What You Did There; I See It.

First things first – if you have an xbox 360, you should see about getting yourself into the Blur Multiplayer Beta if you can. I got my code from The Escapist, via this link, though I’m not sure if they still have any available. I know that Joystiq had some as well, though I do not have the exact link at my fingertips (you could search it just as easily as I could, you lazy bastards).

It’s basically like Mario Kart (you know how much I love Mario Kart) meets Burnout Paradise, but with a leveling/skillup/loadout system. It’s super fun and I highly recommend it. I’m not sure when the beta ends (probably in a few days), but if you can get it, you should, and we should play. Also – I will crush you. My gamertag is Valiscariot. Drop me a PM on xbl and we’ll have some fun.

Second – Lady Gaga pack for RB2 coming this Tuesday. Who’s got two thumbs and is totally stoked? THIS GUY. Seriously, what a great party pack this is. I realize that it will completely kill my training for the PAX East Rock Band 2 Tournament, but I’m still not convinced I’ll participate anyway. As fun as it may be, I’m not quite convinced that I want to miss Saturday/Sunday panels because of it (not to mention the dozen or so guildies that will be in town for PAX). We’ll see.

Third – Bioshock 2 was everything I wanted it to be. Yeah, yeah, Yahtzee didn’t like it, but he doesn’t like anything – that’s his thing. It was a really good combo of old and new. Goodbye minigame of Pipe Dream, hello quicktime event that doesn’t suck (although I did find a bug in it – if you initiate the hack on a turret, and then auto-hack dart it while the quicktime screen is up, the quicktime screen stays up until you reload the game – boo!). The game was as long as I wanted it to be, the Little Sister events happened about as much as I could tolerate without getting annoyed, and there were enough Gene Tonics to make me wish I had more tonic slots. Well done. Multiplayer ended up being really, really sloppy, but fun for a while. The Sinclair Solutions addon didn’t really add anything I wanted to the game, but we’ll see what happens in the future. All in all, I’m happy.

I’ve somehow avoided buying FFXIII, and instead I’ve added it as the only game in my Gamefly queue. We’ll see how long it takes to get here. Gotta save money for PAX!

As much as getting one’s hours cut at work can hurt the wallet, there are certainly bright sides to such an occurrence. In this particular case, one of those benefits has been playing WoW all day. This is pretty rad. I find that the daytime crowd, while fewer than the prime-timers, more than make up for it by being either a) even bigger douchebags or b) robots (see fig. a and fig. b, right).

Conversations such as these are just a tasting of my daytime experience, though, as I’ve spent most of my time working to better myself in-game. Fed up with being poor both irl and in-game, I’ve reactivated my second account and once again set up a side machine solely dedicated to working the auction house.

You see, I don’t want to work for my money. Why spend all my in-game time farming or doing dailies, when I could instead just set up another machine that constantly scans the auction house, looking for foolishly-low-priced deals? I make him jump every 20 minutes or so, and when the computer makes an audible “ding!”, I look over and click “yes” or “no”. Easy money.

I will say, however, many of my friends make UNREASONABLE money by working professions into it. Maybe I’ll try it; I’d love to make 20k a week instead of 2.5k. The trick, of course, seems to be having a jewelcrafter. This will require some work.

To that end, I’ve been leveling my Shaman. I’ve spent a good portion of the past several days remembering that level 51-53 is, in fact, the worst level area in all of leveling. You’re too high to do any of the quests that are close together, you’re too low to do most of the plagueland quests, and the only things that are reasonable for you are like, Felwood quests that are 48907 miles apart from one another. Before 51, you can find quests to do if you look hard enough/have done them enough to know where to be/where not to be (hint for Alliance – stay out of Feralas altogether). At 53 or so, Tirion’s quests in EPL open up and it’s tons of grinding (over a hundred mobs he wants dead) – it’s like a carpool lane to Outland. I’m actually on my way to freakin’ Un’Goro right now, because at least if I grind there, I can skin everything and maybe make some cash.

EDIT: Ok, so I totally forgot about Un’Goro. There are, in fact, a ton of quests for low-50s toons, they’re close together, and they involve a lot of grinding. Also, Shamans¹ are OP – I’ve been soloing devilsaurs all weekend. So yeah, levels 51-53 aren’t as devoid as options as I may have previously declared. My bad. I will revise my statement, and declare that the 50s in general are the worst, if only because they take the longest (you may say “but no, the 40s are worse!” but that’s because you’re trying to level on Alliance in Feralas, and that’s never a good idea).

Anyway, if all goes well, I should be in Outland by later this evening, at which point it’s smooth sailing to 80.

EDIT 2: Level 58 has been achieved, and I am on my way to Hellfire. Wish me luck. I’m home tomorrow as well, so I’ll try to get a post up about the Mike Doughty show I attended on Friday; we’ll see.

¹ Yes, Shamans is, in fact, the correct pluralization of Shaman. I don’t like it either; I think it’s unsightly at best. But hey, that’s how it goes. I’ve accepted it and moved on.