New Warhammer Online Blog

In the interest of returning this blog back to it's intended nature as a general gaming and anime/manga blog, and to give me somewhere to continue my WAR rambles without feeling guilty about deviating from that intention I've decided to create a second blog. So my continued Warhammer Online posts will continue at  Obsessive Focus: A Warhammer Online Blog.

I will continue to include all my posts in the livejournal mirror of Soramimi Keki if you would like both topics in one place.

How WAR saved me from WoW

In August I was playing Lord of the Rings Online and pretty happy. I was excitingly looking forward to the expansion and gladly provided information, pictures and movies from PAX to my fellow LoTRO players.  In September I got into the Mines of Moria beta and also got my minstral to 45, five levels bellow cap.  I'm not sure what happened but I got bored. I think as much as I love Tolkien and his works, playing a character in his world is just a little ... bland. Perhaps it's my preference for a more sword and sorcery type of setting. Regardless I was playing way more Tales of Vesperia than I was LoTRO. 

Then that day came. The day I dread fairly often. My boyfriend, my gaming and roleplay partner, the love of my life said words that cut to my heart....

"I'm thinking about going back to WoW."

In a instant panic attack full of visions of duo farming SM for that dagger I never got my 40 rogue and countless hours of mind less gulch farming and a world full of men with shovels for hands and barrens chat my mind raced for a way out. The first thing I thought to say was "I won't love you anymore if you make me go back to WoW!" but I deemed the situation not quite at that level yet. Taking a sharp turn to the right my brain scrambled for something, anything to divert him from that terrible idea. "Sex!" There was a good idea. "I'll do you if you don't go back to WoW." I felt this was probably a short term solution and I was not ready for dedication it would take to make it a long term one. 

"We can play Warhammer Online!"

I said these words not a week after stating that Warhammer Online didn't interest me and that it seemed like a PvP centric gankfest. (Can you feel the carebear shining through there?) But faced with the threat of a return to the land of epic farming, faction farming and ... and ... Goldshire (!) I was desperate.  Blessedly, he said that would work.

I bought a copy of WAR the next day while my boyfriend was at work. Just one single copy. You see, I still wasn't sold. I'd read a review that stated very clearly "If you are not a fan of PvP this game is not for you." I am in fact, not a fan of PvP, so I was pretty sure the game was in fact not for me. 

By the time he got home a few hours later he had to nearly pry the mouse from my clutches and peel me away from the desk to get a chance to play. Even then I hovered over his shoulder, pointing out the Tome of Knowledge and how it was "a deed log on steroids" and shoving at him like an excited kid telling him to join a scenerio que and yammering about class combinations that would work well for us.  Needless to say, a second copy was in my hands the next day. 

WAR Bug Fixes

I need to make a post with more substance, I know this. But I had a random thought:

Though Warhammer has some slight bugs, mostly of the graphical and animation sort, as any new MMO will have I really apprieciate the rate at which Mythic is releasing bug fix patches. Nearly every game I've played previously has seemed to follow the pattern of 'Only fix things that are major instantly. Everything else can wait to be applied in a giant bug fix patch a week or so from now" Even when whole quests lines were broken and unfinishable they'd remain so until the devs got around to their next weekly or bi-weekly patch.... if then (Hello, Vangaurd.) 

Neary every day I check the patch notes and find a small patch fixing a handful of bugs. And I wonder why more developers don't do that.  It seems a vastly superior way of doing things. Heck, last Thursday there was a scheduled maintence that applied a rather large patch including some crafting reworks. Shortly after the patch there were issues with the login servers and realms came down again for a few hours. When the servers came back up they'd taken the downtime as a chance to apply EVEN MORE bugs that they'd apparently finished off between 10am and 3pm that work day. I love that. 

Waaaaagh.

*sigh*

That's about all I really need to say. I never thought I'd be playing Warhammer Online, much less loving the hell out of it. I've never liked PvP ... but I'm having a ball with RvR. Not only that... I'm playing destruction! I'm beating up high elves and laughing maniacly. It's all the Dark Elf women's fault. Give me fantasy girls in skimpy clothing and I'm all over it. I was the same way with Dark Elves in Lineage 2. I'm a straight girl, I don't know what it is. But once I compaired Dark Elf outfits to High Elf outfits my side was chosen. 

The roleplay is a bit lacking, though I largely blame Mythic for that. How the hell do you release a modern MMO without basics like /sit, /walk and social gathering spots? Even more mind boggling given that they have flagged RP servers with a pop up explaining the rule set and letting you know it will be enforced. I joined an RP guild, and Brit and I are of course roleplaying with each other constantly as usual.

I'm also suprised by how well I do in PvP. I sucked so hard at it in WoW and avoided it like the plague in EVE and Lineage 2. I'm usually top ranked in scenarios I do, second only to Brit who's also a Sorcerer and of course better than me at it. 

Yeah. WAR. Rawr.

Sorry LoTRO. 

School blues

Today will be my third day of Japanese class. Honestly, I'm a bit jaded about the class. I find the teacher nice but a bit less than stellar in her teaching style. The first day was so terrible that I began to question perhaps dropping the class. It's taught in what I guess you'd say is a very "conversational" style. Which means that it's taught by spending five minutes showing you fifteen kana, ten minutes making you play an odd form of bingo with your classmates using these kana that you don't actually know and the rest of the time learning daily phrases rapid fire and "roleplaying" interactions using them with your classmates where you pretty much read lines from the board because the line you've just been taught has been mushed up with the last ten you just learned and you can hardly keep them straight. Suffice to say, if I'm learning anything from this class it's from self study. And I can self study without paying $400 for books plus tuition and four hour round trip bus rides thank you.

I think it's just a question of learning style. I expected Japanese class to go like my Spanish classes did. Give me run downs of sentence structure, teach me a handful of verbs, nouns, pronouns etc, teach me conjugation and allow me to ... you know, learn to form sentences. Instead I feel a bit like a parrot, spotting off lines who's use I know but who's meaning I do not. I know how to chat idly about the weather with someone but I have no idea what the individual words in the sentence mean. And without that knowledge, I'm not really learning Japanese am I? I think I was looking for something a bit more achedemic and a bit less hands on.  Frankly, I feel I'm wasting my time and that since most of what I'm learning I learn by teaching myself I'm also wasting my money. 

I'd say that it's worth it to have a native speaker to teach you pronounciation and such but I have two advantages on that. 1) Brit has taken years of Japanese classes and is quite good at it so I have an in home tutor. 2) I watch a CRAP LOAD of sub titled anime and don't have any problem understanding how sylabyls are pronounced.

I think I've learned more Japanese memorizing the lists of useful phrases most players in Final Fantasy XI learned. Knowing how to chat about the weather is going to be as useful to my goals of understanding Japanese media as knowing how to say "You can pull another. I have enough MP" would be. 

I feel lost in the class very often. But it's an odd sort of lost, I'm a good student and a natural achedemic. I'm not use to not knowing what's going on. But apparently giving me a stream of sentences who's meaning isn't solid in my mind other than "This is how you say "Thank you for last week. Here is the book you loaned me. Thank you." and then asking me to interact with a random stranger as if it were they who loaned me a book is a recipe for me feeling like I haven't learned a damned thing. Also, my level of learning seems directionally proportional to my interest in the subject matter. I am very interested in learning to understand Japanese. But with the teaching style and the direction of the class I end up throwing my hands in the air and feeling like "Who cares?". Which isn't condusive to learning. I'm going to come out of this only knowing hiragana, which I will have mostly taught myself because as said any time spent on them in class is rapid introduction and review of what you were apparently suppose to have taught yourself over the weekend. 

Maybe I'd feel a bit less bitter if going to a 4pm -6:30pm class didn't involve leaving home at 1:45 and getting home at 8:30 ; ; 

Death to the College textbook industry.

Honest to god.

$450 for books for ONE class. That's in addition to the tuition cost and an extra $50 in unexplained "fees" for said class. What kind of crack is this industry on?

Nearly $600 for books for three classes this quarter. And that's just for one of us, Brit and I are going to be forced to share whatever materials we can because FA isn't going to be in until long after classes start and that has to somehow come out of our pocket.

Is there a tree shortage somewhere? Do the teachers get some kind of commisions for forcing $170 a piece books at you? Would it really be concidered wrong if beat the snot out of the teacher who requires us to buy three $100+ books for one online class? Who would blame me. 

Kitchen Princess Vol. 6

Ugh! It took me so long to get my hands on this volume of Kitchen Princess. I read most my manga from the library. Seattle's public library actually has a really vast amount of manga so it feeds my habbit much farther than my wallet would take it. And I avoid the crazy weeaboos who live in the manga isle at Border's so bonus! The downside is how long I have to wait sometimes for books, especially if it's a popular series. For example, I'm number 27 or 34 people waiting for the 18 copies of Kitchen Princess Vol. 7 in the city. That'll be a while.

Anyway! After the cliff hanger at the end of volume 5 I was a little disappointed with how this one went. The whole series can be a bit vapid but dealing with the death of a major character in such a breezy way didn't sit right with me. And the reaction of the other students didn't wring true either. Daisuke's sudden change of priorities and immediate loss of distain for whatever it was he hated his parents for was also less than stellar. Throwing in yet another plot twist and cliff hanger at the end made me toss the book into the air with a "Feh!" and curse my interest in soap opera shoujo like this. But I'm still going to read the next volume ... for the some reason that I've watched Clueless dozens of times. I have a weird attraction to mindless candy.  I'd probably enjoy Kitchen Princess more if I weren't reading Fruits Basket at the same time. Reading a stellar shoujo while reading an average one makes the latter feel worse than it really is. 

It's been a crazy busy few days with little time for gaming or anime. I'm finally, after SEVEN years of being out of high school, getting back into school seriously. The problem is I only decided this about two weeks ago and classes start next week so I've been going a bit nuts flying around getting financial aid in order and leaping through all the loops that colleges like to throw at you before they let you attend. However, as of today I am done with everything and free to start classes next Thursday with my first Japanese class. I couldn't be more excited.

Fall is a wonderful horrible time to be a gamer.

If my list of must play games gets any longer I'm going to have to live on ramen for a month to afford them all. Fall is such a wonderful and terrible time to a be a gamer, wonderful in that "Holy crap look at all the awesome" way and terrible in that there is only one of me and my wallet is only so big.

I've got games currently owned to play: Lost Odyssey, Atelier Iris 2, La Pucelle Tactics, Puzzle Quest not to mention LoTRO and Alba18. Games just released to buy: Spore, Tales of Vesperia, Star Wars: Force Unleashed, Too Human, Infinate Undiscovery.Games coming out soon: Fallout 3, Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria and I'm sure all those lists have things I'm forgetting.

My question for the gaming industry is, why do they do this every single fall? My sanity and my budget beg you all to spread things out! Ten months of nothing new and two months of feeling like I'm drowning in games is just too much roller coaster.

On a blog note, I removed the "bento" from my tag line until I can afford to cook good food again. Felt a bit like false advertising.

Aria the Animation Ep. 1-5

I've been on a slice-of-life kick lately, it's like I'm allergic to plot all of a sudden. The newest I've added to my long currently watching list is Aria the Animation. The first thing that caught me was the color pallete. I know, odd right? As an ex-fine art major I'm very into color theory and I know which shades appeal to me personally. Lucky Star does, Sketchbook ~fullcolor'S~ does, and so does Aria. It's also a bit of fun color theory that all three of those series share an easy going slice of life theme as well.

The setting is certainly unique. Hundreds of year in the future a girl chases her dream of being a gondolier ... on Mars. It took me two episiodes to get that Aqua = Mars, which I think is delightful. Any sort of typical sci-fi esque voice over explaining where mankind currently stands wouldn't fit with the mood. And mood is one thing Aria has. It starts with the color pallete of soft almost sun faded colors throught out and extends to many wide panning shots of water and city scape of the sort that you'd expect in a French indy film rather than an anime. The animation is top notch. The show is just down right -pretty-. There's an almost fantasy like theme throughout, the combination of sci-fi and fantasy that the Japanese excel at and which sadly there is not nearly enough of, with different professions in Aqua taking on mythological names. The gondoliers go by the term Undine with the three best being known as the Water Faeries to the Sylph who deliver mail via airbike. 

It's much less character driven than other slice of lifes like Lucky Star or Azumanga, unless you count the abundance of adorable scenes centered around the cat President Aria. The characters are much more low key than most anime and very believable. Humor is present, I've gotten plenty of giggles thus far, but it's less slap stick and usually contained in odd facial expressions or the adventures of Aria-sato. 

If you don't like the slice of life genre chances are pretty good that you won't like Aria the Animation. If you do, or if you've previously enjoyed artsy foreign films, you'll probably like it. I'm very quickly becoming a fan. 

Albatross18

I admit it... I have a problem.

Name a free to play Asian MMO, especially a cute anime based one, and chances are I've played it. I can't stop downloading the darn things! Most can't hold my attention for more than a few days but it's like an addiction, downloading and trying them. I don't know if I just like seeing new games or if I'm actually hoping to find one that I can play for longer than a week or two.

Current obsesesion, Albatross18 (Pangya everywhere else, and a much better name in my opinion)

I first came upon the game when I was playing Trickster Online, an addictive little game that I played for a few months made by the same company. In Trickster two of the characters of Pangya, Arin and Kooh, are little pets that follow you around. I though Kooh was adorably hot ... then I found out that she's eleven. This doesn't stop people from lusting after her and clothing her in skimpy outfits and that disturbs me. What disturbs me more is that... she's still hot! Gah!

Anyway, I tried it probably a year ago but didn't play much because frankly I suck at sports games. Giving it a try again and I'm sucking a bit less and having more fun. It's pure eyecandy, and without the graphics and characters I doubt I'd play. There is something really satisfying about hearing that "Paang-YA!" though. The game is plagued by the same idiots as any other free game but it's a great distraction. I'm trying to save up to buy Arin but at the rate that I seem to be making pang it'll take a month to earn that much. ; ; 

I want this so bad. Yes, those kittens are omlets. 

PAX Aftermath

I meant to make posts about each day of PAX but ended up spending so much time writing reviews and answering questions on the LoTRO forums that I never managed to update my blog. So here's a quick run down:

Saturday - So crowded I couldn't breath, honestly. The expo hall, which I expected to be busy obviously, was so bad that just walking down the aisles you were often stuck for twenty to thirty seconds completely unable to move because of some traffic jam ahead. This situation made it near impossible to stop and look at anything much less talk to people. I spent very little time in the expo hall on Saturday and most of it was spent at the Turbine booth. The panel I was looking forward to most, one about writing and marketing a gaming blog, ended up being such a fanfest for the internet celebs in the panel that it was more "Meet and scream at your favorite blogger" rather than an instructional panel. I ended up leaving about ten minutes inot because of that and the fact that it was held at the smallest and most poorly set up theater in a corner of one of the main halls. Standing room only and so loud and poorly lit that you could hear or see anything on the screen. 

The highlight of the day was the Fallout 3 demo. I am not much of a FPS player, I've played a few but there has to be something else to hook me there aside from shooting crap. I am a huuuuge Bethesda fan. I've spent more time playing Oblivion than any other game, save MMOs. Somehow I caught that Fallout 3 was a shooter but missed that it was Bethesda until I read it in the PAX program. Also, shame on me for not realizing that Bethesda = awesome RPG. I am going to play the hell out of Fallout 3. It's like "post apocoliptic Oblivion with guns".  We called it an early day Saturday because there was a four hour chunk of time between panels that we wanted to see and with the crowds just decided that going home would be more fun.

Sunday - We spent most of our time on Sunday in the main theater, we watched the end of the second PA Q&A, the Spore demo (more coming up) and about half of the Dragon Age Toolset demo before we wandered off to get in some last minute expo hall action before the doors closed. Sprore.was.awesome. Like a good chunk of gamers, I've been waiting on Spore for years. I didn't realize that it was going to be SO freaking awesome nor that it's coming out next week. Everyone in the theater was excited afterwards, I was surrounded by people calling friends on their cell phone to rave about Spore. 

The expo hall time after was another highlight because ... we finally managed to demo Aion. Brit and I have been waiting for that game for over two years now. Finally getting our hands on it after so long was like crack. Our reaction after playing it for about fiften or twenty minutes was "Can't wait till that releases" and Sunday night at home was filled with both of us randomly commenting "I want to play Aion..." 

We ended up skipping the final Omegathron round. It didn't start until 5 but the line started at 3:30 and was already packed. We just dropped off our punch cards and left to get some dinner at Westlake Center before heading home. 

PAX Day 1 and LOTRO: Mines of Moria

(This a copy of a post I made on the Lord of the Rings Online forums. I'd rewrite it for a better blog format if I weren't so damn tired.) 

"

The banner in the main entry, first thing I noticed when I lined up to register. It was huge.



The line to enter the exhibit hall. I stood here for two hours for MoM. My feet hate me, but it was worth it.(Addition: I said this, and then found out what a useless fiasco the line was with thousands of people waiting 2+ hours to get in while people who just registered were walking right in because they didn't know there was a line and no one bothered to stop them)


The standing ads I mentioned. There's a key to decifer the runes in the main PAX program, and if you translate it and bring it to the Turbine booth they enter you in a contest for some awesome stuff.



MoM central! I thought I'd taken more pictures, but apparently I didn't.

I'm no game reviewer, Moria is indeed huge. One portion that really impressed me is the caverns where the Balrog was found. It looked at first pretty typical of a huge dungeon space. But then Jeff started leaping off ledges and I realized that every single area of what I'd assumed from experience to be backgroun was explorable. He dropped down probably five or six ledges, each quite a long drop and still had more above. Every corner of the zone is actual zone, meaning no flat texture on a sky dome or any such. The scale was really amazing. Also, apparently they actually did make the Endless Stair, though we didn't see it. I saw stable markers on the map, but my curiousity about what we'll be riding wasn't satisfied.

Warden looked really fun, there were probably two dozen or more combos. Basically warden has an added UI bit, a set of squares (five I think). You can build combos by using abilites, which each have a color. (Think fellowship manuver - yellow, red, blue, green.) You can choose either to say, do two yellow colored moves and then perform the combo, or follow that by two red and a blue and build up to a bigger combo. It seemed hella complicated and I joked to my boyfriend that I'll need a cheat sheet of combos on my desk to remember what does was. There were a LOT of them.

I mentioned to a few people I sat with at the party that I was kicking myself for not asking what races were limited to what class. I believe both the warden and runekeeper demo characters were Elves though. The armor was also flipping gorgeous, especially the robe the RK was wearing. I was happy to see some new things, rather the same three or four basic robe shapes with different textures.

The legendary weapon system, as I said, really floored me. It was very in deapth and complicated, and I can say there are going to be some really godly weapons coming out of it.

Now, must feint. Have to be back at 11:00 am tomorrow

Edit: Bah! Forgot to elaborate on trait sets. I was really confused by the concept, and they've been so vague about what it is that I feel having seen it I should explain. They revamped the trait ui big time, and gave us a ton more slots. Each type of trait now has it's own tab in the UI. The new traits are in sets, like armor. So say, you collect this set of specific exploration traits. You set two of the traits from the set and earn a bonus, four and earn the first bonus plus the new one etc. I didn't get a chance to ask about how the old traits will fit in (or think too really. Info overload!) but just from the look at the UI I got I saw a whole heck of a lot more slots, including at least five or six legendary."

I arrived at the Turbine booth just after the exbit hall opened, it was the first place I headed. Seeing two men in Turbine shirts, obviously dev types playing Moria I scampered over ended up one of a dozen or so standing around watching them demo all the different details and ask questions. It wasn't until afterward that I realized the man I watched play and who answered all my questions was Jeff Steefel... the freaking excecutive producer of LOTRO. So, I not only was one of the very first to see Mines of Moria as this is it's first public showing, but I got a rather personal run through and Q and A with a big wig. How fracking awesome is that?

Later in the evening Brit and I head across Pike to Gameworks for the Turbine party. It was a lot of fun, free food, free drinks and tshirts (woo, swag). Two things impresssed me about the shirts. 1) They had seperate shirts for creeps and freeps (the "factions" in LoTRO. Though they're really less factions than ... eh. Google "monster play". It's an awesome system.) Freeps got a shirt that said "Watcher of Roads", which I of course got. And creeps got "Servant of Angmar". Fippy (my warg) would knaw my leg off for not getting the creep one but he can deal with it. 2) They had women's cut! Any gamer girl prone to getting swag tshirts knows how insanely rare it is to find that. I'm wearing the hell out of my shirt. 

I think my favorite non-LoTRO related moment of the day was the keynote speech. It really touched a cord with a lot of the growd I think, and was very nerd-empowering. I'm glad I decided to go. The other was getting to see Wil Wheaton, who I use to have a mad crush on as a little girl. I could have stood in line to meet him as well but I had an unusual attack of shyness in the large crowd. It's been years and years since I felt uncomfortable in a crowd. I guess like, eight thousand is just my limit. 

One a personal note, my feet are killing me and how in the hell does a convention center get away with charging almost $4 for a bottle of Vitamin Water? Saddest part of PAX weekend? I have so little time to play LoTRO. And I just finally finshed Tomb of Elendil which has a boss that tends to kick your butt and take hours to kill. Plus, roleplaying wise I'm finally at a point where I can advance some personal RP that I've waiting to do for a month. But PAX, Gah! 

Edit: Will resize the imagine to fit better tomorrow. Having done my duty as a gamer to share new info with my brethren, I am finally going to pass out. Early day tomorrow. 

Yakitate!! Japan and PAX prep

For some very odd reason, I can't stop watching an anime about bread.

I picked this one up while looking for blog themes, I found one based on this anime and thought "Alright. It's about food... sure". After one episode I told Brit that it seemed too over the top and shonen like for me, but that he'd probably get a kick out of it's satire and comedy. He watched the first episode and didn't really like it. Yet now for some reason I keep watching it...

The central storyline is about a boy with magical "Solar Hands" who has a dream of creating the perfect japanese bread. The title is a pun, and puns are everywhere in the show. Pan means bread in Japanese. So calling his dream bread Ja-pan ... well, you get it.

It pokes fun at the over the top, action oriented shonen genre but does it in such a way that I'm pretty sure that somewhere there's a group of ten year old boys who take the show very seriously. If I didn't realize that it was a satire I'd likely have thought it very, very stupid. But as someone who admitedly loved Naruto but rolled her eyes as it's fights that lasted half a dozen episodes and entire episodes where nothing really happened other than to up the stress level of whatever seven part fight was happening at the moment, I can get that Yakitate!! Japan makes fun of itself while succeding pretty well at being a shonen anime itself. It includes overly frequent references to the lead characters warmer the normal magical Solar Hands, campy cut scenes of the wonderlands that good bread apparently gives you when eaten, a character who's sword doubles a rolling pin etc. 

The only question that remains is ... why am I still watching it?! I don't know. Maybe I have a soft spot for Japanese insanity or maybe I'm just nuts enough about food to actually enjoy the educational rambles about bread making. Scratch both those maybes. It's like ... Iron Chef meets anime.

Silly bread-anime aside, I'm gearing up for PAX starting tomorrow. I'm excited and feel really spoiled that such a big gaming con takes place ten minutes away from me. Friday is opening day which means waiting in line since we didn't get to pre-pay. That should be fun. Turbine, the developers of the MMO we currently play, is throwing a party at Gameworks after the exhibit hall closes which I am hella looking forward to.  Free food, free drinks, games and lovely lovely swaaaaag. I'm also looking forward to meeting Critters from NC Soft/Tabula Rasa who I worked with back when I ran a roleplaying fansite for that game after beta. Pictures will follow, if I can find the usb cord for my poor old camera.  

The path goes ever and on.

If I spent half as much time updating this blog as I have fusing over it's hosting and template it'll be the third longest blog in history. I've still got to finish my blogroll/links and come up with a discription if I decide to do so as well as provide a location for tags, my current media and thumbnails of bento pics. Blah. My prior personal blog was kept for six years, in the interst of promoting sanity on the internet I will attempt to make this one a bit -less- personal than the last. I will provide a bit of background in that my name is Melissa, I live in Seattle but grew up in small town Missouri and I'm a Japanese language student and gamer girl. 

Centered around my hobbies: Gaming (and roleplaying), bento (my new craze, yum yum) and my ever prescent Japanophilia. 

A bit about the name - I started my first online journal when I was sixteen, eight years ago. Yes, I said "online journal" because when I began the term blog hadn't been coined. In emo teenager style it was named after a Tori Amos song that was in my head the night I set it up. Keeping the tradition this blog is named after the title song of Azumanga Daioh which happened to be stuck firmly in my head when I was pondering a name.  It's literal translation is "earless cake" or "deaf cake" but the meaning is closer to "imaginary cake" or "dream cake". I chose to spell cake as it is pronounced in Japanese "keki" becaues I think it's cute.