Now that school has started I've been extremely busy. Between GotGame, school, commuting, and personal things, I haven't had much time to game. Recently, I've gotten to 70 and I've been running a lot of different things. Now, I'm up to the heroic difficulty 5-man instances. Once you're 70, you pretty much have to specialize, which mean I stuck to healing. I like healing, but once in a while I'd like to fight instead of getting beat up. So I decided I wanted a 70 paladin (I know they're not the best, but they live longer than rogues or mages). Well, since I'm so busy I don't have the time at all to level all the way to 70. So my solution to this problem was to have someone level my character to 60, and I'll do the rest. The problem is there's a million different services out there and varying prices. I needed to find the right balance of price, speed, and safety (since power leveling is illegal). After looking around I suck with a place. Things were going smoothly until they got caught when my character was 32. My account is not temporarily banned and I don't really know what to do. I'll figure it out.
Note: the website above isn't the site I used, it's just one I googled. I'm not saying the site I used because I'll feel bad if I ruin their business.
So this previous weekend, GotGame was at Never Never LAN 3.0 in San Francisco hosted by Ascendancy Gaming. I was there from 2pm to about 2am doing assorted things. GotGame brought tons of food, t-shirts, and raffled off a 8800 GT. The interns that made it were: Zain, me, Ryan, Gabe, Martin and Carlos; we all had a good time. The LAN had consistently around 100 players at all times mostly playing Call of Duty 4, Counter-Strike: Source, and Team Fortress 2. The only game out of those I have is Call of Duty 4, so I was just playing the public LAN game. I didn't stay for the tournament because I didn't have a team. Well, it was a great experience since I haven't gone to a LAN in roughly 7 years. Met cool people, talked about GotGame, and fragged some noobs. Check it out at http://www.ascendancygaming.com/.
It's stupid that I'm trying to be good at two games. Especially when those two games are Call of Duty 4 and World of Warcraft. I try and budget my time well between the two, but there just aren't enough hours in the day. I think about it and I could very well just stick to one game and do extremely well in it... but no, I have to play two completely different genres. It's also stupid because it messes with my reflexes and movement within the game. In WoW I kinda just run around at half speed, pausing next to an opponent just to press the same few keys over and over again until dead. Rinse and repeat. Then in Call of Duty 4 I'm constantly running around, looking down sights, and chucking assorted hand held items. Just wait until Crisis Core comes out, then I'll be split between three games. The only thing that seems to be stopping me from playing games all the time is GotGame and sleep. I don't include food because I can just play and eat at the same time (now that's time management!). Ah well, I'll get there in both games someday. Maybe instead of being pro in one game like ZigZag, I'll just join crappy clans in both games. Although it is tempting to go pro.
Then I can spend weeks bragging about my win at Gigafrag LAN.
Well, it was just my 21st birthday. Too bad I don't really drink or anything. To celebrate, I've decided to build my own computer. My budget is a grand, but I think I'll go over a little bit because of little additions that I like.
Apevia Black Mid Tower Case
Some Fans with blue LED lights
Gigabyte Intel P35 ATX Motherboard
EVGA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB
600W Power Supply
Core 2 Duo 2.66 Ghz
Corsair 2GB (2x1GB) 800 RAM w/ head spreader
Western Digital 120GB HD
LITE ON 20x DVD RW
Samsung 20" Widescreen LCD Monitor
Total comes out to around a grand. I hope everything works well!
I got to go to this year's GDC, which was quite exciting. The best thing that I got to do there: Super Smash Bros. Brawl! If anyone knows my smash playing background, I used to play as Marth, so naturally I chose Ike. His moves are pretty similar including the counter move, but he's a lot slower than Marth. He feels like Roy a little bit. I only got to play once which was disappointing but I did get to see some of the new people in action. Metaknight seems pretty overpowered. He flies like Kirby but has the attack range like Link. On top of his multiple jumps he also has a high up-B jump. The entire game the person playing Metaknight just kept fluttering around and sli
cing a.k.a. fly byes. I felt like a giant noob because I didn't know how to use the smash ball. I was the person to get it... and then I just kinda sat on it. then it got knocked out of me. Later that game I got another one and used it (it was just a simple smash attack to activate it). I was quite disappointed because Ike's smash is more of a 1v1 move. If you look at other people's super smash, they fill up the entire screen and whoop ass. We'll see how everything looks in the end. I gotta go pick up a Wii now.
For anyone who knows me, they know that I'm a RPG kind of guy. I do play every kind of game out there, but RPGs I think are the best. It's just so cool that you can customize your character and watch him/her grow. The other great part about RPGs is that the majority of the time they're turn based which means no anxiety! I don't hate action games or anything like that, it's just there is a time and a place for action games. There's never a time and a place for RPGs; you can play them at any time... But this brings me to my main point: Final Fantasy's journey into action games. If anyone remember, back in the day Square didn't really create action/adventure kind of games. They did have Xenogears in which you did a lot of jumping and stuff to move around, but the battles were all turn based. Ever since Final Fantasy 7 or so time was a major factor. If you take your time to pick "Attack" you could have already been attacked. Now, most recently the new Final Fantasy 12 game for the DS or Final Fantasy 7 Crisis Core for the PSP are all heavily dependent on finger movement rather than strategy. They both kind of have some RPG core, but they're action based. SquareEnix is just trying to take over every genre. They have the fighting game coming, they have real time strategy, turn based strategy, role play games... what's next? Final Fantasy Soccer? (The sad thing is I would still buy it). Well, either way, Final Fantasy is slowly taking over every genre. I'm glad to see it happen because they're a fine developer, but come on, Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales? Bad SquareEnix. Bad.
-Allen
