Mini gift

A shirt I got from my friend Leslie for Xmas; very cool.
Front

Back
Found at http://philcos.info/

My friend Fefe is taking forever to send me any pics of her and her guild in WAR. She instead sent this cool pic. Took her forever to get the lightning going at the same time.

Her letter to Santa:

Dear Santa,

Here's what I want for Christmas...

Dark Promise Shoulders and Chest
Ten +24 Willpower Talismans
Healing Crit pocket items
7 tali slot Dagger from Lost Vale (wish big)
Beat N'Kari without failing 100 times
Win all SCs with my pug groups
Win all Royals and Warlord that drop
Receive ability to detaunt WHs for 10 mins =P
Beat the 3rd Vulture Lord boss w/two Zealots
Guild lvl increased to 40 w/free mounts for all
Flip to stage 2 on all Altdorf sieges
Receive a Royal for each tell to/from from Sovietunion
No timer on pies to throw at Ghorfist
Unlimited AP for me & Shams to heal Upsilon & Iceycold
Unlimited Mary J for ...you know who you are
Self-rez cooldown is now 5 sec
No girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/hubby aggro for all

and last wish...
For everyone on Iron Rock to have a great Christmas & Happy New Year!! :D
Thats mine.. and thats before any patches with bloom or graphic updates.. (don't even think i'm on full graphics mode!)

Today is the day

Merry Christmas everyone.
Drink, be merry, spend some time with the loved ones and of course, get some gaming done :D

DAO Lasting Impressions

And there sure are alot of them! I've been off this week and been doing xmas shopping, alot of walking and truly not enough gaming; boo. My friend Jag and I had an email going back and forth of all the great, no-so-great, and curious things we came across in Dragon Age.. and needless to say, it was a lot.. it was a WALL OF TEXT. And I hate reading wall of texts, so here is parts 1.

**Huge spoiler warnings.. but why haven't you played this game yet? :P **

**note: both Jag and I played our copies on the pc, tho i've seen it been played on the 360.. I picked the pc for better control of the characters and camera views, and i'm quite sure Jag picked pc for his amazing rig**

Jag - White
Moi - Yellow

Enchanting/Runes/Items/Crafting:
1) Undead creatures, did i miss them? lol cold iron runes were nice and all, but i never actually used them
- quite a bit of undead in the Redcliff storyline

2) Paralyze + Slow runes -> difference between novice up to grand master -> mob level impact? percentage change? are these runes affected by any stats?
- I always used the most powerful on the appropriate character ;)

3) Item depth; there are so many weapons and armors and craftable items, and without a good 2-3 walkthroughs you can't experience using all of it

4) Crafting; much easier than prior rpg games, just need the skill, the plan and the item, no silly spells to create

5) Enchanting; wish you could do it yourself, so you could enchant on the fly and react to the situation at hand

Story line:
1) I really like the spin on dragons, their origins and place in the "world". in this case, which is not typical, they were not highly resilient to magic. making them the "old gods" was very cool, and stating that only a few have been woken up and in charge of blights leads right into a DAO 2.

2) Flemeth was a dragon... ummm.. old god? just a demon? demonic dragon? i would have loved to explore a deeper story here. Morrigan played such an important role... can you actually tell her to leave your group though? might try that with an alt.
- should have tried telling companions to leave too and see what happens..

3) Question: what is the function of The Pearl establishment in Denerim? besides the Duelist trainer.. and a fewwww side quests... there isn't any function except for the woohoo you can pay for.... 'woohoo'

4) Interesting how they incorporated Shale and fleshed out HER dwarven story.. it really fit.. but it makes you think.. huh.. they made me pay X amt of money to get something that feels like they ripped from the original game. Maybe thats just the case when they make a character fit so well into the story, that it makes you feel like they purposely withhold it from you to make a buck..

5) Deep characters; each with their own story; I always thought Sten was lying or that he was framed, and then when he said how he lost his sword and thats why he went into a fit of rage.. it made no sense, until he explained how the sword if part of their being, their soul, and without it, he cannot go back to his homeland with honor

6) Codex; like the tome of knowledge, TONS of background info that one could spend reading that IS critical in some instances as without reading it, you may not be able to get some fantastic items (ie. dragon slaying sword in mage tower)
7) Limited origins, everyone's mage origin will be the same, and humans can only be a noble rogue/warrior

Map/travel:
1) need a better travel system, or better travel points... it wouldve been nice to see Orzammar have the same city-type map that Denerim had.

2) more random encounters would have been good.

3) Stealth worked well; if you detect enemies, your companions will stop following and stay out of view, while you do what you need to do in stealth (steal, disarm traps or setup your own traps), and when you actually attack them, your companions will THEN rush in once you got the backstab bonus

4) The quest tracker; wasn't as helpful as it could be

Game Performance:
1) a few glitches here and there, nothing worrying. i recall once stepping into a tub in the royal palace in orzammar and then falling to the side and being trapped in the air... furious since i didnt save since EVER and had to restart! limited glitches;
- i've only ctd 3 times in over 70 hours of play

2) i noticed after several hours of playing the loading screen between travel spots and cut scenes gradually slowed and slowed until it was taking 10x as long since the first time you loaded DAO... a simple DAO restart and all was good again.
- i agree, it was scary :P

3) Different camera views; sometimes overhead mode is much better than over-the-shoulder mode

4) The inability to take manual screenshots; in my experience.. makes me a sad panda

Rawr! me sad panda!

The many reasons..

Name a game you can spend a whole 2 hours just dying, losing, barely make any progress and still have a blast?

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Give up?

We were playing it on expert mode, my brother, his two friends and myself, we barely could pass even the first stage sometimes and it was jokes the whole time. Even more frantic was four player survival against an unlimited stream of zombies. We got slightly better each time in survival, but only by a few seconds ;)

Just one more round. Just one more round.

Whereas with Modern Warfare2, it was alot of cursing, low kill/death ratios (atleast for me; ill post some pics of that later), not being able to find a good weapon/perk combo, as I no longer like the tactical knife aka Witch combination. Not to mention the 10+ min wait for a match to be setup (good job Infinity Ward.... not!) Add noob toobers.. javelin hackers.. and unlimited ammo.. prestige lvl 70s that are little kiddies.. mute mute mute mute mute... (why can't it just be auto mute everyone?) Some idiot today added our Clan tag to their name.. the impetuous btard! Seriously, you don't have enough pride to keep your own and gotta copy others?

Hence the reason why I haven't really played Mw2 in over 2 weeks.

The Story of WAR

Besides many things that could be fixed or added to make WAR more enjoyable.. would you want more scripted events?

Sure there is the quest text that one could read, but i'm quite sure most of us have it set to autofill and then we quickly accept the quest. Especially if there is more than one quest available at the npc, we usually just pick them all up quickly to save time instead of reading it. Unlike (thankfully) WoW, we don't necessarily need to read the quest text to figure out what to do for the quest as whammer has a great quest tracker and both the mini map and area map is nicely outlined with red to let you know where to go. What makes it significantly better than other mmo's i've played is that clicking on the area will bring up the quest text and still allow your character to maneuvre without pausing them.

But i'm getting more onto a tangent.
Quests tell a story, one that sometime tend to forget as we are on a different quest of fame, wealth, glory and max level.
I always liked how in whammer in the dark elf area, in the first major outpost, there was the floating fortresses that was ferrying all sorts of troops underground. It included blackguards, corsairs, witch elves and even a hydra. As a scripted event, it was really cool to watch, too bad it wasn't just all marching, but maybe the hydra gets loose and the npcs needs to corale and get it back into line.

You see these scripted events happen more often in public quests; usually at certain points/when you complete stages, some scripted event happens and you see the story change. I would want to see this happen more in other parts of the game. It doesn't need to do anything, but something more interesting than patrolling npcs, or npcs that are killed by a mortar blast.

I always loved the welcome/login screen in Heroes of Might and Magic 5. In the most recent expansion of barbarians, a huge cyclops is attacking a human town and wave after wave of human soldiers attempt to subdue to the cyclops. And they get smished into a fine paste. ;) If you watch too long, you'll notice that its a loop, but thats only if you watch it for over a minute. The same thing with WoW and their login screen with WotLK, the bone dragon flies in and roars.. cool roar, but it doesn't do much.

I would love to see more scripted events in whammer; maybe ones you can't alter, one where you can sit back and watch how it unfolds.

Borderlands DLC

With some MS points that I got from my birthday, I finally used some the other day and purchased the dlc for Borderlands: the Zombie Island of Dr. Ned. If you're a zombie lover, then this is a great download(800 points; and a nice 1.1gig download).

I believe you can go to this area as soon as you hit lvl 10. I finished it within... 5ish hours.. a bit shorter than I expected, but very fun... something things to mention:
- 3 legendary weapon drops in that time frame.. whereas only 1 legendary drop in 15+ (easily) hours in the normal game

- zombies come in many varieties, some spit at you causing you to lose vision and slow down, some crawl on the ground if you melee them or critically hurt them

- there are alot of zombies! its a different way to play as you're used to baddies shooting at you and taking cover; zombies just try to overwhelm you

- there seems to be a bug for one of the quests in the dlc, you get an easy quest to fix a special vending machine, but when you go back to the game later on, it's in-operable..

- its a dark game.. as expected with zombies, but it feels vastly different than Borderlands which does have it's over day-night cycle

- still everwhere is a ghost town- this town only has the claptrap and thats it.. your only other friend is the automated turrets..

Things i'd like to see in Borderlands 2:
- released not between 2 major launches (ODST and Modern Warfare 2); I didn't really hear and breaking stories (atleast on Kotaku) about rocking numbers.. but this game could have sold more if it came out possibly before ODST

- more interactable townspeople; its sooooo lonely in towns.. who cares if it's meant to be played with other players? I want npcs as well that are not just stuck to the ground.. ones that will shoot back at me if i shoot at them!

- weapon attachments; you can equip elemental modifiers to your special ability but not weapons?

- custom characters? b/c it all seems that the skills/talents are the same with different names, bring in the use of classes and then customize that way

- mini map (how could i forget this?) duh

- (small atleast) item cache in town

- the ability to see the quest item reward instead of just an icon

- a smarter drop system that will see from your proficiency what you use and drop the appropriate weapons (Gearbox did a good job in regards to ammo and health drops, but doesn't seem to translate over on weapons)

Find her

Not me, but my friend Kosi.. still playing WAR; still loving it; it seems its all about having a fresh look at it, playing to have fun, having a great guild (i told her to send me more pics of her and her guild: Dreams of Darkness) and enjoying the fun in an mmo.

She's apparently the number 3 healer on the server** (for the life of me i can't remember which one), but grats to her! Always an amazing healer and check out that goblin charm! I miss my old guild Wake of Corruption... we had fun :)

**edit: she's humble and states that this week she is the number 3 renown healer or w/e ;)

Progress

The article at Kotaku..
http://kotaku.com/5422154/achievement-chore-she-plays-for-gamerscore-whether-its-fun-or-not

Basically about the obsession of getting Gamer Points on the 360 for that gamer. It speaks to me b/c thats what this original blog was all about; getting and showing readers how to get those rare tome unlocks in WAR; on the 360 i loved the gamerscore and achievements concept... but its kinda cooled down as I don't think i'd get an extra 10k points to be as high as my friends who has had the system for over 2 years.. and the points don't give anything special unlike WAR where you may get titles, items or pocket items.

I guess its the same when you play together to get achievements, but I may not go as far as to throw games to give others achievements..

Going Ons

Modern Warfare
Currently: driving me nuts with that previous loadout of speccs which focuses on the tactical knife.
Can't figure out: whether i want to run faster, or be stealthy, as neither option works as well as the first couple matches..

Thus: using the light machine guns with Scavenger/Claymores in capture the flag, but people get wise :P
almost swore off the game in frustration; rage quit!

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Dragon age
I intend on fnishing it tonight..
I've united the country, beheaded Logain (sorry spoiler), and on to fighting the Blight and the ArchDemon

Still: no pics as i deleted them, set the auto screenshot to off, and still don't know how to manually take screenshots (screenshot hotkey is f12....) so weird

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Going to use some Microsoft Points for my 360 for:
Borderlands: Dr Ned's Island downloadable content (loving it again)
Castle Crashers: evil character downloadable content (must make a tank!! every character is speed and magic)

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Going to purchase: Left for Dead 2 soooonn..

Both Best buy and Futureshop have Buy 2 Get 1 free deals.. goo individuality!...:
http://www.bestbuy.ca/catalog/dept.asp?logon=&langid=EN&catid=23393
I read Walmart is making games 10$ cheaper.. which resulted in Gamestop's stock to drop.. but maybe its only in the US.. as I didn't see any real price difference the other day..

Youse gets a logo as I like the service better :P

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Is it Penny Arcade or Gu Comics that readers buy the artists xmas gifts? I dunno..
If you want to get me something, get me this ;)