We’re still here, just not doing a ton of site stuff recently. Our roommates are getting married very soon and quite a lot of time has been intertwined with that <s>debacle</s> lovely event (just kidding J+T, <3). I’m also swamped-ish at work with some super cool stuff that I’m really excited about. Our super sikret site project may be on hold until after that wedding and my project is done.
As to what we’re up to otherwise, we’ve sort of whole heartedly fallen back in love with WoW and have been playing at a good clip. Our warlock and priest are up to 70 and we’ve been finishing off quests, batteground- and arena-ing, and even went on a couple dungeon runs (including a somewhat surprisingly successful raid to Karazhan). So that’s a good time.
We picked up Braid on Xbox Live Arcade last night and got through a good bit of that as well (through World 5, I believe). Pretty awesome game. Tough and fun puzzles, fucking gorgeous visual style, good music, and a pretty decent ability to controller-swap. Looking forward to playing that a little more this weekend. As well as lots of dungeon runs in WoW with our roomie who wants nothing more than us to play with her.
That’s it for now!
Our audio equipment has failed us. The super secret project we were planning to release tomorrow has fallen on its face. We have new equipment and shall be delivering on our secret promise soon.
Grr. More later.
Despite appearances here, we’ve been hard at work on a new aspect to the site. We’re gettin’ pretty close and are pretty excited about it.
Otherwise, our priest/warlock duo in WoW just hit 53 tonight and we’re having a pretty good time just levelling in WoW again. We’re on the server we’ve played on for a while so it’s nice to hang out with friends (both real and virtual), play some classes we haven’t played in a long time, and just generally destroy some monsters.
Mara was also out of town for most of this week, so I putzed around in a few other places. Played a little Team Fortress 2 which is always fun, finally got access to Heavy Assault Ships in EVE and bought my first Ishtar, and spent a little time in WoW. While it was nice to have some of my own time, it really made me realize how much we do together and that’s it generally more fun when you’ve got someone to play with.
So, we’re now Gamers in Bed. Got the domain, changed the blog, and we’ve got some plans.
New URL (gamersinbed.com)should be DNS propogating over the next couple of days and hopefully this blog won’t be too broken while it’s transitioning (it might get broked if you visit the site). I think all old links *should* still work but I’ll be putzing around and checking to make sure it all works.
Keep an eye here for our new project that should be showing up relatively soon…
PS - I may or may not go back through and change the text of the posts to have our real names. We are doing away with our pseudonyms of Sally and Harry. If you’re a first time reader and you go back in the archives, you should be able to figure it out.
So, Sally and I bought EQ2 over 2 years ago after we quit WoW the first time. With the new Living Legacy promo going on, we decided to hop in and see what it looked like so many years later. Patching and all that wasn’t too bad - we just let our clients download over night. Character creation always takes us (read: Sally) some time, so we played around with that. We went back and forth between good and evil, human-like chars or furry chars, and eventually settled on the evil fairies, because, c’mon: evil fairies. So we logged in with visions of grandeur of toppling heroes and making lives for ourselves in Norrath.
We quit about 5 minutes later.
Now, we know EQ2 is a well-loved game by many. We are just totally and absolutely unable to get past the UI and visual style. And I mean totally. We both logged in, ran around for a minute, picked up our first quest, killed a few monsters, went outside to take a break, and both agreed that we should immediately quit upon returning. To us, almost everything about being in-game “feels” wrong.
I actually have a lot of similar complaints about LotRO. Things like floating names above NPCs, the style of the interface windows, the fonts used, and the size, shape, and design of the tooltips always bother me. These games always tout the “immersion” factor as big selling points, but I find badly designed UIs one of the fastest ways to break immersion. For me, immersion is more about not really thinking about the fact that I am playing a game so that I can just *play* the game. Ornately decorated bag panels, floating names about NPCs that I don’t really care about, tooltip dialogs that are badly formatted and huge, and really ugly, badly rendered “fantasy” fonts all really put me off.
We might be back to WoW… again. We also briefly played with DDO and played a decent little bit of Mythos, so we’ll have more to say on that stuff. For now, back to work.
HD trailer here
Sally and I loved BG&E. I’m excited to see what they’re doing with the new one.
So, Sally and I have both totally missed the boat on games that allow you or require you to have character surnames. Almost all the games we’ve played just have a single name for your avatar. Guild Wars threw us for a loop and we sat there for about 30 minutes trying to come up with surnames for our characters, trying to figure out if we should use the same one, if the surname should be our “primary” name that all our characters user, or something else entirely.
So, open topic, how do you use surnames for your characters? Same surname across all alts to make it easy to identify yourself on any character? Same first name? Ignore the subject altogether?
Harry and I picked up GH3 a few days ago. The packaged guitar that comes with Rock Band has always kind of irritated us, the strum bar is too squashy and neither of us are smart enough monkeys to have wrapped our brains around using the small fret buttons for solos. Whether this guitar is actually “worse” than any others is certainly open to debate, but maybe because we learned on the old PS2 and Xbox controllers we don’t like it much. It also isn’t backwards compatible to GH2 and we’ve been having a hankering for doing some duoing guitars or guitar/bass on that.
Long story short, the simplest solution to all of this was to go out and buy GH3. We had contemplated just buying the guitar, but if you’re spending 70 for the guitar alone you might as well spend the extra few and get the game.
It’s not exactly news that GH3 doesn’t live up to the rest of the genre, so I’ll try not to beat a (now year or so old) dead horse too much. Suffice it to say that the opinion of the general populace from when GH3 came out is a pretty accurate in my experience. There’s nothing particularly WRONG with it, but they implemented a number of features that just get in the way of what you want to do, which, in my case, is namely rock out to goofy songs I know and love (or, in a lot of cases, songs I know and loathe, but then grow a sinking, private joy for because they are just SO DAMN FUN to play) and very little else. A key example of the game getting in way of the game is the ‘boss battle’ that you have to pass to open up higher levels. I find them to be gimmicky and well, pretty absurd. I am a ROCK STAR. I play GUITAR. This is not Free Style Hero, I am not doing a DJ battle. Nor am I dueling banjos. It’s an awkward fit. That said, it’s not a horrible mini-game, but it got in the way of me playing the game I want to play.
Last gripe is for whatever reason, I’m just not as good at internalizing the visual info of GH3. I don’t know quite what it is, if it’s simply that it’s a busier display and it takes that one or to nanoseconds more for my brain to read the notes and communicate info to my hands, but I’m just not as good at it. I miss stuff that I know I can play, patterns and rhythms that I know are totally do-able I just boff, and I do it over and over again. It’s very odd, not to mention frustrating. I started playing through the solo campaign on my own last night and ended up playing a couple of songs over a few times rather than progressing on because it just galled me that I only got 3 stars when I knew I was technically capable of acing the song. I also find the other UI features harder to see and digest the meaning of at a quick glance. This, certainly is partially just conditioning, my brain just doesn’t have a GH3 auto-pilot wired in to be able to glance around and digest the meaning of the things I’m seeing, but I also think they are (at least for me) less intuitive.
All that said, it’s still fun to play a new batch of songs, and it’s nice to see how far I’ve come from a skill perspective. When I stopped playing GH2 I had kind of plateaued out, I could do the first couple of songs on Hard, but not much beyond that. I was really struggling with getting the fifth button in to my repertoire, and adding that along side the increased difficulty level was just too much. Since Rock Band’s difficulty curve is much more forgiving, playing that let me sneak in the fifth button and work that out, and then advance the difficulty once I’d got some technique. So, now that I’ve bumped myself comfortably in to Rock Band Expert guitar, it more or less equates to GH2/3 high end of hard, low end of expert.
Back to the orriginal issue of the physical guitar controler, while it’s much, MUCH better than the Rock Band packaged guitar, I still prefer it less to the old GH2 guitar, I like the snappy buttons and the snappy strum bar. The GH3 guitar’s strum bar is much better, as is it’s whammy bar in comparison to the Rock Band guitar. I like it’s weight, and I of course love that it’s wireless, but in terms of tactile response I sill prefer the older one. Harry, thank goodness prefers this one, so we no longer have to play the “no, I’LL be nicer” game with who’s using what controller.
It would be extremely remiss of me to not mention the one very nice thing about GH3, which is that you can play the campaign through in multi-player mode. Granted, one person has to be lead guitar and the other person is forced to be bass or rhythm, but you can swap up who plays what easily, and you can also play through at different difficulty levels. We’ve both been annoyed recently at how many games require you to play as a solo player in order to unlock multi-player content, and mercifully, although GH3 trips and falls in to any number of murky pits, it avoids this one.
