West Karana

1) David Cook. Randy needs to shut up. David C brings down the house.
2) Syesha. I love her. She’s totally got a career.
3) David Archuletta. He ruins whatever he touches.

David C. and Syesha for final 2 — my dream matchup.

Gawd, they’re doing the recap right now and every time Archie sings it’s sleep-inducing (though his second song was good). I love, er, hate how he ruined the Dan Fogelberg song.

DialIdol is predicting David C by a landslide, David A next, and Syesha to come third. That’s a CRIME against HUMANITY. No WAY Archie deserves to make it into the final two.

With my EQ2 raiding career at an end — I just don’t have the time for a six day a week raiding commitment any more — and the EQ1 guild up and running now, it’s time to start adding back in the other games I want to play. I love EQ1 and always will, but EQ2 is my home.

I know I’ll miss raiding. But every night we would meet at 8pm, run to 11 or 12, and then I’d have to do my writing for the night if I hadn’t completed it before. Since just keeping up with my raid commitment meant more than 20 hours a week raiding, I stopped logging in at any other times because that was already too much time spent playing MMOs. So the group instances I loved — gone. Playing the alts I cherish — gone. All gaming but raiding wiped out. That’s the raiding trap. You raid casually, learn to enjoy being part of a larger group and trying to be as effective as you can be. That’s a lot of fun, but you want more, and so you join a raiding guild. Now you are owned. You have just voluntarily given away all your free time. Saturday was our only day off, and you can bet I played no EQ2 that day. Raiding sucked away all that I loved about the game, except raiding itself.

I was falling asleep in a Shard of Hate raid a couple of weeks ago. I was also falling asleep on my day job, my writing was increasingly sloppy, my boss at work told me people were noticing I was dozing off at odd times in meetings and such, and it looked like my desire to raid could endanger not only my health, but my real income. And so, though I meant to log in and explain all this, I could not bring myself to click on the EQ2 launcher for weeks.

Once again, like EQ1 and WoW before it, I had let a game come to dominate my life. If I clicked that icon, I would by that small movement of the fingers, put my life and livelihood at risk.

There’s a reason raiding guilds are dominated by teenagers, college students and the unemployed. Who else can really afford the time? Not that anyone can, really. And even if YOU feel you can balance a full time day job and a 20+ hour a week raiding commitment — I’ve proven to myself time and again over several different games that I cannot, as much as I would like to.

When Davic informed me that Delusions of Grandeur had deguilded me, I felt relief. A burden had been lifted. I wanted more than anything to be running around with the Big DoGs of Befallen killing big stuff, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t even log in to tell them why.

One of the unfortunate casualties of my love of raiding has been my alts. Their levels lurch upward whenever I am between guilds. The last interregnum got my inquisitor to 80 and my necro to 68. Now it’s time to give them a little love.

Perhaps to mirror the EQ1 nostalgia group, Stargrace has invited people to join her over on the EQ2.Najena server for some old-fashioned EQ2 nostalgia. Both EverQuests were meant to be enjoyed with a group of friends, to my mind the best way to enjoy ANY MMO. I was chatting with her this morning as I respeced to DPS and looked over the guild recruitment tool to see if there were any casual guilds I recognized. And I was thinking… hmmm… IRS incentive check… 7 main characters… wholesale swap to Najena server… Nah. Even I can’t justify $350 for that sort of change. Especially not after bringing a couple characters over to Luclin on EQ1.

But Winterwing, my Arasai bruiser. Maybe I could bring *one* over for a good cause. She’s hovering (as Arasai do) somewhere south of 30, fresh from soloing most of the Butcherblock quests. Soloing is pretty boring. If I had a regular group, though, that would be something.

Or maybe I could just save $50 and restart Winterwing over there, but this time as an assassin. A pure dps melee class — my favorite non-healer type of class. (Why choose a bruiser, then? I liked how she looked in a gi. Really.) I dunno. While it’s likely to be the continued adventures of Dina and Dera in EQ2 on these pages, it might just be a small winged faerie who gets to tell her story for a time.

I feel a little like a relic at this moment. Everyone is talking about Age of Conan, Warhammer Online and Wrath of the Liche King, and I realized… I have no interest in any of them. I have a coworker in the AoC closed beta, but going around in gangs randomly ganking people wasn’t that fun in EQ2’s Nagafen from either end — seemed really pointless to me, though I did enjoy the feeling of danger and risk it brought to the game.

Still, they will rise or fall on their merits, and I’ll be watching from the sidelines. I have my EQ1 and EQ2. Mythos is coming out, Champions Online and Chronicles of Spellborn are on the horizon. I can spend my time anticipating those, while enjoying the good games I am already playing.

Flagship Studios is being incredibly responsive to its beta players, retooling Mythos at a fantastic rate to improve the game play and move it away from the “Diablo II”-clone label. It’s turning out to be something new to Western MMOs — a AAA-quality, Free to Play MMO with microtransactions. Dungeon Runners shares a lot of similar elements, and is released while Mythos is in beta, but it does not include microtransactions and has shown a greater reluctance to move in any significant away from the Diablo II model. Plus, I consider it rather dull. Mythos’ over the top, here’s a hundred mobs at once, edge-of-the-seat gameplay gets addicting after awhile.

Anyway, since I won’t be playing any of the current generation of MMOs as I wait for the next, here’s my quick takes on my hopes for them.

Age of Conan: This will be the EverQuest 2 of this generation. Few people will be able to play the game properly, but those who stick with it may find a fantastic game. It will follow the EQ2 arc. A quick burst of initial interest will give way to mass defections. AoC will fix the problems, get back on track, and in a year, the game will be where it should have been at launch and the players who stuck with them will be having fun.

Warhammer Online: The game can’t possibly match people’s expectations. EA Mythic may think that with enough money and marketing might that they can pull people away from WoW. Unfortunately, they are doing nearly nothing to lure non-WoW players to the game. They may think they can get a couple of million players without Blizzard noticing, but a lot of other companies have thought that in the past. It is impossible to drag WoW players away when they release a new expansion.

Wrath of the Liche King: I’ve seen the videos. This expansion is going to blow in the doors. AoC may struggle through because it is a significant departure from WoW, but Warhammer Online is going to be pounded. WoW will keep its crown for another year. By the time people finish the new content, Warhammer Online will seem like a has-been, and people will be more likely to wait for the next new shiny rather than give WAR a try. It’s all about the opening weekend — or free month. It is impossible to entice people to leave WoW unless Blizzard shoved them out the door first.

Why EA Mythic thought releasing against WoW would ever work… I dunno. Blizz was never going to give them an easy, uncontested launch. About the only thing EA Mythic can really do now is delay it a further six months and put in something so cool that the delay would be worth it.

There’s also SOE’s new MMOs, The Agency and Free Realms, coming out at some point, probably around the WAR and WotLK launches. The buzz on both these titles is so incredibly low, as are the expectations, that almost anything they can do will look like a success. If either game compromises the PC gameplay in favor of the PS3 gameplay, you might as well write them off right now. It won’t be these games that convince anyone to buy a PS3.

Anyway, I’m afraid all you’ll be seeing on the pages of this particular blog is more EQ, EQ2 and Mythos adventures for awhile. Mythos won the Mythos vs Dungeon Runners competition on my hard drive by virtue of not being boring. I am HOPING to get into the Spellborn beta (Spellborn devs, HINT HINT). I’m not sure I can talk about another beta I am in, but my high hopes for it were utterly crushed.

AoC, WAR and WotLK players — I’ll be looking forward to reading about your adventures :)

There’s a fine line between ‘research’ and ‘ah, what the heck. game on!’. I crossed that line several times yesterday.

Wanting to check out any recent Mythos changes (and there are some coming soon), I logged on, intending just to run around. But I wasn’t the same person that was just casually playing and had been stalled at level 20 for the past few weeks. I have Kanthalos at MMOre Insight to blame for this. I’d originally built my Bloodletter up the Crimson Hand (pet) line and hadn’t really branched out from that. This turned out to be an ever less of a good idea, since I spent ever more of my time keeping my pets alive and resummoning them. Eventually I would just wade into melee myself and just ignore the pets. When Mythos added skill respecs, I respecced to Martialist, the weapon spec. That’s when my hybrid spec really started to hurt, since I couldn’t wear the best armor or wield the best weapons.

But I’d been playing all wrong ANYWAY. My pet spec had taught me to carefully weigh my pulls and to not get over my head. My NEW spec — where rays of death power strike mobs, who then send out their own rays of death power — rewards over pulling. Pull enough, and even the worst boss mob dies, instantly. Aside from certain Zone 3 dungeons where mobs snare you and silence you, preventing magic or potion use, clearing a mob-filled dungeon room was as simple as running a circle around it, then firing a single blast into the center. Mopping up strays took just a few more seconds.

I got three levels in about as many hours. I’d mostly skipped Zone 2, but Zone 3 is annoying with those snare/silence mobs and Zone 2 was there to help :)

The other thing Kanthalos taught me was how to game the Briss quests — these are repeatable, randomly generated quests which offer one of three random rewards. Usually they are junk, but occasionally he has something nice. I used to grab one occasionally, do it, get the crappy reward and sell it immediately. Turns out you can accept and abandon his quest (and those of other similar quest givers), and keep on asking for a new one until something you like is offered. Since I have very little luck going — most of my gear has either strength, dexterity or both on it to support my hybrid spec — I don’t get very much purpose+ quality loot in the normal course of a dungeon run. Briss and his friends made sure I was well-geared… except for the pants.

Those are a problem. So I respecced my crafting line to legs and am farming the components for the best pants I can make. Unfortunately, it will be tough making pants with all that strength on them…

I completed another couple crafting quests. I’m currently on one requiring a specific kind of ectoplasm, of which I have found precisely one. I think I need about twenty… and it only drops in Zone 3 dungeons to boot.

I have never grouped with anyone in Mythos. Mythos’ major failing in my opinion is that it plays just like a single player game. Flagship is going to be making it more MMO-ish, but with no reason to group, why would I? I’ve soloed lower level epic maps. It’s still the same game. I don’t think I have even ever spoken to another person in game, aside from asking questions in the general channel.

Of course, I was trained by Diablo II to see other players as cheating semi-literate jerks, who would alternately reward you with duped loot or kill you where you stood. Still, there is as little need to group in Mythos as there was in D2, and so, solo I’ll stay. Perhaps if I was playing on Elite mode, as so many players seem to be these days, then the need to group would come along with it.

After the character wipe, I might give Elite mode a shot.

The goblin spawner got stopped up. That’s the only explanation why we were sitting in the King room in Sol A, mindin our own business, when suddenly seven, eight, ten goblins were dancing on our lower intestines. Between sudden goblin drop ships landing troops wherever we happened to be, having to keep apart from the other group, and the powerlevelers who used the place as their private reserve… well, by the end of the evening, corpses were piled high at the entrance, the goblins were very well fed, but most of us were pushing 30… and we had fun.

Sol A was the first place we’ve gone where we weren’t the only people there. To their credit, the powerlevelers tried to stay out of our way, but there were so many of them…

In a pickup group, dying so many of times could only have ended in a lot of bad feelings. With a group of friends, taking risks, having fun… it was great. And for all the times we died, there were three times we might have died, but managed to pull it off, and those kinds of battles pay for the rest.

Next week is Butcherblock LDoN, and the week after… Mistmoore Castle.

German EQ player Mohanos is looking for people with whom to start a European-time progression group on the Luclin server.

Those people who want to see EQ from the beginning once again (or perhaps for the first time), but couldn’t make North American times… might want to check this out :)

The leader of the Tuesday group said we should finish our racial armor quests before next week; I figured I’d get them out of the way today. A variety of wolf furs, various yellowjacket drops, and some iron bricks from goblins.

I started at around 6, finished at 11:30. OUCH. Okay, I thought that would go faster. I did take a couple of breaks. I peeked into the Bazaar to see if I could find any sort of shield that would work for me and wouldn’t be considered twinked. But all of them, even the cheapest, were well beyond what we’re allowed to use. Same for weapons. Even assuming I had that sort of cash… it would have just been too much.

I had a Lodizal shield on my cleric I wanted to hand to my paladin but that would just be the same thing. In the end, I camped the Shiny Brass Shield. And got a Ghoulbane along with it.

Shiny Brass Shield drops in Crushbone and Ghoulbane in Upper Guk (or via a quest in Butcherblock). How could I get them at the same time?

Well, nobody wants to camp Ghoulbane these days. The Upper Guk camp is tedious and will make your life pretty tough once you become KoS to live frogs. The quest is less tedious, but still involves a fair amount of camping, and is often broken. Oh, turns out there is an NPC in Felwithe that drops both the SBS and the Ghoulbane.

Now, he’s not going to waste any time with a level 15 paladin. But against a 75 cleric… no chance. There was someone building faction by handing batwings to one the caster guildmasters, and the person came over to check out what I was doing. Well, since I was going to camp over to Sela once I’d killed it, and didn’t want to get into a clickwar with a ninja looter, I zoned it and came back in a few minutes, did the deed, and Sela was well-geared.

Is it twinking? Yeah. But only a little. If Upper Guk groups existed, I could have camped it. If I felt like spending another four hours camping gray mobs, I could have got it that way. Instead, I got it by having a high level character get it for me. But this char is a tank. Befallen proved how bad things get when the tank isn’t properly geared. The sword and shield are appropriate for her level, are necessary to hold aggro, and could easily have been (and probably was) worn by level 15-20 paladins seven years ago. This sort of thing would have been what you’d be expected to bring to a group, as a tank. People leveled far more slowly, and had a chance to camp their gear. Even a nostalgia guild can only take it so far.

I don’t like bending the rules, so full disclosure here.

I did camp the armor components legit, though as the night wore on, I cared less and less about beating down mobs to make wasps spawn, and more and more about just getting it done ASAP. So I would gather up a dozen mobs and bring them to the guards at The Wall. When the guards had finished them off, I would bring more. And more. And then the wasps started coming back. Thanks guards :)

Shout out to Kuron, who finally finished his warrior epic 1.0 after what was it, six years? This nostalgia thing is pretty powerful! Big grats to the big guy. I dashed into the picture to show off my racial quest armor as well :)

Two days until Solusek’s Eye! I don’t want to have to tank with my ranger, but I bet I’ll end up doing so. It’ll still be fun :)

The Friday progression group is pretty hot stuff, but leveling in EverQuest is so fast now that we quickly leveled past a lot of low level content that we really wanted to see. The only cure? More cowbell. Another progression group! Hakiko couldn’t make the Friday progression group, so he went ahead and made another for Tuesdays. I simply couldn’t resist. I rolled a pally, and with the help of a guildy and some others, finished the tutorial missions for the last of my armor, and then headed off to the dungeon, Befallen.

Befallen is by far the greatest challenge I’ve met so far in this game. You don’t pull singles. You pull dozens. We must have had four complete wipes in there — those old joys of corpse runs, we did those. Darting down the stairs looking for our gear… trying to fight things naked… bunches of fun — but in a GOOD way. Modern games have zero risk — none whatsoever.

I wish we’d had a rogue. though. Losing our keys each time we died plus not being able to easily grab our gear made things insanely tough.

Even with all the deaths, I went from level ten to level 15. Next week: Paludal Caverns!

Afterward, I logged on to my cleric to help Kuron and a couple of his friends clear Fear and kill Cazic-Thule. No golems popped, though, so no ball of golem clay for everyone’s favorite beard-adorned trashcan. :(

Last Thursday I did a huge interview with Vanguard developer Lenny “Tiraslee” Gullo, and as well as talking a LOT about the upcoming VG game update, he let me play with a lot of the new mounts and showed off some of the new spell graphics.

Well, after wrangling with Windows Movie Maker for a few days (the heat of a thousand exploding stars cannot come close to my frustration at that program’s limitations, but at least it’s free), I finally finished putting it in some sort of shape, and it’s being rolled out on Massively in three parts today.

The first post, where we show off the new mounts, is up now. Later today is a spell effects video, and this afternoon is the mega-interview where a lot of information about the quests to get the mounts is revealed… as well as other neat stuff.

Check it out! And let me know if you liked the videos… or if you have any suggestions for better cheap (or free) video editing software that can deal with the Fraps codec and 1680×1050 video.

Tor has been continuing their free release of books in electronic form, and I have been totally enjoying these free glimpses into new works, formatted to display well on my Sony Reader. First, though, is a book still hammered into the beating heart of dead trees.

Matter by Iain M. Banks — Banks’ returns to his much-anticipated stories of people at the fringes of his Utopian spacefaring civilization, The Culture. In the Culture, all boring work is down by non-sentient machines, the intelligent machines and human-kinda people basically do what they want and live in gigantic spaceships or massive orbital stations, and are really kind of boring. Since it’s no fun being part of the Culture if you can’t fiddle with other less advanced civilizations, the Culture stories almost entirely focus on the Special Circumstances crew; those who have a taste for harsh living and interference.

It’s a good thing they do, because what’s happening in the local Shellworld could mean bad juju for the entire galaxy. Shellworlds are gigantic artificial planets built as a series of nested spheres by an ancient civilization that had surrounded the galaxy with them back in the day. Their original purpose was unknowable, but since they all left, and the civilizations of the galaxies beat back the other aliens who were systematically destroying the Shellworlds, colonists have arrived now and again to start new lives amidst massive alien tech.

Matter starts us out in the middle of a war between two feudal societies both pulled into the Industrial Revolution by covert alien influence. Level 8 of the Shellworld attacks Level 9. Betrayals, intrigue, flights, a trip into the vastnesses of many alien civilizations (including eventually the Culture), the invasion of Level 8 by Level 9 in retribution, a massive waterfall slowly wearing away the cliff that covers an ancient alien city, a princess sold to (assumed) slavery in the Culture, a prince deposed… Matter splatters bits of color all over the canvas to begin, and by the time its filled in the rest of the painting, you’ve read galaxy-spanning space opera at its finest. I would recommend Matter as a good introduction to Iain M. Banks’ science fiction.

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson — Here’s when I fell in love with this book.

The Milky Way was a band of white fluorescence (now brighter, now darker) lit by flaring, dying stars. Stars were created and stars were demolished with every breath of summer air.

And it all moved.

Moved in vast shimmerings and intricate dances suggesting ever-greater, still-invisible cycles. The sky beat like a heart above us. “So alive,” Diane said.

One night, the stars quietly went dark. Every satellite in the sky came crashing to Earth. People panicked. The Earth was veiled by an opaque field they came to call The Spin, and it wasn’t just making astronomy impossible, it was pulling the Earth into the future; a million years outside the Spin were a single year on Earth. Hardly anyone believed this until an ill-considered nuke strike against one of the orbiting structures thought to be responsible for the Spin dropped the veil slightly for awhile, and the effects of accelerated time were all around.

The rapidly aging Sun making life on Earth unprotected by the Spin increasingly impossible. The people of Earth plot a desperate plan to use the passage of time itself to save them from an inevitable death in the corona of the expanding Sun and to find out just how and why they were abducted by the Spin at all.

SF is full of stories about unknowably advanced aliens who put a shield around the planet to protect us from the galaxy, the galaxy from us, punishment, judgement, as an incubator — whatever. It’s a common trope. What sets The Spin apart is Wilson’s incredibly apt portrayal of how life can continue on a world where something incredible has taken place… and yet people still have to work and eat, taxes must be paid. The story of life under the Spin is interwoven with a tale of life after it; both tales give clues about the other in an indirect way that doesn’t spoil many surprises. The eventual reveal of the Spin’s purpose is telegraphed far enough in advance that we needn’t wonder too much how the book will turn out; what’s important about the Spin is not its end, but the journey there.

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi — I loved Heinlein’s Starship Troopers as much as anyone when I was a kid. Remove the libertarian politics and add more sex, and you have Old Man’s War.

In the future, Earth has colonized the stars. But it’s a busy place out there, and nothing is given for free. We have to fight for places to live, fight to keep them, and fight in revenge when they are taken from us. Life in the Colonial Defense Force (CDF) is brutal, and usually short. They need lots of willing recruits who are glad of whatever extra time they get to defend the colonies. And they get them in the senior centers of good old Earth. For a promise of renewed youth, the elderly of Earth are sent out to fight and die for the colonies. A writer and his wife sign up for the CDF when they are 65; if they make it to 75, they are allowed to ship out. He makes it, she doesn’t. From there we follow Rico’s career is a space marine, dropping onto strange planets to kill what they need to kill, trying not to be killed, and watching the idiots who don’t follow order die, and good friends who did, also die. Can an old man in the body of a twenty year old find love among the stars and also stay alive long enough to enjoy it? It could happen. If you loved Starship Troopers for its tales of brave soldiers fighting every description of homicidal alien, you’ll enjoy this acknowledged homage to that classic of SF.

—

Tor keeps sending books to me and I have to keep putting them on my Reader. I found a site that publishes classic SF works that have fallen out of copyright in electronic form, and I’ll be writing about that soon. Cory Doctorow just posted his latest work, Little Brother, about a group of teens who use brilliance and technology to throw off the creeping Big Brother-ism that is engulfing the US and Britain, and I’ll be giving that a glance as well.

Currently finishing up Julian May’s The Golden Torc just for fun.

Hard to believe tonight was just the third meeting of our Nostalgia-fueled progression group! We’re trying to slow down our progression so that we have the chance to see everything, and we’re looking to the Lost Dungeons of Norrath to give us instant, instanced fun, challenges and decent loot.

Gozad was the big winner. He started off as a 17 monk, and quickly won a huge weapon upgrade, a nice cloak and a Legends of Norrath Starter Pack and ended the night a hair from 19. Because of Moors questing, I was one kill from 21 and ended the night about a third of the way through 24 and with a booster deck of my own.

We were again short a tank, and so I tanked for the second group. Props go to Coldheat for keeping me alive so well! Our only real tragedy was when I tested a locked chest and KILLED EVERYONE! It points out just how important having a good class balance is in EverQuest. We could have done so much more, so much faster, and gotten some more loot, if we’d had a rogue.

A couple of the people had never done LDoNs before! Astounding, as LDoN was the expansion that became SOE’s love letter to casual pickup groups. You could bring a wide variety of group builds in, from just three players to a full group of six, and the dungeon would adjust itself to the number of people and their levels. The loot was excellent, the experience decent, the time commitment was low, and it was easy to find groups. LDoNs were what EQ meant to casual players until Dragons of Norrath updated it for higher levels and better loot.

Given that we really have no idea who will show up on progression nights and yet still wanting to get out there and have fun, LDoNs are a perfect way to spend the evening.

We started out with an easy LDoN, and then another one. When we heard the other group was doing hards, well, we decided to finish off with a hard one as well. It was a little harder, but Coldheat’s “Soothe” spell made splitting difficult rooms easy.

It was a great night :) Next week — we explore Solusek’s Eye.

Stargrace did an excellent writeup of this, and got it in sooner than I did :) I do want to point out that we are still looking for more EQ1 nostalgia nuts who want to see the old world with friends. We’re starting a new progression group on Tuesday evenings, but there’s still time to join the Friday group if you don’t mind a couple of days of grinding to hit level 20 (it really goes incredibly fast these days). Check us out at the Nostalgia the Guild Forums.

Today, the Age of Conan open beta opens. And people are fibrillating over it, slavering, EAGER to download a game most of them will have forgotten about in six months. But not today. Today, it brings meaning to their lives. Today the sun is shining right on them and the birds are singing because, today, they can play a new video game.

People are not only accepting of marketing, they willingly dive right in. Even though each and every one of them knows that if they really wanted a quality game experience, they’d pick up the game a month or two after it launches, when the rush is off, the game is stable, and it’s clear if the game is really awesome or just meh. Something you can’t really tell when ten thousand people are lagging the beta servers.

We computer fans have a long history of falling prey to hype. Remember the “Midnight Madness” spectacle Microsoft orchestrated around the release of Windows 95? Nothing was going to stop those people from buying an OPERATING SYSTEM at midnight. So they could be first to… what, exactly? Nobody really knew. They got over it pretty fast, waking up, wondering what all the fuss was about.

There was no fuss. Just hype. Software marketers have become masters at building hype. Age of Conan, Warhammer Online… If you can somehow get a player to make an emotional connection that can entirely bypass the rational part of their brains… well, you’ve made a SALE.

Because, you know what you’re going to do in AoC, and Warhammer Online? That’s right. You’re going to make a character, kill stuff, level, loot corpse, repeat. The same grind you see in every other MMO you ever played. It’s the *same game*.

If you were buying a car, you wouldn’t trade in your perfecly serviceable car for another just because it looked shiny and new.

Oh wait. Yeah, people do that all the time. Because Marketing WORKS. Marketing’s entire purpose is to make you WANT something. Build that emotional connection. You see that SUV rampaging through the mountains and fields and say — yeah, I’d like to be able to just drive around in mountains and fields and stuff instead of driving to work every day. And then drive their shiny new SUV into work every day. Dream realized. No change.

You won’t become an axe-swinging barbarian by playing Conan. We’re all just geeks behind keyboards, performing repetitive actions for no rewards, wasting time likely better spent doing something that would make a positive difference in our lives.

But hey, I guess if marketing can bring meaning to our lives and convince us that sitting for hours behind keyboards performing repetitive actions for no reward is actually something pretty fantastic, then who am I to say different?

Rock on, Conan dudes. You have six months to do it all over again for Warhammer and Wrath of the Lich King.

Marketers everywhere rejoice.

(Full disclosure: I waited two months after EQ launched in 1999 to buy it, a year after WoW launched to buy it, and I bought EQ2 the first day it was out. And I didn’t wait in line for Win95. That would have been silly.)

Okay, thanks for the info about Mythos’ Active Camera mode. This lets you get a little lower down, and lets you use the WASD keys to move around. Q and E to turn. INS to fix the camera (I remapped this to F since I have no friends… on Mythos :). Turn on this mode by going to the GAME tab in options and checking Active Camera Mode and UN-checking Pitch Lock.

But hey, how does it look???? Well, watch this video and find out — and I even NARRATE it! Yes, my first, deadly step toward video blogging. Except, you know, with just game video.

You DON’T want to see my bedroom.

Anyway. Here ’tis. Enjoy! If you can!

And for comparison, here is what Mythos looks like with the regular camera view, and point-and-click to move.

I wrote an overview of Mythos crafting this morning, you can read it if you like, but that’s not what I’m pleading to Flagship about.

Please, PLEASE… let us play in the third person from-behind view like WoW and EQ2… Your game is so gorgeous from down here. I don’t love Diablo so much that I’ll be unhappy if you toss the overhead view for third person over the shoulder. And get rid of point-and-click in favor of WASD. Actually, I love the game — but please consider lifting camera, movement and targeting controls from WoW or EQ2, either one, I don’t care which.

It would be amazing.

Ah, I think I found the problem…

I haven’t written about the Fires of Pompeii episode or Planet of the Ood because, well, who cares. I’ll never watch either episode again. Scratch that; I watched the Pompeii one twice. That was good Who. Planet of the Ood will be sent to the psycho-recycler by armies of gray-clad, tentacly-faced Ood.

This week, the Doctor rehearses a goodbye speech, Donna visits her Uncle Ben and Aunt May, Martha Jones takes a crash course in effective minion management, the people of Britain forget how to roll down their car windows, and Evil Wesley Crusher helps an army of ugly hobbits take over the world, in part 1 of the Sontaren Stratagem.

Spoilers follow!

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