What I've been up to

Perhaps you’re saying to yourself “Darth Bunnywabbit, you lazy non-writing slug, you took a whole week off to lie around the house playing videogames and eating turkey, what’ve you got to show for it?”

Well, I’ve got a few inches of words to spraypaint on the virtual wall, or I will when I finish typing.

I suppose part of the answer is I’m doing other stuff besides videogames, or trying to, anyway, and another part of the answer is that my two favorite games, WoW and Sims, just aren’t doing it for me at the moment.

Sims especially. I actually felt guilty for trashing it so hard in my review. But hey, that’s the beauty of being an advertising-free blogger.
You never have to suck up to the sponsors. If a company puts out a stupid product, you can call them on it. With no middle-class anxieties about “ooh, there goes my cred in the industry not to mention my free mouse-hand squeezies with logos on them.”

Anyway, I did note that some of the stuff in the expansion was actually stuff I had wanted in the game, had blogged about. For example, the locally-flavored locals, none of whom so far are platinum blonde black people named Jose Torunaga. And more wacky supernatural occurrences.

So I decided to play the damn thing through, i.e., get my country acceptance level maxxed in each country, while leveling winemaking, uh, NECTARmaking and photography. Because that’s how I play games. Like a freight train, heading toward The End.

After getting Mary Sue, my first expansion sim, through most of the quests, I got to the point where I despised her and couldn’t play her any longer, something that happens frequently in Sims 3 after I’ve spent nine hours of clicking to build my toon an acceptable house or patiently waited for them to grow perfect cheese and steak plants. So I sent one of her neighbors on a journey to China only to discover . . . that rat Mary Sue already looted all the tombs, sprung all the traps and made off with the gigantic-boulder-smashing-hammer I’d need to pwn the tombs in Egypt. Game over.

So I made my next toon, or toons, I should say: the Jabberwocks. I put them in their own virgin neighborhood with no tombs yet plundered. I made them as fat as possible and addicted to key lime pie. She turned out to be a brilliant surgeon despite my intent to have her be a stay at home mom or a cook, so for a while I was enjoying watching my sim with a BMI of about fifty dress up in her surgical scrubs and run off to save lives. They also looked cute on the bicycles and scooters one is forced to use in remote countries like France and Egypt, because those countries apparently don’t have cars yet, just a lot of ruins to loot and jewels lying around on the ground.

I tried questing both the Jabberwocks but stopped at the point where I realized that their quests might be solo but their instances were shared. For example, if Mr. Jabberwock got the quest to “go in the snake cave and get the icon of doom” and Mrs. Jabberwock had plundered that cave earlier in the day, Mr. Jabberwock was out of luck. So that was how Mrs. Jabberwock became a brilliant surgeon, I started just parking her at the chessboard to learn more logic while her valiant hubby went pedaling through the hills of China.

For the Jabberwocks, it all stopped when they had kids. The first one was sort of cute, a boy. Their first reaction was to run off to China, at which point a warning popped up that I couldn’t take Junior because children are not allowed out of the country apparently, and a Cruella de Ville-ish nanny popped up to tell me not to worry, Junior would be just fine.

Because I’m evil that way, I had the Jabberwocks conceive yet another child on their first day of vacation. And it took, the little “you’re knocked up, sim woman!” lullaby played. But she didn’t even start hurling until she got back home – just to ensure that no sims are born on foreign soil, I guess.

No, I haven’t tried shipping a pregnant lady sim out of the country. Yet.

So anyway, now the Jabberwocks had two boys. Which required a lot of work, and they didn’t make it out of the country again until the boys were teenagers. At which point . . . I had three inert sims to sit around the “base camp” while daddy went a-tombing. Granted, travel is “free time” and you don’t have to accomplish anything, your sims can take a free week in another dimension studying really hard or working out before reappearing at home refreshed and leveled. But four sims is too much. And I didn’t really like the dad sim to play him without his family.
On to the next sim. And I figured that if the game wants me to be an action-oriented boy whose great desires are to be Indiana Jones while winning martial arts championships – if there is a little girl out there with those two obsessions, buy her this game, and then go get therapy because I think you’re projecting heavily – I made a dude character named Erik Chimera who is max muscular, very slender, and wears a rakish beret over his cherry-cola-colored hair, along with a gray set of “Indiana Jones and Crocodile Dundee Time Travel To The Eighties And Shop At Banana Republic” adventure-wear.

This is how you bastards at EA WANT me to play your game, right? Oh, by the way, he’s bisexual and flirts with everyone. I want to see how that goes over in Egypt when he steals someone’s husband.

Anyway, my new sim Erik looks sort of like an emo Che Guevara, and when he’s not tending his garden, he’s working out with his martial arts dummy. He’s a master martial artist in fact. The animations for master martial artist look a lot like the ones for the noob martial artist. I think a high martial arts score will always beat a low one, but I suppose I’ll have to make a whole fight club to confirm that. Maybe Elitist Jerks will link me if I make a spreadsheet.

Erik has never really had a legitimate job, but he can fish. So far he’s made about fifty grand in the tomb plundering business. He’s welcomed with open arms in China, he’s got some scary looking cougar in France that keeps sending him on bogus errands and he’s never been in Egypt. He’s also free of the “mummy’s curse” so far, which has afflicted my two previous explorer sims, but I could never quite find out what that does or whether it’s even bad.

He also lags really bad. Move move move pause. It’s on a count of four. Step step step freeze. I tried adjusting my video card settings. I checked my other sims – the Jabberwocks are all fat and happy, and they have way more objects on their lot.
I copied Chimera’s house and moved him to a fresh neighborhood. No lag. But also, the tombs were still locked up, I’d have to start over. Can’t put him in my main neighborhood, Mary Sue already trashed the tombs there. Apparently you get one (1) quest toon per neighborhood, preferably male. Got that, all you girly-game-players? No more weddings, it’s time to pillage primitive countries like France.

Wonder if the Chinese government will ban it? Lol.

So if I ever get through this stupid last minute “quests in Sims” crap I’ll let you know. On the other hand, I’m really enjoying building stuff with basements and koi ponds when I’m not staring at Erik Chimera’s chiseled abs, and yeah, I feel dirty about the fact that I’m enjoying the parts of it I’m enjoying. But I’ve been feeling kinda antisocial, and it’s cold, and building sim houses is fun on a cozy winter night.

Meanwhile in WoW, or maybe this is why I’m feeling antisocial:

I’m, um six people, not counting the bank alts.

First, I’m my main. On rare occasions. My main has all the gear she needs, along with a colossal sense of resentment towards another faction in the guild that I’ve complained about before. So she brings out her magical overpoweredness only during progression, of which there isn’t much. We finally got the beasts of Northrend down in heroic the other day, after a great many failed attempts. We also had a problem with people only appearing for the free ride raids, not for the heroic 25s where you have to work and might leve empty handed, so the guild officers took up this stupid “heroic 25 at a moment’s notice!” project by scheduling raids for “whenever the 25 people they felt were best suited were all logged in at the same time.”

I’m also a tank. Sort of. My tank has acquired 3/5 T9 (the ordinary set, my main has the trophy set). I had to veer off and get a couple pieces of damage gear. This is because I was showing up for raids only to have a preponderance of tanks, so they’d tell me to go dps. Except I didn’t have dps gear. Whenever I roll on dps gear, one of the people from the aforementioned faction of asshats pipes up “but that’s an alt off spec, you should give that to the new dk who just joined and will /gquit before the end of the week.” So my dps numbers would come out terribad, and then they’d tell me my playing sucked, and as dps, they’re right. And frankly, I resisted efforts to shove me towards doing tanking and dps on the same toon. I would rather have four specialists than two dual specs. Damned if I’m going to gear my warrior for dps and then turn around to get the exact same stuff on my death knight. They're finally coming around and letting me tank stuff like Onyxia without asking me to switch. But speaking of death knights. . .

I’m also my death knight. Having finally hit level 80, I’m waiting for the cross-server looking for group thing to start up . . . because I’m really really bad. Absolutely awful dps. I’ve been carried through Onyxia and a couple heroics, and I think I’m going to gear this toon some place where people don’t know me. I still do better DK dps than I do on my warrior though.

And I’m my blood-elf-turned-draenei hunter, checking out the alliance on my server. I’m in a great guild, which has carried me through some Ulduar achievements, and like the DK, I’m also waiting for the patch before I go into maniacal instance running mode and get geared. So far it’s been easier to get groups as a bad hunter than as a bad death knight, but both of them need carrying and I hate being carried, so my noob 80s will be doing a lot of heroics before I let them play with the grown ups.

I’m a level 55 mage now. I can portal to everywhere, but most importantly, when a death knight death grips me, I can freeze him in place, then teleport away and nail him with frost bolts – usually my teleport will be up by the time he staggers frozenly over to finish killing me. When a rogue gets the drop on me I die really fast, but when I notice him, or even because I thought I might’ve heard the “invisibility” noise, I can make a big annoying blizzard that freezes him in place and keeps him from vanishing until people in real armor arrive to beat him up. Paladins still give me a little trouble but hunters stop annoying you really fast when you sheep their pet and start spewing magic at them. In fact, sheeping is about the most awesome thing ever, and in five more levels I’ll be able to turn stuff into bunny rabbits – the whole reason I’ve been grinding this toon, she looted a tome with that particular spell. My mage has done less than 200 quests but she has a whole lot of honorable kills, and is well on her way to her second battleground epic mount. This could very well end up being my next favorite toon. She is down with the spirit of the bunny – treachery, speed, escaping, sneaking around causing mischief, avoiding the Fudds.

And then there’s the druid. Her guild doesn’t raid, so if she’s going to finish getting geared she needs to run heroics. But she’s on a tank-shortage server. I figure once the patch comes through I’ll be able to crank out up to five heroics a night on my toons that need gear, or probably two or three instance runs in less time than it would take to watch a bad movie. It just seems more efficient to gear everybody later rather than now, and focus on . . . hiding behind that tree in the middle of the field in WSG waiting for a self-important death knight with an incorrectly spelled name to stomp past, and turn him into a little lamb. Baaaah!

And now, back to see if Erik Chimera is still lagging.

If he is, it’s gotta be tied to the level of quest-completion. Otherwise, a clone of him in a virgin neighborhood would lag, and that doesn’t happen. And by the way, there have been some gruesome crashes with the new sims, several of which have resulted in a full system restart and one of which knocked my video card out of commission for several horrible moments after seizing up. Maybe the game isn’t really finished, they’re gonna patch it later, and maybe they designed it to hang whenever you get near the end.

And if I can’t handle the lag any longer, all the blood from all the paladins and rogues and death knights and gnomes and other evil creatures I slay in Alterac Valley tonight will be on EA’s hands.