August 2015 Archives
Coming to a Close ~ Blaugust Day 31
Posted on August 31
Today is the final day of August, which coincides with the last post of Blaugust. Congrats to everyone who undertook the challenge! Now give yourself some much-deserved rest!
O Guild Wars 2, Where Art Thou?
Posted on August 31
So, GW2 dropped the bomb this weekend, announcing some major changes to the game. First, the base game is now F2P, and second, raids are being introduced. Both of these elements effect the atmosphere and community of a game so vastly that GW2 is becoming more and more unrecognizable to me now. If I had any curiosity about HOT, it has quickly been squleched for good.
What’s on my Phone? ~ Blaugust Day 30
Posted on August 30
I was late to adopt a smartphone, and for many, many years, I didn’t need one. It wasn’t until my sister and her husband picked up iPhones a few years ago and started lauding their uses that I became interested. So, I took the plunge and bought the iPhone 5S on release day. It’s the phone I still use till today, and I really don’t have any intention of changing anytime soon, even though it’ll be turning 2 years old next month (?)
I’m Writing for MMOGames ~ Blaugust Day 29
Posted on August 29
I realized from Murf’s comment from when I shared my most recent column published at MMOGames.com that I never officially announced that I’m writing there. So, I guess I’m officially announcing that I’m writing there, in particular for the Eorzean Evening Post column.
FFXIV: The Rising 2015
Posted on August 28
Just attended The Rising event for FFXIV’s 2nd anniversary.
ARK: Meet the Flintstones
Posted on August 28
Now that I’m shaking off the effects of Blaugust (I have the rest of this month’s posts queued to go on my other blog), I hope to get back to posting here more regularly. So, let’s start with last night’s ARK session.
FunCom’s The Park ~ Blaugust Day 28
Posted on August 28
News was released this week that FunCom is planning to launch a solo game called The Park this fall. One glance at the images and at the trailer shows a lot of similarities to the amusement park in The Secret World.
My D&D Alignment ~ Blaugust Day 27
Posted on August 27
I thought that StarShadow’s post about D&D alignment was interesting, so I also took the online quiz for myself, and not any of my characters.
GW2 3rd Birthday ~ Blaugust Day 26
Posted on August 26
Yesterday, GW2 started passing out the birthday goods for their 3rd year birthday “celebration.” Unlike some games, GW2 doesn’t really throw any kind of event for their birthday. They just pass out presents and put things up for sale in the gem shop (woo hoo… what a celebration!).
Starbound – Colony Update Trailer
Posted on August 25
This update looks amazing!!
MMO Box: WildStar ~ Blaugust Day 25
Posted on August 25
This isn’t really a memory box post seeing that I bought the box for WildStar only a few months ago. I haven’t purchased many retail boxes lately. Like many folks, I now rely more on digital keys and downloads and Steam. So, posting this in the series is only here to compare what a more modern MMO’s box looks like compared to some of the older boxes I’ve blogged.
FFXIV: Breaking the Blahs, Making Progress With Machinist
Posted on August 24
Though I’ve been making progress on Tai’s Eso armor for the past few weeks, I’ve been in a state of blah with FFXIV. I think I have just been doing way too many end game dungeons – one a night is quite a bit for me, then sometimes getting pulled into other things by FC members.
MMO Memory Box: Guild Wars Nightfall ~ Blaugust Day 24
Posted on August 24
Just like Guild Wars Factions, Nightfall had a cool pre-order box.
MMO Memory Box: Guild Wars Factions ~ Blaugust Day 23
Posted on August 23
Let’s go back in time to 2005-2006 when a Guild Wars expansion pre-order looked like the above.
MMO Memory Box: Lord of the Rings Online ~ Blaugust Day 22
Posted on August 22
Next to Guild Wars and FFXIV, LOTRO is one of the MMOs I’ve put the most time and money into over the past decade. I was a beta player and purchased the game at launch — I still have the special beta cloak that you got for buying the game from Best Buy (each store had a different cloak design).
Mobile Triple Triad ~ Blaugust Day 21
Posted on August 21
First I want to thank folks for their encouraging words yesterday. The situations are not resolved, but you made me smile, and that made the day better. I really appreciate it!
Bummed Gamer ~ Blaugust Day 20
Posted on August 20
A number of folks have written about their gaming regrets. Today I’m struggling with gaming disappointment.
WordPress Microblogging Experiment: Statistics Speak ~ Blaugust Day 19
Posted on August 19
I interrupt my trip down nostalgia lane to look at blog statistics. Super interesting, right?
MMO Memory Box: Guild Wars Prophecies ~ Blaugust Day 18
Posted on August 18
I don’t need to write a huge history here about my time playing the original Guild Wars since I’ve done a long recap. I keep the summary short: I played GW in a few of the open betas, then picked up the game shortly after launch in 2005. It was one of the first MMOs I was able to nudge Syn into playing, which marked an end to my total soloing in games (though I still tend to keep a few solo alts hanging around).
ARK: Welcome to Camp Ooga Booga
Posted on August 17
You can write on signs in this game. I just discovered this… no joke!
My Gaming Style Revised
Posted on August 17
Looks like there’s an updated version of the Gaming Style test at the Quantic Foundry.
ARK: Everyone Do the Dinosaur
Posted on August 17
I’ve been keeping my eye on ARK: Survival Evolved for a while after hearing about how awesome the game is supposed to be. Since I’ve been playing other survival type games (7D2D, H1Z1, Salt), ARK wasn’t really something I was in a rush to pick up, though I thought the idea of a survival with dinosaurs was pretty cool.
MMO Memory Box: Vanguard: Saga of Heroes ~ Blaugust Day 17
Posted on August 17
Ah, yes. Vanguard. This was a game that I learned about just before it launched, and bought into the launch day hype.
Ark: The First Night of Ooga Booga
Posted on August 16
Oops. Looks like Ark was on sale at Steam and my zombie hunting troop decided to play with dinos for a change in pace. Took most the day to figure out how to get the private server to work properly, but it was worth it.
MMO Memory Box: World of Warcraft ~ Blaugust Day 16
Posted on August 16
What’s this? Me… a usually non-WoW player… have a box from WoW launch? Well, yes, I do!
MMO Memory Box: EverQuest 2 ~ Blaugust Day 15
Posted on August 15
Even though I didn’t have too much experience with EQ1, I bought into EQ2 at launch. Why?
FFXIV: Celebrating the Moonfire Faire
Posted on August 14
So this year’s Moonfire Faire is in full swing in FFXIV. We get some snazzy new one-piece swimsuits for gals, two piece suits for guys, and a beach party in Costa Del Sol.
MMO Memory Box: Dark Age of Camelot ~ Blaugust Day 14
Posted on August 14
Like many young fantasy fans, I had a soft spot for Arthurian Legend. So, when I saw a MMO about Camelot, that’s where my mind leapt to. I had no idea that the game was meant to be an RvR endgame – I probably wouldn’t have picked up the game if I had known. This didn’t really matter, though, since during this time, I rarely saw endgame of any MMO I tried. DAoC was no exception.
MMO Memory Box: FFXI: Rise of the Zilart ~ Blaugust Day 13
Posted on August 13
This game. This game. I never wanted so badly to be a part of a game that just wasn’t made for me more than FFXI. I picked it up pretty close to launch, so everything I write about here reflects the game in that earlier time.
My Blog Museum
Posted on August 12
tl;dr: I launched a page where I’ve archived old blog posts that I imported from my old WordPress blog.
MMO Memory Box: Horizons: Empire of Istaria ~ Blaugust Day 12
Posted on August 12
Horizons is now better known as Istaria. It’s a game I’ve actually returned to over the past decade, and in 2009-2010, I even wrote several articles about it for MMORPG.com.
Steam Challenge: Salt
Posted on August 11
I picked up Salt earlier this year during the Steam summer sale and had all intentions to play it. I was waiting a bit until they patched in the updated UI and the new NPC models, and I’m glad I did. Just those two elements alone really improved the quality of play in this game.
MMO Memory Box: EverQuest: The Scars of Velious ~ Blaugust Day 11
Posted on August 11
I must admit that I was not a big EverQuest player. I did, however, try EQ out back in 2000 during the second expansion, The Scars of Velious.
MMO Memory Box: Ultima Online ~ Blaugust Day 10
Posted on August 10
A few weeks back, I was rummaging around in a box I had stashed away on a shelf in the closet. This box was full of spare PC parts, cords, wires and old PC games. I’m not sure what I was looking for, but I didn’t find it, and I left the box sitting in some disarray.
FFXIV: Eso Dragoon Weapon Get!
Posted on August 9
For the first time ever, I’ve capped Tomes for the week in FFXIV! That gave me enough for the ilvl 200 Dragoon spear: Antiquated Brionac.
Animal Crossing: New Leaf Fireworks
Posted on August 9
It’s been a while since I’ve played my Animal Crossing: NL game, and when I did, they were having summer fireworks tonight!
Blaugust Day 9 — Monetizing Sims 4
Posted on August 9
Though this post came hot on the heels of the newly announced expansion pack, Sims 4: Get Together, it’s actually been on my mind for a while. I’ve been a Simmer since the original Sims 1 hit the shelf back in 2000. I’ve been a pretty loyal Simmer, too.
Blaugust Day 8 — TGTCML: Blogging at Sygnus.org
Posted on August 8
This short series of The Game That Changed My Life (TGTCML) leads from the discovery of my first JRPG and traces all the way up to my current blog, Sygnus.org. Sygnus.org is a domain I registered in 2001, back when I bought my first website hosting package and moved away from free-hosted sites.
Blaugust Day 7 — TGTCML: Best Friends, Roleplay and Webcomics
Posted on August 7
In the previous post, I talked about how I posted my FFIV fan fiction online back in 1998, and created a small web community through forums and play by email. The interesting thing is that I’m still in touch with some of the people who wrote and RPed with us from that old community, even if the base of the community has long went its own way. In fact, it was through the email list that I met my long-time best friend, Syntyche.
FFXIV: Alexander Normal Win
Posted on August 6
Last weekend, we ran an attempt on Alexander Floor 1. This was the first time I attempted what FFXIV calls an 8-man raid, since I was too chicken to run any of the Coils. I heard the difficulty of Alexander Normal was do-able for most folks, which encouraged Syn and I to give it a try. However, I think our timing was bad in that it was Sunday night and we struggled through with a group for three rounds before having to vote abandon.
Blaugust Day 6 — TGTCML: Discovering the Internet
Posted on August 6
In my previous post, I talked about how, as a teen, I began writing a fan fiction of my favorite game, Final Fantasy II/IV, before I even knew what the Internet was. Once I discovered the Internet, a whole new, wild world opened up before me. For starters, I had access to information I never had before, such as the fact that the characters in FFIV had last names! Wow! (No, seriously, we didn’t get that information in the US version…)
Having Fun in Project: Gorgon
Posted on August 5
The title above is not one I ever expected to write. I’d heard passingly of Project: Gorgon, but never gave it a second look. But after reading Syp’s two different posts on Project: Gorgon, followed up by another good impression by the Nerdy Bookahs, I was convinced to give it a try.
Shire Life: A Moment of Shared Geekery
Posted on August 5
I was stopped at a red light this morning on my way to work. A car pulled up behind me, and I briefly glanced at the passengers in my review mirror. There was what seemed to be a mother and her young adult daughter, who both were chatting in good spirits.
Blaugust Day 5 — TGTCML: Writing Fanfic Before it Existed
Posted on August 5
In yesterday’s post, I wrote about my teenage discovery of JRPGs through the SNES version of Final Fantasy II/IV. So, what’s a creative kid-turned-FFIV-fan to do back at a time when there were no smartphones, no tablets, not a single computer in the house, before Windows 95 existed, and the Internet wasn’t even something I could have imagined?
Blaugust Day 4 — The Game That Changed My Life (TGTCML)
Posted on August 4
This has been such an integral part of my creative life, but I realized that I have never once put this all down in writing nor told this full story. So I’ve decided to use Blaugust as a time to talk about The Game That Changed My Life (furthermore known as TGTCML).
FFXIV: Alexander Attempt
Posted on August 3
We’re continuing to make progress in upgrading gear by running Expert Roulette, and Tai finally hit ilvl 173 this weekend. Since I’m not keen on dungeon running, I’m doing my best to balance Roulette with down-time in the game to mitigate risks of burnout.
Blaugust Day 3 — A Writing Prompt: What Do I Get Out of This?
Posted on August 3
I feel that writing consistently every day really has its own intrinsic rewards. I’ve learned from years of NaNoWriMo that the more you push yourself to write habitually, even on days when you feel you’re only spewing words at the screen, the easier it is to write and the faster writing comes. It’s not something that happens over night… it’s something that comes with time and practice.
Blaugust Day 2 — I Built a Desk
Posted on August 2
Last week, I finally broke down and decided to buy a new computer desk for my front room. I went through all the different desks, reading reviews on Amazon, and decided on this desk in particular. I had no idea that it was so large it needed to be delivered in two parts!
Blaugust Day 1 – Blogging Blaugust
Posted on August 1
Last year, I didn’t know about Blaugust until it was well under way. Sad times! But I also wasn’t as involved with the blogging community as I am this year. Good times!