Sorry, totally not related to anything but, some dude is totally recreating a Sims 3 version of Vice City (as in the city from GTA) using the Create a World tool and that is just pure awesome in my books. Said world needs to include the strip joints somehow.

Speaking of the Create a World tool, I keep meaning to play with it a little more for the sake of creating a custom neighborhood so that my little people have somewhere fun and original to run around. Actually, I kind of want a custom neighborhood to start yet another legacy challenge. If you look hard enough, a couple of really bad half-assed legacy blogs are still buried in the bowels of this site.

The tool itself really isn't all that difficult to use. I am fairly surprised at that given my experience with world editing tools. They are usually just so...obtuse when it comes to the interface and what not. But then again, I've never been willing to soak in enough time to properly learn how to use any of them. I can't think of anything cool to model a neighborhood after. Maybe I will just create an island with a giant mountain in the center or something? Wait no: I will create "Pen Island" except that, it won't be shaped like a pen at all and only a small portion, the tip of the peninsula, will be visible on the in game town map (so that it doesn't get banned off of the exchange :P). The base of the island will contain a massive forrest.

Random WoW bits:

• The paladin class changes were bumped up by two days. As in, they are tomorrow. I smell all around nerfs and a few shiny new spells. 
• Did this happen to anyone else? I updated Pitbull 4 recently, logged in and all of my settings had been reset to the default. I tried restoring the lua file from a UI backup, but that didn't work? Do you know how long it takes to redo all of the UI bar settings? Pain in the ass.
• I wonder if I should go *gasp* holy in Cataclysm? Actually, most of my main spec changes have revolved around guild need. I enjoy playing any of the three specs really, though facerolling has been pretty damned fun. I think I may have found my true calling as a paladin :P
• FINALLY WON Bryntroll, the Bone Arbiter. It's not that it doesn't drop; Oh it's dropped around 5 times. I've just consistently rolled shittely.
• Also picked up the tier-10 pants and a few other things. Ugly skirt is ugly.

FYI: I have a Twitter feed, if anyone cares about that sort of thing. It pretty much mirrors anything posted on my Facebook wall +/- a few things. Okay well, it's little more than a well of boredom as well as a dump for random iPhone pictures.

Ah sorry, real life and uuuh not so real life cuts into my precious WoW time. Twitch. In between games at time moment. So I finished both Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2, which is a great game by the way. Not perfect, but among games that offer decision tree based dialogue, BioWare does a pretty decent job especially compared to say, BioShock for example and how your decisions influenced the game (I'll be good and not spoil it despite the fact that it's pretty old by now...).

I mean, ultimately there are only a handful of ways that any decision based game can end no matter what you choose but everyone's Mass Effect play through is a different experience depending on what dialogue options they picked and who they partied with. It's fun seeing what path other people chose. This sort of gameplay is closer to what PC based role-playing should be, to me at least. I wonder if Blizzard would ever add anything similar to WoW at some point in the future. Actually, I am not really sure how that would even work in a massively multiplayer environment...

So long story short, I and am more-or-less putzing around until Final Fantasy XIII comes out in early March. I think I'll hold off on buying anything new and finish something from my stack of old unfinished games. Probably going to actually cyle back into a period of heavier WoW playing if the servers manage to let me in. Proudmoore has been awful since patch 3.3.2.

We have tanking alternatives now so I have been gleefully DPSing as of late. Consequently, my Protection set has atrophied a little bit to the point where it is marginally acceptable for the new content. But here's the problem: I don't really have time anymore to farm for multiple sets of gear and since I'm not tanking primary spec (and don't tank much anymore), I don't typically roll on tanking pieces unless they get greeded out.

Being hit by a mild case of altism again. I would love to work on my hunter again if I have time (barely have enough time to work on my paladin. Long commute FTL). Or, I could just leave him as a glorified transmute/smelt/mining bot and finish off the Loremaster achievement on my paladin before the expansion hits. So close but so little motivation to quest more!

Oh, I got a new gaming mouse a few weeks ago. I'll make a hardware post about it at some point. It has more buttons. More buttons mean that I can bind even more random macros. Oh, I am open to post suggestions by the way. I have been in the mood to update more but have hit a post idea dry spell.

Hey everyone Blizzard updated the WoW Armory. Neat! Err, been generally absentish over the past week (or so...) doing holiday stuff and preparing for/attending CES over in Las Vegas. I'll do a quick post later this week if I have time. It was lots of fun; the company I kept was the best part (you know who you are <3).

Oh Dragon Age is fun by the way. My obsessive need to play every quest to completion is actually the other reason why I have been "absentish" and not on WoW as much as I usually am. I should post a belated review when I complete it. I think I am almost towards the end. It's a pretty long game.

So I've had to send in a couple of tickets the past two weeks. We totally bugged out the Skybreaker encounter two weeks ago. Noobness happened which resulting in a successful kill with only the people in the cannons up; The loot master not being one of those two people. So consequently, the chest wasn't lootable. Oh, we also got the [I'm on a Boat] achievement despite not really earning it...lol? Kudos to Blizzard for resolving that issue even though it took forever. Protip: don't email support during a holiday weekend.

The other support ticket: Long story short, one of our officers got hacked last week. The hacker cleaned out not only all of his characters, but the entire guild bank as well (time to review bank access policies for the sake of security). Blizzard did a complete restore, but since I am the guild master, I now have the entire contents of our guild bank in my mailbox. Is this what I get for putting off sorting the bank for the past year or two?

I'm having a lot of fun doing the new content. We got Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper and the Airship down last Friday, which was nice after kind of a slow raid the week before. Improvement is nice! Deathbringer might have gone down if my internet hadn't decided to take a huge dump on me. We are still well within the awkward attendance threshold though in that there is an interest in getting back to into guild only 25-man raids, but not enough people (the semi-PuGs just aren't the same. Fuck random people).

I keep meaning to run the new 5-mans (hilt hilt hilt hilt) and the daily random more regularly, but a longish commute during rush hour sort of kills a significant portion of my play time. I got a few more tanking upgrades though during last week's raid and from badges, etc. I really need to work on improving that gear and macro set (awesome guild member posted a bunch of really good ones on the forum a while ago, must find). My raid time is actually pretty evenly split between tanking and DPSing at the moment, with perhaps a slight bias towards DPSing.

Other games that I have been playing: Modern Warfare 2 was fun. I am not really certain has to how much value I received for my $50 given that the single player campaign is short and the multiplayer is gimped to hell. Like the first  game, MW2 retains the same fast pacing and excellent narrative. But at the same time, there are many instances where the game feels distinctly on rails with whack-a-mole-esque gameplay and obviously triggered scenes. Lots of fun either way. I wish there was a co-op option for the entire campaign rather than select missions. More games need co-op.

But anyway, since it is unlikely that I will squeeze out another post before the end of the year: I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Okay, so I have a half-assed Borderlands review rotting in my temporary post bin. Long story short, I started a new job a little while ago. So between that, the upcoming holidays and what not, much of what I was going to post on this site kind of got pushed to the back burner. Oh so I built my new computer a couple of weeks ago and zomg, I can raid 25-man instances again without locking up or dropping below five frames per second. Yay! The video card that I wanted (Radeon HD 5870 wasn't in stock anywhere...I'll have to order that later :/

PuGs: For the past month or so, my guild has been running regular Wednesday night 25-man PuG runs in Trial of the Crusader to some success. Every week we seem to get close on Anub, but fall a bit short in terms of DPS performance. After our first PuG run, we started holding the loot tokens, patterns and orbs for end loot (separate loot roll table from the other boss drops, which are rolled off after each kill). Doing so seems to have stopped the, "rotating door of PuG members who like the suspiciously perma-DC from the raid" problem for the most part.

3.3: My guild hosted a 25-man Icecrown Citadel semi-PuG raid tonight; Basically in place of TotC in the interest of doing the new content. We cleared trash, did a few attempts at the first boss and then called it a night (we end the raid at 10pm). Not so much luck on Marrowgar, but it's fun learning new content. Thinking that we will probably have more luck bouncing strats off of one another in guild versus in a 25-man PuG. It's nice getting input from fresh faces, but kind of a pain getting random ass people to organize in an instance that no one is familiar with. I haven't had a chance to do any of the new 5-man instances or use the random LFG system. Tomorrow night maybe?

Stuff: I was one and a half achievements short of the thanksgiving title and pet. Totally got busy that weekend and forgot about it. Oh well, at least I have my shiny purple 310% proto-drake. This whole new long ass daily commute + time management thing: I'll figure it out and start posting more.