femalegamer

It’s a quiet day gaming wise… apparently the biggest news is that Tiger Woods is playing golf via video game while his knee heals. I’m glad he’s keeping with it and not going to lose his edge… that certainly makes me feel better.

So, since the exciting gaming news was not overly exciting, I though I would have a fun video link day. To start this we need to get a Zero Punctuation review going!

If you’ve never witnessed a ZP review you are sorely, sorely missing in brilliant laughs! Not to mention the most bizarrely frank and on-target reviews, and best done infast-spoken British-born Australian accented goodness. What was originally started as two posts on Youtube was quickly snatched up by the Escapist and new episodes can be seen every Wednesday. If you click the following link, you can visit ZP’s home on The Escapist. I HIGHLY recommend you watch The E3 Trailer Park, Age of Conan and The Orange Box.

Next up, we have to give credit to The Guild, which according to their official site is, “is an independent sitcom webisode about a group of online gamers. It is written for gamers, about gamers by a gamer. Episodes vary from 3-6 minutes in length, and follow the Guild members’ lives online and offline.”

All in all, it’s pretty damn funny! Check it out!

Other webisodes are available via their Web site here!

Happy gaming and have a great long weekend!

The Boston Herald has reported on a presentation given at the American Psychological Association’s convention… The findings? Video games and MMORPGs, like Age of Conan and World of Warcraft, not only make you smarter, but can help improve your incision skills.

Wow. And not of the Warcraft variety… nope, this is more the exclamation of surprise. I knew that video games are considered to be a boon for hand-eye coordination, keeping seniors active and helping stroke survivors regain their motor skills, but surgeons!?

According to the study, laproscopic surgeons who play games are 27 percent faster at advance surgical procedures and made 37 percent fewer errors than surgeons that don’t game.

Hrm… apparently when you’re looking for a new doctor you should add to your list of questions: “So, what server are you on and how far into Sunwell Plateau are you?

I apologize for my extended absence the past few weeks. The good news is I am back and my project is almost complete. It truly was a great, albeit time-consuming endeavor… a 100+ page Age of Conan class guide.

Unfortunately, my class (Bear Shaman) was only at 40 when I started the project… so the research involved a lot of playing, on top of writing. Well, I can truly say that that probably did in the amount of time I will spend in Age of Conan. I think the game has potential, but has several months to go before it reaches it. Forced playing made me less likely to be patient and wait for Funcom to get their act together.

So, it looks like I’m heading back to Warcraft! I’m finding the transition back to be interesting however. For the first time in my WoW life, I’ve come back from another game and found myself missing features. The ability to sprint on all toons in AoC… brilliant! Solo instances in AoC… really smart! Combat that is more than 10 main attacks that are triggered by hitting one key… awesome! And, the ability to line up future attacks… something sorely missing in the WoW world.

Hauteness over at Single in L.A. tagged me in one of her recent posts. Seeing As I’ve been absolutlely M.I.A. the past few weeks, thanks to a rather large project I have coming due, I thought I’d take a few moments away from it and post. In the meantime, I promise I will be back full force soon, just a bit overwhelmed!

Here’s the rules:

1. Link back to the person who tagged you
2. Mention the rules on your blog
3. Tell about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours
4. Tag 6 following bloggers by linking them
5. Leave a comment on each of the tagged blogger’s blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged.

Of course, I may tinge my responses with a video game slant….

1. World of Warcraft: 4 70s: Hunter, Mage, Druid (feral) and Warlock. 2 mid-60s: Priest and Rogue. Missing the game terribly and looking forward to getting back into it!

2. Age of Conan: Initially played a Demonologist, but switched characters with my husband, since he was playing a Bear Shaman and I was hired to write a Bear Shaman Class Guide (that would be the large project that’s kept me busy). Looking forward to finishing the guide and heading back to Warcrack.

3. Top 5 First Person Shooters: Half Life 1&2, Deus Ex, No One Lives Forever and Doom 2 (for old times sake!).

4. I’m a keyboard hog. If my husband and I tackle one game together, he rarely gets the controls. I think that’s probably why we went to MMORPGs… both of us can play together on our own computers.

5. Favorite Sims: Pharaoh, Emperor and Zoo Tycoon. I even take Sims to the competitive side. Hubby and I play side by side, and its all about me having the most money, happiest people, most resources or the prettiest setup.

6. Next up: Wii Fit. We’ve got the Wii… just need the Fit and we’re golden.

Tagged:

Entertainment on Parade

GameSource

Vision

Several years ago I dreamt of making a living out of my passions: writing, computer games and music. Somehow, within the past six months, I pulled it off. I’m a freelancer, the equivalent of a mercenary… my words go to the highest bidder, or in some cases the bidders that allow me to write about what I love, regardless of if they are the highest bidder.

I’ve blogged about games, obviously, and I’ve written game guides, mostly for World of Warcraft (which was cake since I’d been playing the game for three years). The WoW guides truly were second nature: I knew everything I was going to have to say right from the start. Recently though, I’ve taken on an Age of Conan guide, which has been an interesting experience.

With AoC, while I’ve learned alot already, I am still learning as I go and having to keep notes as I play. It’s an entirely different experience. It actually, gasp, feels like work! And, I can’t complain, really, I’m well aware of this. But still, when I log into the game, I know it is more work than passion.

I’m wondering if other people have felt that way. I realize probably not as much from the writing side, but have you ever played a game that felt like more of a chore to get through than fun. Was there a game you played that you didn’t want to continue, but you felt obligated to? Anyway - on that note, I should probably get back to work…

Yet again it was another wonderful weekend of gaming within the FG household (and outside the household as well). On the Fourth of July we went over to a party and partook in some Wii Mario Party fun as well as having our first experience with the Xbox version of Rock Band.

Now, I never got it - I just couldn’t understand the draw of that game (or Guitar Hero for that matter). And then I saw it in action. Four of my friends were up there singing, drumming, and rocking out on guitar and bass. It looked like such a blast, but I couldn’t bring myself to try it: They had so many hours invested in their band - I didn’t want to ruin things within 30 seconds (that and I was too afraid to embarrass myself on Medium, having never tried Easy before. Yet, I had so much fun watching them play.

My hubby and I talked about getting the game and how much fun we could have. But, it would draw away from our original intent of getting a Wii*. (*Late the next night we learned that the Wii Rock Band had just been released.)

Saturday we Age of Conan’ed it for about eight hours. We’ve found that it is harder to have an entire day marathon when it comes to AoC. We never had problems playing World of Warcraft for 18 hours straight, but AoC wipes us out after 6 or so. We’ve debated why and all we can come up with is that 1. the text boxes are harder to read, making your eyes strain more; and 2. WoW is bright and cartoonish whereas AoC is going for more lifelike, but it is also, as far as we can tell, a mostly dismal world… A dismal day in real life makes you sleepy, therefore a dismal day in gaming also makes you sleepy. I digress…

Sunday, we debated the options - we were going over to other friends later in the afternoon for more Wii fun. Our morning could be spent playing AoC, or going to the nearest Best and “checking out” the Wii, Wii Rock band and all the Wii paraphernalia. We chose the latter and several hundred dollars later, we were home with our Wii, Rock Band and various accessories. There was just about enough time to get it set up before we went to our friends home - where we had a fabulous dinner and played Mario Party.

By the time we got home around 10 p.m. we were ready to check out Rock Band on our own. The time flew by and before we knew it, it was 2:30 a.m. and I knew I had to call it a night whether I wanted to or not. So… I’m looking forward to more Rock Band fun tonight, and doing my vocal exercises this afternoon to limber up my tone deaf voice. I already have several thoughts on the Wii version of the game, but I’ll save them for a review tomorrow.

Happy gaming!

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, my husband and I picked up Age of Conan out of curiosity. Despite its bugs, and there are many, oh, so many, the game really seems to have great potential! We’ve leveled our “main” toons up to 40-something (I’ve lost track) with some ease. It seems as though the developers were planning on a much higher focus on end-game content. (In various reviews I’ve read, leveling to 80 takes about 250 hours, as opposed to World of Warcraft’s 500 and some much, much longer times for other games). I even got a second character up to 20 in one day - though it will be some time before she sees more action… we’ve got our eyes on 80 for our mains.

About a week ago, we decided to join a guild whose focus is end-game raiding. They seem like a good group of people and are getting ready to hit the dungeons starting this weekend. Unfortunately, our original goal of trying to be 80 in time to join them will not happen (it seems five levels a day with no time off was, how shall we say, a little unrealistic). Instead, we’re going as fast as we can, while still having lives.

I admit, I’m excited to be starting fresh… a new game, a new group of people… all getting in from the ground level.  We’re all in the same boat… we don’t know what to expect from the game, the content, or anything.

It’s a much different experience than we had with WoW, in which we joined the game a few months after it launched, and thanks to a personal friend, ended up leveling and getting involved in the top guild on the server. In that situation, we were set up to succeed. In AoC, there is no setup… it is just us, win or lose. As much as I loved the roles we were handed in Warcraft, I find myself more excited by this AoC unknown.

A recent study conducted by Australian psychology major Daniel Loton found that 15 percent of 621 adult respondents to an online survey identified themselves as “problem gamers,” or those who spend more than 50 hours a week playing games.

Only 1 percent of those gamers had poor social skills (shyness) according to Loton. Which contradicts the stereotype that all gamers are geeks who seek solace in gaming since they can’t find friends in the “real world.”

The study also found that problem gamers were most likely to be involved in massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) like World of Warcraft and Age of Conan.

Loton’s findings came after last year’s wonderfully profound and inaccurate statement by the American Medical Association which tagged MMORPG gamers as “somewhat marginalized socially, perhaps experiencing high levels of emotional loneliness and/or difficulty with real life social interactions.

Now, I may not be the most outgoing person out there, or the one that is considered the “life of the party,” but I definitely do not turn to MMOs for the AMA’s reasons. In fact most of my friends are gamers and they definitely are not lacking in social skills. Hell, we can party with the best of them, and know that real world fun can tower over gaming any day. Yes, we may all be a bit dorky about our various obsessions with certain movies, books or bands, but put us in a room with a bunch of non gamers  and I bet you couldn’t tell us apart. Unless one of them makes the mistake of mentioning their desktop specs…

It never fails, you want a good night of gaming and something happens to ensure that won’t happen. Having just gotten Age of Conan, my husband and I were very excited to break into the game Monday night after he got back from an evening work meeting.

I was good most of the day, only hopping on the game occasionally to check if I’d sold anything on the Trade Post. I have to admit, having to run the game through Boot Camp is a heaven-sent for my work productivity. While I could hop onto World of Warcraft easily enough every 20 minutes or so (I’m a bit obsessive), the logon process is so long (restarting computer as a PC through Windows takes forever), I’m less likely to do it.

He finally arrived home just before 8 p.m. and within three minutes of him being home… we lost power. Noooo! Where we live, its unfortunately a pretty regular occurrence, and when it does happen, it’s never for a short period of time.

Much grumbling ensued and phone calls were made to the power company. Their estimate 10:30 p.m. Well, there went our evening! Yet again, something in life was telling us we had no choice but to step away from the keyboards.

Despite the initial anger caused by the power outage, we actually ended up having a good time. We decided to hang out on our front porch with a bottle of wine, and before we knew it, everyone else who lives in our building (four apartments) joined us. It was the first time we’d actually gotten to hang out with them apart from the fleeting “Hey! How’s it going?”

Some of the work that was going on was right near our place and we’d occasionally send someone over to try and bribe the workers to work faster. It was an annoying sweltering evening and sitting outside was nothing any of us had had in mind. Turns out the various transformers in our area couldn’t handle the load and they had to reroute power from other areas - I didn’t even know they could do such things. Of that though, I can’t help but fear that it’s going to continue as the summer progresses - this was just early June! We hadn’t even put in our A/C yet! What about in August when that many more people give in!?

Much to their credit, the power company was pretty spot on as the power came on at 10:45 p.m. We all said our goodbyes, happy to head back into our various air conditioned and fanned apartments.

Despite the outage, we still ended up getting a good hour-and-a-half of gaming in before we went to bed.

Well, we did it, we’re putting World of Warcraft down for a while (though I’m guessing we’ll be back). On Friday I picked up two copies of Age of Conan for myself and my husband. I was hoping to have the game installed and good to go by the time he got home from work… I forgot about the PC game to Mac conversion issue.

Instead he got surprised with the game boxes and the several hours of work involved getting the game installed on his PC and Mac’s “Windows program” Boot Camp and the game installed on my MacBook Pro.

Nonetheless, we got a decent amount of playtime in this weekend and so far I have a Level 20 Stygian Demonologist and he has a level 18 Cimmerian Bear Shaman.

I have to admit, we’re both very impressed with the game so far! Beautiful graphics; interesting, immersive quests; nice spells for my Demonologist and a more detailed melee system for his Bear Shaman; the ability to do a solo quest thread in your own personal night instance; and an interesting loot system.

It has already held our interest more than any other MMO we’ve tried since picking up WoW. Then again, that’s not hard to do… There was one in which I played for five minutes and proceeded to get my character stuck on a water well (Dark Age of Camelot, I think). When I realized my character was there for good, I called it quits out of annoyance… five minutes! Maybe we should have given it a better shot.

Although we normally play together, I like that this game has you to play solo in your own instanced world a decent amount. If nothing else, it’s forcing us to really learn our classes right off the bat and not rely upon one another as a crutch all the time.

My biggest complaints so far are the storage opportunities. Your bank bag also serves as the area in which your “trade post” (auction house) items are stored and it isn’t very big. And I’m a pack rat… Mine is full already. In Warcraft we used to use the mail system as backup storage, sending items to one another. In AoC it seems as though there is a limit on the number of items you can send a character… That will get old very quickly.

Anyway, and on an aside, I’m impressed with Boot Camp for running the game. Though I feel dirty logging onto my Mac and having it act as a Windows PC. I’m just waiting for the blue screen of death.

Note to game developers… make more games Mac friendly!