I finally got Skyrim in a Steam sale. I’m not sure exactly what I expected but I kind of thought it would be something a bit more … well, different from Oblivion. All of the same annoying things from Oblivion are still there in Skyrim. The most annoying of which is when five people walk up to you and start talking at the same time. While you’re already talking to someone else.

Am I crazy or did GW2 make green items better than blue items, which is 100% the opposite of every other MMO in history? Did they just arbitrarily pick the colors or is there some logic to it? Somebody “on the Internet” said blue < green < yellow makes more sense because it follows the color wheel. But, like, green < blue < purple follows the color spectrum (ROYGBIV).

Guild Wars 2 is an awesome game. But there is one thing about it that drives me insane. In fact, I have the same problem with almost every game that has a pointer. You can’t see the pointer! This is a major problem in GW2 because many of your abilities are ground-targeted spells, so you need to be able to point to the spot where you want to cast it. (I use the option that automatically casts wherever you are pointing.

Whoa.. I knew that Necromancer had melee-ish capability when you equip daggers, but I didn’t realize until last night just how much raw damage it puts out. I’ve been using a Staff or Axe/Dagger combo, but last night I decided to try out Dagger/Dagger again, and holy crap I was suddenly killing stuff super fast. I’m still not really happy with the Necro’s AoE capabilities. I haven’t found any decent AoE damage spells (compared to the Elementalist at least); it’s mainly AoE debuffs, which are not terribly useful in PvE events.

The hype is finally over and Guild Wars 2 is out (if you pre-purchased it, that is). After being down Saturday morning, GW2 worked flawlessly for the rest of the weekend. Usually the hype far overshadows the actual game. But in this one rare case, it’s possible that the hype was justified. Let’s talk about Guild Wars 1 for a second. I never got into it. Certain things just bugged me.

Well I thought it would be a nice Saturday. I’d get up, log into the Guild Wars 2 Head Start along with the rest of the entire Internet, and have a nice morning of adventure. But nooooooo. It’s been down for two hours now. Not just intermittent connectivity issues; we’re talking 100% dead. And the information coming out of ArenaNet is somewhat lacking. About once an hour we get something like, “We’re looking into connectivity issues.

I’m a bit surprised to say this but I don’t think I’ll be playing TSW beyond the free month. In fact, I stopped playing long before the free month ended. I’m still glad I pre-ordered it, though, because it deserves to have a chance. But I realized that I don’t feel much of a sense of character advancement while playing. You don’t get new weapons very often, and you don’t really get new powers very often, either.

I was going to write up a bunch of hints for The Secret World’s investigation quests, but then I realized that 1) I don’t really have the time to do that, and 2) I don’t really want to do all of the SEO to get them into search results. So, if you were dying to see spoiler-free hints for The Secret World, sorry. :)

This is what my main character looks like in The Secret World. He makes me laugh whenever I look at him. I just wish I could have made him with a pot belly. FYI combining shotgun and sword seems like a bad idea, now that I’ve already committed to it. I was going to use the shotgun for AoE attacks and the sword for single-target attacks, but there’s no compelling need to split them up like that.

I had this impulse to put all my gaming-related posts on a new site, so here it is. I had the melanthius.com domain sitting around doing nothing, so it seemed like a fine time to put it to use. Needless to say, I will be modifying the theme considerably. I am not sure why all of the “gaming” WordPress themes all look the same: Awful. The only thing I will salvage will probably be the color scheme and possibly the Opal font (I don’t know what it’s actually called, but on the Amiga, the super-rounded-letters font was called Opal).

Here are some of my impressions from playing The Secret World for a weekend of beta and a few days of the head start. Likes: The “investigation” quests are awesome! You can Google the answers, of course, but trying to solve them without is a trip. We’re talking old school adventure-style puzzles and riddles here. (Make sure to turn off General chat if you don’t want to see spoilers, ‘cause, you know, people are lazy.

I’ve had a burst of gaming enthusiasm in the last month or so, ending my streak of playing basically nothing since Christmas. As usual, I tend to gravitate toward RPGs and MMOs. The last MMO I played before my break was Star Wars: The Old Republic, which I found enjoyable, but not enough to keep playing past the free month. Then recently, on an impulse, I bought TERA, which boasted a totally fresh new action-based combat system, but again, it didn’t keep my attention past the first month.