Shea and I stopped playing WoW months ago. We stopped playing Rift shortly after that. Its mostly a financial situation. Shea played DAoC for a while then got fed up with it. He and the girls are playing a Wii game pretty predominately called Skylanders. It’s a bunch of little figurines that come to life in game. It’s a money sink but the girls (and Shea) are loving it. We have a few more base figures to buy in order to be able to enter all areas of the game. But we have a 5 year old coming up in March so I’m sure we’ll gather some more then. Or some other Wii game that she’d enjoy.

But as far as I’m concerned I’ve not really done much gaming. Work leaves little time for it, and I’d rather watch tv with my hub and the girls pestering me. I’ve tried Lord of the Rings Online again, and it’s eh, only real benefit of playing it is I get to play with Rae. I’ve got a Lineage 2 account. Which is fine and well except for the fact that towns are kinda filled with squatters and makes the lag in that area so very hard to deal with. But it’s an interesting game, we’ll see if I do anything more with it.

This is why I say I need a cheap non-computer hobby. Something I can still do and spend time with my girls. I could read but that gets expensive fast with books to buy and all. I don’t think our library has rental ebooks, and I don’t have a kindle either. Though not sure that’s all it’s set to.

Ah well. Any suggestions for free games? An facebook games don’t count.

Maybe when Diablo III comes out I’ll have some money to spend on it, we’ll see.

Whelp today we pre-ordered Rift. We both really like the game. It’s a throw back to Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer with lots of WoW thrown in as well. I hope that the end game is worth it. I wasn’t happy with WoW end game. But then I’m not a raider anyway. I can’t say I’m a PvPer either but the end game in Dark Age of Camelot was much better than it ever was in WoW. DAoC at least was a dynamic game play.

I have heard rumors that they may end up making an open world PvP area for the PvE. Personally I think that is a much better end game than just doing raid after raid. I’d rather chase rifts down and fight bosses there than do the same content over and over again. But that’s me.

I do very much enjoy Rift’s public group system. There is no yelling for invites or having to know someone to get in on the action. Its just a click of the button away. Join a rift raid and then leave to go to the next one. Really awesome game play if you ask me. They have IDs just like WoW where you form your group(s) before hand. I’m sure there are raid dungeons as well I just haven’t gotten that far yet lol.

Rift has an infinite potential in characters but I’m sure they’ll cookie cutter it eventually. This this and this are the best and this is the best layout for it. I’ve never been good with the whole cookie cutter specs. That is how all games end up being in the end. I just want to play the way I want to lol. So leave me be.

We are trying out a guild at this time on Keenblade Shard called Retribution. So far it’s okay but we’ve not been on when they’ve done any guild stuff so not sure if they are just a tag to our name or not. But the people seem nice enough. We’ll see as things go on I guess.

We canceled WoW and will be playing Rift when it goes live March 1st. We pre-ordered the digital collectors edition, it was worth the ten dollars to get extra bag space and a free mount on character creation. The physical one wouldn’t be worth it but eh, it’s all good. I’m only concerned about not having a copy of the game on CD so that we can reinstall on a reformat or new computer. But I’m sure I’ll figure something out soon enough on how to remedy that situation.

Shea and I canceled our WoW accounts a while back to save a bit of money. We started playing Dungeon and Dragons Online for a while as it was free to play, but it really didn’t hold Shea’s interest, and there was really no grinding to the game it was all quest, dungeon related like DnD lol.

But Lord of the Rings Online went free to play this past Friday. It’s a grind game, we could sit and just kill things and move when the population was down you get xp for killing things which is typically more up our alley. There isn’t any real PvP here at least not on a free or premium account. Or at least not something Shea’s been interested in checking out yet, but I’m sure he’ll try something at some point.

We are currently playing on Vilya with our Shady friends. My main character right now is Alikatia an Elven hunter. Shea’s playing a Human guardian he’s named Amtank. We are glad to be able to chat with real friends. Some of Shea’s long time friends (Sin and Ara) are playing. Braille and Headstone have wandered over. Shards has a toon moving up as well. And my Dad is checking out and maybe McL will too, it would be nice to have that connection with him. But the bestest part of it is, I might actually get to spend time with Miss Rae. Not that I don’t talk to her enough on gtalk, but it’s nice to be able to do something other than chat sometimes. Her hubby has joined up too. We’ve a nice bit of a guild shaping up and that’s not even recruiting. Maybe next weekend lag won’t be so bad we can actually get a bit farther, we’ll see tho, I’m sure the initial lag will drop down eventually as people spread out through Middle Earth and leave the game altogether.

I hate when you really want to play a video game and you can’t because your PC isn’t up to par.

My PC doesn’t have a supported Vid card for Warhammer Online. And the PC shea is currently on isn’t fast enough and doesn’t have a supported vid card. Shea’s real pc is out of commission. I just spent the last hour or so with tech support trying to figure out the problem. It seems that the network card is fried, so now we have to send it in for them to repair it. So that means we MIGHT be able to play beta on one PC. But we have to wait till we either get birthday money to buy the new vid card for me, but that money has mostly been delegated to a portable dual screen DVD play for the van so we can have something to travel with to entertain the girls. I have have to take christmas money out and buy it.

I really hate that we have to keep upgrading or buying new pcs just to play games *sighs* this totally sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay Game of Stones is really a sad game to play. It’s click and wait, click and wait. Save your money so higher levels don’t come and steal it from your in either resources or leave it on your shop. But the game is highly addicting for being so lame.