I didn’t mean to!
But I went ahead and clicked on the wrong LJ-link and was treated to a glimpse, literally just a glimpse of something from last night’s Heroes which I haven’t yet watched. The glimpse was nothing shocking, but it made the brain try to piece together the context of how it came about and I haven’t been spoiled, I’ve been piqued. Damn you,
Heroes is currently stored on the TiVo since last night I was running around beta-testing (read: playing) the Lord of the Rings Online. It sucked me in mostly because it’s new and different. I do like a fantasy setting and I no longer have a tabletop D&D group to play with and while World of Warcraft was fun, it couldn’t hold my attention. I don’t know that LOTRO will hold it very long either but they do offer pre-order customers an interesting option of a lifetime membership for $199 or regular membership at $9.99 a month. It’s one thing to open and close your gaming account from time to time as you develop an interest in other things (and the real world), but to be able to use it anytime and see that it hasn’t lapsed would be cool. I know many a City of Heroes player that would have appreciated that when the new Veteran badges came out.
LOTRO has some cool features, integrated voice chat through gamespy is the niftiest, as is hearing the shock of two other players when they realize and remember that men play women, duh! Otherwise it’s easy to make comparisons to other fantasy-based games out there. There are TONS of quests available all over the place, and you do have to read the details of them. There are no flashing arrows pointing you one way or the other. Another fun thing is deeds, kinda like badges for CoH/CoV players. The first one I attained was for making it to level 5 without being defeated, but others will pop up after you’ve completed the basic requirement. For instance, kill a few spiders and you’ll discover an available deed for defeating 30 of them, which may lead to an advanced deed for defeating 60 more. They may be titles you can attach to your character, or traits that you can bind to your character as passive skills. Pretty cool. The archetypes are very familiar, they even call them by nickname in the character selection screen (debuffer, tank, nuker, etc.) but each step of character creation offers an optional video to watch that gives a little detail about race, class, etc. I’m not 100% familiar with the Tolkien works, but I any Tolkien junkies will be very happy to see events unfold and recognize people and places from the novels. I like it so far and it makes for a nice break from superhero’ing… at least until I get Jade Empire.
I discovered a new word today: callipygian. Jennifer Lopez and Beyonce Knowles are well-known callipygian beauties.
