Getting Steamed Up

Oh look, here I am writing a blog post at ten past ten on a Saturday night. How did that happen?

Mrs Bhagpuss is away at the moment and I did sort of have a plan to play something other than EQ2 for a while. Then the whole PSS1 thing blew up and I found myself spending more time on EQ2Wire and the SoE forums than I spent playing. Even when I was logged in I was chatting about the situation while sorting my bank vault, which scarcely counts as high adventure.

Three points. Read 'em and weep

So this morning I was keen to throw myself into something. Something exciting. The GW2 beta application put Guild Wars at the front of my mind so I thought I'd go over there and look into this Hall of Monuments thing. Yes, I know I said I wasn't going to bother with it. Yes, I know I said I probably wouldn't even use the same account to play GW2. But I found that nifty HoM points calculator thingy and I had three points (and yes for the last time I know everyone has three points) so I thought, well I bet I could get a couple more and then I'd have a tapestry.

Do I want a tapestry? I don't know! I have no idea what it does. But I could get one, maybe. That would be good because then I'd have a thing that I don't have and that's always good. Isn't it? Don't confuse me!

Anyhooo... I did a little reading on the GW2 site and then I clicked the icon for Guild Wars on my desktop and what happened? Nothing. More than nothing, in fact. It seems my portable drive died in the night. I blame Eligium.

Kinda buff for a panda....

What's Eligium? You didn't follow the link, did you? Good move. You have more sense than I do, that's obvious. I probably shouldn't even have linked it. Eligium is a F2P MMO from Frogster that has pandas. They sent me an email saying they were in open beta so I downloaded it. I can't tell you what it's like because I haven't even gotten as far as character creation. Every time I try to run it it craps out on me. Late last night I tried to get it to run about half a dozen times and it kept crashing. Its on my portable drive and now my portable drive doesn't work.

Ok, circumstantial evidence. Whatever, my drive is fried. I spent a long time trying to get a response out of it with no success. Currently it is sitting on its eighth hour and counting of SeaTools recovery with over 2500 errors recovered. No Guild Wars for me. Also no STO, Allods, Ryzom or half a dozen other MMOs. Fingers crossed, maybe tomorrow.

Wurm then. I really wanted to play Wurm anyway. It's browser based so no problem there. Except it seems there's a client I downloaded and forgot all about that underwrites the browser. I put it on the portable drive, naturally. 

From our live feed

So I played EQ2. My conjuror dinged 89. But I didn't want to play EQ2 so I patched Rift and hit Play. The client hangs. Can't get in. I could work out how to fix that perhaps but it's getting late. So here I am writing this while LotRO patches. Actually it's done now, but it took twenty minutes.

What have I learned?

1. I need a back-up drive with all my MMOs on, fully patched. Like that's going to happen.

2. Maybe I ought to get Skyrim or Kingdoms of Amalur.  Just in case. Like we have candles and matches in case of a power cut.

3. Maybe Steam is not such a terrible idea.

I have been against the concept of Steam from the start. My games but not on my machine? Pshaw! Doesn't seem such a bad idea now, does it?. Tomorrow I'll look into it.

Meantime, LotRO's patched. Time to go hobbitting.