Lounge L33ts Episode 12: The Crater

Northern Gun meets up at The Crater, the best bar in town! Well, the ONLY bar in town, thanks to the apocalypse. Ed, aka "Drenivian" joins us, as well talk about our experiences so far with Defiance from Trion Worlds. The conversation soon turns to other topics such as MMO budgets, insider trading, and games that remind us fondly of other games.

Lounge L33ts Episode 11: The Haunted Burrow

In a retrospective of 2013's Halloween events, we take a look at Guild Wars 2's Blood and Madness, World of Warcraft's Hallows End, Anarchy Online's Uncle Pumpkinhead hunt, and Lord of the Rings Online's Haunted Burrow. Matt also goes over the Neverwinter Halloween event, but unfortunately, I was too late to grab footage of it.

Lounge L33ts Episode 10: The Wyvern's Tail

Each of us had played a little of WoW a long time ago, but it never managed to keep us interested. Now, Barry, Matt, and I have gotten around to playing it again, including some of the new content in Mists of Pandaria. So what is it that has us hooked now? Grab your racing ram and let's all head on over to The Wyvern's Tail and Brewfest 2013 to find out!

Lounge L33ts Episode 9: Bastion Guild Hall

What's this? A serious discussion on the gameplay and storyline of Scarlet Blade? Well sort of...Ran shows up in his Weefleboy persona again as we discuss our favorite classes, the plot behind the warring factions, the ideas behind adult MMO's, and the affects of gold farming in general.

Lounge L33ts Episode 8: Reets Retreat - The Glass Floor Room

     For the second season premiere, we try something a little different: and improvised (kind of) RP session. Weefleboy schools us on the professions available, shows off his shiny new smurf suit, and refuses to address some intimate questions on the details of his operations. Meanwhile Pinqi wonders if he/she's chosen the right path in life, and Mad Matt shows off his gun. It's anarchy, I tells you! Anarchy Online!
    Also make sure to check out our Youtube channel!  https://www.youtube.com/user/LoungeL33ts/about

State of Blog 4/29/2013

     Hello all! I just wanted to let everyone know what was going on and the plans for the future of the blog.
     Some bad stuff went down this past winter for both my self and my friend, Randy, with whom I do the Lounge L33ts podcast. Around the end of January, my mom suffered a severe heart attack. She thought she only had the flu, even though my dad felt there was more to her symptoms. She wound up waiting three days to go to the Emergency Room (it's commonly recommended to seek aid within ninety minutes), thus more damage was done to her heart. She was in Bay Area Aurora for a few weeks, and had a triple bypass surgery that turned into a double bypass. Then she was transferred down to St. Luke's in Milwaukee and stayed there for another couple of weeks. Before all was done, her heart had gotten down to ten percent strength and there was talk of a possible transplant. However, with help from a pacemaker/defibrillator she has gotten stronger and is at home now. In fact, she has recovered so quickly that the doctors don't think she'll need a transplant anymore.
     During all this, I dropped everything thing and was planning on moving back home, but my friends and my aunt helped convince me otherwise. Madison is decent city with a lot of culture, and I have built up a support network of friends and co-workers. I have a life down here that I'm not quite so willing to give up. While I'm a little apprehensive when it comes to affording this life, I at least have steady income from a reliable job. I just need to budget better.
     And here we get to Randy's troubles. I won't go into too much detail, but Randy lost the roof over his head and has had to move in with my friend Bob and Bob's parents. He is trying to get on Social Security while at the same time working on his resume and, hopefully, job hunting.
     I have posted a brief video on the situation with the Lounge L33ts podcast here:

http://blip.tv/LoungeL33ts

We have the episode filmed, and I am currently editing it. In addition I have set up a Lounge L33ts email and Youtube account which will soon be seeing activity. I'm planning on uploading the latest episode, then going back and posting the first season episodes in between to help people get caught up. We're going to try something a little bit different: roleplaying sessions. It won't be every episode, but every now and then, we will hop on as our characters and give their point of view on what's happening within their world. There will still be regular episodes where we talk as our selves, but this will help provide a little variety.
     I'm still working on the final part for "The Way to Kumas." I was planning to have it finished quite sometime ago, but then my mom had her emergency. I want to have an ending that wraps up the situation for the characters but allows for further stories to develop off of it. My aunt has told me it's "like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, except much better." I have yet to see the newer movie, but there does seem to be some similarities. I'm planning on being able to write my next short story within a month.
     And so that's what has been going on lately. Between my mom's heart attack, possibly moving back home, and helping Randy move, the blog has been a bit empty. It's time to get back to work.

Lounge L33ts Special 2: Frostbluff

Our resident expert on all things Tolkien, Sarah Bloy, takes us on a tour of the newly renovated Bree on Landroval server. Then it's off to Frostbluff to part take in some of the Yuletide Festival activities. Ran momentarily gets into a kegger of a problem, while the rest of us try to save up for a pony. Afterward, we go to see a play at the famous Frostbluff Theater, where Sarah becomes the Star of the Show and Matt finally finds a use for all that rotten fruit and flower he's got laying around. Finally, we don't play enough MMO's to warrant a Top 10 list, but we do go over our most favorite MMO's and the biggest disappointments for 2012.

Lounge L33ts Episode 7: Home for the Holidays

We spread some holiday cheer from the Home for the Holidays dimension in Rift (Faeblight server). Joining us is our friend Bob to explain why he's chosen Rift to fill the base building hole in his heart that City of Heroes left behind.

Lounge L33ts Presents: City of Heroes, The Final Hours

Randy, Matt, and I are there for the end, as bumpy as it was. I've taken care to remove most of the recordings where we're shunted off to the queue after Virtue crashed the first few times. Eventually, we wound up finishing off in Freedom with new toons. It certainly felt like we had gone back to our beginings on Freedom, before the migration to Virtue after Architect Entertainment was introduced. This was hard for everyone involved. For me, it was my first ever venture into MMO's and my first step into a 3-D explorable world. For Randy and Matt, I suspect it was a way to express their creativity and imagination. This game will be sorely missed. A big thank to The Legendary super group! They lived up to their name. The Lounge L33ts will keep going on CO, LOTRO, AO, TSW, and Rift, if you ever want to give us a shout out.

Lounge L33ts Episode 6: The Loft

We eventually get around to talking about our experiences so far with the super hero MMO Champions Online. But first, so more geeking out over Anarchy Online!

Lounge L33ts Episode 5: The Horned God

     I've been playing The Secret World off and on since it officially opened up, and so far it's been a lot of fun. It has it's faults, though. Every time my friend Barry comes over, I have a brief moment of fear that he'll ask to play the game with me. Lately he's been picking Star Wars: The Old Republic, which I don't currently have installed and have informed him of this fact last three times he's been over.
     I'll get to SWTOR again in the future. Right now my plate is already piled high with my friends' latest surge into LOTRO, trying to find solace in that sweet bosom before the closure of City of Heroes. Have I told you yet how Ran-san (aka "Namiru" in earlier posts) pledged to never play LOTRO? Have I mentioned that he just bought the Riders of Rohan expansion and is currently marching his way through the Lone Lands on a level 30 toon? Of course, Matt, Sarah, and I have been there with him.
     But to get back on topic, it's not that Barry is a bad gamer. He's saved my skin quite a few times. It's not that TSW is a bad game; I've been enjoying myself. It's just that certain teams of people work better in certain games. Barry and I work pretty well together in Champions and City of Heroes. However, get us to try to work together on even the most straight forward of TSW's missions and we're usually slaughtered at least once. Usually from some misinformation gleaned from a website, or faulty memory. When I teamed with Matt and Eric, I didn't die once.
     What I enjoy most about this game is the immersion. It sounds silly, but I'm the kind of person who loves to approach random NPC's and see what they have to say, read their back stories, watch practically every cutscene, and follow every dialog tree I can for them. I want to know the whole story, explore the entire city without leaving any trace of fog of war, gather all the exploration badges, and do as many side missions as possible to unlock further information about the world I'm playing in. It comes down to a love of miniature things. I used to love collecting dollhouse furniture and stuff like the original Polly Pocket and Littlest Pet Shop toys. Maybe it's a craving for control over something. Maybe it's a creative outlet for building my own character's backstory. Either way, TSW satisfies this curiosity in a way that CoH, AO, and even LOTRO haven't. The illusion always seems to wear thin in those games, but not so much in TSW.

Lounge L33ts Episode 4: The Prancing Pony

We manage to get Randy to play LOTRO, Sarah Bloy joins us to bestow some Tolkien wisdom, and we hear the Tale of the Bag of Devouring (it involves a dragon).

Lounge L33ts Episode 3: The Ski Chalet Part 2

In the second part, we come to a conclusion. NC Soft is the FOX of MMO's.

Liunge L33ts Episode 2: The Ski Chalet Part 1

     I think we spend more time reminiscing about City of Heroes/Villains, than we do berating NC Soft for...well...being assholes and shutting down the game in late November. I'm sorry if you're tired of hearing the CoH community voice their disapproval over the game's closure. I disagree with Ran-san (aka "Nomiru" in previous posts), I know the game wouldn't have been around forever. Eventually everything ends. This was not the way to end it though, and NC Soft has only themselves to blame for the bad PR. However, even after all that, I'm still going to play Guild Wars 2. I figure I paid for it, there's no subscription, and I'm pretty sure I can enjoy the game without paying into the cash shop, so why not? I've only managed to log about 2 hours of gameplay, but it was fun enough to make me want to return.
     This episode, I also introduce Eric "Setzer" Craig, the current Head of Registration for Geek.Kon 2013 as one of our guests. He's been playing CoH for quite a while and I hope I can have on in future episodes to discuss other MMO's.
     We wind up touching on a wide variety of topics this episode including Tabula Rasa, Korean Grinders, esports, The Secret World and other Funcom games, etc. As always, polite, constructive criticism is welcome, as this show is still very much a work in progress.

Lounge L33ts Episode 1: The Grind (Pilot)

Well, here we go! The very first episode of Lounge L33ts. There was a bit of trouble with recording for this episode. Like I said in the inroduction, this was an episode of firsts. If FRAPS shows numbers in a magenta/pinkish-puple hue, it may not be recording properly. When we finished, I opened the file to find that only the last three minutes had been recorded. Then Matt let me know FRAPS should be loaded (although not necessarily recording) before the game is loaded. In order to get the backup footage to me through the dropbox folder (restricted to 2GB in the free version), Matt converted the file to an flv file. Unfortunately, Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD doesn't read flv's and I had to use Total Video Converter to convert the file into a wmv, a file type I knew the editing software would recognize. After editing, it was rendered into one of the "Internet HD" file types offered and sent through Total Video Converter to become an flv file again. At 1.9 GB, it was too big to post on Bliptv. So I went back into Sony Vegas and rendered the edit into an "Internet SD" file, which was small not to have to be converted in TVC. It was a bit of work, and hopefully the next episode will go more smoothly. Anyway, in this episode Matt Winchell, Ran-san, and I meet up in Anarchy Online's The Grind where we discuss  how we all got caught up in MMO's, the news on Game Director Fia "Lindelu" Tjernberg's departure, and the prospects on the future of the game: