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  • LOTRO Tour 11: Thorenhad to Rivendell

    In our continuing quest to travel to the ends of Middle Earth (at least without area transitions), we now leave the moron sons of Elrond and head to Rivendell to meet up with Lord Elrond in his library. We don’t take a hidden passage that Peter Jackson decided was appropriate for The Hobbit movie, but instead take the normal route. We ride from Thorenhad to Rivendell, still in the Trollshaws. We cross the Ford of the Bruinen and head up a steep trail to the High Moors, then down into Imladris. We enter the Last Homely House and visit Elrond in his Library.

    The music in Imladris is some of the most pleasant in the the game, and the game has lots of moving music. The scenery is pretty good, and the water isn’t too bad. The biggest problem with Rivendell is that everything is too spread out to make it a useful home base for crafters. The changes to Bree recently have made Bree a great location for crafting, with vaults, fields, workbenches, forges, and ovens all in close proximity. The only better place that I can think of is Galtrev, which adds representatives from all the crafting guilds to a room off the crafting hall (so that’s why everyone should buy the Return to Galtrev skill when you become Kindred with Dunlanders, except, of course, Wardens and Hunters who can get their port skills earlier).

    Also in LOTRO news, I picked up one of the new Teal Fireworks Steeds for my Champion yesterday. It was a new addition to the Anniversary rewards, and since I had last year’s one, which was still available, I figured I’d better get this one. Its colors are teal and purple, so it’s pretty effeminate, but my champ is a manly elf, so he feels perfectly comfortable riding a girly horse, at least until he gets to Rivendell, where the bored elves will tease him endlessly, until he thumps them…

     

  • LOTRO: Harwick Mounted Daily

    Rather than bore you with more of the Middle Earth tour, I’ll post an example of a daily mission given out in Harwick. This mission is one of those given as part of the overall goal of rebuilding the destroyed town of Hytbold. Each mission earns 5 tokens that can be used to rebuild some part of the town (each component takes 5, 10, or 25 tokens).

    This mission is being posted as an example of the mounted combat that came as part of the Riders of Rohan expansion to the game. I love the mounted combat, but make no claims of being particularly good at it, though I’m certainly getting faster at doing these missions. The whole video is less than 3 minutes.

     

  • LOTRO Tour 10: Ost Guruth to Thorenhad

    Continuing the tour of the vast Middle Earth as presented in LOTRO, we ride from Ost Guruth in the Lone Lands to Thorenhad in the Trollshaws. We stop by Bilbo’s stone trolls and then end with the sons of Elrond. Unlike games like Skyrim and Star Trek Online, where most of the terrain is accessible, in LOTRO, there are very clear boundaries that channel the player along certain paths. On the way to the stone trolls, I took a wrong path through a bunch of live trolls (but too low-level to attack me) and ended up back near the road. I needed to use the map to find my way to the stone trolls, since I haven’t played much in the Trollshaws lately.

    I end up at Thorenhad, where the moron spawn of Elrond hang out. I call them that, because in the Ford of Bruinen skirmish, one or the other brother needlessly attacks a couple of baddies that position themselves in an obvious, but out of the way, spot. This always happens at the most inopportune time, like when many other baddies are attacking, so if you don’t have a healer on your side, it could be bad, since you lose if one of the Elrond spawn dies.

    I did the path on my war-steed since they are faster even than the rented horse rides between stable masters.

     

  • LOTRO weekend update

    This was a good weekend to play LOTRO. Not only was the Anniversary Festival going on, they were running a special 100% XP bonus all weekend. Because of that, I didn’t do much with my Lore Master, because he is at the level cap, but instead took advantage of the XP bonus to work on my Warden and Minstrel. The Warden is questing in Dunland and went from level 68 to 71, while the Minstrel is in Moria and is now level 57 from 54 or 55. I also did a little work on my Hunter in Rohan, but he’s still level 79.

    I did run the Hytbold dailies once on my LM and figured out what was going on with not being able to rebuild more of Hytbold. It turns out there are 2 rebuild quest givers in each area, once for when you are an Ally to the faction the area is named for, and another for when you are Kindred. I am Kindred with the Sutcrofts, so the 2nd guy showed up and I spent the more than 100 Hytbold tokens I’d built up.  I am close to Kindred with 2 of the other factions and will continue working on it. Last week, my LM also finished the Eastern Rohan epic quest line, which ends with a bit of a whimper. The final prize is a 2nd Age Legendary Bridle for your horse, which is a great thing, but remember that the quest line in Great River gave us 2 Worn Symbols of Celebrimbor, so we could make 2 level 75 2nd Age Legendary Items. This Bridle seems like a letdown, though I’m sure the reasoning is that we should get all our really good stuff from the new raids (which I haven’t done, because nobody wants a Lore Master – they always call for healers or Captains).

    Overall, a very fun weekend in LOTRO. I really like the way Moria has been redone. It is much easier to get around and the quests tend to be better. I suppose it is a lot of work and not very cost effective for the dev team to redo all of the areas, but some facelifts, particularly in Enedwaith and Misty Mountains would make them more appealing. Moria needs more fast travel routes, too. It’s annoying to have to take a slow pony to Orc Watch or some of the other southern locations.

  • Zen Pinball recorded with Hauppauge HD PVR 2

    Note: I’m truly horrified that I didn’t spell Hauppauge right in either the title or the article. And I knew better… Sorry Hauppauge!

    I bought the Hauppauge HD PVR 2 Gaming Edition when it was on sale at Amazon a week or so ago, and finally got a chance to hook it up yesterday. As a test, I recorded the excellent Zen Pinball running on my PS3. This video shows one of the Avengers tables, which look and sound great. I am not a very practiced player, so the game is over mercifully quickly for those of you that watch the video.

    The HD PVR 2 is a nice step up from the old HD PVR that I had before. With that one, I had to switch cables and do all sorts of annoying and tedious things to set it up for either XBox360 or PS3. The new one can have both attached at the same time, which is very nice. The biggest bummer is the lack of an easy way to switch between inputs without going into the software running on the PC. I also may return my unit, because it seems to have a cosmetic flaw: only half the unit lights up when it is in standby mode, so apparently some of the LEDs must not be working. Overall, the video quality seems good, so if you want to record your PS3 or XBox360, this seems to be the unit to get.

     

  • Too Many MMO Special Events, Too Little Time

    The number of daily things I need to do in two of my favorite games keeps growing, yet my time to do them in does not, sadly. In LOTRO, I should be doing Hytbold dailies with my level 85 Lore Master, and, until recently, I’ve been pretty good about doing so. The two things that have changed that are: a) I can’t find any more things to fix in Hytbold, though I know there must be more; and b) Star Trek Online has started the Crystalline Catastrophe special event!

    STO’s new event has us run an improved version of the old and horrible Crystalline Catastrophe encounter. The new one is actually winnable with a PUG (pick-up group for those of us who aren’t MMO aficionados) and includes lots of nasty Tholians to deal with, too. It is not particularly easy, as the Crystalline Entity can do lots of damage, especially after it finishes absorbing energy for the attacks of the players who weren’t paying much attention. I have to do it twice each day, once for my Fed Tactical guy and again for my KDF Engineer. It takes about 15 or 20 minutes and is pretty fun. The end goal is a big chunk of dilithium and more, so it should be worth it.

    I’ve also been doing some of the New Romulus Embassy daily missions to get some Fleet Marks so I can help my moribund fleets progress in construction of the embassy and space station. Generally, those are short missions, the longest of which involves flying around the planet to scan for radiation, so maybe 6 or 8 minutes.

    But now back to LOTRO, the 6th Anniversary Festival has started. I put a couple of my alts through the main festival quest line, but probably won’t do more. I have both of of the festival mounts among various mounts, and while I like the fireworks one a lot, the Anniversary mount isn’t my style. I do have some advice for players in the beer fight in Thorin’s Hall, though: stay in the arena after you get your points so others that aren’t as awesome as you can get their points too. There’s plenty of time to turn it in, so get knocked around a few times to help others out. I did that last night with my Hunter and I think the gesture was appreciated by a couple of people that hadn’t finished yet.

    So I suppose this is a good problem to have – my favorite games are keeping things interesting with special events. Now if only I had more time!

  • Got a War Steed for my Hunter in LOTRO

    Yesterday’s 10.02 patch to LOTRO fixed at least one of the annoying bugs I mentioned in my previous post: the ability to track Legendary Items now works properly again. I haven’t checked if the goats are still gliding their way across Dunland, Eregion, and Great River, but that’s a minor issue that just damages immersion, but doesn’t significantly impact the game. I have high hopes that it is fixed and will report later if it isn’t.

    I’ve been working hard on Tallhelm, my Hunter, to get him up to level 75 and into Rohan so he could get a War Steed. I finally managed to do so, and I like it. I also made him a level 75 First Age bow, since I got a Worn Symbol of the Elder King in a lootbox (perhaps the greatest lootbox ever?). The war steed skills for Hunter differ significantly from my Lore Master’s skills. The Hunter has a few more ranged damage skills, while the Lore Master has a health steal skill and a damage reflection buff. Perhaps the Hunter will get a heal skill later, but if not, then he will need to kill quickly and get out of trouble fast, while the Lore Master may have more ability to stay in the fight longer because of the heal ability. We’ll see how it goes, but so far, I’m very much enjoying having 2 characters that can use War Steeds and do the excellent mounted combat added to LOTRO with the Riders of Rohan expansion.

    My Lore Master has been busy with the Hytbold daily quests, and has rebuilt part of the town. Some of the quests are great, but others are terrible. I tried a race from Cliving about 4 or 5 times, but either kept being unable to find a race gate (pillar of light) or, in the last case, server lag meant it didn’t register when I went through it TWICE! So I gave up on that one. Another very frustrating one is climbing the tower in Eaworth. I got pretty far up last night, but fell near the top after about 10 minutes of trying. Gave that one up too. I like the mounted combat missions the best. In fact, I wish the devs would come up with mounted skirmishes. I’d love to do those over the conventional skirmishes any day (assuming they are good).

    As an experiment, I put the Send to Kindle button on the website. Why anyone would want to use it for this content is beyond me, but it’s neat and I’m a nerd, so it’s there. Enjoy!

  • Buggy LOTRO updates make it not quite as fun

    The LOTRO developers have been doing a tremendous job of adding features with the many updates they’ve been doing recently, but perhaps quality control has been suffering. This latest update (#10) made a number of significant changes, including adding some instances around the Lonely Mountain (surely to try to exploit the publicity surrounding the Hobbit), as well as changing the primary stat for Wardens from might to agility and changing/nerfing some of the armor set bonuses.

    Those are mostly good changes, but a number of bugs were introduced as well, and they vary from trivially annoying to show stoppers. A trivially annoying one is that the game forgets which Legendary Weapons you are tracking (displaying their level on the screen). You can turn it back on, but the game forgets when you log out. A worse problem that hit me last night was that as I entered the Great River region, everything stopped. I couldn’t move, get off my mount, activate any skills, or even log out. Eventually, I killed the game, which resulted in a graphics driver hang. Upon trying to log in again, it hung pretending to try to clean up the old connection. Killing the client a few times had the same result. Eventually, I waited a while, rebooted, and it worked. So not a terrible thing, but annoying and unfortunate. Lots of others are running into the graphics driver hangs that are making the game unplayable for them. At least in my case, it didn’t prevent me from playing once the crazy server connection issue timed out.

    Another bug that I’ve noticed since the patch before Update 10 is that the goats in Eregion, Dunland, and Great River are gliding rather than walking. Obviously their animation is broken. Their run is okay, because if you attack them, they run like crazy to get you, but their usual walking behavior is messed up. Again, not a big deal, but it sure breaks the illusion of the game world to have magic gliding goats.

    In short, I’m happy that LOTRO is getting new content and is being actively developed, but some of these bugs are annoying and should have been fairly obvious to catch. So the devs should keep up their good work and QA should stop drinking on the job. 😎

  • Enjoying iPad game Acheron Prime

    In addition to playing LOTRO and STO, I’ve been playing a fun iPad space RPG called Acheron Prime.

    Like Egosoft’s X* games, it’s clear that this game was not created by native English speakers, as the voice acting and spelling are terrible, but, as with the X* games, it doesn’t take much away from the game. (For the two of you who aren’t familiar with regular expressions, X* means games like X2, X3, XTension, etc.)

    In Acheron Prime, you play a space pilot flying in a 3rd person view from just above and behind your ship. In the game, you must fight pirates and mercenaries, mine asteroids (actually, mineral or gas pockets), and trade so you can buy bigger and better ships and equipment. You equip your ship with weapons that do various types of damage, sensors, mining lasers, missiles, salvage or repair drones, exploration drones, and armor plate, in order to handle bigger threats. Then you explore the solar system in order to figure out why you have no memory and what you were trying to do when you were attacked, causing your memory loss.

    The game is pretty, as the image below shows, and it has surprising depth, both in the plot and the side-quests that make you explore and fight.

    IMG_0142

    The controls are very good, and, in my opinion, much better than Galaxy On Fire 2, which had controls that made it hard to hit anything. Here, the stick on the left side controls your ship’s turn, while the large thrust button controls whether you move or stop (yes, there are only those two options). The A, B, and C buttons control weapons or other equipment in your ship. Up to 5 buttons can be enabled, and each has context sensitive rules which allow you to, for example, not fire a missile if the enemy is too close or is very damaged. These rules are pretty flexible, and you can define ones that suit your needs. I use A for most weapons, B for mining, and C for missiles.

    There are a few bugs and issues. The biggest issue/bug is that finger registration is poor in the lists for buying and selling stuff. It is very hard to select the right item. An annoying issue is that the game only saves when you dock at a space station, so if you push the home button to check your mail and the app gets purged from memory, then you lose your progress unless you just docked. That should be fixed in any game for a mobile platform. It is crazy to assume we can always spend the time to get back to the space station to save.

    All in all, it’s a terrific game, and I’m only part way through. I have no idea how far along I am, but I’m level 39 (lower center of the picture) and I’ve seen people in forums that are in the high 60s! So there is a lot of game here, making it a good deal if you like space games. If you like Galaxy on Fire, try this one. Killing targets is actually possible here, though they aren’t always pushovers. I’ve died a few times. Even my battlecruiser has had its shields knocked down before I destroyed the pirates attacking me.

  • Choose your favorite Free-To-Play MMO: Star Trek Online or Lord of the Rings Online

    Massively is having a vote today between my two favorite F2P MMOs: Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) and Star Trek Online (STO). I enjoy them both tremendously, as I think both have created compelling stories and fun content based on their respective universes, so I decline to vote one over the other (though frankly, I play LOTRO a bit more than I play STO).

    If you want to cast a vote, go here.