AngryJason's blog

I had a production deployment this weekend starting at 6pm on Friday night.  I woke at 7 am, getting to sleep in a bit, since I figured I'd do a half day from home, then relax for a while.  I ended up working all day, right up to 6pm.  Got on the call at 6, and hung up at 6:15, to call back in at 7pm.  I call in at 7, and did not get off the phone until 12:30am on Sunday.  Sunday morning, we had more to do, so back on the phone at 9:30am.  We finally finished up at 3:30pm.  Yesterday, I got to the office at 7:30am, and left at 8:00pm.  I had another call at 11pm that lasted until 12am.

In an earlier post, I mentioned the Frost Troll in Skyrim kicking my butt so far that I landed in New Vegas.  I really didn't like the game when it launched, but it started clicking for me.  I'm at the point where I'm 30 hours in.  I have decided to ally myself with the NCR.  I couldn't accept the Legion's slavery angle.  

First off, I finally got into the big beta for Star Wars The Old Republic.  I played on Saturday, from 11:00am right up until kickoff of the Iron Bowl.  Got my trooper up to level 8.  I thought that for a stress test, the servers performed well.  I did have a problem with desktop crashes when trying to create a Sith Inquisitor, but for my trooper, it was easy going.  My main thought about the game - it's cool.  However, I didn't feel immersed in the Star Wars universe.  Once the cutscenes were finished, and I was deployed on Ord Mantell, it felt like any other mmo.

Friday afternoon, I'm texting with my old roommate from Alabama.  I say to him "what I really want to see happen is for Oklahoma State to lose tonight, then Oregon and Oklahoma to lose tomorrow.  A Clemson loss would help as well".  Damn if it didn't all happen.

Now, Bama is looking like a lock for the BCS game.  Sure, there are some oddities about it, but looking at it objectively:

#1 LSU - Undefeated - no question about going to the BCSCG if they win out.

Despite having only played Skyrim for a few hours, Halo CE was delivered on Tuesday and I decided to put that in the Xbox as I wanted to have a somewhat early night and knew that Skyrim would probably prompt me to do "just one more quest".  Upon booting up Halo CE, I felt that that graphics weren't all that great.  However, I love the handy back button here which switches the textures to the original release.  Wow, what a difference.  It's fun taking that stroll down memory lane.

Really, not much to say about Skyrim.  I finally got to play it yesterday.  Kind of funny, I felt a feeling of panic once I got out of the keep and was dumped off in the big open world.  Pretty much feel the same way I do about other Elder Scrolls/Fallout games - combat is feast or famine.  I'm inclined to play a melee character, but in these games, range seems to be where it's at.  Will play around with it some more.

I finished LOTR on normal difficulty last night.  The ending was a tad underwhelming.  Overall, I liked the game.  I think "Poor Man's Dragon Age" sums it up nicely.  

I let the kid play some skylanders last night.  My frustration was higher than the previous night.  Not reading instructions, not exploring, just running around beating stuff up.  Granted, I did work a very long day and skipped lunch, so I was frazzled.  Maybe, I just need to watch him when I'm in a more relaxed state.  I know he's going to want to play tonight, so I'm going to try to get him mother to monitor it. 

LOTR should finish up tonight.  I may be able to do a couple hours of achievement mop up, but I expect to be through the campaign tonight.

What should I move on to next?  The massive backlog, or take it kind of piecemeal with Lego Pirates, Otomedius Excellent and light stuff like that?  I guess I could do the MW3 campaign, but I still need to finish up the MW2 campaign.

Still chugging along on LOTR: War in the North.  Not a fantastic game, but it's holding my interest and getting pretty good.  The under-powered spells seem to be more effective after some leveling.  It does drag in some spots - I think I went 2 hours in game without an option to repair my gear last night.  I'm fully intending to see this one through to completion.

This brings me to my next issue - so many games - a common gripe around here.

Got Lord of the Rings: War in the North yesterday, and played for a couple hours.  It's a mixed bag, not great at this point, but playable, and a decent challenge.  It comes off like a poor man's Dragon Age on the surface - but that's not a bad thing, in and of itself.  I've only been playing single player.  I have a feeling that the game is better when there are three people playing, but oh well, I wanted to try it out and didn't want to play with some random person who would ninja loot while I'm getting my ass kicked by a troll.