I started playing Aion this past Sunday. Originally, we had planned on playing on the Asmodian side (because hey, red eyes and manes and claws are cool), but found a lot of people in our group were having difficulty connecting to the server or could not make an Asmodian character because that faction had been locked.  So, despite all of our planning, at the last second we switched servers and sides. 

Actually, I'm quite pleased we switched to Elyos. I wanted to play Elyos from the get go, but some other people were more interested in Elyos. I know there's not much of a difference other than the visual, but I like just how "happy" everything is.  



Poeta is the starting zone for Elyos, and it's beautiful. Perhaps the biggest draw to this game are the visuals. Everything in this game is stunning. The controls are pretty smooth too. It just feels good.



The quests are fairly standard in the MMO world, but they're presented a little bit better than they are in other games. Your character engages in a little conversation with the NPC and you also receive short little cut scenes for some of the more important quests and missions. This campaign (campaigns are sort of like missions from FFXI - they progress you through the story line in the world) reminded me a lot of the final quest for the Draenei in WoW, where the whole town cheers you on.



I decided to level as a Chanter since Kyle was rolling a Templar and I figured it would be a good combo. So far, Chanter seems to be a lot of fun. Your main role is to buff everyone in your group with your Mantras, which act in the same way as a Paladin's auras do in WoW, except you get to use up to three of them. You can always heal, though your heals are not as powerful as a Cleric's, and you do a decent amount of damage meleeing with your staff.



Leveling with a group is the way to go. Fights against normal mobs take a lot longer when compared to WoW, and it's difficult to handle multiple mobs on your own (some classes more than others). Respawn times are also fairly quick, so you may find mobs repopping in areas you just finished clearing. But the main reason is that it's simply a lot more fun. I've been leveling up with Kyle and Ehk, who is playing a Sorcerer. Our group works together pretty well.



I wasn't sure at first how much flying would add to the experience, but it really is an awesome feature of the game and adds a new dynamic to PvP. You're restricted in quite a few areas from flying at all, and are restricted to just gliding (basically if you jump off a cliff, your wings will pop out and you'll glide safely to the ground - usually you cover a lot of ground this way).

In areas where you are free to fly, you still cannot fly as long as you want - you have a flight timer, allowing you to stay in the air for a few minutes until it runs out. Once you're back on solid ground, your flight timer will slowly regen back up (though you can fly, as long as you have just the smallest amount in your flight timer - though you'll fall back down to earth shortly after you take off). So you can see how this can add another element to think about in PvP, figuring out when the best time to fly is. 

Overall, I'm enjoying my experience playing Aion so far and hope to post some more pictures in the future!

  We will be switching to the Israphel server, as Lumiel has become the official RP server.  Look for Lumoria on the Elyos side if you would like to join us! We now have about 14 people playing together.

Asmodian was too popular D:

A bunch of us (meaning 7) from FFXI are playing Aion once it releases. We're going as Asmodian on the Lumiel server (North America). If you're interested in joining us, you're more than welcome to! 

I haven't really felt the desire to make an entry on here in MONTHS, but I realized today that I would like something as a marker to seperate and reflect on my days again.  So here I am.

WEDDING

I'm getting married in about a week and a half.  WHAT?! I know, right.  It's so close and I should be panicking, but most things are in place by the point.  I still need to nail down renting some chairs (down to the wire, for sure) and figure out what we're doing for the ceremony (we have a justice of the peace) and I need some shoes.  But I think that's about it. 

My coworker's aunt, Paula, completed my dress alterations last week and she did an amazing job.  Just as I was putting it on for the final fitting, I got a huge grin on my face because I knew even before it was on all the way that it was going to fit.  I had no clue that having a really nice dress would make such a difference in how I would feel about the day.  Before it fit me, I was just stressed about preparing everything for it. But now that it's altered and fits me properly?  I'm just excited! 

Kyle and I are getting our marriage license tomorrow, so hopefully that won't take very long since I'm leaving work for an extended lunch in order to do it.

HONEYMOON

Kyle and I booked a fight and hotel package deal to Puerto Rico and I am SO PUMPED. Kyle hasn't been on vacation since - oh - the 1st grade?  And I haven't been on one in about 6 years, so we're totally splurging on this one.  We have an ocean view room with a balcony and a great hotel that is right on the beach in San Juan.  I'm hoping we get to go snorkeling and hike in the rainforest and lay on the beach and all sorts of fun stuff. I'm just hoping the plane doesn't crash or anything on the way there or back. 

DOG

We got another greyhound a couple of weeks ago. Her name is Suni.  She's much smaller than Mercury and brindle in color. They're kind of opposites.  Mercury is about as low maintenance as you can get, and Suni DEMANDS attention.  She is very curious and has chewed up quite a few things already, but she's learning to be a good pup.  She's very affectionate though and loves to follow me from room to room. I would like to do some training with her, since she can be a little wild and overwhelm you at times.

TRINE

So I've been playing TRINE as of late.  It's a little 5-7 hour side scrolling 3/D Platformer/puzzle game.  You control 1 of 3 characters and can switch between them as you like: a thief, a wizard, and a knight.  Each has their own set of abilities that can help you solve getting through an obstacle a number of ways. 

It can be a little frustrating at times, but the thing about this game is that it saves only completed levels.  So if you're halfway through the level and want to stop for the night, you can't quit and come back right where you left off - you'll start back at the beginning pf that level. So because of that, I usually push my way through the puzzles instead of just giving up and coming back to it later.  It's a fun game and it's also very pretty, althought the lighting effects tend to make the game lag (I have it set on High). 

WORK

Has been incredibly busy and stressful.  I'm supposed to get an hour lunch, but lately I've been eating at my desk instead to cram to finish some more stuff. Our marketing team of three people is putting together a 400 page catalog on a 3 month schedule without a manager. AAHHH. I feel like I have a million things to complete before we begin laying out the catalog next week, but I'm no where near completion on them yet.

Letterposie

Uh, I think the domain name or expired or something?  I'm not entirely sure, though I haven't even checked into it yet.  GoDaddy.com is who I registered the domain and hosting through, and usually they're awesome with communicating with me, but I didn't recieve anything from them with regard to that, so I'm not sure what's going on exactly.  I'll guess I'll look into it when I have time, sometime this century.

Wedding

April flew by and holy cow it's only three months away and holy cow I have shit-zero done. Location? Nope! Dress alterations? Nope!  I talked to my sister the other day too and she talked my ear off about the wedding - about centerpieces! and color themes! and a "special moment" with the groom before the ceremony!

I'm so thankful that she is willing to help, but hold on!  My list of "shit to arrange" was much shorter!  Location, alterations, cake, boquet, tux, dude to marry us, DONE.  No placecards, no centerpieces, no color themes, no special moments, no table linens.  My idea was this: ceremony on the beach or pond or whatever, go back to my apartment or rental cottage and sit on the couch and eat some cake and play guitar hero. Seriously. Is that totally unromantic?  I don't need all that stuff, I just need my friends and family there to witness Kyle and me finally tying the knot. 

FFXI

What? Did you read that title correctly?  Are you SURE? Cause I thought it said FFXI.  And FFXI being a title is totally not possible because I thought I had banished that game TO MY PERSONAL 7TH CIRCLE OF HELL. 

Well, turns out I had a dream about it a couple of weeks ago.  Without telling Kyle or Ehk about my dream, they had both mentioned wanting to play it again. On the same day! Without even talking to each other about it either! So I KNEW it was destiny.

We managed to get our accounts back last week and have been leveling up subjobs and wowowowoowowowow is level sync the most amazing feature ever.  Leveling subjobs has actually been enjoyable since we can just level together, no matter what level the person is.  Awesome. 

Content wise, FFXI kind of seems that it's on its last legs, but there's a lot of content that we haven't done yet, so we'll enjoy exploring that.  Hey, it's new to us, right?  I don't think we'll get the Crystalline Prophecy since it basically seems like a microtransaction thing (pay 10 bucks and get this body piece).  We did pick up WoTG though, so I've been spending my time level Scholar with Kyle's samurai, Ehk's White Mage and SAM, and Keagan's BLU.

 Kyle is away in Chicago for six days for training, which means I've been all alone for the week.  It's been kind of weird, as I've never been totally alone for this amount of time.  It's nice having Mercury around, at least.  I do really miss Kyle though - sounds so silly, since he's only been gone since Monday, but I haven't been without him for so long that his absence is making me feel really off balance.  It's really dissapointing to come home and not find him there - I mean, he is the reason that I fly out of the office as soon as the clock hits 5. His car is still in the side lot, so I always seem to forget for a moment that he's away and get excited for a brief second, until I remember that he's in Chicago.

LE SIGH. I know - all of that makes me sound like such a helpless female. SO BE IT.

DOUBT and SLUMDOG

I watched Doubt last night and really, really loved it.  It seems like a very carefully crafted movie.  The way the story was told reflected the story itself and the underlying themes. Meryl Streep was amazing and her character was pure awesome.  There just seem to be so many different ways you can interpret many details in the film and kept me up thinking about it last night. 

In contrast, I watched Slumdog Millionaire tonight, and while it seems to be an interesting story, it seemed almost thrown together. Maybe I'm missing something?  It won a ton of Oscars for a reason, right?  I just that it was ok. :(  What am I missing?

Well, the original plan was to play Prince of Persia, but Kyle is using the controller to play Last Remnant, so I've moved onto plan B.

American McGee's Alice flew into my radar a bit before Kyle and I started dating (probably a year or so after it was released in 2000 - I know, just realize the only games I played at the time had Mario in them). I expressed some interest in it, but didn't really know what the game was like at all - only that it was some twisted, dark version of Alice in Wonderland, which sounded pretty interesting to me.

So given that I'm working my way now through a very lengthy game list, I decided to give this a whirl.  I'm only a couple hours in, but so far I think the concept for the game is pretty interesting and the overall theme is really cool.  It's a platformer, which I don't have a ton of experience with, so I often find myself teetering on the edge of death - which has lead me to saving the game after every single monster I kill.  Not even joking.

We'll see if I decide to stick with it.  In other news, GRRRR at coworkers and GRRRR at not having a boss.

I finished Mass Effect Sunday night.  It's a great game and I had a lot of fun completing it.  I did most of the side missions, and in the end clocked around 30 hours.

Main Story - This was fantastic, obviously.  I loved how interactive it was and that your choices could change the course of the game.  I also enjoyed the different relationships you could cultivate and discovering the back stories of all of the different characters. It did take me a while to get into the sci-fi setting as I can't even recall ever playing a Sci-fi game before, but the detailed descriptions of planets, aliens, space ships, and more made it really easy to immerse myself and understand the setting. Also, my character was a badass.  She was an awesome, strong female lead.

Combat  - I wasn't sure how the combat was going to be, but it's really well done and very challenging. I played as a Sentinel/Medic.  This is not a game that you can plow your way through - you can pause in the middle of combat very easily and look at the situation and figure out your next move. This is probably why I enjoyed the combat so much - sometimes I have to take a break from a game if the fighting is too intense, but being able to carefully plan out what I wanted to do next really kept me from getting nervous while fighting.  Really fun.

Side Missions - These were kind of interesting little side stories, but sometimes it felt I was just trying to plow through them to get them checked off my list. I wish there was a little more to them, as they can't really compare at all to the main story line.

Graphics - This isn't the lastest and greatest graphically since it's a year or two old, but I thought some of the enviornments (especially Ilos) were gorgeous and the facial expressions on the characters blew me away. This added so much depth to the story and breathed life into these characters. On the various planents, I thought the skies were always well done, but the terrain on the planets seemed to really be lacking, especially compared to some of planents with main story involvement.

Negative - The only negatives for me really were that the side missions felt kind of empty and the inventory system.  You can only equip characters with items if they're in your current squad, or you have to run down to the bottom of your ship and go through all the different characters to see which equipment is an upgrade for who.  This gets old really fast.  There's also an item limit, and it gets annoying running through your equipment after each mission to figure out what to equip, who to equip it to, and what to sell.

Overall, great game, and looking forward to the second one.

Star Ocean

Kyle only had the last end game dungeon to run in order to complete the end game.  This dungeon is 20 floors and has no save points, and contains the best items and hardest boss in the game.  He set aside Sunday to work through it.  He started playing it around 11:30 and there he sat on the same position on the couch until 4:30. Just as he thought he was getting close to the top floor, we had a power surge and everything in the house reset. And how many times have we had a power surge before?  Never.  Awesome.

So now I think Kyle is done with Star Ocean.  Maybe he'll get the urge to finish that last dungeon someday, but I don't think it will be any time soon. :(

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So now I'm figuring out which game to play next.  I think I'll play the newest Prince of Persia for something light and fun and goooooo from there.

 FIRED

Not me, thankfully, but my boss was fired last week. There hasn't been any clear explanation given as to why she was fired - she wasn't given one.  There were rumors going around a week or so before, but knowing that she didn't really help to improve the image she gave the president I guess.  

See, she found out the week before that her husband out of the blue wanted a divorce, and then found out that he was having an affair with his coworker.  She was screaming profanities at him on the phone during work (she doesn't have a private office, it's shared with the rest of the Marketing Department (which consists of 2 designers and 1 marketing assistant/PR person) along with spending a lot of her time checking his phone records at work.  

I mean, she's was very understandably upset (as I would be) and I know it must be hard to control your emotions when you have something like that happening in your personal life, but it seems like she didn't try to control herself at work with that regard and I know our President really doesn't like bringing personal problems or issues into work.

I was sad to see her go though - she's a really nice person and a big reason why I accepted the job.  So the three of us have been fending ourselves for the past week, trying to figure out what projects were going on and what we have to finish.  Right now we're working on the large task of putting together a 300 page catalog in a couple of months without a manager to guide everything. We have daily meetings in the morning and worked out a clear time line, which helped.  If we can't pull this project off though, we're probably all out of a job, so we'll see how it goes.

It gets a little frustrating trying to get work done because people are always coming into the office asking for little things, so it's impossible to just zone into one particular project.  I think once we get deep into working on this big catalog project, we're just going to shut the door so that me and the other designer won't be interrupted.

MIRROR'S EDGE

I beat Mirror's Edge last week, over a couple of nights during the week.  I didn't realize how much I enjoyed it until I beat the game and felt a pang of sadness from not being able to play the game anymore.  It was really frustrating at times (I required Kyle's guidance on a couple of parts), but I really enjoyed pretty much everything in the game.

Any parts where I encountered enemies though sometimes proved to be too intense for me and I would have to take a break to calm down (I know, but I don't really play any single player FPS so I'm not used to taking on a bunch of enemies alone in a first person view). 

MASS EFFECT

I purchased Mass Effect through Steam over the weekend and got started with that.  I really like how strong the female version of Shepard is - I was afraid she was going to be wishy washy like the majority of video game female leads. There's tons of extra story background to read, side quests, and planets to explore, so that's all been really fun so far.

Maybe I just suck, but I've found the combat to be challenging as well (I'm playing as a Sentinel too, which is pretty much a support class, so maybe that's part of it too).  I remember exploring this one planet and I kept dying to this one particular portion of enemies.  I quit the game for a couple hours, thinking I had perhaps stumbled on an area that I wasn't supposed to be at yet in the game or something.  But when I returned, after a couple more attempts I finally killed them and found out that it was all actually part of the story line.

When it comes to arranging my squad, equipment, mods, and talent points, I don't really know WTF I'm doing. I'm just hoping I don't screw up too bad and just guessing with everything.

STAR OCEAN

Kyle is over 80 hours in now.  He got the max level of 255 on all the characters and has completed the first dungeon and a lot of the arena.  I think all he has left now is the second dungeon and the bunny racing.  He might have to save the second dungeon for the weekend though, since there are no save points in it.

WORK

Work has been going well. The company I work for produces safety signage (you know: DANGER: Don't touch this or you will DIE; or CAUTION: Wet floor - those types of things) and they had a couple of people out for various reasons, so all of their orders were backed up.  So for the past two weeks, I've been helping the production department with orders.  It's a bit brain numbing, but hopefully this week I'll actually get to design some stuff for my department.

The only thing I don't like is that there seems to be some weird stigma about leaving right at 5 PM. I'm paid a flat annual salary, so I'm not compensated for overtime or staying late or anything, even if I do need to stay past 5 and finish up a project (yes, that sucks, but in this economy I took what I could get).  People like to linger around after 5 - the other designer in the department always stays way after 5 (usually 6 or 7), which I don't understand.  People kind of look at you funny if you bolt out the door right at 5. 

I asked my boss about this and she agreed with me.  She said, "Yeah, people are always looking to see who leaves first, but I have absolutely no problem being the first one out that door."  I'm glad she doesn't have an issue with leaving when I'm actually supposed to leave.  I like the people at work and everything, but when it's 5, I want to go home.  No way I'm staying longer if I don't need to.

WEEKEND

This Saturday Kyle and I were lazy and just stayed home all day, which was nice as we haven't been able to do that for a couple of weeks.

Today, we took Mercury to the dog park.  This time we went to a different one in a park in an area called Barrington, which is a swanky neighborhood in Rhode Island.  The park was a lot bigger than the one we normally go to and had quite a few more dogs, so Mercury was able to run around and play a lot.

We normally see a lot of pitbulls and pitbull mixes at our usual dog park, but here there were mostly purebreds.  We talked to a nice couple with a Welsh Corgi, saw a Great Dane that only wanted to chill out by her owners, Beagles, a Bloodhound, a chocolate Lab, an Irish Wolfhound, some German Sherperds, and more that I can't remember.  It was kind of cool to see all the different breeds.

Mercury seems to have somehow caught some tapeworms, so we went to the pet store to pick up some dewormer.  In the parking lot we saw this cute cute cute Newfoundland puppy - so fluffy!  He was really well behaved too.  So cute!

GAMES

We (meaning Kyle, I pretty much watched most of the time) "finished" Star Ocean 4.  It was good, there's a lot of depth to the game.  Kyle is going back now and doing all of the endgame stuff.  The story was ok - there weren't any major plot twists that you couldn't figure out way ahead of time, but I liked most of the characters.  Minus Sarah.

Right now I'm playing Mirror's Edge while Kyle is doing all the rest of the Star Oceans stuff. Mirror's Edge is pretty fun, though frustrating at times.  It's hard because they don't give you all the rules to begin with, so you don't know exactly what you can and cannot do. 

I was a little hesitant to try the game since the reviews I read were mixed, but I really enjoy the visual style and the challenging puzzles. 

I haven't gotten much of a chance to play my DS at work, but when I do I try to work my way though some Mario Kart, which I haven't touched at all really.