Corusca

It’s been a good while since my last post here. As you’ve probably figured out if you’re a follower of The Adventures of Raquel™, most of my lack of time has to do with my upcoming wedding.

This Saturday is the big day and the arrangements have bitten quite a chunk off my free time. Plus a bunch of other stuff which has a timing that has converged to coincide with these days.

My bachelorette party was awesome. Thanking my wedding godmother and my godfather again here for planning the whole deal. Also thanking who attended for their very nice company. It was the best time I’ve had in quite some time. And if I’m not mistaken it was the first and only time anyone but my parents ever planned an event for me. Did I mention it was an awesome party? Because it was, and not only saying this because of the hot male stripper or waiter. The whole day was fun, and I finally went to a Luso-Nippon bakery where I’d been wanting to go for ages and ended up never going.

Last Friday my mother was scheduled to do an intervention at a hospital and I took the day off to be with her. She ended up not being allowed to do the medical exam because of some complications, probably to do with the fact that they left her without eating for almost 17 hours straight, and her liver isn’t the best working organ in the block.

So anyway, Friday was a different day, spent mostly on the hospital, but also with my dad, who I had lunch with, and trying my wedding dress at the store for the last time. The wedding dress tryout was the only excuse I could think of to convince my mother not to freak out because I tooka vacations day to be with her.

My aunt passed by the hospital and we chatted a bit when my mother was already taken to a place where visitors aren’t allowed. I hadn’t talked to her in ages, and I realized that I shouldn’t let so much time pass between meetups with her. She’s cool (and somewhat insane :P).

After my father passed by the hospital (a novelty that was surely influenced by my taking the day off to be with mom), we stayed a bit longer but ended up leaving him with her at almost 7 o’ clock, until the visit hours were over. We headed toward downtown on foot, but not going through the main avenue, instead through some less travelled streets. Found two interesting stores on the way downtown: a goth shop and an… well an ‘indie shop’ which had a ton of original, one-of-a-kind items and clothing, accessories, the works. The shop is called Crew Hassan (check out their website).

It was also my sweetie’s birthday last week and we had a family dinner on the day itself and then a dinner with friends this Saturday. My friend Ana and I expelled him from the kitchen all of Saturday afternoon, and made him a cake, of which I shall put some photos online some time. Learned a ton of stuff regarding cake-making from Ana, who’s slowly becoming a baking goddess.

Gave kitten three gifts, one of which were boxers I bought at Springfield with some origami instructions. The other two were Street Fighter IV (so he can kick my butt as vengeance for getting his kicked by me at Tekken repeatedly :P) and also Guitar Hero: Metallica. I think he liked them though we’ve only had the time to try out SFIV and the rest will have to be played later.

A bunch of other stuff has happened this past month but I’ll stick to talking about these more recent events.

This week will prove stressful since we have to take care of some things that couldn’t be handled before due to logistics and timing issues. My Google Calendar looks like a superstar’s calendar would look like. Tons of stuff to do on these next few days. I’m trying to keep it together despite being very tired of all the planning and scheduling/rescheduling, and to be quite honest, just wishing it was the day already so I can stop planning stuff, and no longer have to run around like a mad person to take care of so much stuff, and so on.

This is probably my last written post before I’m officially a married woman, and possily even the last one before I’m back from my honeymoon in Thailand. So wishing you all a nice Summer. Have fun.

There’s a hype all over the gamer scene on the Internet regarding BioWare’s MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic mostly caused by the very awesome cinematic trailer that was revealed in E3 a couple of days ago.

I’ve been excited with the prospect of a fresh Star Wars MMO being made by BioWare, but not nearly close to what one would expect, from someone who, like myself, is a huge Star Wars fan and a huge BioWare fan. Having been disappointed with Star Wars Galaxies when it came out a few years ago, makes me more cautious this time around.

Obviously I have big expectations regarding the game, given BioWare’s history of producing great story-driven RPGs, but I’m not having the whole ‘clouded judgment’ thing enough to make me overlook obvious flaws it may have. There are less positive things, like BioWare’s inexperience in producing MMOs, and the rumoured possibility of it being a micro-transactions based game.

I’m still used to the monthly fee model, as every MMO I’ve played and enjoyed, since Dark Age of Camelot, has used that model. A micro-transactions-based model will have to be nicely done so I accept it enough to want to play.

I liked the trailer, and unlike Tobold I don’t think it was badly-timed, not do I think BioWare will make you sit through every spoken sentence each NPC spills out. In fact, anyone who has knowledge of BioWare’s latest games, such as Mass Effect, would know you can almost always ‘fast forward’ through dialogues. And Mass Effect had a *lot* of spoken NPC lines. Although I agree with part of his ‘hopes’ for SW:TOR, it seems like a bit of misinformed knit-picking on Tobold’s part. I don’t think SW:TOR is the second coming of Christ, I don’t believe it will have as many subscribers as WoW has (though it’s supposedly their goal to overthrow WoW), I don’t think it will revolutionize MMOs a lot (it will a bit, yes).

I do believe this has the potential to be one of the best MMOs out there. And let me remind you that before WoW, the subscriber numbers of what was considered a nicely populated MMO weren’t in the millions scale, but in the hundreds of thousands scale. Most of the World of Warcraft population these days weren’t even aware about MMOs until WoW came to the scene.

One of the downsides of WoW’s popularity? Because everyone plus their respective pets plays it, the number of idiot players is a lot higher than what you’d find in previous MMOs. When I dabbled a bit on LOTRO, the difference of maturity in the general chat was astounding. When I look at my sweetie’s screen and he’s playing EVE Online, the general chat also has a lot more quality (and let’s remember this is a free-for-all PvP game, where one would think we’d get more piss talk :P) and less idiocy than WoW.

But WoW’s popularity is not a bad thing, really. It gave MMOs some publicity, set a higher standard for product quality and such. But WoW also *did* eat away some of the market for single player games (mostly PC I’m guessing) by sucking people in to do the same crap over and over again for months.

Seeing my own situation, only now that I’ve taken a ’sabbatical leave’ of WoW, am I playing other games, and urging to play other games. Sure, part of it has to do with me being burned out of WoW itself, and especially of the incredible amount of idiots who populate it, but also because I realize once more how much stuff I was missing by occupying a lot of my indoors time with WoW. I’d done the same when I’d quit the game after months of The Burning Crusade – and much like WoW’s content, it’s a cyclical deal.

Following that train of thought, here’s what I hope SW:TOR will give us: less in-game time required to get stuff done. Blizzard has taken some steps toward that in WotLK (and a bit before), but it’s still not perfect.

Getting back to the timing for the SWTOR cinematic trailer, Tobold should know that MMO developing companies often need to release such ‘delicious crumbs’ to the public, in order to show investors it’s a good thing to give them more money for development because of the build up hype. And if there’s something SWTOR will need more than what it already has guaranteed (which is an already proven good development house and the large target audience that are Star Wars fans) it’s money to develop and polish the game until it shines.

People don’t want another wonderful Tortuga followed by horribly bugged rest of the game, like what we got in Age of Conan.The initial SWTOR will need to be awesome and I mean awesome to the point where after you reach the level cap, you’ll want to keep playing.

I can only hope that BioWare keeps doing what it’s done best in the last few years and doesn’t succumb to probable external pressures to release the game before its ready. If there’s another company, other than Blizzard, who’s known for postponing games a lot but then delivering marvelous products, that’s BioWare.

I’m hoping for this because to be honest (and feel free to call me ‘causal’ :P), whenever I ‘come up for air’ from World of Warcraft I realize I’m missing out on a lot of stuff, games-wise or not. WoW has basically become worn out chewing gum for me.

The initial months after WotLK were quite nice (the quests were visibly improved) but it quickly became ‘more of the same’. I don’t want to be stuck chewing an endless chewing gum. I don’t want to be stuck doing the same over and over in an endless pattern. I want SWTOR to be designed in a way that I can enjoy it slowly, and through a lot of time without getting sick of it.

That’s my hope for SWTOR.

This is the time of the year where the biggest video game event occurs: E3.

Yesterday Electronic Arts presented their twelve most talked about upcoming titles on E3. Among them were of course BioWare’s three upcoming titles (no word yet on their mysterious ‘next gen game’). I watched the EA live video stream and drooled at a few of the titles.

As this post’s title indicates, this will me a video-heavy post.

Mass Effect 2 – An extended cut of a previous trailer was shown and can I say ‘woohoo!’? :p I really want to play it. Too bad it’s only coming in 2010…

Here’s the extended Mass Effect 2 trailer:

Dragon Age: Origins had a new trailer and it was gory as usual. Also very good. Check it out:

The EA guys saved the best for last and showed what I think is the best game trailer for a game that I’ve seen in a couple of years. The game itself will be the first MMO fully voiced, which imho will contribute a lot to the in game immersion, much like it did on Mass Effect.

The first cinematic trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Watch and drool.

If you want to watch the very cool stage entrance that preceded the presentation of SW:TOR, go here.

For a huge list of what this year’s E3’s big action-filled games are, check it out here.

That’s all for now. Hoping for more news on the next couple of days, during E3.