I played quite a bit of the beta and right now I am playing a character type that I was able to level to nine in the beta, so I am finding myself a tad bored. I think the game looks fantastic and I enjoy the combat a great deal, but I don't think I will be taking this one past the first month.

Even with only playing FFXIV for two weeks, I feel like I got my money's worth, I'm not even close to that feeling with DCUO, and LOTRO was a complete waste of money. I'm not looking for the next big thing in the MMO genre, I think I've just played so many MMO's and spent so much time playing them that I might just be burnt out. Plus I've purchased quite a few single-player games over the past year and I would really like to play them sometime. It's hard to do that when you have a game you feel obligated to play.

So what does all this mean for me? It means that I am in all probabilities going to give STO one more shot after DCUO is over, but after that I'm done with MMO's for sure. That is till TOR!

A handheld I think I can like!

Sony has finally announced the Next Generation Portable, or the NGP. It's probably a better name than PSP2, but not buy much. I'm not much of a handheld guy, I don't even like playing games on a phone, you know because it's a phone, but just look at how slick that looks! It's just crying out for me to touch it in naughty ways!

The list of third party support is pretty massive which is a good sign. I believe part of the problem initially with the original PSP was UMD movies and trying to get into that market. These days many of the Blu-Rays come with a digital version that can be ported to a handheld device.

I honestly don't know what the specs are for the NGP and I'm guessing I am going to have to purchase games digitally which I am not fond of, but I am more than willing to support anything NOT Nintendo and their crap hardware and garbage first party games!

Destroy Everything!

When I raise my Chaos army to devastate this world, I will have this song be my anthem!

Final Fantasy XIV?

It was just a couple of weeks ago that I was claiming MMO burnout for myself, and now here I am playing Final Fantasy XIV and I can't seem to get enough of it. The developers tried very hard to create an MMO that is different than what's on the market now, and they succeeded, but I don't think it's necessarily a good thing. There are quite a few design choices that have to make you wonder just what the hell they were thinking when developing this game. One thing's for sure, I am really enjoying the game right now, probably because it is different but I don't know if how long that will last.

As much as I want to play I have work and a lot of football to watch this weekend so that will help slow me down some.

They're coming to take me away...

Dear wackos, nut jobs, paranoid freaks and random homeless peoples who believe someone is out for you, please don't shoot those in government, it doesn't help. If you're afraid of the government now, just wait till they get tired of being shot at!

Panzerkampfwagen Tiger Ausf. E known as the Tiger I tank.

I am here sitting at work doing a very dangerous thing by browsing Steam for games when I came across a game called Iron Warriors: T-72 Tank Command. I really enjoy military history, I try to soak it up like a sponge. So I decided to do a google search on the T-72, and what followed next was about an hour and a half of tank info reading bliss!

First I started with the Soviet/Russian Main Battle Tanks. Then I moved onto the early WWII American armoured vehicles and then of course I had to check out the German WWII Panzer tanks. My knowledge of German Panzer's is very limited, but I do know that the dreaded Tiger I tank was one the most feared tanks in the late stages of WWII.

Eventually I made my way to the web page for the Tank Museum located over in England. The Tank Museum has almost one hundred years of tank history within its facility and has one of six surviving German Tiger I tanks from WWII. Not only that, it's the only known working Tiger I tank in existence.

If anyone is actually interested in this stuff, there's a website Tiger-Tank.com that gives details on this particular Tiger tank from it's manufacture to its capture in Tunisia and its eventual restoral in England. Frankly I find this all very fascinating and totally kick ass.

For your viewing pleasure here are three separate videos of the Tiger tank in action.

The year that was and the year that might not be!

Blogging is often fun, can be interesting and is very time consuming. For me it's also difficult at times. I personally don't think I am a bad writer but it is often a painful process of writing, re-writing and just being able to convey thoughts in my mind in such a way that someone reading them can understand. Now if that sounds normal then let me know. I feel that my lack of motivation and inconsistency with blogging has to do with me wondering why I am blogging in the first place.

I love to write, and blogging is a way for me to practice at writing. But I have grown increasingly negative towards what I call OpEd blog posts. I tire of the armchair developers constantly coming out against such and such game cause it's not like the old days and how this game or that game won't be successful unless it does this or that. Or how about the unhealthy amount of comments that come from something as inane as posting a quote from another blog or article. Then there are those who seeming never participate in the very conversation that they created with their post.

But as I was writing this I had an epiphany of sorts - isn't that which I dislike about blogging the very reason why there is this thing called blogging? I believe the answer to be yes and then some. I view blogging as an online journal if you will, but who am I to tell someone else how or what to write.

I am very fortunate that there are those who will read and even comment on my blog and I am extremely grateful for it. I am also grateful for the friendships that I have developed over the past year and a half just from blogging. A big hearty thank you to all those who have taken the time visit my meager blog.

I do hope to write more, unfortunately I don't have an MMO that I am playing so it remains to be seen if I can find something interesting to write about. Until next time, stay classy blogosphere!

It's stories like these that make me believe that their is still hope for humanity. I wish Ted Williams the best of luck, he deserves it!