So what does a Kiryn do when she doesn't play WoW? Well, she tries to play other games, mainly. After planning out my Oblivion character in previous posts, I went to work on actually doing it. I was thrown off a bit when my Major Stats only gave me +5 instead of +10, but all that meant is that I had to get to level 14 instead of 13 to max out my endurance (ignore the numbers on the last post, I obviously start at level 1 so the 1 there is referring to my first levelup which is actually 2 and so forth).

I ended up splitting my other +5 points per level pretty evenly between Intelligence and Willpower. It mainly had to do with how much I had to spam Restoration spells on myself to keep from dying while the rats chewed on me to increase my Heavy Armor skill. I was trying to get a good mix of Armorer (when I had the hammers to do so) + Heavy Armor + Block, evening it out on the other side with Restoration/Destruction + Alteration. If I managed to get enough Endurance skillups to reach 10 before getting too many Restoration points, I'd take Intelligence by way of Conjuration and Mysticism instead.

However, throughout this whole process, I get very frequent rather random crashes. It crashes when I'm swinging my mace to bash this skeleton's head in for a strength point. It crashes when I'm running over that way. It crashes when I'm opening this door. One time, it even crashed before I even loaded the game, after I tried to change the game resolution from the MAIN MENU and then quit... it crashed as soon as I selected Quit. Wonderful.

I tried downloading the most recent update. I tried defragging, updating my graphics card drivers, uninstalling my mods (how painful it is to play without my skill journal, even for a moment!) getting some compressed air and cleaning the dust out of my computer's fans. I tried uninstalling the game, but it wouldn't let me, gave me some error. Had to try installing again, THEN I could uninstall, and then when I tried to reinstall it just hung there without doing anything.

We think maybe it's a problem with the disc... gonna try to download a new copy, and if that doesn't work, I might just have to try buying a real copy. Though I feel silly buying a game for PC when I already own it for XBox 360. Sigh. They've taken enough of my time though, I guess they do deserve my money -- though I have to ask the question: do they deserve my money, if their game refuses to run for more than 5 minutes without crashing on my machine? If owning a real storebought copy doesn't fix this issue, I'm encouraging their shoddy code. I'm not sure I like that idea.

Apart from Oblivion, I'm working on polishing up one of my old sketches (hoping to have the finished version up here by the end of the week), and I went to an awesome science museum in San Francisco with a friend on Saturday. I took the train so I wouldn't have to drive there -- it was kinda exciting, I haven't ridden on a real train since 5th grade (BART doesn't count as a train). My car's still in the shop anyway while they try to figure out why it's making that alarming sputtering noise when it gets too hot. So I spent yesterday (as Khoa was out playing D&D for most of the afternoon) taking the light rail over to the great mall and looking at the plants at the hardware store. Mmmmmm jasmine. One of these days I'm going to buy myself one of those.

And trying out other various Free to Play MMOs. I came to the conclusion that I don't like Free Realms, since their "free 200 station cash" for being around when they hit the 1 million player mark was a Slap In The Face. I was hoping I could buy a pet to play around with the pet trainer class, but it turns out that despite there being cats that only cost 200 station cash, both of them require you to be a member to purchase them. The other cats, from 250-400 station cash, don't require you to be a member, which I didn't find out until after I went around looking at the two cats to decide which one I wanted, then attempted to buy it. When I browsed through the other pages of their marketplace looking for things I could buy, it was a choice between a pirate hat, some sweat pants, a pair of sandals or some consumable potions. Every single other item cost at least 250-300 station cash. Woopdedoo. I'm not playing their game any more.

On Tobold's recommendation, I downloaded a game called Luminary that's supposed to have an extremely advanced player economy with extremely simplified combat, but their localization is so horribly bad that I can't click on ANYTHING without wondering if they even HAD a QA department. Seriously, it's trying to explain this item database thing to me, it tells me to check the "category" list, but that dropdown box is labeled "type". It tells me to click on the red square when I've found what it's telling me to look for, and despite reading SEVERAL TIMES on Tobold's blog and having ample warning of what this mysterious "red square" is supposed to be, it STILL took me several minutes to find it. And as soon as I leveled up by killing one leaf-raccoon, it popped up with a message saying "Congratulation on reach Lv2". Mmmmmmmmm no thanks. I wouldn't call that open beta. Ask me again when the game has actually been properly localized. Also, the game was having trouble deciding if it was called Luminary or Goonzu, or even what company it was by. Half of the time it said Aeria Games, but then sometimes it was made by nDoors. Make up your mind!

One person said Atlantica Online is supposed to be a good game, but despite not trying it out yet, I don't have high hopes as the downloader for the game was asking me where I wanted to download BitTorrent (obviously not what I was downloading) and then proceeded to call itself the "Downloder". I'd show you screenshots of said bugs but I'm at work and they're at home. I'll try out the game one of these days and let you know what I think.