Last October, a game was released called Torchlight. People compared it to Diablo I and II and the creators just by chance happen to have been part of the development team for Diablo who created their own company, Runic Games. I grabbed it for $19.99 and was not one bit disappointed in the purchase.
The game is pure fun. You rip thru layer after layer of dungeon feeling powerful and unstoppable, grabbing all the loot you can…and when you fill up, tell your pet to run back to town and sell it for you. Don’t get me wrong…you will die, but you will have fun doing it. Torchlight will provide you with hours and days of fun. You can go see 2 movies for $19.99 or buy this and get the equivalent of 50+ movies. I played a ranged vanquisher and loved it.
Now they have just announced Torchlight II for Spring 2011. Yet another 2011 release to add to everything I want to play. Part 2 will have the added ability to play with others, while Torchlight I was just a single player game. If you haven’t tried it out and are slightly bored with your current gaming choices…grab it! Steam has it too.
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Peeking at my blog I notice I haven’t talked at all about getting back into the Virtual World building scene. Sooo, I’ll do it now!
The being of July, I got a message from Second Life from a person that owns land around the land I own. They wondered if I would be willing to sell my land so they could connect some of their property. I thought about selling and totally moving out of SL, but my Safety Girl store does pretty well, and pays for all my SL needs, and I have relocated too many times already. So instead – I set up a land swap with him, which turned my T shaped property into a straight line, and it let him connect his property. Win Win.
It gave me back my urge to create something…so I started messing around some. Then I noticed that my long time SL friend Jokay, happen to have recently started up her own personal Grid – JokaydiaGRID – I signed up and popped in to see what she was up to. A few days later I caught up with her to do a little catching up…and she handed me my own Sim to play with and mentioned she would like to have me come help her out with some projects if I felt like it.
A little bit of background on Jokay – if you look back in some other posts about SL, I mention her a few times. She is one of the first people I really talked to in SL. We were neighbors for about a year. She works on projects in which educators use virtual worlds to teach students and hold workshops. Something that is starting to snowball into something really cool and I think will evolve into the latest and greatest way to teach…instead of sitting at a desk copying notes being bored to death.
So now I have a new home in the Open Sim world.
Welcome to Mininesse (Also the name of my Swashbuckler on EQ2) My own little island with a hypergrid smack dab in the middle. jokaydia.metaverseworlds.com:9000:mirinesse if you want to hypergrid to me.
The current project on JokaydiaGRID is a build for training students in the hotel and travel industry. So we are making a role play environment so they can demonstrate and act out situations and meet up to learn in an engaging way. Below are some of the builds going on and you can also check out some screenshots at my Flickr Site.
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Not sure how many of you listen to Podcasts, but it seems whenever I’m driving, I have a podcast on. It use to be music, but now I listen to talking! (Does that mean I’m getting old?)
One of the original podcasts I started listening to was Taverncast. I was playing World of Warcraft at the time, and this was listed as a WoW podcast. It was quite impressive. Way above average quality sound and editing…but most of all it’s FUNNY. It wasn’t a 100% WoW podcast and as time went on, it became less and less related to gaming and more of a variety comedy show. It is a bunch of friends talking about their week that goes off on tangents.
They slowly faded away and made a return only to fade away again due to RL issues. Plus the time to create this show has to be 12 or more…they dont just take out the dead air and the Ummmms. Point your browser here and read about it – http://www.taverncast.com/about.php – Then log onto iTunes and grab a few episodes. The later the episodes, the less you will hear about WoW, if you aren’t really into gaming. If you are into WoW, grab the special Lore episodes or the Murloc Attack and a few earlier episodes. The field trips they did into WoW instances were great too!
Other podcasts I like to listen to:
Analog Hole – http://www.analogholegaming.com/ – 3 basically normal people talking about what went horribly wrong that week, and what games they have played (MMOs, Console games, D&D) along with current gaming news. These guys play WoW. Listen to episode 167 (might be 168) for them to read my listener email!
Massively – www.massively.com – Shawn and usually Rubi, talk about the news of the current week dealing with new and old MMO’s. iTunes calls it TV Squad sometimes, don’t let that confuse you.
Guildcast – guildcast.wordpress.com – Also hosted by Shawn and Rubi… a podcast about Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2.
Others I’ll listen to now and then – Final Score, IGN Girl Fight, EQ2sday
Posted in Gaming, Real Life, WoW | No Comments »
I recently decided to buy a GPS for my car so I can get even worse at remembering directions! I did find a great deal on a good one. It is a Garmin nüvi 760
and it has several cool features.
- It has Bluetooth – so when your phone is near the GPS, calls are received through that and keeps you from having to find your phone and answer it which could lead to you having an accident.
- It can play through your radio using an FM transmitter. It also has an SD card slot and 440 MB of memory, so you can use it as an MP3 player.
- It receives constant traffic updates and will automatically adjust your trip to get around the problem areas. You can tell it not to of course.
This model is usually $400 but Amazon.com has it for $199. I had no trouble setting it up, entering addresses is simple, adding waypoints to stop on your trip is easy. Finding a restaurant, gas, or store is very simple.
One thing I did get for it was a few new voices. It comes with several good ones to begin with, and they are TTS, which means it will read all the street names and location names. I found a place called Pigtones. While these voices are meant to be funny, they are not worth the price. I downloaded GlaDOS – the computer voice from Portal, thinking it would be humorous. It does sound like her, but she says nothing funny, and all the voices you buy there are Not TTS – so you only get turn right at next exit, recalculating, arriving at destination. It is cool for like 1 day and then it loses its charm. I bought 3 others that are not great also. I feel I wasted my money – at $12-$13 a voice – it is not close to being worth it, plus you can only have ONE of those voices on at a time because it overwrites the plain voice on your unit. If you want to get a strange voice – get the free on from Garmin – Elfrod – it is supposed to be one of santas elves, and he says some witty things now and then.
If you think it is time to get a GPS – Click Here to go to Amazon and grab one before they run out!
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Azzura is officially landless in Second Life – She still has 448 squ left in some obscure spot (I have that for sale too). It was just a bunch of 16m squares of land that were for sale and I merged them into one plot before ad spots got put up in them.
Safety Girl, Azzurave, and evolv are all gone. Maybe they will return someday, but by that time there will be soo many new things that what I have will be like stone tools. I do miss SL for the most part, it was a great creative outlet for me.
Looks like I will need to redesign the blog header! Any ideas?
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