My daughter is away this week, visiting her grandparents at their cabin on the lake, and my wife will be away in Vancouver for a few days for work.  That means I’ll be home by myself, with just my dog to take care of, which subsequently means I’ll be free to play whatever games I want, and be as irresponsible with my time as I choose to be.  Of course I miss my wife and daughter, that goes without saying, but still… guilt-free gaming baby!

I’ll be spending some quality time with StarCraft II tonight, no doubt.  I played the first three missions of the campaign last night and I like it so far.  I’ll hopefully have some more impressions of it at a later date.

What I really meant to post about was the news that EverQuest II was going to introduce a free-to-play server.  You can read all the details at the official site, here: http://everquest2.com/news/read/current/3630.

I’ve said it many times before, that I loved EverQuest II back when I played it, and hopefully this move does something to introduce the game to new players.  It used to drive me nuts to hear people put the game down without having tried it.  I’ll definitely be trying it out again myself.  It’s too bad I won’t have access to my existing characters, but they’ve been dormant long enough that I probably wouldn’t know how to play them anyway.

My only concern is that this move may prove to be too little too late.   The last time I was in EQII (free period just before the release of Sentinel’s Fate) it really showed its age and it couldn’t hook me in.  I can’t see anything having changed since then.  It’ll be nice to have the option of poking my head in now and then though.

I’m actually a little surprised that EQII was the game that SOE decided to try the free-to-play model on (aside from Free Realms of course).  I was Vanguard would be the first to go that route.  I would love to play that game some more, I just can’t justify paying for it.

My new computer arrived early last week, and it’s awesome.  The box arrived while I was at work and my wife, who had the day off, called me to let me know it had come.  That made for one of the longest work days in my career.  I felt like a kid just waiting for Christmas morning, wanting to race for the tree to rip open everything underneath it. 

After unboxing it and setting it all up, I turned it on and almost went deaf.  It sounded like a jet engine taking off, and I knew right away that something had to be wrong, there was no way my glorious new PC was supposed to be this loud.  It didn’t take long to figure out that the thermal control program was set by default to run the hard drive and graphics card fans constantly at 100%.  A quick fix later and my liquid-cooled PC went completely silent, and I was relieved.

Rather than dive into some games right away though, I instead wiped out the factory installation and put on a nice, fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate from scratch.  Then I installed Steam and proceeded to download all my games from there.  Unfortunately this was right in the middle of one of Steam’s crazy sales and the downloads were going super slow.  So I just let it run over night, and through the following day.  By the time I got home from work that day all of my Steam games were downloaded and waiting to be played.  I still wasn’t ready to play anything though, because I wanted to install all of my non-Steam games.  This process took way longer than I ever thought it would (Company of Heroes = worst installation ever in the history of anything), but eventually I got everything up and running and I’m now playing games again, and my oh my, what a difference from my old PC.

My old PC is a single-core, Pentium 4 3.4GHz with 3GB RAM and an AGP Radeon 3850, and for the past two months the graphics card was off being RMA’d, so I was running with the Radeon 9800XT that originally came with the PC.  My new PC is an i7-960 quad core, 3.2GHz with 12GB RAM, a Radeon 5870, and two hard drives totalling 2.5TB of space.  Needless to say, there is a significant difference between the two computers.  I can once again run games at their max settings!  So what have I spent my time playing?

World of Warcraft

Yes, I finally get a new PC and I still end up spending most of my time with a game that looked and ran just fine on my old rig.  Of course now it looks and runs even better.  I was quite surprised actually at how nice the game looks.  It has aged very well.  Pictured above is my new Orc Warrior.  Apparently the game doesn’t appeal to me at level 80 because as soon as my Mage dinged 80 I more-or-less abondoned him to start all over with this guy.  I’m hoping to get through as much content as possible before Cataclysm, as I’ve never levelled a Horde character.  So far, level 23 as of this writing, it’s been fun and a nice change from playing Alliance.  I’m on a PvP server again, but have yet to have any PvP encounters, although I’ve only recently ventured into contested zones.

Starting this new character has reaffirmed to me just how much I like this game.  Damn you WoW.

Call of Duty 4

I actually played a few levels of this on my old PC, and I fully believed that it ran just fine.  Playing on my new PC however, with settings cranked, proves to me just how deluded I was.  This is a fantastic looking game, and this is even an “old” Call of Duty, not Modern Warfare 2.  I’m still not entirely sure though if I love the gameplay.  It’s a little too “on rails” for me, and it feels like I’m just moving from one set piece to the next.  I’m curious to see how the story plays out though, so I’ll keep playing it in bits here and there.

Far Cry 2

I picked this up on a whim for $12 the other day.  I’m still early in the game, but so far I love it.  Unlike Call of Duty, Far Cry 2 feels wide open, like I can do whatever, and go wherever I like.  It’s also one of the most gorgeous games I’ve ever seen.  I was originally going to track down Crysis because I wanted a game to “show off”, to convince my wife that this new PC was worth the price, but after reading some reviews and watching some gameplay videos, I didn’t think I’d like Crysis all that much.  I didn’t know much about Far Cry 2; I had played the first one and really enjoyed it up until I started fighting mutants and other creatures.  I just wanted to kill other people damnit.  My understanding is that the sequel is quite a bit different, and so far that has been true.  I like it, and will probably spend most of my gaming time outside of WoW with this one.

Those are the three games I’ve been playing.  I’m also planning on finally getting to Dragon Age: Origins, but it’s still not pulling me just yet.  I don’t know what it is; I want to play it, but I also sort of don’t.   It’s a weird feeling.  Also on my list is Left 4 Dead 2 which I picked up for $10 thanks to the previously mentioned crazy Steam sale, along with Torchlight.  Although, with Torchlight, just before I put it in my virtual cart I said to myself, “I’ll probably never play this, but it’s only $5″, and I bought it.  We’ll see.

The only thing I’m sort of regretting with the new PC is not getting a dedicated sound card.  I figured the onboard would be good enough, but I’m kind of wishing I had gotten one.  I may be picking one up soon.  I love new toys.

To answer my own question of “Now What?“, I have given my freshly level-capped Frost Mage the cold shoulder and started a new character, this time an Orc Warrior.

The highest that I’ve leveled a Horde character is 23, so I haven’t seen a whole lot of the Horde side of the game, and I suppose with the Cataclysm coming soon, this will be my last chance to see the “old world” from the Horde perspective.  I’m guessing I’ll have about two months before Cataclysm comes out, so I don’t think I’ll get too far with this Warrior before I’m re-rolling yet again to see the Cataclysm stuff.

This new character of mine is level 17 as of this writing.  I’m actually on vacation at the moment, visiting with my sister, and in what must count as one of the saddest things I’ve done in a while, I downloaded the WoW client to her MacBook Pro within minutes of arriving here.  Like a junkie I just need my fix.  My excuse is that I’m an early riser and I’ve been able to play while waiting for everyone else to wake up.

The hardest part has been playing without a mouse, using only the touchpad.  That has taken some getting used to.  I’ll be back home in just a couple of days however, where I will eagerly await the arrival of my new PC.  I ordered an Alienware from Dell and the tracking information tells me it should be arriving the day after I get home.  WoW may actually take a back seat once the PC arrives, as I’ve been wanting to play Dragon Age for some time, but couldn’t bring myself to do it on my aging PC.  There are a few other games in my pile that I’ll be looking to check out on the new hardware as well.  Should be fun.

My Mage hit level 80 last night in World of Warcraft, marking the first time that I’ve had more than one character at the level cap since I started playing MMOs.

I haven’t been playing my computer much these days, contributing to the complete lack of updates to this site, but I’ve been pecking away at my Mage’s levelling here and there.  The climb from 75 to 80 actually took much longer and felt more grindy than I had remembered with my first character; all those Northrend quests start to blend into each other and feel the same the more you do.  Last night though, thanks to a friend playing his level 80 Paladin, I whipped through a bunch of quests and did a couple of Argent Tournament events and finished off the final three-quarters needed to hit 80.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do now though.  I think for a little while I’ll try to gear up as much as I can, but I can see that getting old for me really fast.  I could also try going back to my 80 Shaman who’s been neglected ever since I started playing the Mage, but I’d be doing the same thing: grinding for gear.  I’ve never levelled a Horde character… but do I really want to do that now?

Cataclysm needs to hurry up and get here.

Deep in the bowels of the storage area under our basement stairs I have three cardboard boxes that were tucked away when we moved into our house seven years ago.  Within these boxes are smaller boxes of computer games that I purchased many moons before that.  I was struck by a bit of nostalgia the other day so I burrowed my way into the storage area and dug out those boxes and found some great stuff.

Sometime around the mid nineties, the Office Depot near me had a constantly revolving bargain bin of computer games.  I visited the store almost weekly just to check out what they had.  Often there wouldn’t be much of interest, but just as often there’d be a real gem in there.  These three cardboard boxes are full of games I mostly bought on the cheap from Office Depot.

Pictured above are some of the role-playing games among this old stash of mine, some of which I’ve got some very fond memories of.  Included in the picture are:

• Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra
• Might and Magic V: Darkside of Xeen
• Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven
• Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos
• Entomorph: Plague of the Darkfall
• The Summoning
• Eye of the Beholder
• Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon
• Eye of the Beholder III: Assault on Myth Drannor
• Daemonsgate
• Unlimited Adventures: Fantasy Construction Kit
• Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant
• The Complete Ultima VII
• Dungeon Hack
• Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny

One thing led to another and I soon found myself installing these games on my PC with the help of DosBox.  I’m kind of curious to see if I’ll be able to bring myself to play some of these again, or if their time has long past.  I never did play Ultima VII and that’s one game that I’d definitely like to check out.

The one thing that immediately stands out for me is how awesome most of the manuals are with these games.   You definitely don’t see manuals like these any more.  They’ve got pages upon pages of lore, followed by detailed references on the game mechanics, and some even include designer’s notes, which is something I really miss in games these days.

I’m going to try and spend an hour or two with each of these games and post my impressions here over the next little while.  Should be fun.  I hope.