The Holidays

If I have learned nothing else in life, it is that history repeats itself time and time again.  Sometimes this is a good thing and other times it isn’t good at all.

One constant in this world of raging madness is the struggle.  It is the struggle that keeps us focused to stay on the path of life always headed toward the next destination.  The destinations along our path are sometimes nice and other times they are terrible places to be.  Right now I am in a bad place, there are a few different things going on in my life that I don’t care to share with the rest of the world.  The short story can be summed up as, I have lost my way along my path and am aimlessly wandering around somewhere…I will let you all know when I get back on track, until then, always remember to keep your 2 eyes on the road, you never know what you might miss along the way….

WoW Log 28 Dec 07

Well I hope everyone has had an enjoyable Christmas.  I can’t complain really, Santa decided to bring me a late present, perhaps it was because he was so busy he figured I could wait a couple days and surprise me with a gift left on my porch…What was this gift?  Well it was a Logitech G15 gaming keyboard.  I am happy I got it, I am still tinkering with the different macros and bindings.  I went to the logitech.com website and downloaded the latest software and got everything installed, it automatically detected my two games I am currently playing, WoW and Enemy Territory Quake Wars without a hitch.  When I started up WoW the LCD display immediately showed me my current character’s stats, which is very cool.  Overall I am happy with the keyboard, the litup keys are nice too because I prefer to game in a dimly lit environment most of the time.  Usually the only light I have is from the television playing in the background.

Also, I picked up a new mod from the curse gaming mod site, it is simply called Quest Helper and it does just that, it helps you complete quests showing you the quickest routes and where to go and what to do.  In a way it makes questing too easy, but I have to say it makes life much easier, I have taken a lot less time looking up quest information on wowhead now giving me more time to get stuff done.

Tabeyus is level 65 now, I have done a couple guild runs into the Blood Furnace as a tank of course and I think I am getting better at it.  Last night there was 4 of us, our main tank a warrior, a priest, a hunter and myself and besides a few hiccups we owned the place.  I got a new set of shoulders off the last boss, rounding out my feralness quite well.  I can’t wait to get flying form…traveling through the outlands on the ground isn’t so bad, but could be so much better with air travel.  I managed to reach level 375 in alchemy over the past few days by buying the required mats to make the dreamless sleep potion.  One less thing to worry about later.

I also started doing a few daily quests with Giznad, since he has nothing better to do he might as well earn some gold for me, so I have been doing the Skyguard quests taking out the Skettis eggs and escorting the prisoner.  It is an easy way to get 20 gold every day.

Helzbelz is now level 26 and playing him has been a learning experience, testing out my healing abilities while in a group has been fun, I have found that the holy shield is my best defense in almost every situation besides when I want to make a jump from a high distance it doesn’t protect me from taking damage.  I am going to go with a shadow priest build for leveling and I might change that once I get to a higher level.

Until next time friends I will be lost in the grind and I hope everyone has a Happy New Year.

WoW Log 22 Dec 07

Hello again and welcome back to another installment from yours truly.  I wish you all the best and Happy Holidays!  Now, where was I?  Oh yes, the last time you heard I was back in the World of Warcaft and this still holds true…  I decided since I hadn’t tried my hand at playing a priest that it was about time I try one out, so I went ahead and created a Draenei and so far it has been pretty interesting.  Playing a priest is somewhat similar to playing a warlock, mainly because you are squishy and you rely primarily on your spells to take out mobs and such, but they are very different in a lot of ways too because you don’t get a pet, which is good in my opinion, but you get your power word spells, such as shield and fortitude…the shield has proven to be one of the most important spells I know…but overall I have enjoyed playing him.  Right now my priest, who happens to be named Helzbelz is at level 16.  I just learned the skill Physic scream, which sends any mobs within 8 yards of you running in fear…well most of the time anyway, that helps if you have more than one monster attacking you…obviously.

I have decided that am going to focus my attention on leveling my druid, Tabeyus, and my new priest, Helzbelz, my hunter who is level 70 and my warlock who has been level 60 are merely banks/ auctioners and crafters for my other toons.  I decided to pick up jewelcrafting for my Draenei because he has a racial skill of +5 to gem cutting and because I haven’t tried that trade out yet, so far it has been pretty useful and the items I make usually sell pretty well on the AH.

Questing on the islands of the Draenei has been pretty fun and besides the few killing for drops quests, they go pretty quickly.  My plan right now is to reach level 20 and attempt to find a mage who could port me to either Stormwind or Ironforge to save me the run all the way from Menethil Harbor…that is quite a haul and I have done it plenty of times before, but if I don’t have to I am willing to pay for someone to save me all that time…

Overall my reintroduction into the World of Warcraft has been quite enjoyable, almost too much fun, I have to catch myself getting from getting too far lost in the grind because that can be dangerous if you don’t leave a trail of bread crumbs to find your way back home again.

Enjoy the screenshots, I am currently using Mirage UI, see the link listed under Gaming Sites.

Things we do to pass the time…

I was over messing around at icanhascheezburger.comand they have a cool little place where you can edit pictures and stuff…anyway here is my creation…

moar funny pictures

It’s late, I know…

Christmas Cheer

Can you feel it?  I know nothing brings back the joyous memories of being a kid quite like the awesome smells and sights of the Holiday season.  From gingerbread cookies in the oven to the grand lighting shows similar to that of a creation of Clark Griswald.  I haven’t been in the merriest of moods for a while, but I think between a combination of different reasons it might be settling in.  I hope you like the layout of the blog, I thought it was nice…

As far as a Christmas special edition post here at LITG I guess this would be it, so sit right back, pour yourself a cup of hot apple cider and fire up the fireplace friends.

First off, I would like to go back in time a bit to the early days of gaming and how I guess you could say I was influenced to become what you could call (your typical American male gamer) a gaming connoisseur.  The very first memory I have is of my Dad bringing home this big flat yellow thing with two knobs on each side of it and he hooked it up to our console television and showed me how to move the white lines up and down, trying to keep the white dot bouncing back and forth from each side…sound familiar?  PONG…I wish I knew where that gaming system was today…probably could fetch a nice price on Ebay…but why auction off a piece of history to the highest bidder?  After that I think it was a multitude of various handheld devices, from the football games with the red dots to a simpler version of space invaders, then the Atari 2600 happened and OMG!  I have to get one!  But, being on the cutting edge like my Dad was he thought I should get a Colecovision, Donkey Kong…that is the game I remember playing the most…it was their answer to Pac-Man on the Atari I suppose.  Almost all of my friends had Ataris but I got the Colecovision, which made me pretty cool I suppose, we ended up getting more games, Zaxxon, The Smurfs, there were many more, but they are history now.  Then the home computer became popular, the Commodore 64, I didn’t end up getting one, but my sister did, the Commodore 64c model to be exact.  My Dad would bring home games from work on the 5 and 1/4 inch floppies and I would fire them up with my friends for some gaming fun.  Then sometime around 1986 the computer known as ADAM came into our household.  I remember it had a tape drive, strangest thing, I tried playing music cassettes in it, but it didn’t work, we had the game, Buck Rogers, but we kept having problems with it so my Dad sent it back.

Now, let’s fast forward to 1989 and Nintendo, Super Mario Brothers…need I say more?  This game had me hooked from the start, I would invest large amounts of time mastering my jumping abilities saving the princess.  But by this time I was a Junior in High School and spending time with friends was taking up most of my time and gaming became less important to me.  It wasn’t until I got married and met a friend who had a Super Nintendo that he sold to me did I get to try out Mortal Kombat, once again I was hooked, that and Street Fighter 2.  I spent more time playing those two games than anything I played before that for sure.  The time period here from around 1992 through 1994.  It wasn’t until I went to Korea in 1998 when I met a coworker who introduced me to the Playstation with the many of thousands of games being released I couldn’t get enough.  What made it that much more enticing was the fact that I could get a mod chip put in my PS to play the copied games, which sold for no more than $5 over there in Korea.  It was amazingly cheap and so much fun to go down to the store and see what was for sale.  I know I spent way too much time over there gaming (and getting drunk), but I had fun, so that’s all that matters.

We are getting closer to the present day and what I guess you could call my transition to PC’s from consoles was more defined.  In Korea I had a lot of friends who had computers, and back in 1999 3dfx was the king of the hill when it came to 3D cards, most people had Pentium 2 machines with 200mhz processors…

I already had purchased a Cyrix based PC with a 200mhz processor prior to going to Korea with a Voodoo 2 video card.  Once we got to Wyoming in 2000 I went ahead and got a barebones system with an Athlon 700mhz, 128mb ram, and of course the Voodoo card in it.  I still have this machine and use it for my media center PC, I have it hooked up to my TV in the basement.  At this point I was hooked on Diablo, Diablo 2, Starcraft, Quake 2, Unreal Tournament, eventually moving onto BF1942 once I upgraded to a better machine.

Over the past few years I guess you could say ever since I tried out World of Warcraft in early 2005 I have been playing MMO’s with the occasional mix of FPS titles in there.  The other big one for me it Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, I have played a lot of that game, it’s free, can’t beat it…

These days of course as you know I am still playing WoW and sometime next year I will once again be upgrading my computer with the latest and greatest for under $2,000.  I try to stick to that price range, usually I can pick up the best components that came out around 6 months earlier and get a pretty decent gaming machine for that price.

What does the future hold for me?  I can’t say, I can only imagine more MMO’s, possibly something similar to the Matrix plugin happening, the total immersion into a virtual world, where things happen real-time and things you do have a chain reaction making permanent changes in this consistent world.