Game Progress #2

It's been two weeks since I last posted my game progress. Time to go over what I've been playing lately. This past weekend and week were surprisingly light on the gaming front. I did however finish my novel and started on the 2nd draft :)

Onto the games!

Borderlands for PC

Mordecai and Bloodwing

Last week my boyfriend and I played Defiance. We decided it wasn't a game worth buying, but it did inspire me to play Borderlands again. My BF even had an extra copy to gift on Steam so we no longer have to deal with the lousy split screen on the PS3.

We've been playing a little bit every night and it's a blast! Having my own screen makes this game much more enjoyable. I rolled Mordecai because the BF keeps saying snipers are easy mode, so instead of picking the girl (like I did last time) I decided to just start with the type of character who could ease me into shooters. My skillzors are improving faster than I thought they would. Who knows, maybe some competitive FPS over xbox live is in my future?

And hey if you want to jump in on some hot PC Borderlands action let us know. Maybe you can join us a couple times.


Rift for PC

Death Rift and a shiny sword

I'm logging onto Rift every day, mostly to do the Instant Adventure daily and buy and sell shinies on the auction house. I was hoping to be level 52 by Monday, but am still lingering at 51 (It's Friday O.o)

I'm almost done with the Freemarch achievements (which also would count as a game beat!! Achievement sets count as a game beat in the three game rule) The artifacts that I need to finish the achievement all average about 15 plat on the auction house, and I need about 9 of them, which is out of my price range T.T

Leveling is going slowly as well, mostly due to lack of time. I did swap from the Necromancer to Harbinger/Chloromancer/Archon, with the majority of my points in Harbinger. It's a fun spec, but I followed a guide and set up macros which makes combat a bit boring. Not that my rotation on the Necromancer was much more interesting. Things die faster now, so that's good.

I've also been rare hunting in Silverwood. Haven't found a single one, not going as well as Freemarch did. I think the trick is to just camp at one of the rare spots and do something else while glancing at Rift on occasion. Ah well, one of these days I'll kill some rares.

I think I want to play a Cleric next.



WoW for PC

Newbie Warlock

For whatever reason I've logged into WoW a couple times this week. I don't know if I'm burning out on Rift or what... This is my little Undead Warlock. FOR THE HORDE! I think my biggest problem with playing WoW was playing Alliance. I'm a lot more comfortable with Horde.

We will see how this goes, still not in the Colorado guild so perhaps my Draenei Mage will find herself becoming a Troll. My Mage is a high population server and the Colorado guild is on medium. I'd rather play on a high pop server than medium if I were to go back to playing, you know unless I actually had people to play with. Weird concept. Maybe the BF can be wrangled back into WoW... Oh the Mage is already level 90 and maxed out on professions, so.... no slow leveling grind if I converted her to Horde.

We will see. WoW is doing a character service sale, so if I decide the Mage should be a troll I should make that decision tomorrow and take advantage of the sale.



Pokemon Heart Gold for DS

ZERMERGERD A LIGHTNING SHEEP!

So I swapped Pokemon games. I recently beat Diamond so playing through Pearl was a little bit too similar. I never made it through Heart Gold and I really appreciate it being tuned for the DS more than Diamond/Pearl are.

I might be planning on buying Pokemon White when I get three game beats, and then play Pokemon White 2 (which I got as an Anniversary present I think, but haven't played). If I'm quick enough maybe, just maybe, I'll finish in time for Pokemon X/Y.

Oh I picked the Crocodile as my starter, because he's just too cute.

I want you to stay cute forever...

StreetPass Mii Plaza for 3DS
Denver Comic Con was last weekend, and thanks to the loving BF reminding me, I brought my 3DS along. The 3DS has a neat feature called StreetPass and your 3DS comes with two mini-games built in using StreetPasses. Basically a StreetPass happens when you and someone else have 3DSes that get within a certain range of each other. Their Mii comes and plays on your 3DS and yours goes over to theirs. Some 3DS games also have StreetPass functionality, but I'm not going to go into that today.

The two mini games are a puzzle game called Puzzle Swap, and a very simple dungeon crawler called Find Mii (they also released Find Mii 2 to add more fun!) The reward for Puzzle Swap is completing 3D images from various games. Find Mii awards hats for your Mii to customize their look.

I know this sounds a little bit silly, but it's pretty much awesome. So if you don't have a 3DS go buy one now.

Did you do it? Did you go buy one? Good, I need more people to StreetPass with. If you didn't buy one, well... uh... poo on you.


So this weekend I was hoping to my first game beat since reviving this blog by beating Find Mii 2.
The following contains a spoiler, if you have not beaten Find Mii 2 and are planning on it in the future do not scroll ahead.

***********SPOILERS***********

Ya so I beat the two bosses at the end, just like you do in Find Mii. I know what's up Nintendo it's cool. Or at least I thought there were only two bosses until this guy appeared.

Bloody hell where did this guy come from?

I was so excited to get a game beat, but alas they threw another boss at me. At least he looks really cool. He's about halfway dead right now, but I don't have anyone to consistently StreetPass with, so ugh. We're going to San Francisco next week, so hopefully I'll get enough StreetPasses to beat him and have my first game beat in a long long while.


Dune the board game

We were playing a version from 1979. This picture pretty much looks the same

I decided to go to board game night at my local hobby store (which happens to be across the parking lot from where I live, super handy). I've never read or seen the Dune books or movies. I didn't know anything about the world, but I learned while playing this game!

You play this game as one of the factions battling over Dune. These include, the Spacing Guild, the Emperor, House Atreides, the Bene Gesserit, the Fremen, and House Harkonnen. Each faction (except the Emperor) has a special way to win the game unique to them, or anyone can win by controlling three cities.

I played the Spacing Guild. Mostly I was the asshole who sat back and collected spice, eventually bankrupting the bank and preventing the other players from seriously accumulating any spice. As the Spacing Guild the other players have to pay you to send their units to the planet.

The game lasted roughly three hours, and by the end everyone was tired of playing. I won. Apparently inhibiting everyone else's spice accural was a good way to go.

I plan on going back for the board game night after we get back from San Francisco. I had a great time and the people were really nice.

********

Wow I ended up rambling a lot about games. If you made it to the bottom of this page, congrats you get a virtual cookie!

OMG WANT! Candy Corn and Cookie?!?! What an awesome combination

Ok Monday there will be a post with goals for the week! Which *spoilers* will probably be handheld games since we're in San Francisco and I'm not bringing my gaming laptop.

Week #2 Goals

A new week has dawned! And with it some new goals!

Rift

The face I pretty much never see

I hit level 50 today, very exciting. I zipped over to the new continent just to realize my skinning wasn't up to paar. So back to Droughtlands I went to continue working on finishing the quest and improve my skinning a couple points. I hope by the end of the week to be about 53, but we'll see.

Ni No Kuni

So pretty...

I would like to put in a handful more hours and finish whatever tasks I can find. I think I'm at about 83% completion on tasks and I will finish them before I beat the game.

Neverwinter

I might have been too lazy to take a screenshot... shh don't tell anyone ;)

We have a bunch of friends who are wanting to play this with us, so hopefully get some hours with said friends.

Bioshock

Fear me!

Maybe an hour or two on this one? Hopefully? We'll see if there is time with work and other games.

Denver Comic Con

Yay Comic Con!

Coming to you this weekend! I'm super excited and will hopefully have some pictures at the end of the week.

And thus we start the week whee! More games!

Weekly Progress #1

Every Friday I'm going to do a recap of how I've been progressing on my three game rule journey. Here are a couple highlights from this week.


Ni No Kuni for PS3

Everyone needs a faithful dragon companion

I've put in a couple hours of Ni No Kuni this week. I feel I'm getting close to the end which really means I have 20 or 30 hours to go. The big plot twist has been revealed and the main character Oliver is becoming a very powerful wizard. I'm not going to spoil any plot for you, but if you haven't played this game I highly recommend it. Image the love child of FFX, Pokemon, and Study Ghibli and you have Ni No Kuni.

Rift for PC

I got my Raptr pet!

I'm still achievement hunting and doing a couple dailies. Leveling is going slowly.

World of Warcraft for PC

I think I would like to be an Undead Warlock if I played again...

I found a Colorado guild through Meetup so popped into WoW to see if I could talk to an officer. After being in for about 10 minutes I decided I really don't feel like playing WoW anymore and promptly logged out. The magic just isn't there anymore, and even though raiding is still appealing to me, I'd rather try it out in Rift

Neverwinter for PC

Spider mount is epic!

The servers have been pretty laggy for me this week, which discourages play. It's a shame, it's really a fun game to play, regardless of all the whining about the cash shop. I haven't run into any issues with the cash shop and thoroughly enjoy playing player-created content through the Foundry.

Pokemon Pearl for Nintendo DS

This little guy was my starter this time around. So CUTE!

I beat Pokemon Diamond sometime in 2012 so replaying the same story is very meh for me right now. My boyfriend and I are kind of playing together (he's playing my version of Diamond) so we're taking it slowly and enjoying catching 'em all. He's making the game more fun to play.

Bioshock for PC

Yes I'm playing the first one. Yes it's slow going for me. I think I'm about 6 hours in and did about an hour this week... while Defiance was downloading.

Defiance for PC

I don't know where all my screenshots were saved too. BEHOLD random photo from the internet

We played a couple hours in the free to play weekend of this game. I actually thought it was a lot of fun, Kyle thought it was pretty meh for a shooter. I don't know if this is really worth buying...

Don't Starve for PC

Must.....Survive....

Addictive. You die a lot. Just go buy it, it's lots of fun.


Wow, I'm so spread on games it's no wonder I don't finish anything. I didn't even touch Assassin's Creed 2 this week as I planned. I think I'll finish Ni No Kuni first.

Back to gaming I go!

Screenshot of the week

Rifts are neat

A Girl and her Skeleton: Part 1

I said I would write a Rift post today, so here you go.

I started playing Rift again recently when Raptr was giving away the expansion and one month of game time for free. I decided to start playing my Mage Moonsyn with the Necromancer soul tree. 

For those of you who don't know in Rift you pick one of four classes, Warrior, Cleric, Mage, or Rogue.   You then pick three souls from ten to combine into the class you want to play. There are four roles for souls, Tank, DPS, Healer, and Support. You can see all of the Rift souls and classes here. It's a pretty neat system and you can swap between your preset soul choices. Mages can DPS, heal, or support depending on their soul configuration. 

Moonsyn has most of her points in Necromancer with the others in Warlock and Dominator. She is currently level 45 out of a max of 60.

Moonsyn and her Skeleton Companion

Rift is a very polished MMO that continues to impress me. I'm intrigued by what end game is like and hope to do some raiding. I've been leveling pretty slowly honestly. I'm spending a lot of time collecting artifacts which are Rifts collection system. You pick up little sparkles from the ground and each one has a collection set it goes into. Once you complete a set you can turn them in for various rewards. There are so many collection sets though it's a little bit overwhelming. I think I have a total of 15 completed out of who knows how many... a lot.

I also have been completing all the quests in an area. You can "mentor" in Rift which allows you to adjust your level down so you don't have to worry about out leveling an area. In addition to questing I've been doing achievements. I almost have all the cheevos in the first Defiant starting zone, Freemarch. I'm still missing the achievement related to artifacts and Instant Adventures.

Instant Adventures are a kind of neat feature to Rift. You queue to join a group either for a random zone or a specific one. In that zone you get several objectives to complete, mostly of the Kill Ten Rats variety. It's a great way to quickly get XP and a mindless activity to do during conference calls... ha. Currently in my Freemarch Achievement hunt I need to complete 500 Instant Adventures (at about 230 now) and kill one more boss. The bosses randomly spawn, so hopefully in the next 270 adventures I'll get the one I'm missing. I have a bad feeling the Achievement is really for 1000 it just hasn't shown me yet.

So there ya go, part one of a Girl and her Skeleton. Tune in next time to see how how achievement and leveling is going with Moonsyn!

What is the Three Game Rule?

Hello! Gaming Abroad is getting a facelift! I decided Gaming Abroad was no longer an appropriate name since I'm not in Europe anymore, thus the blog is now renamed to Three Game Rule. Welcome back to anyone who used to read this, and welcome new readers! I hope to update a couple times a week. Join me in a crazy journey through my own game collection!

Now you may be wondering, what is the Three Game Rule? It's simple, I have to beat three games in order to buy a new one. Now why would anyone need a rule like this? Let's just say I have an addiction to buying games. 

Here's a photo of the games I've finished:

Games Susi has beaten

Now granted there are a couple missing, either games I've gifted away because they were so awesome, or things on the PC which I don't have boxes for...

For comparison sake, here are games I have not finished:

Games Susi has not beaten

As you can see I have a game problem, namely I have too many.

Some of you may be wondering why I don't finish games. 

Do I just not play very much? Well I'd say I average between 30-50 hours of gaming a week, so it's not a time problem. 

What the hell am I playing then if not these unbeaten games? Lots of League of Legends and MMOs... You know the sorts of games you can't really "finish".

So join me on this journey of game playing and buying. Maybe one day I will make it through my collection, I certainly have lots and lots of games to play (what's pictured doesn't include a handful of games on PC I haven't finished).

So what's up for this week? I'm primarily playing Rift and Neverwinter Online, but am hoping to put a couple hours into Bioshock, Pokemon Pearl, and Assassin's Creed 2. Check back on Monday to see what progress I've made over the weekend! Spoilers: It will probably be about Rift. 

Return to Rift

I re-subbed to Rift and started two characters, both named Ninakas, both Rogues. The first is on the German server Terminus and the second on the American server Wolfsbane.

Why am I playing two rogues? Honestly I love bards. Bards have been my favorite class in MMOs since Dark Age of Camelot. I just can't resist playing one. Not to mention the soul system in Rift allows my Rogues to be very different from each other.

I'm playing on the German server to help improve my German. I'm taking the time to read every quest I can, which is making leveling a very slow going process. I'm a little bit nervous about joining a guild and interacting with people, but I will do it.

The American rogue is primarily to get to play with my boyfriend. He's not a huge fan of MMOs and generally finds them to be easy and boring. So far in Rift he finds this to be the case. I keep promising him it will get more challenging as we progress. Once we hit 20 we'll see if it's worth him buying the game.

Rift has changed a lot since I played at launch. I really like the new soul suggestion system. It feels a lot less daunting than picking souls one a time. Now you pick a general class you want to play and it gives you a soul build for that class, along with suggestions at every level for how to allocate your points. Before you just bought one soul at a time and rearranged your spec depending on how you wanted to play. You still have that option, but it's nice having a general build instead.

The latest Rift update added a lot of content. Mentoring, Conquest, new Instant Adventures, and Summerfest. I'll write more as I experience these new changes.

First Steps as a Bard

This first picture is of Xeoni in a group in Iron Tomb, one of the first Rift dungeons.

My beloved Xeoni is a bard in addition to being a ranger. As I've mentioned before, Rift allows you to switch between 4 different soul sets. My secondary soul on Xeoni is bard. I tend to swap over to bard while in groups because it's fun. I've always enjoyed music oriented classes.

One of my favorite MMO characters was a musician in Star Wars Galaxies. You would sit in a cantina and play music all day long. It was fantastic, you never had to leave to fight things. I would chat with adventurers when they came in and hear about their epic quests, but I didn't have to leave town unless I wanted to. This might sound silly after all, why would I want to play virtual music in a game when I could play a real instrument? Well... actually I don't have a great answer to that question. I'll go with a combination of my Star Wars obsession and my MMO addiction. Those would be the two reasons I enjoyed it. All bard classes remind me of those happy days in SWG (before SOE ass raped it of course).

My next favorite musician class in a game was the bards of Dark Age of Camelot. They were a hybrid of healers and bards. You needed to do something called twisting while playing DAoC bards. Twisting only applies to bard classes and is when you start a song, then start another, and another to get the effects of all three (or more), while refreshing what you started with. Master bards would twist together songs to get effects at just the correct moments. For example if the group needed extra heals, you could twist in extra healing songs. It was a very dynamic and fun class to play. Plus PvP in DAoC was amazing and bards had the ability to mesmerize their enemies, thus preventing the enemy from using his skills.

Both SWG and DAoC are pretty dead games now. Today SWG is a mere shadow of what it used to be. DAoC could be worth revisiting in the future.

I think this is my last photo of Paris, well of me in Paris anyway. Be prepared for Barcelona next week!

EDIT: I just read the latest update from the blog Epic Slant by Ferrel. He talks about the upcoming patch changes in Rift. Check it out here.

The Joys of Playing a Ranger

It was a dark stormy night in Stonefield. My faithful boar, Charlie, and I were enjoying an evening stroll when... a WILD RAM ATTACKED US!

Ok that was I lie. The ram was non-aggressive and I attacked it to take screenshots (Charlie was harmed during the taking of these screenshots, he died). I'm enjoying playing as my Ranger immensely. Charlie is the greatest companion I could ask for. He has great aggroing abilities and with my pet heal we can handle 4 mobs without much problem. Pets are nice when you want to get up and make a sandwich, because they'll take care of those nasty mobbies while you're afk. I only wished he looked cute.

Rangers are great soloers thanks to their pets. Too bad I get bored of solo content, but luckily Rift allows me to swap to another soul set and then TADA I can be a tank, or bard, or sneaky little roguey bastard. The soul system in Rift is amazing. For those of you who don't know, Rift gives you the option of 4 classes, Rogue, Cleric, Warrior, and Mage. Each class has 8 souls available to it, and you can have 3 souls active at one time. The souls are typical RPG classes, things like Necromancer, Paladin, Bard, and Shaman. You get to save 4 presets of your soul choices and swap anything you want outside of combat. I think it's super cool, and you would think it would solve my altaholism... You can find a full list of the Rift classes here.

Sometimes I don't pay attention to Charlie's health while we are questing together. This almost always results in his death and I follow him to the grave pretty quickly thereafter. This is a picture of a dead Xeoni the Ranger. I should take better care of Charlie the boar.

My one problem with Rift is there seem to be updates nearly every day. This is good of course because they are fixing problems but I have a daily limit on my internet. I'm allowed 1 gig total in upload and download. MMOs luckily do not consume bandwidth in mass, but when I get surprised with a 100 meg patch I kiss 1/10th of my internet for the day goodbye. Ah, well the real problem here is that pesky internet limit. Darn you student housing! The internet likes to go down at random times as well... should be interesting if I ever get to raiding in Rift.

And I'll never forget Paris.

Cursed by Alt-a-holism

Hi my name is Susi and I'm an altaholic (Someone who can not focus on just one character in an online game, usually known as their main. These people have many "alt"ernate characters) urbandictionary.com. I've decided to abandon my Cleric in Rift for now and start playing a Rogue Kelari named Xeoni. I enjoy healing, but the draw of the bard was too strong. I'm leveling as a Ranger-Marksman-Saboteur, and having a blast both in PvE and PvP so far.

I have a new-found love for PvP and I believe League of Legends is to blame. A buddy of mine from Colorado (check out his blog http://www.bsamaripa.com/) and I have been playing a couple LoL games. We were lucky last night and had two phenomenal teams. After not playing for months I'm finally getting back into the swing of it. I love pwning newbs. Find me as TowerDivingPanda if you want to play.

I don't quite get the same rush playing PvP in Rift as I do in LoL but it is enjoyable all the same. It's also a great break from constantly questing.

I think I'll add another picture from Paris.

A new beginning

Hello there welcome to my blog. This is my first time attempting this whole blog thing so let's see how it goes.

I've wanted to start a gaming blog, specifically focused on MMOs, for a while now. I'm calling this Gaming Abroad because well I'm studying abroad. Currently I'm in Regensburg, Germany at the University of Regensburg. I'm from Colorado though and an avid female gamer and MMO player.

I'll probably throw some other gaming related posts in here. On occasion I play Magic the Gathering with the local group here, so for the sake of keeping in the theme of gaming abroad I'll post any future experiences I have with them.

I purchased Rift in the middle of March before I went to Paris. I'm playing on the German server Brutmutter. My current main is a level 28 Cleric, Amishra. I joined a guild called Circle of Friends, which has been an interesting experience. It's an open recruitment type guild so you get all types of people in there. If you've ever been in one of these guilds you know what I mean. I fall into the social achiever category of MMO gamers, but I appreciate being in a guild who doesn't mind the fact that my German isn't completely up to par.

This is a picture of Amishra and her new hammer. The hammer is a reward for a quest you get from killing the big boss dudes from the Part 2 event for River of Souls event. So you Americans can have a chance at it on the weekend. Trust me you weren't missing much by them pushing it back a weekend, in fact be grateful. The event was a little buggy, which of course is why they cancelled it.

The biggest challenge I've had playing on a German server is understanding the German internet lingo/MMO slang they use. Not only do I have troubles sometimes understanding what they're saying, but I also feel uncomfortable telling people when they need to change something. For example today I ran Mines on my little Cleric with Warden as my main soul, so I was healing. Anyway it was clear after two or three pulls that we really needed to CC or risk wiping (we wiped 3 times in total on trash). The tank was ok at holding aggro but taking massive hits from 4 mobs. I have no clue what Germans say for CC (Crowd Control for you non-MMOers out there...) so in English I typed out "We need CC O.o" in hopes someone knew what I meant. Luckily they did and started turning mobs into squirrels. We finished the dungeon, but it was rough going. Even though the group was only ok, I felt I could have done a much better job healing. I'm still toying with my healing souls. I have a great build for PvP healing, but PvE healing is still a bit of a challenge for me. It's a bit disheartening since I've been a healer in every MMO I've played since EQ, time to do some research on the forums...

And in closing I would like to add a picture of me in Paris, because it's gaming abroad after all.