We need some rain. Been dry for a couple of weeks, and hot as hell. Our AC is barely keeping the house temp in the high 70’s. Ugh. It rained a little last night so maybe my yard will be okay for a few more days.
I recently acquired a new Playstation Portable with custom firmware. This new firmware allows me to run emulators on the PSP. So far, I have emulators installed for NES, SNES, Genesis, TurboGrafix16, and Game Boy Advance. Most of the games run very well on it that I’ve tried. There’s not really anything cooler than running Super Mario World on a Sony handheld, is there?
So far I’ve just been dicking around with this, and have not spent a lot of time on any game, but it’s fun to go back and look at the old school from time to time. I may try to go back and finish Chrono Trigger on it, which I got around 2/3 done on SNES back in 98 or 99 or so (still have my cart but not sure I want to hook up the SNES ;p).
Still having a lot of fun in World of Warcraft. My main on the new horde server (Thunderhorn) is a troll priest (43) named Rez. Last night our server was down for maintenance so I played with PS3 instead.
On PS3 I was playing around with the demo for The Darkness. Seems like a pretty innovative first person shooter. I really dug it, may have to snag this game but I probably should try the demo on 360 too to see which platform I like it better on.
My Wii isn’t working right but I haven’t had a chance to mess with it to see if it’s something I’m doing wrong or if it’s broken. Either way I’m not happy about it.
Had a really good time this weekend playing EverQuest 2 that I got in the SOE Station Access Collection. Lyndal and I got it at the same time to try out. For one thing we have been using Xfire and/or Teamspeak to do voice chat during the game and that just makes it a heck of a lot more fun. So we got some evil characters up to around level 9 or so in EQ2. Here are some random thoughts about the game.
First, leveling up is way faster than EQ was, but maybe it will slow down a lot later. I think it’s even faster than wow up to 9. Secondly, the game has some very decent quests. Way better than the quests from EQ1. About on par with WoW, really. I enjoyed the quests, especially the one where you have to go murder this guy’s ex girlfriend because since they are for opposing factions he can’t have her so he’d rather her be dead. There were other choice ones, like poisoning a loud mouth dark elf, and of course the standard go kill N mobs, or collect X widgets. But I did enjoy them overall.
The graphics to me are not as good as World of Warcraft. Sure, technically they are fairly impressive, but artistically I just think WoW is heads and shoulders above EQ2 and pretty much every other MMORPG. I also think the animations in WoW are much smoother and nicer looking than EQ2’s. Also the environments are nowhere near as compelling as WoW’s, at least not so far as I’ve seen. I was able to get EQ2 to run in a window much like the way WoW works so that was nice, I like being able to access Firefox or whatever while playing. EQ2 didn’t want to play nice with Xfire though, so I had to disable that.
The bottom line… would I pay $15 a month to play EQ2? Well, in a world without World of Warcraft, for sure, no problem. But I think I still prefer WoW over EQ2. I can see myself getting a toon or two up into the mid teens or early twenties in EQ2, though, because it is pretty fun. I will say that EQ2 is so far the best MMORPG I’ve played besides World of Warcraft, even better than City of Heroes which I liked a lot. So if you don’t like WoW for some reason and still want a fantasy MMORPG, check it out.
Leveled up my mage Xashi on Argent Dawn from 22 to 24 today. I’m really just killing time until Melingko levels up to 42 or 43 or so, so that he can adventure with Ami, my 43 NE Hunter. I really need someone to come join me in WoW. If you are on Argent Dawn or want to be on Argent Dawn, a fantastic RP server, then shoot me a comment so we can hook up. Pick up groups can really be a pain sometimes.