Now then…what shall we talk about?

I’ve gotten a little work done on Planitia, but not enough to merit an update. Instead, I’ve been doing two things:

1. Cooking. I recently made duck for the first time. It was also the first time I’d ever eaten duck. I used this recipe, but I didn’t have time to brine the duck. I just steamed it and then pan-seared it.

It was excellent. The meat was a bit tougher than chicken – almost like turkey – but the flavor was stupendous. Especially the skin and the fattier parts of the bird. They were succulent.

Bolstered by my success with the duck, I decided to finally purchase a food processor. I’ve been wanting one for ages but either didn’t have the spare money or couldn’t figure out which one to buy. My restrictions were:

1. 7-10 cup bowl size. My kitchen counters are ridiculous tiny and I don’t have the space for a bigger one.

2. Bottom-mounted motor; direct-drive motor mounting. These are the most reliable and efficient kinds of processors.

3. Exactly two speeds – on and pulse. More buttons than that merely leads to confusion.

4. Price range: $75 to $100.

I’d despaired of finding a processor that met all four of those requirements (especially number 4) until a trip to Bed Bath & Beyond turned up this little number on special for $99.

Now if that looks familiar, it’s because it’s the processor Cuisinart’s been making for decades. Look at the plain white case and the sharp angles on the base – it’s a throwback right to the 70’s, and a few years back Cuisinart stopped making it. They introduced sleek new models with curves and chrome and lots of buttons and people hated them – they took up more counter space, weren’t as reliable and were harder to use.

Thus, the reappearance of the Pro Classic. I got exactly what I wanted – a perfectly usable, reliable food processor for under $100. Go me!

And for its inaugural food I tried to make lemon cheesecake. I completely messed it up; when all was said and done, it was a little done around the edges of the pan but almost completely raw in the middle. So I spooned it into a bowl and now it’s lemon custard. I’m sure it’ll come out better next time.

2. Playing World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. Blizzard did a great job with the starting areas of the two new races and smoothed out lots of the little annoyances of creating a new character. Bags now drop much more often and you’ll usually get a bag or two as a quest reward. The money progression seems to be better since I haven’t run into a case yet where I haven’t had the money to train upon reaching a new level. And you can actually grind the Cooking skill up to about 40 with ingredients you can buy.

The quest lines are also showing some inventiveness. On the Draenei side you will get a quest around level 11 or 12 that will allow you to ride an epic mount for 15 minutes. That’s an excellent way of giving new players a taste of what they’ll get if they stick with their characters. The Blood Elf side has some pretty cool stuff too – I was shocked when I discovered exactly how it became possible for Blood Elves to be Paladins.

And, of course, pretty. Pretty pretty. Silvermoon, the BE city, is particularly gorgeous…I almost wish I lived there.

Of course, once you get a character of either new race to about level 20 you’re thrown out into the rest of Azeroth, which you’re intimately familiar with if you’re a longtime player like me. The two new races and starting areas do not justify the expansion’s $40 price tage by themselves. Nor does Jewelcrafting, which is interesting but in the end is just another crafting skill (and they didn’t even introduce a new gathering skill to go along with it).

No, what would be worth my $40 would be if I could pull my 60 Paladin, Surago, out of retirement.

I mentioned how deeply disappointed I became with World of Warcraft once my character hit 60. The game became a slot machine rather than a linear progression, and I was unlucky enough to choose a profession (blacksmithing) that doesn’t really allow you make a lot of money unless you raid, which I simply do not have time for. If Burning Crusade will allow me to solo from 60 to 70 and use my skills to actually make enough money so I can buy the stuff I need to do my epic mount quest, I’ll consider it $40 well spent.

But I don’t know if it’ll do that yet because I’ve spent almost all my time on my new characters. I have gone to Outland and I know that there are soloable quests in Hellfire Peninsula, the starting zone, but I don’t know if that progresses all the way through Outland. And I’m not sure what raising my blacksmithing and mining to 375 will do for me yet from a monetary perspective.

Oh, but one thing I did truly enjoy was listening to the howls of indignation from people who have played for years only to discover that fairly common drops in Outland were equal or superior in quality to the epic sets they spent months grinding to get. Made me feel justified in not going down that path. Laziness pays off again!

So I don’t have a final verdict on Burning Crusade yet. I need to not let it interfere with Planitia, so I’ll probably just play it on the weekends.

Sorry for revisiting this topic, but this was just too good to leave as a comment:

“WAAHH!–Ultima IX is awful–They ruined my game!”
…ENOUGH ALREADY!

It’s been 7 years, and I still hear mostly negativity toward this game. I apologize for using this forum to vent, but being that Veridian actually worked for Origin, I feel that I could at least get the benefit of the doubt here. My experience with U9 was a good one, and it holds a very special place in my heart for a number a resons. The game is still on *my* harddrive too, and I still find myself going back to it time and again.
It’s always the case that the negative voice is strongest, so let me go on record as being the first one to say–I found no major crash bugs in Ultima IX. Now, I think that’s because I was an Origin fan for years, and I was already used to heeding their words–when they said ‘UPGRADE’, I followed their advice as law, and I was never disappointed (well, there *was* that ‘Cyberman 3-D controller’ recommendation…but I’m not gonna get into that right now) 🙂

Having all the required CPU, RAM, and Video Card recommendations, there were no speed issues either, although I (unlike the nay-sayers) did not expect 30fps in an RPG. I glided thru Britian with a very respectable 9 FPS, and was delighted that I could set the view/graphics distances at maximum.

The plot-stopping bugs were fixed by the time I got to them, and I patched, and had NO PROBLEMS. There was a crash here and there, but I expected that from such a state-of-the-art game.

I will admit that the voice acting for the Avatar could’ve been a bit better, and that the plotline was not as deep as other games in the series, but I submit that U9 WAS and Ultima, and better than most computer gaming experiences I’ve ever had.

Joe Garrity

I think I’m just going to let that stand as the ultimate rebuttal to my earlier remarks.

I’d heard a lot about this game when it was first released. Sadly, most people who bought it at the time did so because – OMGWTFBBQ! – it included a demo of Final Fantasy XII with it. Those people missed out. This isn’t like that Metal Gear Solid 2 demo being released with Zone of the Enders.

I’m about ten hours into Dragon Quest VIII, and honestly, it’s the best console RPG I’ve played in a long, long time. It’s gotten very positive reviews but most reviewers have suggested that the game isn’t for a general audience since it uses such archaic game mechanics.

I personally think that the game stays true to the Dragon Quest line but also makes a lot of concessions that make the game easier to play than older games in the series, and I actually would recommend it for a general audience.

Yes, the game is tough. But that’s okay. In most RPGs nowadays, random encounters are effectively yard trash, pretty chunks of XP that will hardly give you any trouble at all. Thus, fighting them is boring. Final Fantasy XII tried to fix this problem by introducing the Gambit system, which allowed you to automate such yard trash fights. What a concept.

Dragon Quest VIII instead solved the problem by actually making just about every encounter a possibility for your party to wipe. When you enter a new area, the enemies there are typically capable of killing you if you’re unlucky and encounter a group of five or six toughies (especially if they get to act first). Thus, encountering a new enemy type is interesting, not boring…the player thinks, with some trepidation, “Huh…I wonder what he can do.”

But you have a good chance of fleeing from anything other than a boss fight. Your main character will quickly learn the spell Evac that will instantly exit whatever dungeon you’re currently in, and soon learns the spell Zoom that allows you to teleport to any place you’ve already visited – even dungeons. And wiping causes you to merely get resurrected at the nearest town with the loss of half your gold – there is no “Game Over” screen in Dragon Quest VIII. So death is annoying but no more than that.

And as if that weren’t enough, your secondary character, Yangus, quickly learns an ability called Whistle that instantly causes a group of enemies to spawn and attack you. So despite its old-school rep, leveling in Dragon Quest VIII is actually less boring and faster than in just about any other console RPG I’ve ever played. Just find an area where the monsters are tough but killable and have Yangus whistle over and over. When you’re getting low on health and mana, Zoom to town, rest up, Zoom back to the dungeon and do it again. Once you’re carved out of wood, go complete the current plot point.

Plus, the game is pretty. It’s pretty WoW-style, which means that the game isn’t any kind of technical achievement but has a clean look and nice textures and models. The voice acting is actually quite good, with the cheesy characters sounding cheesy and the serious characters sounding serious and the tough characters sounding tough. The music is quite nice, and it’s almost all streaming digital stuff that was composed by Koichi Sugiyama and performed by, oh, I don’t know, the TOKYO METROPOLITAN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA. The Japanese do not look down on games as an inferior medium like Americans do, which is what makes uber-coolness like this possible.

And it’s $20 new now. Definitely worth picking up if you’ve got a PS2 and like console RPGs. Or if you have a PS2 and have never tried a console RPG.

Whoever designed the chapter “Lowlife” in Half-Life 2 Episode 1 deserves a good swift kick in the nuts.

Combat overall in HL2E1 seems poorly designed; the designers appear to have not realized that if you make the enemies even tougher than they were in Half-Life 2, and then at the same time give the player fewer weapons with which to fight, it might make for rather frustrating combat sequences. Add to this Lowlife’s trick of there being no goddamn light in the level and it’s just ridiculous. It’s been a long time since I’ve just gotten so fed up with a program that I just Alt-F4’d out, but this game did it.