Daily Blogroll 12/7 — Expansion edition


The Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor 69 years ago today. Now we’re having a little payback at the expense of the whole world. I know a lot of people who plan to take days off to play their way through the entire expansion as quickly as they can. My cousin Tom even (jokingly, I hope), regretting that he had to work, thought he might let his son take the day off from school to play.
I’d like to be more excited about the WoW expansion. But — I just don’t think a game can make me feel like that anymore.
On with the blogroll — it’s been a long weekend. I was too busy playing a game which cannot be named to write much, so there’s a lot to catch up.

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Daily Blogroll 12/2 — Rift-tease Edition


There’s a Rift Beta event this weekend, and that’s about all you’ll ever hear of the beta from this site at least. To call their license agreement secretive would be an understatement. In Rift, you start out dead, and then are sent into the past to, I guess, prevent the events that led to your death from occurring, or something. Best let them explain it:

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the survivors from the desolate future of Telara have resurrected champions and sent them into the past to prevent the dystopia caused by the Bloodstorm and the blindly faithful Guardians. Join the techno-magical Defiant in their fight to change the course of history!
Play to Win! Escape to Freemarch and you could be eligible to win an NVIDIA Geforce GTX 460 video card! Terms and conditions apply, click here for details. In-Game Prize Packs will be given away to ten (10) select players who complete the objective!

So, there you go. Log in, escape to Freemarch, and you could win a video card, or an in-game prize pack. You will never, unfortunately, be able to tell anyone in game WHERE you got that prize pack, because as far as future history is concerned, this beta never happened. The first rule is: You don’t talk about Rift Beta. The second rule is: YOU DON’T TALK ABOUT RIFT BETA! (Thanks to Amanda Rain for the Fight Club ref!)
Blogroll juiciness after the break!

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Daily Blogroll, 12/1 — Dress Like a Pirate Edition


It was a 7.1 gig patch, but I did managed to get into Flying Lab’s Pirates of the Burning Sea last night, and spent a little more time with it tonight. Just went through the tutorial, did some of the Yuletide quests, joined a “society” (guild) named La Fédération, and wandered around the starting town. Veteran players were being helpful over the nationwide chat and the server was hopping. One server for North America, one for the EU, and a test server. I haven’t played PotBS for a couple of years, but I was very much impressed by their improvements to the land game. The NPCs sing, dance, and make the town very much a lively place to stroll — see the video at the end.
There’s a bit of rough sailing today, though; read all about it after the break.

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Daily Blogroll, 11/30 — Worst Case Scenario edition


World of Warcraft’s forthcoming Cataclysm expansion (1 week away!!!!) is still setting fire to the blogroll today. Hey, if all a MMO has to do these days to generate some buzz is destroy the world, well, I have a couple candidates who could use some devastation.
I logged on to Vanguard yesterday evening to check on how my characters had fared in the big colossal server merge last July, and was shocked to find that whenever it was I last logged into the game, there had been no patches since. For a game that has had zero developer support in eleven months, the community there still seems vibrant and positive. You just can’t kill a good community.
You know? Forget EQ Next. EverQuest doesn’t need another reboot. EverQuest players are never going to jump ship to a completely new game, anyway. Why not VANGUARD Next? Come on, let’s start a petition or something.
Crunchy hot blog stuff after the break.

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Daily Blogroll 11/29, Nostalgia edition


Saturday, I linked to a raid force taking down some old Kunark and Velious mobs. That got me into the game to try and see if I could find any of those same bosses – Cazic Thule, Faydedar, Trakanon and Velketor the Sorceror – up. As far as I know, CT and Faydedar, in their original forms, are no longer in the game. Trakanon had been killed just moments before I got to his lair. Velketor was up, though, and I’ve embedded a video of our meeting at the end.
Hit the break for the latest gossip from around the interwebs!

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