I finally hit 31 in Rock Band last night after about a dozen duels of which I lost two.
Huh? Levels? Grinding? PvP?
Yeah, this is Rock Band. If you start exploring the Multiplayer menu in Rock Band, and avoid the unsatisfying “Band” player matching, where you and three random strangers from Xbox Live slowly come to understand why people suck, you’ll come to Tug of War and Score Duel. Score Duel was unsatisfying. Tug of War is surprisingly strategic.
You’ll rise the first few levels quickly — I was 27 after my first couple of hours. But it’s been a grind since then. I’d thought 30 was the level cap until I played someone who was 36. And so I grind. Some days it’s hard to find a group, but last night, I was getting them almost immediately, leaving me very little time to practice the quick stick twirl, which I find I am liking a lot more than the standard big spin. I saw a commercial for that new teleporting teenager movie, Jumper, and Samuel Jackson was using a big spin with this little grapple thing they use to stop people from teleporting.
So I’m a MMO player, so I guess I’ll be grinding to 50…. in Rock Band….
Vanguard: This is like Beta all over for me. In Beta, I played one day, meant to play again, never got around to it. Here, I bought the game, played one day, meant to play again, never got around to it. It’s not the bugs or lack of players or performance. It’s just TOO SIMILAR to what’s out there now. I was telling Genda the other night that I can’t see how Copernicus (from 38 Studios) can possibly succeed if they give us anything like what we already have. And that, I think, was Vanguard’s most damning failure. So, I’ll be uninstalling it. I can always reinstall it later. I just never have a free hour and figure it could best be spent playing Vanguard.
Pirates of the Burning Sea: My son got this over the weekend, he’s having a blast. He’s level sixteen or something now? Back in his level 1 ship, he can’t keep anything afloat. The lag is horrendous, but even with that, he’s having fun. He’s actually off the Xbox for hours at a time. He’s a pirate, of course, and he groups with other pirates and sails around sinking the French.
Naturally, if I play, I will have to choose the French. I have a great name: Bois Embrouille, but then I was thinking I could be Blanche DuBois, because I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers.
No particular movement with my EQ2 characters: Winterwing became a 28 bruiser after doing the Nektulos Beach questline, then heading to Butcherblock to complete some of those quests. The quests are moving toward the higher level part of Butcherblock, near the Lesser Faydark zone. Soon she’ll be starting in Steamfont as I continue bringing my very first character through EoF. Dorah, my necromancer, reached level 67 as she worked through the lower Kylong Plains quests — and got her Sokokar, of course. Every single quest reward has been an enormous upgrade for her.
