Archive for the ‘Gaming’ Category

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EverQuest Stuff

Monday, July 13th, 2009

Been going through more things that belonged to me during that stage in my life I played EverQuest. Some items just shock me: I really had that? I really thought this was cool? I used to listen to trance and all my kinetic sculptures would be going… wow, are those things noisy. No wonder mom has trouble hearing. ^_~ I really did think it was cool.

Discovering lots of things I should have given up years ago when my tastes changed. Like a huge, heavy box of… blurry photos? A few rolls I kept for some reason when my light meter broke and I didn’t realize it. So, off to the trash with those. I discover the negatives to photos I sold to our High School Sports Office, way back in maybe my Junior year. Photos from my Kite flying days that just has a faint line of pink to suggest a kite might be there.

Then I discover all my old things from when I was a Guide on the Quellious server in EverQuest. That brings back some memories. I trained apprentices towards the end of my 5 year run as a Guide and processed their reports to submit. Wow, there’s my old Dragon Tour I used to take brand new guides on. My vague directions through the Dragon Necropolis as only a Guide or GM could go. Wow, I miss that run. Once I told one of the major raiding guilds on the server “Off the record, you guys are nuts!” *grin* I still have notes detailing some of the times I was asked to help them with wipe recovery when the server crashed. Guess I wanted details for my guide report for those days.

Lists of my fellow guides, then the guide liason and the GMs I worked with. Wow, memories.

Good people… I miss them all.

Below that, the EverQuest games. I have the original box to the orginal game, then Kunark, Velious, Luclin, Planes of Power, and onward. There’s enough cloth maps to make a quilt and a tiny toy sword that I somehow remember being a model of the one you got from Guk.

The games don’t take up that much room, but I’m still not sure what to do with them. I won’t ever play again, can’t really sell them, but man… these are the first things I’ve run into that make me truly hesitate.

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Hard Drive Failure

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

Remember that brand, spanking new computer I built back in September?

Mom got up this morning and flipped it on like she always does. She usually gets up 1 – 3 hours before we even begin to regain consciousness and checks her e-mail and does a little genealogy research. She got up this morning, flipped it on… and nothing.

A message appears asking for boot media. She then does the good thing my mommy has always done: Wakes me up to deal with it.

I think “Bios must have updated.” It does have the occasional habit of deciding it needs to boot the portable hard drive instead of the main drive. (I don’t have bootable media on it.) No, that’s not it. Maybe a cable died. Nope. Eventually, I get a message saying “No any hard drive detected.” Oh, frig. (Any other time I probably would have been chuckling at the bad grammar.) Nothing I tried could get that stupid hard drive to boot. There was no noise, no smell, no visible damage, nothing to indicate a problem. The activity light would light right up, I could feel and hear the disk spinning. But the bios will in no way recognize my precious hard drive. Only comment my mom made was that it “sounded louder than usual” when she turned it on. (Which isn’t all that helpful, considering how many fans and heat sinks are in it.)

So, I drag my old Compaq granny machine out and hit my guildies up for advice. (Ugh, that thing is so slow compared to my baby.) All their troubleshooting advice fails to work too. Finally Kel and Rasm began posting links and I discover that my particular hard drive model is prone to bad heads and firmware failure. (Seagate Barracuda 7200.11) I’m pretty sure I would have heard bad heads, which likely means firmware failure.

I told mom on her way to work to ask Craig if he could take me to Best Buy to see if they had something cheap. No problem, plus Jeremy told me they had one for $79. Good. Gets me to tax returns, when I can drop the money on a proper hard drive.

The loss of data is actually not a big deal. I really didn’t lose too much, thanks to backups. I had all my MP3s on my portable hard drive and all my college homework is also on my portable hard drive and the older stuff burned onto DVDs. Big thing I lost was all my fonts, our resumes, and all our e-mail. I still have to go to the Seagate site and see if I can download a few utilities… maybe see if I can slave the old drive to the new one. Really, I can’t think of anything aside from our fonts and the e-mail that’s a critical loss. The fonts and resumes aren’t even really that critical… though I can’t find some of my fonts anymore.

The big deal is that I’m going on 8 hours reinstalling everything from the operating system to my programming utilities to my games. Course, World of Warcraft is going to want to patch for another 5 hours. I’m also not looking forward to installing Visual Studio and MSDN. *shudders*

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The Safety Dance

Friday, January 16th, 2009

Went to 25-man Naxxramas last night, completing the Spider Wing and then started on the Plague Wing. Went well, until we reached Heigan.

Heigan’s room itself is divided into quadrants radiating out from the stage. As you’re fighting him, some sort of liquid is erupting through cracks in the floor, leaving just one of those quadrants clear at a time going in the order of quadrant 1, 2, 3, and 4 before repeating in reverse order. (i.e. 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1)

Phase 1 has the melee slowly moving him across the room in this order while ranged showers death on him from the stage. Phase 2, Heigan teleports onto the stage, sending ranged to the floor to avoid a quick death. The entire raid then has to do the dance until Heigan comes down from the stage. Then, it begins all over again.

I had the brainstorm to color code the safe areas with a smoke flare to help people better see the safe areas. We didn’t color code, but we did drop flares in each area. It seemed to help some of the raid members, but well… not so much for myself.

I know the order, I just lag and either fall behind or don’t see the safe spot in time and run right through it. My frame rate was up where it belongs… but for some reason I experience just enough latency in Heigan’s room to make it difficult for me. Thus, I can’t make it through even first dance across the floor. Cue 16 minutes of torture as I wait for the surviving members of the raid to take him down.

I was so frustrated last night I forgot to loot my Emblem of Valor before taking the port to Dalaran and logging.

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Naxxramas

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

This is a post about World of Warcraft. If you don’t play, you probably won’t know what I’m talking about. ^_~

Grobbulus

Well, my guild went to 10-man Naxxramas tonight. Lets just say it went way better than yesterday’s attempt at the timed run in Heroic Caverns of Time: Stratholme. Now, that’s not to say Stratholme is difficult, my regular group and I all have our drake mounts and now just do it to race our previous times. It just stymied the group I was in.

Anyway, back to Naxxramas. The previous raid cleared the Spider Wing, so it was now time to choose another wing. First pull, not even 2 minute in… and we wipe. Turns out our raid leader, Seaotter, had it set to 25-man instead of 10-man. *laughs*

So we regroup and begin clearing to Instructor Razuvious. First attempt fails due to adds; someone got too close to some mobs in the back of the Instructor’s area. Second attempt went fine. Not feeling like we have the firepower to continue the Military Quarter, we retreated and decided to try the Abomination Quarter. The river of ooze and crawling ooze monsters were – by and large – our biggest enemy. The river of ooze is this – almost benign looking – shallow channel filled with green, glowing ooze. When you fall in or attempt to cross, you lose a fair amount of HP and mana. The ooze monsters are a little further down and are slowly crawling in three columns across the path. They won’t attack you, but if you touch them it instantly kills you. (We took to calling the area where the ooze monsters are crawling across the path “Frogger.”)

We clear just the path to Patchwerk and prepare to pull him. I’m eyeing the mobs we didn’t kill and thinking “Oh, I can see them all aggroing when we pull Patchwerk.” Primrose sent me a /tell about the same time with the same thoughts, which I then passed on to Koori. We pull… and I Feign Death as all the mobs move in. Wipe-O-Rama while Prim and I laugh our heads off. I literally could not stop laughing.

We resurrect and regroup… this time we’re sure to clear all the other monsters. As for Patch, it took forever to kill him. We did eventually drop him, no problem… he just has a LOT of HP you have to burn through to bring him down.

While it wasn’t an upgrade, I did grab Hatestrike to spare it from being DEd. If I can locate something nice to duel wield with it, it might be a replacement for my Whale-Stick Harpoon… but for now, it’s in my bank.

Finally, we tried Grobbulus. It didn’t go as well as the other bosses, mainly due to the logistics of the fight. He leaves poison clouds, requiring that he be kited around the room. Periodically, he’ll send out ooze monsters that have to be dealt with and also makes people a “bomb.” People who are the bomb have to move away from the raid so they don’t hurt any other raid members. We got him low, but just couldn’t keep it together long enough to kill him. So as of right now, we’re going to try hitting the Spider Wing a few more times to get a little better gear for our core raiders and see what happens.

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Build Your Own Computer

Monday, October 13th, 2008

Well, today was the day I built my own computer for the very first time. ^_^ Lets just say, for all the times my blood-pressure soared, it went off without a hitch. Right now, I’m preparing to install Windows XP on it and am about 75% of the way through partitioning and formatting my new hard drive.

As you know from my previous posts, I made a list of the parts I would need a couple weeks ago and placed my order. My goal was a really nice, but not state-of-the-art gaming and graphic arts machine. Basically, I needed it a little more powerful than the standard computer you can buy from the store, but without the several thousand dollar price tag.

So, my case came today. Cue me prancing out to the street in my pajamas to grab this HUGE box from the UPS guy. (Who has actually been really nice about huge box a week thing.) After lunch and doing a little more homework I set to work. (more…)

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The Death of a System

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

I got an internship with Second Life, working on an experiment for one of the professors at my college.

While I’m seriously geeked over the prospect of an internship in an MMO, my time over the past few days in Second Life has taken my video card to the brink of death. Yesterday, it bled over into World of Warcraft when my minimap and pet were turned into pixels for several minutes after I logged in. I really didn’t think there would be a problem because at first glance Second Life has similar system reqs to WoW.

So, I had two options: A.) Burn the money on a new video card or B.) Get a new computer.

Lets see…Buy a new video card when: The current video card is dying, the heat sink on the north bridge spontaneously fell off so I probably have heat damage (which is probably half the reason for the graphics problems), and now the hard drive has been clicking intermittently. Yeah, new computer it is.

Not happy with the factory-built systems I have been finding, I decided it was high time to build my own. So, $830 later, I have parts coming from Newegg.

Here’s the specs/parts:

And finally, since I’ll have access to XP Pro once I can get back to my programming classes, I ordered an OEM version of XP Home to tide me over.

So, in roughly three days, the poor UPS guy should be planning my homicide. *laughs* (He seems to be deathly afraid of Luna!)

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No Date; WoW is still wowing me.

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

Well, Brad called and chickened out of the date.

He said there was nothing he wanted to see, but then asked if I wanted to drive all the way to Greenville (30+ minute drive one-way) to play Final Fantasy and listen to him play his guitar.

Umm, no.

So, I told him that we’d try for another time. But to be honest, I’ve lost interest. (Actually, to be really honest I think I lost interest after the 2am phone call.) The “come over to my house and play FF” for a first date just put the last nail in the coffin.

Anyway, logged into WoW and played until I was level 9. Found out I can’t send or receive mail either, or do much with the bank. *frowns* I hope my Battlechest gets here soon. Not having tells, mail, or bank access really sucks.

I’m more impressed in this game than ever.

Much later, Theresa and Brandy hunted me down in game and surprised me. ^_^ I thought they were on a raid and suddenly they’re right in front of me. Talked a bit, Theresa invited me into Seventh Cavalry, and got some Hunter advice from Brandy.

Overall, it was a great night.

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More drama

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

What the heck is it with me and drama?

Oh, more drama at work. I had to train a new temp Thursday and lets just say, she’s one of those people who would find a conspiracy against her in “Good Morning!” Very petty, didn’t want to listen to me, and then throws this huge, over-the-top drama trip on me when I started to show irritation at her and then became angry with the techs and quality control people. (e.g. I’m angry, thus it must be at her.) Ugh. Ended up being hauled into the managers office over that one. Now she thinks I’m her bestest friend.

Then, yesterday, I had to train on Cell 1. I can’t keep up with that machine and apparently they want me to run it while the usual operator, Brad, is on vacation. Went okay, he’s a geek like me and a classic Final Fantasy fanboy. Cool, I get to discuss FF8 – 102 and my favorite characters. So about halfway through the night, Brad asks me out “sometime.” Okay, I’m game for a little fun so I give him my number. We get out of work at 11pm. He calls me at 2am. *grumble* Rambles through everything he did until he got home to call me. *irritated sigh* I just want to go to bed. After 8 hours of working with me, having the courage to ask me out, now you’ve decided you’re nervous? Finally says he wants to take me out for a movie. Saturday. This evening. Not sometime, today. *frown* Okay, I don’t go to the theater anymore, so I have no idea what’s playing. I tell him I’ll watch anything. Silence at the other end of the line.

I finally suggest that he pick something out and give me a call today.

Totally regretting agreeing to going out sometimetoday. I understand he’s nervous, but if he’s going to be this shy, he’s seriously barking up the wrong tree.

Kadiri -- Icecrown ServerAnyway, up to level 7 in WoW. Started hunting in the upper-level newbie area, had my first kill-stealer, and just relaxed in general. I still have to finish that stupid spider-egg quest. (Wow, at first I didn’t think there was anything KOS in the newbie area. *laughs*)

I’m currently playing a 14-day trial version that Matt gave me. Anyway, after Brad called, I decided I needed a little social interaction after all. So I looked up this guild called “Seventh Cavalry” and see that nearly everyone is on. Went to send Joyleaf and Koori a tell for kicks and discovered that I can’t send tells on the trial version. *laughs* Figures.

Anyway, gotta get homework done so I can go out with Brad tonight. *grumble-sigh*

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WoW is amazing!

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

Wow, World of Warcraft is a fast-starting game. I’ve already completed several quests and have another couple for when I log in probably tonight or tomorrow morning.

In just a couple hours of play, I’m already level 5.

I’m not telling anyone my character’s name or server until I’m at least level 15. I need to play the game myself, not be twinked to all end. (Though I didn’t realize until the icons started blinking that someone buffed me at some point.)

I will say I rolled a Night Elf hunter, short blue hair. Oh, and I just scared the crap out of myself climbing that stupid tree to find my trainers. lol THAT is too much like Kelethin for my tastes.

Anyway, yes, I am definately here to stay. ^^;;

@ Theresa: I hope you’re right, because I think this is what I needed. I can’t afford to slack off school.

@ Tiffy: OMG! Hi!! Oh yeah, it kind of surprised me how fast the actual game started. I was expecting some of the same things from EQ, talk to the trainer first, then find my way to the newbie grounds, yadda yadda yadda.

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Planar

Sunday, November 17th, 2002

There. I did something with Legacies. I’m sorry guys, but I don’t really have time to play right now. :-( If you guys want to reassign groups or just try a different idea than the one I came up with, go ahead. If you want me to choose someone and give them Admin powers over the board, I’ll do so. *hugs* Sorry. Still not sure what you guys want me to do with Nic Jean’s character though :-(

Work has just been a bitch with my time lately. I haven’t had much of a day off in recent times… I mean, heck… normally I get to see Yugioh on Saturday mornings, but all I got to see was the 8am showing. I know that Malik shows up, well… Cameo type thingy as he does the puppit-thang with Bandit Keith, but I missed the next episode. Fantasy, you may have me at Kaaza yet! I’m spending most of my time trying to get rested so I can survive the next day at work, so my internet time has shrunk down to checking my mail. At least my paychecks are semi-decent…. I did get to go shopping and repair a little of my wardrobe last week. Got several tops, a load of underwear, and a couple low-rise, boot cut jeans. (Pretty decent, not those horrifically exaggerated things I’d been finding. Boot cut isn’t Bell-Bottoms, despite what some designers seem to be thinking) ^_^ Now just to get that Debit Card so I can do a little shopping online. Want to make it to Grand Rapids soon… one of my favorite Craft Shops is having a massive sale and I/we want to splurge a little. That and I want a few more clothes… it feels good to start getting clothes that actually fit me. Now to stop drooling at those black, leather pants I found at this one store. ^^;;

Listing to “Plane of Time” and “Plane of Earth” themes from the new EQ expansion… I really love those. ^_^ The latter has this really cool Egyptian-sounding thing going, which drives me right back to my Yugioh fetish. I really want to play-play, but everytime I intend on coming on I’m too tired to even want to to much with the computer, let alone seriously play. Ah well *hugs everyone*

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