After setting World of Warcraft up again on the new drive, I spent a little while working on quests. There’s still more left than I expected in the Howling Fjord area, but it shouldn’t take too much longer to finish them off.
Dunno if I really want to start playing again in earnest, but it killed some time…
I haven’t played much lately since I’ve mainly been reinstalling stuff after upgrading my hardware and installing Windows 7. But, with plenty of free disk space now, I put GTA4 back on and played through the first handful of missions.
I’m not sure I like the melee combat system, though. Moving around is so slow and blocks and disarms are hard to pull off. This mission where I had to rescue my cousin and then chase down a loan shark took me a good four tries before I beat it, mainly thanks to trouble with the melee.
But at least the performance is pretty good now.
Tonight I continued in my quest to help out the poor orphans in WoW, taking a furry little wolvar out with me. The quests were fairly simple, involving taking him to various locations around Northrend, but a few of them were places I hadn’t been to yet, so there was a fair bit of running around, and I even died once when I ran off a ledge that wound up being a bit too high up. It took a couple of hours, but in the end I now have a little wolvar pet of my own. Now get back in the box!
I also popped in to World of Warcraft tonight, just out of curiosity since there was a major patch today. Unfortunately, I then learned that they also added ‘orphans’ you can adopt as pets, but they’re only available for a limited time. Of course, my compulsive side will not let this pass by, so I know what I’ll be working on for the next little while… Damn you, Blizzard!
In King’s Bounty tonight, I finished off most of the remaining above-ground elven quests and encounters. It turns out that some of the ‘overwhelming’ named fights aren’t really as hard as the estimation claims…
So, now the only place really left to fight in is the Land of Death. This time, I managed to find a boat there, which made getting around and scooping up loose loot much easier. I finally found the last obelisk, which netted me a map that I can give to one of various different people for a reward (sounds like the best reward for me is a bunch of runes if I give it to the not-yet-rescued elven queen).
With a few bumps to my leadership (now around 10,500 at level 22), and a bit more exploration of the Land of Death, I now have some places where I can find appropriate-level fights, so the outlook doesn’t look so bleak anymore. I’ve also managed to build up some decent cash reserves again, so I’m not in immediate danger of running out of troops anymore.
And it was yet another long day in King’s Bounty, but with a fair bit of progress. I finished up nearly all of the encounters and quests in the dwarven areas (except for a gigantic spider that’s really tough), finished off all of the ‘named’ pirates sailing around the Isles of Freedom, and then headed to the elven lands.
The elven areas are fairly tough, but there I was able to pick up new types of troops that are a bit better than the humans I’d been sticking with. The archers in particular are pretty good, as well as some unicorns and dryads. I’m sticking with the horsemen though. Unfortunately, heavy losses mean I’m running out of the lower-level elven troops now, and I’m on the verge of running out of cash, whereas I left the dwarven areas with more money than I knew what to do with.
I’m going to have to choose my battles a bit more carefully, though right now most of the upper elven lands are largely cleaned out and now I need to work on the Land of Death, where things are even tougher yet. Maybe I’m going to have to revert back to my cheaper human troops…
It was a long day in King’s Bounty today, but there wasn’t really any progress in the main quest. I finished off a bunch of encounters and quests on the Isles of Freedom, including a few I didn’t even know about before, and started clearing out what was left of the dwarven areas.
Along the way I also completed the test of magic, which was one of those areas that was immediately accessible right at the start of the game, but seemed like it would be near-impossible…
Yesterday I also spent a bit of time with Hard Truck Apocalypse, which I’d picked up in some sale a little while ago. It’s reminiscent of Autoduel, being based around driving around with armed vehicles, doing quests and shooting up other people’s trucks.
The story is rather cliche (the basic out for revenge for my father’s death, etc.) and the production values are rather low, especially the horrible voice acting. It’s also rather convenient that everybody in the future has to wear masks that just happen to remove the need for facial animations in the cutscenes… Still, you get to drive around and blow stuff up, which can be fun enough on its own. The main complaint so far is that there’s been an awful lot of backtracking through the same roads, but it looks like I’ll be sent to a new area next at least.
Yesterday I finally got back to King’s Bounty after a bit of a lapse, and made some quick progress in it. I got the peace treaty with the dwarves signed, and in doing so unlocked the final member of the Chest of Rage and got promoted by the king. But, now the princess has been kidnapped.
That opened up the Elven lands, and I did a quick bit of scouting around there to pick up loose rewards, though there wasn’t nearly as much I could easily grab as there was in earlier areas. I’ve still got plenty of old quests to work through, so after that I headed back to the Freedom Islands and cleared out a bunch of monsters and quests from there.
I’ve also been dabbling a bit more in Daggerfall recently, and after trying to do a few more dungeon-diving quests, I gave in and turned on the cheat mode, just so I could use the rotate-through-‘interesting’-spot hotkeys. Otherwise, things are just way too hard to find or wind up being somewhere completely inaccessible.
I’ve mainly only done quests for the various guilds, though, gaining a couple of ranks in each and a couple of levels along the way. Levels have been slow though, since I haven’t been using my usual method of raising magic skills, and I probably took a few too many advantages at character creation. The available armour is still pretty low-quality stuff.