Rift Free Trial

Rift is one of those games I’ve been curious about but haven’t tried yet. A while ago I decided to not reserve much (or any) of my free time to MMOs because, as you know, they are very time-consuming. I haven’t even finished Dragon Age II, which isn’t an MMO, and I was loving the game.

And now the nice Rift peeps are offering a free trial, and I feel very tempted.

It’s only 7 days, afterall… *ahem*

Wrath And Me

Although I had another busy weekend, I managed to spend a large portion of Saturday playing Wrath of the Lich King, before heading out to a couple of friends’ (immensely fun ) birthday dinner.

So far, I’ve leveled my hunter to 73, and started a Death Knight, which I’ve only leveled once since her initial level, 55. I’ll talk about what I’ve seen so far in Wrath, and comment on a few other things I’ve seen people talk about all over the place.

I’ve mostly quested so far and done a couple of instances – Uthgarde Keep and The Nexus. The instances are nice, and The Nexus is by far one of the best looking ones in the game. In comparison with The Burning Crusade, the initial instances are more accessible to the common player, not being a leap from the ones we used to do before WotLK came out. I found them more relaxed, but maybe it’s just due to me playing an exclusive pew pew class and actually being able to enjoy the view while playing (no more staring at green bars a lot of the time \o/).

The quests I can talk more about. I’ve been told that the Howling Fjord quests are more fun than the Borean Thundra ones, and was momentarily tempted to switch from BT to HF. I ended up sticking about the Thundra and after some Saturday afternoon questing, I’m glad I stayed there. I was questing with my sweetie, and we went to do some quest involving murlocs. Before these I was skeptical because the only murloc I ever liked was my pet, the adorable murloc cub, Lurky. Anyway, I’ll spoil you a bit, so skip the next paragraph if you prefer to go do the murloc quests without previous info.

We go there to talk to the King of Murlocs, Mrgl Mrgl, and end up finding out that he is in fact a guy from the D.E.H.T.A. camp in disguise, in a very silly murloc suit. Minor details that I loved: you can see a zipper on the costume’s back (saying EPC) and a little bit of the NPC’s boxers, full of little hearts. So we end up doing some quests for him, including one where we had to free a load of infant murlocs of some cages. They are just as adorable as Lurky and we had them following us all around. Another quest included us dressing up in murloc suits, carrying a while flag and wandering around to do some stuff. Fun, especially because the suit is even sillier than we thought: when we ran, one of the eyes of the costume poped out temporarily, and we found out that we could do a murloc dance if we /danced. Plus, the way we jumped was jsut priceless. Needness to say, I took a zillion screenshots, which I will eventually upload to flickr (I’ve only uploaded the three I’ve included in this post).

From these quests and others we can tell that Blizzard took one step further into the creation of really fun quests. Sure, you still get the odd ‘get me 15 ears’ or kill ’6 bears’ quests, but there are a lot more than just these, and a lot of them are so much fun, either due to the mechanic of the quest, or little details you see while doing the quests.

Some details I loved:

• The Murloc suits. Seriously fun for all the reasons I mentioned two paragraphs back.
• On a ‘get the items off the wolves poop’ quest, the wolves do the funniest animation when pooping. I’ll just say that they should eat more fibers.
• The lines some NPCs say are amusing. One that pops to mind is the poachers when they get the fake furs we set into the traps saying ‘It’s a miracle! The beast skinned itself!’
• The names of some achievements. I still say the max cooking one should be called ‘Even better than Mama!’ as a homage to that wonderful cooking game, Cooking Mama.
• The Giant Turtle ships – will post screenshots later.
• Being parachuted off a gryph

I was checking out some reputation rewards, and they managed to include one that I really want. A pet penguin. Yes, you read right. I want a pet penguin and I don’t care if it means getting exhalted with a faction, especially because the other exalted reward is a very cool, epic fishing pole, which has an interesting feature: underwater breathing. Both are must-haves and since there are some quests for this faction that are done in the Howling Fjord, over there I might go as soon as possible so I make them while they are still green quests for my level, or at least I hope they still are.

Oh yeah, and of course I’ve already made my Death Knight, a cool-looking dark-skinned/white-haired female draenei. Dark skin with those creepy glowing eyes is made of win.

The World Goes Warcraft and Round

I’ve had a pretty busy week so far which explains me kind of slacking with posts. Several things are changing in my life, some for better, some for worst, and some I’m still unsure of and will have to wait and see what life brings.

I started looking at wedding dresses last week over at Chiado, and the ongoing adventure of finding me a dress that I actually like and that looks good on me will continue this weekend. x_x This time we’ll need to be there in the morning as the stores which had more affordable stuff (meaning: stuff that does not require selling my liver to purchase) were closed in the afternoon. Boo.

Tonight we’re going to pick up our new World of Warcraft expansion Collector’s Edition. Yay! I’ve been informing myself and with some luck it will only take 15-20 minutes to install on my laptop. I’m hoping there’s no new patch after that. Of course playing tonight will be as painful experience as it gets in an MMO: people camping everything, hellish lag, server queues and quite possibly servers going down. In other words: a normal launch week day.

As you may have noticed I’ve posted some photos of Sintra and of BD Amadora on my flickr account. The Sintra photos were taken in the evening we got locked in the Pena Palace Garden, and we went to BD Amadora the following week. It was a good and bad expo at the same time. I enjoyed the sci-fi decoration, and I loved some of the art sections there, such as the Tara McPherson one, and the section with chinese artists’ work which were the best in the expo. I also liked the fact that Richard LeParmentier a.k.a Admiral Motti in Star Wars was there signing autographs, like he’s doing for us in the photo below.

This year I managed to resist buying anything (except for the autographed photos), and even refrained from buying a Sasuke gashapon (or trading figure? I couldn’t tell with the distance) I saw being sold there. I’m hoping my usual anime merchandise dealer get some at his store someday so I get the coolest-looking character in the show (so far). Yes Gaara also looks cool, but I’ve never seen him do anything in the show, plus he’s not as stylish. :p

[ Side note: dear 'Naruto' fangirls/boys who may be thinking of replying to this post: refrain from hate commenting on my personal taste. I hardly give a rats arse about the show and could not care less if your heart belongs to Gaara or another imaginary character with whom you'd like so sleep with ( since you obviously can't with a real person). I simply like the quiet, cursed dude who dresses in blue, has a sad repressed past and who kicked ass whenever I saw him fight. Thanks. ]