The winners of the Halloween Art Contest for Guild Wars were just announced, and I’m amazed. People are so creative, dedicated and skillful. Art is not something I generally care about, it’s pretty but I don’t know much more, but art revolving around my favourite games, stories and film are something special, since it also ties to something familiar and known. And something I love.
Just look at this amazing piece:
Art made by Leon Of Troy.
I just read today that the Aion team is coming to Sweden during Dreamhack! I’m so jealous, I want to be there! I’ve wanted to go to Dreamhack for several years, but I’ve never had anyone to go with. And now I live so far away it isn’t possible to go there even though I would be ok with going alone, because I’d have to carry both monitor and computer around on trains for about 20 hours before getting there. :(
It’s awesome that the Aion team are coming to Sweden though :)
Tumtum has moved from its old domain to my new and flashy .com domain, Anjasaurus! I have a lot of plans and ideas behind this move, but I will write more about it later when it’s getting finished :)
Change your blog links to http://anjasaurus.com!
These two weeks are two of the more nerdy weeks I’ll have this term. There are prototypes, Great Vowel Shifts and lots of cognitive theories.
Yesterday I spoiled myself with some new techie stuff.. I bought a sleeve for my MacBook, a new keyboard and a mouse. The sleeve was well needed, I’ve used a pillow case until now! Not very flashy for a geek and Mac nerd :P
The keyboard and mouse are both Logitech, I really like them. Spent some more on the mouse and got a pretty good gaming mouse, but I was cheaper on the keyboard. I still got the silver/black low profile keyboard I wanted, but it wasn’t that expensive. Woo!
The keys are a bit harder to push, they’re not as responsive as my old keyboard, so it will take a while and a lot of typos to get used to. But that doesn’t matter ^^
For those of you who can read Swedish and care about student and uni life, read this article by Isabelle Ståhl. It felt very relevant for me, and I realised I might need to sit down and think about my expectations on life.
Aion was officially released on 25 September in Europe, with the headstart for the preorderers starting at the 22nd already. So, depending on if you preordered or not, we have now been able to play Aion for a full three or four weeks.
I must say, Aion has not made a great first impression. Not because it’s a bad game, not at all, but the queues and lag makes the gaming experience less than optimal. For the first two weeks it was more or less impossible for a casual gamer to play, since the queues ran up to 2 hours as early as 18:00. This has now been solved by adding new servers, and the queues definitely seem to be gone. Instead, last week, we were given sick lagspikes of 30-60 seconds. It came to the point where you would kill a monster, go into town and by the time you reached your warehouse (storage/bank), then you would start taking damage. Luckily, this lag wasn’t around for too long, and the problems seems to have disappeared now.
Reading all this, you would probably assume I don’t like Aion. But I do. My evenings are usually quite busy, but since I’m studying, I have odd times off when I can play. This means I could play off peak time, and avoid some queues. I also want to give Aion the chance it deserves, and not discard it because of server problems at release, a lot of good games had that.
I’ve only reached level 21 so far, with most of my legion (guild) being in the 30s-40s, so no group play for me yet. I’m sure they would join and help me with the earlier group quests if I just asked, but I am mainly a solo player who loves group/legion chat. The path to lvl 21 has been quite enjoyable so far, in a stereotypical MMO way. Aion really feels like a stereotypical MMO, but really there’s nothing wrong with that. Not for me, I’ve never played one seriously. Crafting is quite unexciting, the usual “buy mats and grind” type, it’s the kind of items you can make that might make it stand out a bit. You can actually make useful stuff, as long as you spend money and time on keeping up with your level. Leveling is killing monbs and questing, so far. Not until level 25 can I join what is so typical for Aion, the Abyss with PvP and PvPvE questing, hunting and fighting. This is my next goal, and I need to reach it before I can fully evaluate Aion. :)