Monthly Archives: October 2009

My Poor, Neglected DS

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Reminded of it by a forum post, I fired up Animal Crossing: Wild World on my DS for the first time in ages. As expected, the place was overrun with weeds, but other than that, it was pretty much as I left it. I hooked up an old 802.11b router so I could connect to WFC, and maybe I’ll catch up on a few of the online gifts, if they’re still giving them out.

I also started The Dark Spire for the first time. It’s supposed to be an old-school, hardcore dungeon crawler, and it certainly feels like it so far. I only just made it past the character creation, but that retains the nostalgic old process of picking your race, class, and rolling for stats for each member of your party.

But Without The Eyeliner

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Since I’m trying to wind things down in WoW anyway, I figured it was about time to embark on something I’d meant to do for quite a while: working through whole series of games. And with Risen just recently released, I may as well do the Gothic series first (Risen isn’t technically part of it, but it’s very similar and by the same developers). This could take a while though, as they’re all fairly lengthy games…

I picked up Gothic 1 from GOG a while back, and it’s definitely hard to get into at first. The 3D graphics are really showing their age and the interface is just bizarre. The mouse only controls the camera and nothing else (there isn’t even a mouse cursor), so you have to use weird keyboard combinations, like Ctrl-Forward to activate things and talk to people, strafe left and right to move between columns in the trade screen, etc. It takes some getting used to, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.

So far I’ve been dumped into a valley sealed under a magic dome, with the job of delivering a letter to the mages. Of course it’s not that easy — I have to join a camp, work my way up through the ranks, and so on just to be able to get close to the mages. I’m in the Old Camp right now, trying to impress people so that they’ll promote me within the ranks.

A Mage’s Life

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Lately, most of my time in WoW has actually been spent on my mage alt. Over the weekend I managed to get him from level 19 to 26, and raised jewelcrafting to 217 and enchanting to 136 (enchanting’s a bit of a pain to raise). It’s strange because he’s simultaneously more boring than my warrior (just cast Frostbolt over and over and over…), but more interesting because I can’t approach situations the same way by just barging in like I would with the warrior.

I didn’t neglect my warrior entirely though, managing to complete the zone quest achievement in Zangarmarsh, collect a few more aspirant tokens at the Argent Tournament, and finally got around to socketing some of my equipment. With the boost of a few gems, I finally have a defense rating of 536 on him, which is good enough to avoid crits in non-heroic dungeons (I need 540 for heroics).

Damn You, Maladaar

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I spent most of my time in WoW tonight working through some of the Auchindon dungeons, to try and clear out some old quests. I forgot that Exarch Maladaar was the boss of the western area though, and he’s pretty much impossible for me to solo right now due to his ability to clone me and summon help.

I did manage to work my way through the eastern dungeon for the first time, completing a couple of quests there and getting the key for the southern one. I couldn’t make it all the way through the south dungeon since one of the mid-bosses was too tough, but I did make it deep enough to get a book for a Nagrand quest and resume that quest chain.

Unfortunately I don’t think any of them counted towards zone quests that I still need for achievements…

Crazy Cat Tauren

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I took a bit of a break from the usual daily routine today and went around collecting some pets, picking up a couple cats, a couple of wyrmlings from the Blood Elf newbie areas, a worg from a quest in LBRS, and a giant frog from the Darkmoon Faire (though the egg for that one won’t hatch for a week). I’m still about three pets short of having 50 total though, which would get me a skunk pet as a reward.

And since I was fooling around in LBRS anyway, I picked up the pieces of the attunement quest for UBRS and finished it off as well. There were other quests I could have done in there along the way, but I didn’t really have room in my quest log. Oh well, it’s an easy enough area at this point, so I’m sure I’ll be back later.

Zzzzz…

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Still not much exciting happening lately, but I did at least eventually get a full set of Brewfest clothing and the second-last achievement for the event. I’m still missing the last one since I never got around to doing the fight with Coren Darkbrew, but there’s always next year. The Darkmoon Faire is starting up and I got the two frog pets from it, but I’m not sure if there’s really anything worthwhile that I can buy with tickets anymore.

Other than that, I picked up a nifty little game called Windosill on Steam. It’s really just a Flash game that’s a series of 10 puzzles, but they’re really well-done and it only cost $3.