The last couple weeks I’ve just had drained batteries.  Completely kaput.  I took this week off, mostly unplugged and slept what seemed to be a dozen+ hours per day. Typically when I take time off work, I still have some contact.  I’ll check mail a few times a day, maybe take a call or two to sort things out.  This week I let my BlackBerry drop dead and just disconnected.  I think that’s honestly the first time I’ve done that in 10 years, at least in a situation where the was a signal possible.

E3

I did keep up with the news somewhat mind you.  E3 came and went, and there really wasn’t much to talk about.  If you love sequel-itis, then hey, they’ve got you covered.  More Battlefront (with an amazing deluxe package that gives you a damage boost on normal packages), Fallout 4 has a date and an iOS app, Uncharted has a sequel, FF7 is coming back (curious how that will work out), SWTOR has a neat expansion/reboot…It’s not bad news so much.  I think devs have finally figured out how to use the consoles properly now, so the games are looking pretty amazing.

Anyone taking bets on when The Last Guardian will actually come out?

Steam Sale

There was a lot of stuff on sale, holy bajeebers!  I picked up Ori and the Blind Forest, which is a cool game in the metroidvania style.  With amazing art and music.  Superb game actually, great throwback to a fun game style.

The rest of the stuff I either already had or it didn’t interest me much.  Stick of Truth I did pick up, for something like $10, so that will fill some dead time eventually.  Arkham Knight isn’t on sale but apparently it’s the best of the series.  Winter sale I guess…

Marvel Heroes

2 year anniversary on a super cool ARPG.  Syp has posted a fair bit on it and it’s well worth your dollars.  I think they have a really great cash stop mechanic, though I’m curious as to how much is left in the Marvel vaults for them to release as playable characters.

I picked up Doom with some Eternity Crystal (the droppable F2P currency) and I am quite impressed.  He has great lines, looks cool and his moves are all pretty signature.  Due to some other characters being at 60 (including Cyclops) I was able to get him to level 60 in about 2 days of sporadic playtime.  Then with a bunch of lucky drops, kitted him out for some solid damage potential.  I also took the time to level up Squirrel Girl.  She’s awesome!

Wildstar

I had mentioned before how I wanted to get back into this game.  Well, I subbed up this week and patched my way in.  I had posted about what I thought was missing from the game, and I am rather happy to say that most of that downside list has been addressed.   There’s a lot of casual/daily content now at 50, shiphands, adventures, dungeons, plot dungeons, battleplots, battlegrounds and 4 main daily hubs.  Raids have been dropped to 20 players, itemization has been tweaked so it isn’t as crazy.  Lot of classes have been balanced as well (notoriously the warrior).

There are people playing, I see them all over the place.  That said, it need more people STAT.  It’s great that it’s going F2P in the fall but there needs to be something in there now to get more people playing.  I’m a bit reminded of what happened to SWTOR in this case, where the game dropped subs like the servers were on fire. It was a 90% server merge after all.  When F2P hit, the game took a few months but picked up a ton of steam and now there’s players everywhere.  Wildstar needs that player boost.  It’s a quality MMO.

FF14

Expansion hit a few days ago.  I have an old account I played with for a couple months, and I was impressed with what was there.  I dropped out however, due to real life taking almost all my free time.  I’m curious to see what’s about mind you so I wanted to get back into the game.

Let me say that Square Enix has some of the absolute worst infrastructure/support services on the planet.  It’s is almost absurd.  Trying to log in, my typical passwords aren’t working.  Ok, now I get locked out for some reason, though no idea how long I’m locked out.  I try again in 10 minutes, same message.  A quick search tells me it’s a 30 minute lockout, and extended by some magical number everytime you retry and the lockout is still in effect.

Fine, let’s try a password reset.  Ok, none of my security answers are working.  Maybe it’s the case of the answers.  Nope… not that either.  Ok, maybe I have a token attached to the account (there’s a field there but it doesn’t tell me if I have one).  I check my mail and it looks like I tried to attach one, but there’s no success message.  Fine, let’s try it out.  The app won’t work on my iPod and won’t work on my Android tablet.  It will work on my wife’s.  Super.  Put in the data to restore it, invalid key data.  Arghhhh!!!

I end up on the support site, submitting a ticket.  Interestingly enough, it asks me for the same security questions as before to submit but doesn’t give me any errors when I put in the answers I thought were correct.  I haven’t received any notice it was sent, or that there was an error.  Just an on-screen message that it may take some time.

So at this point, I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to do.  Calling them is apparently a 2 hour wait and since they are only open during “business hours”, I’m not quite sure what that will accomplish other than a massive long distance charge on my phone.

/amazing.