Screwed to the sticking place
I’ve finally summoned up the courage to start reading Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.
It’s been sitting under the bed for the past year or so as I didn’t fancy reading anything too dark.
New Phone …… New Posts
Time passes and tech rolls on. My little HTC Touch Diamond has just been replace by a nice new Nokia N900.
Over all It’s been quite a nice experience, a perfectly acceptable little keyboard some nice little apps and with a switch from Orange to T-Mobile RECEPTION AT HOME !!!!
I’ll post some more as I go on.
Elections and the media
An Interesting Election Article from David Yelland of all people
Ok maybe its not just me
It looks like its Tim Burton as well
What becomes of the absent minded ?
Last night was a game of 2 halves (a bit like last nights CL final, only the half where ManU played well only lasted 10 mins ha-ha)
After some initial confusion, an impromptu pairing of Golden Boy and Psy Girl kicked off, and started a longish Devouring Earth mission.
The pairing gelled fairly well, as being Rad/Psy PG is fairly Tank friendly. Meaning that her green pulling all the mobs into one group makes her Greeny debuff much more effective, and helps a tanks damage output no end. As long as she’s fairly judicious in using TK Blast. A couple of wipes from unwanted aggro grabbing, but thats about it.
Anyway, just as they got to the end of the mission, a slightly confuse PJ wandered in pleading calendar amnesia. She swiftly transformed into Morgan and the trio set off on an interminably long CoT mission. This was one of those ones with a huge map, lots of bosses and too well hidden glowies. After finished it off, all 3 called it a night.
The cast
Morgan 34 Claws/Regen Scrapper
Golden Boy 30 (woot) Super Strength/Inv Tank
Psy Girl 33 Radiation/Psi Defender
Lightweights of the world unite
Thats the players, not the team….
The A Team proved anything but last night, as the (fairly) awsome trio laid waste to some petty tough dudes…
These included a random selection of Malta and Nemesis, with the odd AV chucked in to move things along. MisAdventure, Ramblin Syd and Handshake proved equal to all before them.
A few faceplants, mostly lag related, but hey, when your 50 why sweat it.
After 3 missions, all three players bailed pleading work and such.
On the whole though, a good night
An Unusual Night
A rather disjointed nights play in COH land last night. For some reason the servers were down for an emergency patch for the start of the evening, probably something to do with the earlier announcement about AE Farms and banning exploits.
Anyway, as the Champions Online beta was open last night I hopped on there for a bit annnddd…..
yuck, OK I started the client in “lowered graphics” mode as I didn’t want to upgrade my drivers last night, but the graphics looked muddy and amateurish.
The character designer was plain confusing, but after muddling through I started the intro mish.
I found problems with the controls, the way that the right and left keys “strafed” sideways rather than turning (for which you have to use the mouse), and also I kept accidentally changing my camera position because I was using the mouse much more than in CoH.
This is probably as it is intended to run on an XBOX as well as a PC.
The UI was cludgy and cartoony – in a bad way, plus most of the screen widgets took up WAAY to much screen space and were rather intrusive.
On the plus side the launcher is good as it downloads and unpacks in parallel (CoH could really do with that), and the fact you can give feedback on the dev arc’s which would be good too.
Mind you this looks very much like work in progress, and I wouldn’t pay money for it (yet)
When you look at he CoH forums, all the p**d off PvPers or kidults who have just had their AE Farms nerfed by the devs seem to be holding out CO as some sort of nirvana. I think they may be sadly disappointed.
As soon as CoH came back online logged on with some relief, and too little used toons ran out Misunderstand (Mind/Emp Troller) and Baron Samedi (Dark/Dark Def).
They only managed one mission, and even then they didn’t finish it, Itt was CoT and Pumicities, which meant lots of Spectral Followers debuffing every thing in sight, and lots of face planting by our intrepid duo.
Eventually, they had got to to the end only to come across 2 bosses, at which point we gave up…and MisU logged off
Just as BS was finishing a mish to ding 12, Power Jenny popped up apologising for play Champions Online while waiting for CoH to come back online.
Oh well, not a bad evening.
Girls Night Out
The Shield Maidens had a night out on the town last night, as they painted the Steel Canyon red. Maiden’s US, Space, Shibuya and Afrique spend most of the evening being chased around by the boys, starting with a longish run in the Steel Canyon Safeguard mission.
They fended off the unwanted advances of the nobbly green young men (Trolls) for quite some time before getting bored and leaving for more excitement somewhere else.
This lead to the doors of the bright new Mission Architect club, where they met Saul Rubenstein and his Cut price task force. There our girls were pursued by literally hundred of men in uniform (and some in their underwear) while the picked up Sauls dry cleaning and collected his cereal. Mainly Council, with a mild smattering of Malta and Fifth Column.
The Girls
Maiden Afrique 18 (woot *2) Shield/Battle Axe Tank
Maiden US 18 (woot *2) Shield/Supe Strength Tank
Maiden Shibuya 18 (woot *2) Shield/Energy Manipulation Tank
Maiden Space 17 (woot *2) Broad Sword/Shield Scrapper
Mission Architect Stuff
It looks like the community is growing around the MA stuff, as the Rating/Dev’s choice stuff is a bit pants to actually find a decent arc or turn upand flag an undiscovered diamond.
Here are a couple of MA review sites I found, I’m sure there are more out there.
BTW could Paragon Studios get Google to set up a MA search engine, just a thought.
http://www.masearch.somee.com/
http://cohmissionreview.com/
The former is an ASP thing and runs like a dog
2 Weeks Catch Up
I haven’t sent one of these I a couple of weeks, so here goes….
Starting with the most recent first, the Weather girls plus one ventured out into Faultline and preceded to pwn just about everything that they came across. This included Arachnos, Sky Raiders, Tsoo and others I may have forgotten about. Either way even without recognised damage dealers the girls (and token boy) were too tough to handle.
The Cast
Hurricane Tess 25 Storm/Elec Defender
Winters Light 26 (woot) Ice/Storm Controller
Golden Boy 29 (exemplared) Invul/Super Strength Tank
The week before had a rather paired down roster, as Swami was off pleading holidays or some such. Anyway the A Team rump of MisAdventure and and Ramblin Syd went all virtual and visited Architect Entertainment for some Dev Choiced User Created fun.
The first arc was reasonably short, had a lot of instanced out door maps and lizard type things and hunt the glowie missions. These were a much too easy to find, the combat was unchallenging and it all finished too quick. Rather unsatisfying really.
The second arc was much more challenging, and involved a LOT more face planting. Based on a 5th Column derivative, the mobs were TOUGH, especially the ones that spawned lots of robot pets and the ones with Stealth/Assassins Strike. The latter did for MisA on a number of occasions. We didn’t finish it, but I’d like to give that one another go with Handshake or Heart’s Desire on the team, as BYO green really didn’t work out that well.
In other news, I have started very slow progress on my own MA arc entitled “Murder on the Dancefloor”, I’ll let you know when it’s anywhere near playable.
The other arc I’d like to try is provisionally titled “The Ballard of Ramblin Syd”, but I’d like some practice on this other one first.