Pink Gamer

Good afternoon fellow gamers. Recently I began a new MMO called Aion.
I didn’t actually think I would like it as much as I do when I started, but it turned out to be pretty fun. It plays a lot like WoW – you have a starter area where you complete mundane quests and you follow a quest-line (the big quest-lines in this game are called “Campaigns”) to ascension where you become a Daeva with pretty wings. For about three seconds the other Daevas make fun of you because you started out as a Raider, but then all of a sudden they are clapping for you because you pulled out your wings for about two milliseconds. I thought that part was a bit off.
So once you become a Daeva you can do my favorite part of any MMO – crafting. The fun part about crafting in this game is that a) you can fail a craft (and gathering) and b) you can perform Work Orders to gain levels and a reward. You get a new Work Order every ten levels, but you’re better off doing the first FREE one until level 40 when you can no longer do it.
Now, I say you can fail a craft as if it’s something shiny and new, but FFXI also had this same concept, but crafting in FFXI was almost like pulling teeth if you’re not patience personified. I happen to love FFXI crafting, for better reasons than this, but that’s not what this post is about.

I have to admit, the one part about Aion that I don’t like so far is how linear it seems to be. I never really had that problem with WoW, there were always several places I could go to, and the Instance party creator made it easy to get into parties and run a dungeon. Now, I haven’t gotten very far into Aion, and once you get past the first 20 levels it may turn around and become really exciting in this aspect, but for now you run through campaigns and follow a set path of areas until you finish. I thought it might open up a bit after the starter area, but so far it’s still been a bit like playing out an already written storybook, which is fine (and the point) for RPG games, but a little disappointing for MMOs.

A really nice aspect of Aion is the short cut-scenes. Every once in a while when a campaign quest holder gives you a quest you will be shown a short scene of where you need to be and sort of what you need to do. They’re not so long as to be boring and they’re quite frankly really pretty. THIS GAME IS GORGEOUS – I think I forgot to mention that.

The battle system in this game is good. It’s pretty much like WoW – you have your 1,2,3,4,5,6,etc macros, you mash buttons and auto attack until the target is dead. There are four broad classes with two subclasses for each major class. Warrior, Mage, Scout, and Priest, and I’m pretty confident I don’t have to explain what each class does. The subclasses include Templar and Gladiator, Sorcerer and Spiritmaster, Assassin and Ranger, and Chanter and Cleric respectively. You’ve got Templar – the giant shield toting, main line of defense, and Gladiator – which provides more damage than a Templar but still a fair bit of defense. Every other class will never really want to take damage as Mages and Priests are squishy as hell and Scouts really aren’t much better. Chanters CAN wear mail when they ascend, but it doesn’t stop them from taking a fair amount of damage. The difference between the Mage and Scout classes are a bit obvious, but as for Priests, Chanters are primarily a buff/debuff with some healing capabilities and Clerics are what you would really think of as a main healing class. The difference isn’t huge, but most arrogant MMO snobs will argue the uselessness of Chanters over Clerics. Sometimes I hate MMO players. -.- <- Plays a Chanter and finds nothing wrong with it.

Anyway, like I said, Aion is a beautiful MMO. It’s pretty much entirely solo-able up to 50 level cap, which is nice for me because I like to play on my own most of the time, or with my boyfriend or roommate. All in all I’d say the game is pretty awesome, not really many complaints so far – except for the unavoidable irritating and immature in-city LFG chats. Guys, you aren’t cool and you certainly aren’t better than the rest of the world just because your character is level 50. Go get a job or something. Jerks.

Recently I’ve begun playing a new fantastic free MMO called Hello Kitty Online. It’s an adorable little game where you complete quests and farm and build a house and stuff for inside your house. I’m not very good at the game yet, though I wouldn’t say that anyone has any more skill than another at a game where literally all you do is click to move and click to execute commands. I suppose I should say I’m not as knowledgeable about it. The thing that really kind of makes me troubled, though it’s the only problem I’ve had, is that in order to upgrade your farm, you either need to have 3000 loyalty points, which aren’t that easy to come by, you get them from logging in and playing minigames and such, or you need to PM one of the GMs. For me, having to ask a GM to have something in-game is kind of eh. I’ve gathered that a lot of the GMs are really nice and all, but it still kind of makes me go, eh but why? It is to my understanding that you used to be able to get bigger farms in the farm market, but they took it away for some reason or another that I never caught on to.
Anyway, this game is absolutely adorable. You go out and you have to complete quests which usually have to do with forging, tailoring, cooking, or carpentry (the four production crafts in the game), though I don’t have any recipes in the carpentry section. You can level all of these up and you level up your chopping, gathering, mining, and planting passive skills as well. All of these go towards upping your total overall level. You don’t gain any experience from fighting things, which is to be expected from a Sanrio game.
I love this game. It’s kind of hard to really get into at first and I just liked it from an aesthetic point, but my favorite part about MMOs was the crafting, which was why FFXI was so heartbreaking for me (you needed ungodly amounts of money to be able to craft), and so an MMO where all you do is craft adorable hats and such and talk to other players is kind of a dream come true for me. Lawl. You also can get monster cards to drop from the critters and you can have your own pet to follow you around. They leave if you’re not petting them and feeding them a lot, though. I’m currently in the process of trying to get an adorable pink mouse pet. The mouse critter is usually grey, but the leader “Squeet” is pink, and the leader cards usually take a long time to get them to drop. I’ll have to camp him if I really want it.
Speaking of, this is my other problem with the game. When you defeat a critter, they just fall asleep in the spot you defeated them and then eventually wake up in the same spot you downed them. It makes fair camping completely non-existent as one person stands on top of the critter and just waits for him to get up. I would propose that for these leader types, they disappear and reappear in a random spot near where they usually walk around. I just think standing on top of something waiting for it to wake up so that no one else can get it is kind of cheap.
And that’s my HKO intro. I encourage everyone who likes cute to play.

Ok so seriously, Cooking Mama is one of the greatest ideas to hit the Nintendo DS. So when I saw that Cooking Mama would be created for the Wii I was all ZOMG YESPLZNAO. So then I had to wait until I actually had a Wii, and hurrah for my boyfriend’s mama getting him one last x-mas-time, or a Hannukah-time gift as it would be for us. So we slammed that game up to the top of the Gamefly queue and it arrived faithfully in the next few days.
I was so excited. Cooking Mama: World Kitchen! OH. DEAR. GOD. This game is friggin impossible. If you shake the wiimote too fast, you drop your utensil, too slow and you’re doomed to the timer, and where is your happy medium? Somewhere between too fast and non-existent. When you select cook with Mama, if you screw the pooch you get a chance to save yourself using Mama’s leet haxorz. But good luck on that, you have to do some insane wagging of the remote that almost never works and she just shrugs her shoulders when she screws you over. Not to mention that when she tried to prevent you from putting the wrong spice into the mixing bowl, it looks like she’s molesting you from behind, especially with the way your character’s face looks while it’s happening. Holy cow, Mama.
Despite being f-ing impossible, I did manage to score a 100 on ONE recipe. Something easy most likely, I honestly don’t remember my success through the pain and torture of trying to do simple tasks through shaking and pounding a poor, defenseless piece of plastic.
This is easily one of the most frustrating games on the planet. I don’t know if it’s just because the wiimote that I like to play with (it’s sleek and black and sexy!) has been known to give a bit of trouble, but I presume that even if I were to switch to the boring wiimote my chances of success MIGHT increase by maybe .01. Their complete desire to make the game as Engrish as possible does, however, bump up their rating on the melikey-scale.
But alas, this is not the ONLY mind-numbingly tedious games I’ve gotten my hands on lately. Anyone out there ever play Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz?
Don’t.
Or maybe do, just so you can know the pain.
My mother bought it because she thought it used the wii balance board. It does not, sadly, because then I might not have been tempted to take it from home. We recently had a little get-together at our apartment and we all sat down and tried to play through the ridiculous game. You die every three seconds. It’s insane. If you’re the fat monkey, you can’t get up hills ever and you end up going too fast and rolling off. If you’re the small monkey you end up going too fast from the get-go and then you fly three hundred feet into the air and plummet to your doom. If your any monkey at all you bounce around in anxiety of falling just before you reach the goal and then the game mechanics say screw you and you die anyway. Then you reach the boss fight and it takes you about three deaths to even figure out what to do, and then when you finally do, you get overexcited and screw the whole thing. And then if you’re like me, you desperately want your monkey to go left so you start moving your arm to the left until you’re falling off your chair, bed, whatever you’re sitting on, only to realize that a simple twist of the wrist would have done the trick and now you look like an idiot with your butt half off your seat, poking your nearby friend in the eye socket with a wii mote.
I hate this game. It’s not even cooking mama cute. It’s just obscenely hard and the monkey’s look dumb.
HATE YOU SUPER MONKEY BALL!

OMG 80!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I participated in the battle for Wintergrasp the other day. For those unfamiliar, it is a giant lots of people PvP battle to control an area in Northrend. Apparently everybody who participates is level 80, as opposed to my at the time measly 75.

By the way, leveling past 60 suckssss without RAF.

So anyway, the whole thing lasts about 30 minutes, and you die about 20 times overall. Once I realized you can make tankzorz the whole battle got a bit easier, though I still died like a noob. Our efforts, of course, were useless, Alliance defended Wintergrasp. Alas, perhaps next time.

So anyway, more important things. I started messing around in Freeworld3D, which is AWESOME. Terrain mapping is sofun! Apparently I’m like, actually good at it or something, which is kinda awersum. It’s just fun, digging ditches and making big cliffs. Then eventually someone will come in with some models and put trees and stuff in it. Eventually it’ll be playable. Fun. My very first terrain was a snowy field with patches of dead grass. Very emo of me. I’m working on my very first full-size terrain with intent for play. We’ll see what happens lololol. I’m switching over to Bryce, because apparently it sucks less.

Today the servers are performing super maintenance or something because apparently stuff went wrong. Le sigh. I’ve been gone most of the day at class, I wanted to get to level 79. I also wanted to do some super farming. I’m so patient when it comes to that stuff, not to mention my luck skill is OVER 9000, that I should be making oodles of gold. So how come I’m sopoor? ; ;

Today, however, is more about the atrocity of something I witnessed earlier this afternoon. Now, I know this has nothing to do with video games, and it really only applies to ladies, but LEGGINGS ARE NOT PANTS! I saw one girl in particular, out of the two today who were demonstrating this fashion sin, who was wearing knee-length black leggings. They make your thighs look ginormous, your knees knobby, and the lower half of your legs super pudgy. Just don’t do it, you look dumb as hell. Girls apparently think it’s a new retro 80s trend, but as much as I like a lot of old fashions, this one died for a reason. Put it back in it’s grave and move on. You’re not exercising, you’re not in a yoga class, you’re in public. Put on pants.
I rest my case.

Hokay, so I did nawt plai much of teh WoWz tonite, mostly becuz we cleend teh whoole apartment aftur teh piepz burst, but I turned in a few questz and maed it to 63, jes. Took me two quest turn ins and a butt-load of stupidbutt Bog Lords, which, by the way, NEVARRR drop those stupid squiggly things that you’re supposed to bring to some little wussy guy. Riddle me this: How come when you kill Zebras for their hooves you only get them once in a blue moon? Don’t all Zebras have hooves? (I don’t mean real Zebras, I mean the WoW Zebras) And shouldn’t all Bog Lords have their little squiggly thingys on them? And in the quest log, it specifically says that the little brat wanted them in order to prove how many I killed. BUT! I killed sooo many of them, and he only knows I killed six. Laaaame. I should have gotten sooo many squiggly things in return. I’m just sayin…

In other news, aside from my unfair return of squiggly thingys which resulted in my demise at least once, I am also playing Rune Factory! Such a fun game, in case you were wondering, they literally made Harvest Mood with butt kicking involved. It’s a bit tough, you have this weird Rune Power that no one really explains to you, at least in the beginning, because heck if I know what that jazz is all about. It depletes pretty much anytime you do anything, and quite frankly, I’m not sure if your rune power increases as your level increases, which basically means you kill five things and then have to go rest up, which you can only do once per day. I think the game was specifically designed in order to frustrate the poo out of me. All I want to do is court some sexy, rural, country chick and grow strawberries. Is that so much to ask? I didn’t think so.

And Puh-leeeeese Rune Factory. Why can’t you just give me the dumb hammer already? I have the axe and the scythe (or sickle? I prefer scythe) and the… other.. thing….. yeaah. So why can’t I have a hammer, too? I need it for hitting things, maybe getting ores? For… stuff? I JUST WANT IT, OKAY! >.> I have talked to every townpeeplez in the whole town at various times of the day and all they’ve given me is useless words of encouragement. Le sigh.

Tonight was a gewd night for teh gamez. I WoWed all day again, as I had been my entire MLK jr weekend. I had to hang around the apartment today, even though it was a school day!, and wait for the maintenance guy to show up and fix the burst pipe in the kitchen and turn the water back on. Long, sad story there.

Anyway, burst pipes aside, teh gamez were grood. Got another three levels today… I think. It’s getting hard to keep track since days of gaming kind of just merge together in the brainz. I finally got to do some Burning Crusade dungeons! — I hate them. I hate doing dungeons through the dungeon finder now that I’m above level 58 because you seem to ALWAYS get slotted with a DK. I HATE DKs. (That’s Death Knight, for those of you not familiar with teh WoWz) Everyone I have partied with thus far has had no idea how to play their class. What I believe has happened is that they are most likely between the ages of 12-16, probably young boys, and finally hit level 55 on their Orc warrior and said, OEMGEE, IZ TIEM TO GOW N PLAI TEH KEWL DETH NITE NAO because all they seem to do is spam buttons and take aggro away from the tank, who then struggles to keep aggro himself, all the while, the poor shaman healer is fighting her slow healing wave cast time to keep everyone alive while a group of level 60 elites destroy the party. *ahem* Pardon me for that rude declaration of probable truth.

As I was saying, I got to run the Burning Crusade dungeons, which, aside from the minor setback, are all pretty cool. I honestly don’t remember the names of either dungeons we ran, my head is pounding from a migraine. (I love WoW so much I fight physical pain to play) We ran the dungeon where some jerkfaez yells at you the whole time, which in my opinion, is just a little bit rude. Something about his blood, I don’t remember, as I said, I was fighting to keep the DK and pally boyfriend alive. The DK always made it out alive… the pally… yeah, don’t sit next to the tank when you’re the healer if you don’t think you can keep everyone not DED.

The point is, Outlands rocks!, even if I have to be a scrub again. It’s way worth it to be low-level in Outlands than high level in Lamezville McNobodysthere Land. And Outlands is way cooler looking than most Horde places in Azeroth. Hellfire is not really pretty, but Zangarmarsh is all blue and hazy and stuff. We took a picture there, too! If you ask me, it’s adorable. Tomorrow I think we’re going to have a picnic there. … What?

Huggles atop Giant Shroom

A wonderful thing happened last night. I became level 60! Big whoop, you say? Well, as I am but a lowly noobie in the world of WoW, this is my first character I’ve leveled up from 1 all the way up to the big leagues. It feels good. Or shall I say, grood.

Teen Girl Squad!
I want to be What’s-Her-Face.

I had ventured into Outlands once before on a Death Knight, which are way overhyped, by the way, when I had the old account of the boyfriend’s friend who said he was never going to play again, but as even more of a nub, I was hopeless. Also, as Alliance, I was even more hopeless. FOR THE HORDE! So I wandered around wondering what to do with myself until I gave up and went back to my level 30 Draenei shaman.

But! All hope was not lost! After spending roughly 48 hours leveling up my new shaman, we made it to Outlands. Now, had I been soloing, even if I could have somehow kept the RAF bonus (that’s Refer-A-Friend- 300% exp from kills AND quests!), I would have taken at least twice the time. Following a Paladin boyfriend who has had 5 years of WoW experience boosts your productivity by about six kajrillion percent.

Needless to say, I’m proud of myself. One does not simply walk into Mordor. Er, Outlands? Er, yeah. Basically I’m pimpin now and don’t you forget it!