Humble Bundle Acquisitions: The Lord of the Rings Online

If you're not already super burnt out on WoW, or maybe just looking for a little free MMO time, Lord of the Rings Online, or "Lotro", is a solid game that is worth your attention. 

See the show below!

Most Enjoyed: 2012

Sure, it's coming way after I promised it, but here it is none the less.

Mists of Pandaria - I'm currently taking a break from WoW because I'm tired of farming in games (ironically, I love the little farm you can get in the game now). But a great expansion! I'd be more interested if I had a good raid team/schedule, but in the absence of that. I'm ok without playing for now.

Starcraft 2 - I managed to get a feel of being more involved in the game this past year. Great game. Great community. Expect more great things to come.

Dungeon Defenders - I got freaking hooked on this for a couple of months! Still a great way to burn a few hours.

Guild Wars 2 - Content patches are coming out all the time for GW2. You should definitely take a look if you're in the mood for a good MMO w/o wanting to pay a subscription.

Age of Empires Online - Still fun, but after playing SC2 the gameplay itself feels slow and stale.

Punch Quest/Ski Safari/Road Trip 2 - I love these side-scrolling runner games. Extra props to Ski Safari for having the catchiest music.

Amnesia: The Dark Decent - Aubrey and I finally got brave and started playing through this game. And then we got a big tv. And then we played it on the big tv. And then we decided we were better off just watching Day9's playthrough.  By far one of the creepiest games I've ever played. Great mechanics.

Nastolgia:
Chrono Trigger/Majora's Mask/FF3(6) - Got these babies on the Wii Virtual Console and I play them on the treadmill. Great multitasking!!

Changing Gears

I'm giving away two copies of DOTA 2! Click this link for details!

Want to know how big of a dork I am? So big that I'm constantly planning out my gaming time and intentions. Today you'll get to be part of that planning.

The main goal here is that I want to play more Starcraft because I really want to get good at it and have a better understanding of the game so I can contribute more to the community. However, there's about a billion other fun games to play. I've gotten way into Dungeon Defenders in the past week and I've hardly played anything else at all. Guild Wars 2 just had it's first major patch with a ton of Halloween content. There's this new game called FireFall that I don't know anything about but is getting hyped out the yang that I might want to try. Plus there was that whole Panda thing that just happened....

And then, of course, there's my real life. Taking my wonderful wife on extravagant dates. Classes. Finding a full time, benefited, job so that we don't have to live just over the poverty line. Keeping new content on the site. Remembering to take the trash to the curb on Mondays. I'm a busy guy.

So here's my gaming plan:

• At the end of next month, I'm going to let my WoW subscription die so I wont have to pay that anymore. I'll go back for major updates, but other than that, I've got too much to play. I've got some triple experience refer a friend bonus stuff doing on until then, so I'll try to get my priest and my monk up to 80 to take full advantage of that. Done. 
• I'm going to stop playing Dungeon Defenders like a freak.
• I'm going to check out Guild Wars when there's a major update and whenever I get that MMO itch.
• I'm going to play more Starcraft. I'm actually going to start putting it into my weekly schedule.
• I will start to actually follow my weekly schedule. I'm an adult. It shouldn't be that hard. Right? ...Right?

And here now is my structured Starcraft plan:

• I am going to be playing exclusively Protoss in 1v1 (and usually streaming it).
• I'm going to be focusing on what I feel like I am "sucking at."
• First, I will be choosing one build order to improve. 
• I will be following the ORCA method. 
• When I'm feeling really good with the one, I'll move on to one for each match up.
• From there, I'll address specific things and change my play to incorporate them more.
• For instance, I never use air as Protoss, so I'll use an air-heavy build.
• I will do this until I reach Master league.
• I will then buy another copy of the game and start the same process for another race. 
• I realize those last two are very ambitious. I might stop at diamond.
• I will start casting one pro game a week to help myself get more familiar with players, builds, and maps.

And that, my friends, is a gaming plan.

Mists of Pandaria: Haters Gonna Hate

Just my luck to devote a blog to Starcraft just as a WoW expansion comes out.

If someone's really all that curious about Mists, there's about a million sites and videos they could watch, so I'm going to make this a pretty simple review.

1. The new continent has a great sense of presence for the player and the environments and music are all fantastic.The Pandaren and other new races all look great and fit right in with the game.

2. The Monk is good. I've been leveling up a tanking monk and it feels fresh and fun. Thumbs up to the Monk.

3. Questing is better than ever. There are several driving story lines that I promise are not "juvenile" or whatever it is that people are so worried about since there are giant pandas. There was one quest line in involving some raccoons that was particularly good.

3.5. The factions are all pretty cool so far and give awesome mounts when you hit exalted. And they're even going to buff reputation gains for alts soon. That's going to be pretty great. Unless of course your enjoyment of the game depends on things taking a long time so you can gloat that you have it and other people don't. Then you'll hate that. And pretty much everything else in life as well.

4. Pet Battles = awesome. Sure it's a total Pokemon ripoff, but anyone who played Pokemon back in the day knows it was a great game and it's nice to have it incorporated into WoW. I know I'm really enjoying it.

5. And the big one: there's a ton to do once you hit level cap. There's lots of rep to get. There's two new battlegrounds coming out. There's the pet battles. There's three raids plus LFR coming soon. There's a bunch of heroics as well as scenarios (shorter, more story-driven, dungeons). There's challenge modes (special versions of dungeons for speed runs and exclusive loot). There are world bosses that drop raid loot. There's the Black Market Auction House. And Blizzard's already about to put the new patch on the Test Realm with even more new content. The future looks bright!

All in all, people who want to whine will do so. The rest of us are having a great time.

P.S. Here's my main dude. He's a stud.

Bonus pic:

Guild Wars 2: MMO relief!

I've done nothing for the past week except my homework and play Guild Wars 2. Mostly just Guild Wars 2 though.

"What?" you may ask. What's a total Blizzard fanboy doing spending so much time playing GW2? Isn't that Panda thing coming out next week? I'll tell you what I've been doing: enjoying it completely.

I'm just going to launch into the things I like about it. Keep in the mind the only MMOs I've played a lot of are WoW and AOE:Online.

Character creation is a lot more elaborate than other games I've played. (I know that City of Heroes apparently had the best creation ever, but I never got around to that one.)

Personalized story arch. I love this so much. For the first 30 levels, the story arch is dependent upon your character and choices you made during character creation. There are splitting paths during each possible story as well, adding even more variety. There are little cutscenes in this game too, which I think is kind of cute more than anything, but certainly effective for the narrative.

Attacks and abilities change with weapons/attunements/kits. This is one of my favorite features by far. You don't just learn moves as you level, you have a different set of moves for each possible weapon configuration (as well as another set for underwater) that can be swapped out on the fly. Add dodging and lots of positional abilities and you've got yourself a game where you actually feel like you're fighting something and not just mashing number keys.

You level for everything except mob grinding. Well, you get experience for killing mobs, but it is probably the least efficient form of leveling. Quests, crafting, PvP, and crafting are all emphasized to be something you can jump into at any moment and feel "productive" as far as character progression goes. I think this freedom is the driving factor for why the game feels so fresh and new.

Dynamic quest events add a great sense of urgency to questing. It also brings every player in your vicinity together to do something epic together, which is just a better way to play.

Quality of life improvements for the economically minded. Crafting materials taking up all the bag space? Just press a button to send them to your account-wide collectibles bank. Seriously. Why isn't this feature in every game? I love it. Need to check the Auction House (or in this case, the Trading Post) just press the "O" button on your keyboard and you can buy and post away. No need to head to town.

Speaking on heading to town. For a small fee you can Fast Travel like a demon in this game. And you're even rewarded for finding the Waypoints. If there's somewhere you want to go, you just go there. No travel time.

It's new. And by that I mean that everyone is still figuring it out to some degree and there aren't many elitists yet. As someone who plays a lot of WoW, I find that extremely refreshing. Sure, the game's got a billion bugs, but if someone pops into the area chat and says "Good grief, why can't I find X" or "This game seems hard, can I get some pointers?" people actually help them instead of just calling them a noob and telling them to go to a website. With the exception of last Friday night when a very strange (and uninformed) political debate broke out in the zone I was questing, the chat has stayed 100% relevant to the game and is almost always positive.

No subscription fee! Just buy it already! I'm on the Dragonbrand realm.

P.S. I should probably mention things I dislike too. I didn't really think of that. If I have to pick something I do not like, I would say it's that you don't get your first 5-man dungeon experience until level 30 and it's fairly difficult. Dungeons are my favorite thing about WoW, so having to wait so long for each class stinks.

P.P.S. There's 10 professions (or classes) but only 5 character slots. What's up with that?