Brynulf, Bearer of Hope

Bearer of Hope

As I mentioned on Twitter last night, I finally completed the Volume One epic quest in Lord of the Rings Online. Council of the Secret Fire members Azzera (loremaster), Kelmric (captain), Phebe (hunter), Telebrethil (warden), and Brynulf (myself,  hunter) joined up with Narmeleth to defeat Mordrambor and Mordirith.

fellowship_1_15_12
left to right: Telebrethil, Brynulf, Phebe, Azzera, and Kelmric

Having Volume 1 completed is a great feeling of accomplishment, very much like when I first hit max level. Incidentally I also hit 65 last night, but the novelty has worn off of that experience since this is the third time I’ve hit max level with Brynulf.  Finishing Volume 1 was fun and rewarding for me, not because of any difficulty involved, but because of the amount of time I had invested. I’ve been chipping away at Volume 1 since the game launched, which also means that I’ve had at least one quest log slot dedicated to a Volume 1 epic quest for the life of my character.

So now it is time for Brynulf to make a victory ride on his new white horse back to Moria and tackle Book 5, Chapter 5 of Volume 2.

brynulf_on_a_white_horse

Happy Birthday J.R.R.T.

I had no idea it was Professor Tolkien’s birthday today (thanks Goldenstar), but I’m definitely going to offer a couple of toasts in his honor. If you want a bit more biographical information on the Professor, go see Once Upon a Hobbit.

Tolkien's Shelf

The Hobbit and the Order Slip Tolkien has been the largest influence on my reading habits every since I was 8 years old. I bought the Hobbit when I was in elementary school via a class book fair. The teacher passed out a small pamphlet that had all of the books being offered with a small summary and a picture of the cover. I don’t remember why I picked that one, but I can remember counting out dimes and quarters to pay for it and I’m sure the librarian was thrilled when I came in with my bag of coins. I still have the book and the slip which I used as a bookmark.

If I remember right, it was that summer that I checked out the Lord of the Rings trilogy from the public library. It took me the entire school break to finish them and I don’t know how much I really understood (certainly not as much as when I read them now), but from then on fantasy was about the only genre I would read (until I found Heinlein and got into sci-fi).

Since then, I’ve reread the books multiple times (including the Silmarillion), enjoyed Peter Jackson’s movie adaptation, and now I spend a little bit of time almost daily in Turbine’s interpretation.

Happy birthday, Professor!

Looking Forward to 2010

If the release schedules and expectations hold, 2010 will be an interesting year. There are the two huge science-fiction IP’s coming via Star Trek Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic, Blizzard is doing something of a reboot of the Warcraft world, and the DC/SOE juggernaut is expected as well. SWTOR is also interesting since it marks Bioware’s entry into the MMO genre, and I’m very very interested to see how well they are able to bring a focus on story over to a massively multi-player environment.

My biggest concern for 2010 is a repeat of the Warhammer effect on SWTOR.  Warranted or not there seem to be a lot of players who are expecting SWTOR to revolutionize MMOs, kill WoW, and possibly cure cancer. I hope I’m wrong, but I think that most of the gamers disappointed with 2009 will also be disappointed with 2010.

So here are my bullet points for the coming year. (more…)

Looking Back at 2009

I think 2009 was a good year for games, even MMOs. Sure WoW is still on top, Warhammer continues to struggle, there’s not been any revolutionizing innovation in the MMO genre, but I don’t really care about any of that. All of the games I started the year playing (EVE and LoTRO) I still enjoy, and I found a new game (Champions) that I like an expect to be playing through the whole of 2010. (more…)

2009 Q4 – Followup

Back in October I posted my goals for the remainder of the year. The short version was:

  1. Have a Drake in EVE for my main Blue Kae, Gallente Jack-of-all-trades.
  2. Max level hero in Champions.
  3. Finish Volume 1 of the epic quests in LoTRO on my main, Brynulf.

How did I do?

EVE

Blue Kae has the skills and certificates to fly a Drake, but not the money.  He has 4 million ISK in his wallet, and the current market price for a Drake in Sinq Laison starts at 25 million ISK. That’s not counting insurance and fittings. To be honest though, I’d completely forgotten that I’d set this goal until I started this article so I’m happy that my skills are met. I’ve been in skill training only mode for the last few months, although I did do a bit of mining recently.

Champions

This is another goal that I forgot I set for myself. Max level in Champions right now is 40, and my main hero, the Silver Hunter, is at 32. He’d probably actually be 40 by now if I hadn’t started two alts in November: the Ant (level 12) and Deadaim (level 17). Still, I’m not disappointed about missing this goal. I’m still enjoying the game and I’m sure that Silver Hunter will get to 40 soonâ„¢.

LoTRO

So I didn’t hit this goal either (which make me 0 for 3), but I got so close. Volume One has fifteen books in it and I’m on Book Fifteen which has twelve chapters. Want to guess what chapter I’m on? Yup, Chapter Twelve. To be completely honest, though, that’s much farther than I expected to be. I was only on Book Ten at mid-December. I happened to volunteer to help some kinmates out with an instance, which turned out to be part of Book Ten (but past where I was). After that instance, the kin group helped me get up to the same chapter and then we continued on to finish Book 10, then 11, then 12, all the way up to 15. So a big thanks to for all the help to Phebe, Telebrethil, Kelmric, Lylariel, and Daevin. I should actually finish Volume 1 this weekend, we have a kin fellowship planned for tonight so I may get to check this goal off only two days late.

So while I was 0% on my goals for the last three months of the year, I did have a great time gaming. I made more progress in LoTRO than I truly expected, and I’ve joined a great kinship (more on that later).

What’s a Blue Kae Anyway?

Curious about why I use the name Blue Kae as a handle on various games and as the name for this blog?  Wondering if I picked random Scrabble tiles, or there’s some deep dark Dan Brownesque mystery?  Scarybooster has the full story go check it out. [Note, I’ve inserted Scary’s original post here since he lost the original during a horrible blog upgrade accident.]

Yesterday, I had a post about playing a hero in real life and games. I don’t consider this post playing a hero, but it is a way to help a person get noticed. Brian aka Blue Kae is one of the nicest virtual buds I have “met”. I enjoy reading his blog and talk to him over Twitter daily.

I try to do post like this not to draw attention to my blog or force other bloggers to link me, but because I like to get to know my bloggers. I want you to know what I know. For me, blogging is a great social network. This is my Facebook. I enjoy these type of posts the most, because I feel like I am getting to know a friend. I don’t treat my blog as a competition between other bloggers for hits. I won’t ever tell you how many hits I get or how many comments I have, because it doesn’t matter. What matters is if you like what you read. That is why I have stars at the end of each post. I don’t need you to comment, but I do like it when the stars are filled out so I can gauge if you liked the post or not.Anyway, this post is not about me, it is about Blue Kae. He is great guy. Check him out on Twitter or his Blog.

I bought an Xbox 360 two years ago to play Mass Effect. I also got a Zune 80gb about the same time. I knew when I signed up for a Live account that the nickname would be attached to both devices and I had never been happy with the nickname I had on the original Xbox. Mostly because it was so forgettable that even now I can’t remember what it was. I didn’t want any l33t speak or other garbage and I’m not a big fan of names like xx_killa_xx. I think names are very important, especially in online spaces when that’s your first impression of a person. Unfortunately in most MMO’s I pick names based on the background lore and for Xbox Live there is none.

So here’s the criteria I had:

1. nothing stupid
2. nothing too long
3. something that could be shortened easily that I would still like
4. something that I could use in other online spaces beyond Xbox Live and Zune

Of course a lot of the names I tried out on Xbox Live were already taken.

I ended up looking at two word combos as a way to have something easily shortened. My intials are B K and my favorite color is Blue. I also thought Blue would work out good as a shortened version. Kae, I made up. I liked it because it sounds like the letter and I’ve always liked the ae vowel combination (yes I know that’s weird). So I checked online and Blue Kae was free on Xbox and on Gmail.

In September of last year when I was thinking about starting a blog, I couldn’t come up with any clever titles I liked. So instead of something clever like Bio Break or Dubious Quality, I just went with my gamertag and registered Blue Kae

… Treat others as you would like to be treated.

While you’re there be sure to check out my three most favorite Scary posts [links removed since they’re all broken now, see above for why]:

  1. Suck It!
  2. Aion Character Creator
  3. Playing the Hero

Champions Podcast

If you’re a Champions Online player and looking for a good podcast that covers the game from both a beginner and advanced point of view, go check out Podcast of Champions.  It is hosted by brothers-in-law Todd and Matt, or John Franks@photontorpedo and Cicerone@cicerone.  The guys have a lot of good information on the game and fun back-and-forth banter, so even though the shows all run past two hours, you won’t realize it. I’ve been listening to all the back episodes (I’m up to episode 12) and the production quality has been very consistent.  They’re on episode 14 now, go on over and check them out.

Special thanks to Blamefulgecko on Twitter who pointed me to the podcast.

Lessons from NaNoWriMo

Today marks the last day of National Novel Writing Month, and while my final count of only 1545 words is a small fraction of the 50,000 I needed, I don’t consider participating a mistake.

I didn’t commit to participating until after it had already started.  I had done nothing to prepare and had no ideas about what I wanted to do.  I’d already been working and re-working a short story, but since goal of the contest was to write a full novel, I needed to come up with a new idea that I could get a full length novel from.  I was able to come up with a rough idea within a couple of days and started writing that first week.

I’ve had a few false-starts and the story’s details have shifted slightly, but the overall theme has stayed the same. This has given me some confidence that I can come up with a workable story idea on short notice, which isn’t something I thought I was capable of.

Besides building confidence, NaNoWriMo has helped me break a bad habit. I was finally able to get myself out of self-edit mode when writing.  I have always had a problem of writing and rewriting sections over and over again.  This slows down the writing process and leads to me over thinking what I’m doing.  The end result is usually frustration and deleting the file.

So while I don’t have a lot of words to show for my month, I do have the start of a good story, 3k words of background notes, and some better writing habits.  I’m pretty excited about the current story and intend to continue to working on it. I’m definitely planning to try NaNoWriMo next year, and hopefully with a bit more preparation I’ll get to 50,000 words. Having fewer great games released in October and November wouldn’t hurt either.

Fallen Earth Dropped

Well the reprieve for Fallen Earth has expired.  My current subscription is up tomorrow and I’ve set it not to renew.  I’ve played maybe an hour in the last month.  It is a good game and pretty fun, but the setting just hasn’t drawn me in.  I don’t mean the game isn’t immersive, because it definitely is.  Maybe it would be more correct to say that the setting didn’t engage my imagination.

When I play LoTRO or Champions, I’m not just grinding quests or mobs.  I have an inner dialog going on where I think about why my character is doing what he’s doing and what he thinks of the events he’s experiencing.  I get very attached to my MMO characters and most of them have a background story.  Often the story develops while I’m playing and I don’t always write them down, but any character that I play for a while develops some kind of background.

Even with my general lack of interest, I might have kept the subscription active for another month or two in the hopes that something would click for me.  Unfortunately, my MMO schedule is going to get more crowded over the next six months, not less.  Star Trek Online is in closed beta now, open beta is planned for late January, and release is February.  My interest in LoTRO has resurged lately, partly because of the coming Mirkwood expansion and partly because of a good kinship I joined.  I’m also continuing to enjoy Champions and EVE Online.  If anything, I may have to take a break from EVE when STO comes out, depending on what the available subscription options are and how well the beta goes.

So unfortunately, Fallen Earth, its not you, its me.  I hope we can stay friends.