5 Things that can make self-employment seriously awful

That whole freelance games critic thing is the best job I ever had in life. I do something I absolutely love doing and, occasionally, I even get paid a little something. Not remotely enough, but it's a job for the kind of person who craves attention more than worldly possessions and I've come to terms with that. For the most part. And when I complain about the sucky side of things, my friends tend to tell me off. "You're your own boss, you can sleep in every day, you work from home and you're still whining. If you really hated it so much, you'd go find yourself a new job!"
Funny thing is, if I really could get employed as a writer, rather than being a crappy freelancer, I wouldn't hesitate to do so. But I suppose my friends are referring to other, less exciting regular office jobs. Fair enough. If I hated being a freelancer so much, I'd probably get one of those jobs. Everything has its ups and downs. So, if you've ever considered self-employment, be sure you can deal with this stuff:

5. Distractions

Resisting the urge to take part in this week's poop throwing contest, Bob did all he could to meet his deadlines.

Working at home has its obvious perks. My cat is here. I'm not wearing pants. Nobody gives me any weird looks when I have the occasional wank break. The cat's kinda used to it by now. And I don't have to worry about my boss magically appearing behind me the moment I check Facebook. Have you ever felt the temptation to check on your Farmville account, play a quick round of Angry Birds or waste your company's valuable time some other way while you're supposed to do your job? Imagine having full access to your Steam account, a bazillion brand new games and nobody to ask you why the fuck you're not working when you spend eight hours grinding levels in Pandaria. Unless you get paid to do exactly that, of course.

Sleeping in can be another problem. Sure, I don't have to actually "get to the office", unless you wanna count the way from the bedroom to the living room. Shower and shave? Meh, no one is gonna look at me all day. But getting up late means you'll miss important emails and phone calls, people get pissed off because you're not reliable and chances are, you'll end up working all night, meaning you'll get up even later the next day. And work piles up all the time, usually when you least expect it. The other week I was supposed to write a class guide on some MMO, but the publisher failed to provide the necessary characters, so I had to level them up from scratch. At the same time, another publisher contacted me and demanded an explanation about why I was so harsh when I rated their game. Then they told me about the "factual mistakes" I've made while they're reading my article in Google Translate, because they don't actually speak the language the article is written in. So I had to spend the next hour explaining to them what I actually said and why their translation is wrong. I don't get paid to do this, but it needs to be done. Also, if the publisher in question happens to read this, I still love you and I don't mean to point fingers.

So I'm explaining my review on one game, leveling some characters on another, then I'm getting a call from the office, asking me how many dungeons there are in a third game, which I've reviewed three weeks ago. Because they need that detail for the article. Fuck if I know. And that's when one of our pets got sick and refused to eat, so in between calls, emails, level-grinding and typing stuff, I'm bathing, creaming and force-feeding a lizard. And when one customer wasn't satisfied with the quality of some gameplay footage I had recorded for them, I had to spend the rest of the night re-recording and re-uploading everything, meaning my business night ended sometime around 6:30am. But I get to sleep in, because I'm such a lucky bastard! And strict deadlines lead us right to the next problem...

4. Deadlines

I got a call one night when it turned out that a publisher was going to re-use some of my magazine reviews from one or two years ago. Which, of course, were grossly outdated by then, but they were gonna sell them off as brand new. "Can you update these reviews and make sure all the facts are still correct? Amount of dungeons, races and classes, pricing and so forth. We need this by tomorrow." While this certainly doesn't happen all the time, these things do happen. It's the kind of stuff you have to be ready for when you're self-employed. Emergencies. And I really, really like that particular magazine, I didn't wanna let them down, so of course I went and spent the rest of the night fixing this mess. At no charge. Because I'm a nice guy, I scratch your back, you scratch mine, that kinda thing.

Unfortunately, you cannot expect the same kind of courtesy when it comes down to getting paid for your work. About a month ago, I've sent an invoice to a customer and when there was no payment after two weeks, I went and contacted them. And I was told that people were on sick leave or on vacation, so there had been a slight delay and the invoice would be paid this week. And there was no money for another week, so I contacted them again. And they responded with the exact same message. Sick leave, vacation, money goes out this week. Bit weird. Do they really mean it this time? Am I gonna get my money this week? I don't fucking know.

"So, how's freelance games journalism working for ya?"
- "Shut the fuck up and put another magazine in the fire!"

You see, I never know that I won't be paid on time until it's too late. The guys who sign my invoices just pass them on to accounting, where they'll sit around until somebody gets in the mood to take care of them. Whole department is on vacation? Somebody called in sick? Computer problem? Cosmic rays? Doesn't fucking matter. If they don't pay up for whatever reason, I won't know until I check my bank account, then I ask the guys who sign my invoices, they ask in accounting and they say that nobody was there to pay, but they'll probably take care of it sometime this week. If I'm lucky.

So what am I supposed to do? Charge them late fees? What am I gonna do if they refuse to pay them, hire a lawyer? Like I could afford that! And they know I can't. I could go on strike, refuse to post any new articles on their websites, put all guides and level ups on halt until the money gets there, but that hurts me more than it'll hurt them. Because eventually, I will have to pick up the slack and any delay in my work means further delay for my pay.

I couldn't pay the rent last month. I would have been able to pay, had my employers paid me on time. They didn't. So the transaction to my landlord didn't get through and my bank has, in its infinite wisdom and glory, charged extra fees for the failed transaction. Because banks care and the customer is always right and if some automated process fails and I don't have enough money to pay the rent, it makes perfect sense to punish me by taking even more of my money away from me. Look at those tv ads where smiling, happy people go to their local bank and everyone is happy and there are smiles and handshakes. It's all liiiiiiiiies!

3. Lack of Safety

We tried it that way, but I'm too big.

Everybody can be replaced. I could piss off a publisher who fails to pay up on time. They'll remember that. Maybe they'll be more careful next time. Maybe they'll just give the next job to somebody less bitchy. Being self-employed means you probably don't have any binding contracts with the people you work for and if they no longer require your services for any reason, well... they don't even have to fire you.

This is especially tricky with games journalism. They give me work, because I'm fast, reliable, relatively well-known and I'm simply good. And not too expensive - great value for money and all that. Problem is, there are countless people willing to do my job for less than what I get. They may not be as reliable, they may not be very talented, but they'll be so happy about the proverbial 15 minutes of fame, they wouldn't dare dream to complain, cause trouble or charge a humane amount of money for their work. So, not only can I be "laid off" at any time without so much as an explanation, they can instantly hire a new guy to do my job for less.

And with the rather modest amount of money I get for the job, which may or may not be paid within a reasonable amount of time, I can't really put anything into a "rainy day fund". Should the magazines I write for - god forbid - cease to exist or no longer require my services for any reason, I'll be fucked harder than your younglings when you ask Josef Fritzl to babysit.

2. Stress

I have this one recurring nightmare: I'm late for work. I get stuck in traffic, I miss the train, I'm out of gas, I oversleep, my brain comes up with all kinds of reasons for me to be late and when I finally make it to the office, everyone's kinda pissed off at me and I worry about losing my job.
I haven't worked in an office for more than a half decade and I have never met any of the people I work with in person.

Tight deadlines stress me out. I had to finish three reviews the other week, two of which were about games I haven't had the chance to play yet. One of the games crashed my computer, because it was an unstable beta. Hour-long server maintenance stopped me from playing. And I ran out of goddamn time. And that causes insomnia. When I finally go to bed between 4 and 6 in the morning, I'm dog-tired, but I can't fucking sleep. My brain is in "work-mode". I go through my recent articles. What did I write again? Did I mention that new class, the pvp issues and the problems with the item shop? Did I remember to upload those screenshots?

The next step is terror shits. Okay, it's really just diarrhea or all kinds of stress-related stomach cramps, but that doesn't sound as awesome. And over the past two or so weeks, which have been unusually stressful, even by my standards, I've developed a whole new symptom: Tinnitus. My left ear is ringing and it won't fucking stop. Never had this for as long as I've lived. Started just recently and went away when all my work was finished. Now I didn't get paid for anything, I can't pay my bills, my fridge is empty and my fucking ear started ringing again.

"Maybe I should call the boss and tell him I'm s... aw fuck!"

Of course this isn't the only problem. When you get sick, you can't just stay at home for a day instead of going to the office. Your office is at home. And you can either grit your teeth and do your job no matter how shit you feel or you can leave it, miss your deadlines and screw up your chances at getting more work in the future. And the fun doesn't stop there in my case - with most of these symptoms being caused by stress, actually asking for an extension of my deadlines will only cause more stress, because it makes me look bad. Hurray!

1. Maintaining a Relationship

"Remember when we still had the time and money to go out?"
"No."
"Me neither. HAHAHA!"

When my partner comes from from her underpaid day job, she wants to talk. She wants to have dinner, talk about work, have some quality time with me. And I gotta record video footage, write previews and grind levels like there's no tomorrow. And I'm stressed out. I can't focus on what she's saying, I don't have time for her, I get aggressive and she feels rightfully neglected.

Sex? I'm way too fucking exhausted and I won't be able to come to bed before 4am. Hit the town this weekend, go to a nice restaurant and make up for the time we're not getting with each other? Fat chance, there's no money on the account! We should go on vacation when this month's magazine issue is finished and there won't be as much to do. Oh wait, the money thing again...

Working at home and sharing your home with a spouse means you won't get your "office" to yourself all the time. You could put up the "do not disturb" sign and avoid all contact, so you can finish your job on time, which will harm your relationship in the long run. You could take a break, listen to your partner, talk about their day, spend two hours having dinner and watching a movie together. Which makes going back to work even more difficult and may potentially hurt your career in the long run. It doesn't matter what you do - you're always screwed.

My partner and I have started to share my job as much as we can, so we can be together while I work. When I'm supposed to write class guides, she'll level one character, I'll level the other. When I'm supposed to review a game, she plays it with me, so I can get a second opinion and she can check out features like crafting or housing and pets while I look into raids and pvp. I'm incredibly lucky that she's so understanding and loves games as much as I do. Problem is, you can't expect your partner to be into your job as much as you are. You can't expect them to understand when you get pissed off at them when they try to talk to you after a long day at work, while you're still in the middle of it. Having a loved one at your work place may sound like a cool idea, but in most cases, you'll end up hating each other.

-Cat

Waiting for a game I've already bought four times before

One of the things about getting older is that I should be getting a little wiser, more experienced, I'm supposed to learn stuff. But year after year, I've been the perfect retarded customer the gaming industry wants. A new Call of Duty gets released and I go buy it. Three days later (literally), some website announces that Activision registers a new website, trademark or some other shit, announcing an upcoming new CoD title for next year. And just like that, my new game becomes 50% less awesome. Because I'm playing something, which is bound to become outdated in about twelve months time. Something I've only just installed.

Don't get me wrong. Of course they're releasing a fucking new CoD in a year. There's a stupid new CoD every fucking November. But they don't have to rub my nose in it. "Haha, you moron! We've got you all hyped up about our game, now we have your money and we're gonna start the hype machine for a whole new version!" What really bothers me, though, is how I always fall for that shit, even though the game never really changes. Yes, every new CoD comes with a brand new singleplayer campaign, which I really don't care about. The multiplayer part, however, has been the exact same thing since Modern Warfare, just with new maps and some new weapons here and there.

The games are so similar to each other in multiplayer, for the most part they just feel like map packs and minor balance patches. One game comes with "pro" perks, which are more difficult to unlock than regular perks, the next game removes pro perks again, the one after that slightly nerfs perks, the next one buffs them a bit and so forth. One game makes killstreak rewards more powerful, another one removes the most powerful killstreak rewards, yet another one adds even more killstreak rewards and lets you customize them.

You know, there used to be a time where people could just set up their own damn servers and adjust all of these settings by hand. They didn't have to buy the game again and again every year and just accept those relatively minor tweaks here and there.
With the upcoming release of CoD Ghosts I couldn't help but cringe at their shows and presentations around the game. Why the fuck did Jimmy Fallon feature that stupid game in his show? And then there was this:

Erm...
So Ghosts has exactly one new, slightly unique feature (I'll get to that in a bit) and other than that, it's the exact same game. Again. So how do you market that shit? Add an Eminem title song and a 10 seconds clip of him talking about the game. Invite some RL marines to have them slaughtered by a bunch of nerds in a multiplayer session, live on stage. I can't help but feel that they've run out of ideas a while ago and now they're pulling off weird shit like that, since there really isn't anything left to talk about when it comes to a "new" CoD.

That's especially the case when Mr. Rubin talks about how they've looked at every single aspect of the game in order to find stuff to change. You know, telling people they wanted to make every component of the game even better. But to me it sounded more like, "We had a really hard time slightly changing stuff around a bit that hasn't already been changed back and forth a hundred times, anyway." Think about it. Quickscoping, no quickscoping. Nuke killstreak, no nuke killstreak, nuke killstreak again. And so forth. They add stuff, nerf stuff, remove stuff, add it again, buff it again, going in circles. They're not improving anything, they're just adjusting the rules a little bit each year and that's it.

And they keep talking "next generation". Next generation this, next generation that, next generation my fucking ass. Look at multiplayer videos from any CoD game from Modern Warfare 2 to Ghosts and you can't even tell they're all supposed to be different games. Okay, so you can blow up a gas station on one map, nuke a bus off a cliff on another and turn one map into a blazing ruin when you nuke it, that's new. And that's fun the first three or so times you see it. I don't see anything groundbreaking, innovative or next-generation there, but hey, an actual change, whoop de do.

The one really new thing, and the reason why those bastards are getting me again, lies within the new squad system. I didn't even look at Ghosts. I didn't care. I didn't want to buy this game again. But I'm a sucker for this whole squad thing. Create and customize a bunch of soldiers, pick all their gear and perks, set up the perfect team and fight the squads of your friends. It's really just a glorified bot match and I doubt that a lot of people will care for it much, but I'm actually looking forward to squad matches with Claire. We're into that whole customization and optimization stuff.

Fighting a bunch of 14 year olds on the 'net, the whining, insults and bitching, all of that is gonna be fun for the usual 3 or 4 weeks. But fighting the Bear, squad vs squad or teaming up with her to fight the squads of our friends, at our own pace, "offline", whilst unlocking new stuff and leveling up... yeah, I'm up for that. That's probably the most casual way I've ever played CoD and I don't even mind. If that part of the game turns out to be as fun as it sounds, if it's well-executed and enjoyable, then I'll stick with just that. And then I won't give a shit about them releasing yet another CoD a year later, which will probably get rid of squads again to "offer the classic prestige experience our veterans have been asking for" or some shit. Nah, they'll probably find some other hook and get me hyped enough to buy it again. I'm an idiot. -_-

Oh well. One more month to go until the game comes out. I think I'm gonna practice a bit by playing some of the earlier titles of the Franchise. Modern Warfare 2 was always entertaining. Akimbo SMGs. Incredibly stupid, but so much fun! Got a few days off after all my hard work, so I may as well give it a try. Let's see how that'll go...

-Cat

Nightmares

I'm playing a fun little game called "reload your online bank account every ten seconds" right now. Yes, a nightmare-themed blog. And we're having a bit of a money-related nightmare right now. You see, one problem I have to face with my self-employment is that there's no regular paycheck and I depend on my employers to pay up on time. Which they usually do, but right now I'm waiting for three transactions, which have been delayed a bit. The first one got buried under a ton of mail in a very busy office and they didn't notice my invoice to them until I reminded them. Honest mistake, shit happens. As for the second one, well... "Yeah, should have gone out as far as I know." Well, so far it hasn't. And the third one got delayed because of vacation and sick leave.

These things happen. If you can't deal with this kind of stuff, then self-employment isn't for you. However, it gets a bit problematic when things get delayed by a week or two and you can't pay your bills (I should have paid the rent on last month's 25th but couldn't) and you can't go out, buy stuff, have fun, that kind of thing. You see, it was the Bear's birthday this week, we wanted to go out today, have dinner in town, maybe do a little shopping, we wanted to order 2 copies of the upcoming CoD Ghosts and just enjoy a kickass weekend. Problem is, the money ain't there yet. Might arrive any minute, might arrive in an hour or two. Might not arrive until Monday. Sigh.

It's ironic. I'm waiting for the biggest amount of money I have ever made in this job within a single month. I've never had so much work before, but in the end I've met all my deadlines, finished all my stuff and I'm looking forward to receiving a pile of money, which will financially secure us for the rest of the year - unless we spend it all on pizza. Yet I'm unable to pay the rent or celebrate Claire's birthday right now, because the money isn't there yet. Right now I don't know when we can finally go out and celebrate - or if we can go out at all. What's worse is the paranoia that goes along with this. What if the money won't be there all day? What if there's not gonna be any money on Monday? Yesterday was a public holiday in Germany, which may have delayed all payments and transactions a little further. I miss having a predictable, monthly paycheck.

But let's move from RL nightmares to traditional, dreamy ones. I think I've just dreamed up an entire episode of Outer Limits or Twilight Zone or something. The whole thing was in the near future, Claire and I were finally married, we even had a baby (WTF?! We HATE babies!) and for some stupid reason we decided to buy a car. One of those really massive ones. A Range Rover or a Hummer or some shit. So we bought one of those monstrosities, went back home and it didn't take long for Claire to show some really erratic behaviour. You see, since it was the future, it was possible (and perfectly normal) for certain companies to put commercials and advertisements right into people's minds and dreams. And apparently, Claire got stuck in a Range Rover commercial. She was logged on to an online game and I noticed how her avatar was getting torn to shreds by monsters, but she didn't even care, because she was busy looking at maps and routes and stuff on the internet. This isn't like her at all. You see, she takes her gaming very seriously and the life of her avatars is top priority. I told her that she was getting her ass kicked on her game. "That's not important right now. I'm planning a trip with our brand new Range Rover!" I shook her, shouted at her, asked what the heck was going on with her and for a moment, she went back to normal. She seemed tired and confused and we decided she should get some rest.

Something wasn't right. I picked up the phone to call a doctor or 999 or something. I'm not entirely sure, it was a dream and they never make perfect sense. But the guy on the phone just tried to sell me cheap insurance. I tried asking family and neighbours for help, but they were all just advertising stupid products. I was trapped in my own, personal Truman Show and everyone around me had turned into some kind of commerical zombie. I figured I was the only one still sane because of my willpower and intelligence (ahem!) and the fact I'm just not into having a lot of expensive stuff. I went to the bedroom to check on Claire, but she wouldn't even wake up. I squeezed her, kissed her as though to wake her up from some grotesque fairytale sleep, showed her our baby, wanted her to come back to me. It looks a bit stupid when I'm writing it down like this, but imagine you dream up some weird shit like that and you're convinced that the one person you love the most will never come back to you. Not fun.
That's when she opened her eyes. She smiled at me. Had no idea why I was so desperate and freaked out. "Everything is fine, love. Don't worry", she said. Words couldn't describe the relief I felt when I finally had her back. "Why don't we go on that trip in our new Range Rover?"

You know, that's a pretty good ending right there. A real kick in the teeth. But it didn't end there. I got out of the bedroom. And our house was empty. Abandoned. And I was a lonely old man. Claire had left me and moved on a long time ago. Because it wasn't her and everyone else around me who turned into some kind of dream-advertisement zombies with zero sense of reality. It was me. I had slept my entire life away, living some bizzare tv ad fantasy as though it was real. When I finally woke up, my whole life was over.

Now that's some weird shit to wake up to. And my subconscious has ripped off quite the nice amount of sci-fi and mindfuck shows and novels to entertain me over night.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not freaked out or shaken or anything and this isn't gonna haunt me. I didn't write about it in this blog because I have to unload or "talk about it". I wanted to write it down before I forget all about it. Because I'm fascinated with how complex and surprising the whole thing was. Most of my dreams tend to be random garbage, which rarely makes any sense, but this one told a whole story. Not a brand new or original one, but it was still very interesting, as far as dreams go.

Oh well. Back to the real nightmare: Reloading the banking website and not finding a single penny in my account. Reload, reload, reload....


-Cat

Yay Dragons! On and off the Internet

If you're a regular visitor to this humble blog, you'll already know that we're into dragons. Well... not into dragons like certain people who like to refer to themselves as furries, but... you know, like that:

This is Hugo Bosc, our pet monitor lizard.

We have a whole bunch of reptiles now, but if I had to pick a favourite, it would be Hugo. High entertainment, low maintenance. He craps once per week. Once. That's it. It's also beneficial to his health when you feed him now and then (duh), but he's the easiest pet we've ever had. And walking a 3ft reptile around town is one of the coolest things you can do. He looks a bit smaller on the picture, but he's roughly 1 meter in length now - and still growing. The only thing that was even better than walking our pet dinosaur was walking our pet dinosaur whilst being followed by a big tortoise. Went on regular trips outside the shops for his exercise, but he's been sold now. Not Hugo. He's ours. He's not going anywhere. ♥

Virtual dragons are still going well, too.

Apparently, there are some hard mode dungeons for 5 players when you're at the level cap and all, but other than that, you can pretty much solo everything. In fact, some people claim they're soloing the "endgame" dungeons, as well. I guess all it takes is a decent dragon.
One might argue that this kind of destroys the point of playing an MMORPG, but if I can choose between doing something on my own and teaming up with a bunch of random morons, I'll always go solo. So yeah. Go dragons! Go Dragon's Prophet! I'll solo, thank you very much. Or do the occasional duo with Claire. Besides, it makes sense that way - your dragon is supposed to be powerful, you should feel his strength, not consider him another boring battle pet, so if you need to team up for fucking everything, it'll only serve to make you feel like a wimp. Boo!

-Cat

How to train your Dragon - A first look at Dragon's Prophet

The above video is based on the first ~2 hours of gameplay - read this entry if you want a little more detail.

Claire's family has picked up the rather unusual hobby of horsery and horse-related competition in some MMO targeted at little girls and the creeps who stalk them: Star Stables. I'm not even kidding. Her mother, grandmother, aunts, sister, everybody is racing horses on the internet now. To be fair, it is pretty amazing how online gaming can help the whole family stay in touch, allowing them to play and chat across three generations. Glorious, modern times, indeed.

The only kind of horse I care about comes with baked potatoes and steak sauce, but there's a different kind of animal, the feeding and care of which the bear and I have picked up: Dragons. According to the story of the game Dragon's Prophet (DP),  the noble elder dragons have created the entire world and everything in it, apparently for the sake of boning the shit out of everything. I might be paraphrasing a bit here, but the basic idea is that dragons have mixed with just about every kind of animal you can imagine, so you'll find wolf dragons and bird dragons and crocodile dragons and so forth. Most of them are friendly, they're all incredibly smart and powerful and you can force them to be your friend by sitting on them until you break their will and they stop trying to throw you off. The game refers to this process as taming. Uh-huh, sure.

Taming and training said dragons is what DP is all about. Every player, no matter what class and skills they have, gets to tame dragons. "Where's the fun in that?" you might ask, seeing as you're not really all that special if everyone around you has their own dragon. Well, the idea is to make your dragon unique, to teach him the perfect set of skills to match your needs and play style or, better yet, the perfect tag-team of dragons to help you through every situation. Picture it like creating your ultimate Pokémon team, an analogy I hate, because I find Pokémon utterly annoying and stupid, but the comparison is still valid.

You see, when I started the game, the good people at Infernum were nice enough to sponsor me Whisperwind, a cool-looking, scaly green dragon:

I take a shot of Vodka whenever I see a player, who named their dragon Toothless.

His primary attribute is strength and he comes with a whole lot of kickass melee abilities. And since I'm playing a melee character with a big sword and a heavy armor, I figured that Whisperwind would complement my character perfectly and that he'd become my 'main' dragon.

So I played for a while, ran a few generic errants for various NPCs until I came across my first dungeon and found a little rock drake thingie. I don't remember its exact name, but it's basically a mix between a peacock and a dragon, which came with a unique, rocky texture as opposed to his more colourful friends. So I sat on him until he agreed to like me, I had him fight by my side for a bit ANDHOLYSHITITSHOOTSLIGHTNINGANDFIREANDOMFGWOW!1

I looked at his stats and he was the exact opposite of Whisperind - a complete nerd! His primary stat was intelligence and he had a lot more ability slots than Whisperwind, who presumably excels at sports, guzzling beer and beating up smaller dragons for their lunch money. And he came with his own assortment of devastating spells, which quickly made him the strongest dragon in my humble collection. Oh yeah, you'll want at least two or three dragons to accompany you at any given time for various reasons:

- Dragons may get injured in battle or simply get exhausted and need a little break, so you'll want a tag-team partner to take over

- Some dragons might be excellent tanks and/or healers, but cannot fly or swim. Some dragons might be mediocre fighters but grant amazing buffs. Different situations require different dragons

- I've run out of bullet points and I think I was convincing enough, but the list looks better when I mention at least three things

Not all dragons sport wings or the ability to swim, but they may be really fast runners.

So now I had this tag-team of dragons, one of which used nothing but melee attacks, much like myself. The other one was a genius with devastating magic attacks. Sweet Jesus! But those dragons are much more than mere WoW-style hunter pets or, worse, Neverwintan companions. They're your tanks, your healers, your scale-clad army of one, when you can't be arsed to play with random strangers. Because who the fuck does that in MMOs anymore?

You see, the four classes in DP are damage dealers. Yes, one of them is called a guardian, but he doesn't get an innate taunting ability and there is no dedicated healer class, so he's pretty fucked without a properly skilled dragon. The ranger relies on bows and gunblades, there's a ninja-style oracle and some spellcasting fellow and that's about it. They're all pretty fast-paced and devastating, they can hold their own in a fight if they have to, but the moment you're surrounded or facing a boss, it's your dragon who runs the show. Dragons tank. Dragons hold off the enemy so you can get away and save your ass. Dragons fucking rule.

And they allow you to travel in style.

Dragons come with random skills, random amounts of skill slots and random attributes. You may tame a dragon, who comes with nothing but crafting passives, which help you gather more resources if you're into that sort of thing, but it also means they're useless in a fight. I ended up with such a dragon, a complete waste of space - except he knew how to heal. So I sent him and Mr. Nerd to training until the nerdy one had learned the healing spell from the newest addition to our lair - whom I've immediately released back into the wild when he was done teaching my other dragon. "We'll call you!" Yeah. We won't. His resume went into the shredder, he's not even in our system anymore. But our employee of the month took his healing magic. Hurray!

The amazing thing is that nerdy magic dragon turned into an amazing healer right off the bat! The moment my health drops to anything below 90%, he puts regenerative goodness on my character and battles have become infinitely easier. This dragon dishes out insane amounts of spell-based damage, tanks bosses for me and keeps me alive all at the same time. I don't have to give him orders, there's no need to set up an AI, the dragon just knows what to do! Considering how incredibly brain-dead and useless AI-companions in most other MMOs are, the dragons in DP are pretty damn impressive.

And when you fight bosses like this ugly fucker, you'll WANT someone else to tank!

In the long run, I may have to specialize one dragon in buffs and healing, another one in magic damage and have a third one to taunt and tank and they should excel at running, flying and swimming, respectively. Or maybe have three jacks of all trades and switch them in and out as they need breaks. I'm not entirely sure how much customization and fine-tuning will be requicked as difficulty increases towards the higher levels. The first 20 levels went by rather smoothly.

What's less fun is how tedious it can be to teach one dragon's skills to another dragon. As you send them to field training, your dragon might not learn any new skills at all or pick up a useless crafting ability you didn't want, forcing you to shell out some small amount of RL cash (or daily quest currency) in order to unlearn the unwanted new talent and have another training attempt. Patience (or endless amounts of money) is key.

What's great, though, is how you can put armors, saddles and other goodies on your dragons to make them stronger and sexier:

Shiny metal armlets and butt covers!! Whee!

DP has its flaws. The possibility to solo dungeons with your dragon (or team up with a loved one, like I do) is awesome. Nuking zombies with pumpkin bombs is hilarious. Fighting boars, bears, wolves, goblins, bandits and cultists is... meh. The game world is full of generic kill and fetch quests, generic creatures... in fact, dragons aside, the whole game world is dull and generic. I love the dragons, the taming, the training and everything that goes with it, but the world doesn't suck me in. To many of us, Azeroth is (or at least used to be) our "happy place". It's cartoony, sure, but it feels alive and immersive and there's a lot to see and to do. It's a charming, believable world. And I don't feel that when I play DP. No quirky, lovable characters or fantasy races, nothing to make me feel like it could be my virtual "home" of sorts. I don't enjoy Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn much and I'm glad I don't have to play it for work anymore, but Eorzea immediately drew me in. You can love or hate FF 14, but its amazing world is what draws over a million paying customers into the game right now.

DP? Not so much. It looks really nice and I'm sure I'll encounter some stunning, unique landmarks as I level up and explore, but those green fields and lush trees and lakes and mountains could be part of any game. Allods, Runes of Magic, any random Korea grinder - I've seen these exact same landscapes dozens of times, in dozens of games and I see nothing new, nothing that speaks to me, that stands out. This is probably not going to be a problem for most of you, unless you happen to MMO-hop like I do, but it makes me sad. I love the gameplay, I'm actually looking forward to taming and training more dragons tomorrow, but I'd be twice as excited if I could be fully immersed in the world. That said, my first impression is still really good and, some annoying technical (Nvidia-related) issues aside, I'm having a great time.

Water dragon or not - how am I not drowning?

-Cat

House of the Hairless Spiders

Remember when this blog was still updated? That was before I had to write four articles in a single week. Such a massive workload is entirely new to me, except maybe around the holiday season and even then that's usually just one or two weeks of stress. These last few months? Holy fuck.
I'm having fun and everything, but this is the first time I feel I might have overdone it a little. Gonna finish one article today, somehow crank out the remaining three as we get closer to the weekend and next week it's time for another huge article, a medium article and a video. And then I'm just gonna chill for a week! I hope. Wait... I think that's when my column is due. Aw crap, I need a vacation! -_-

There's a very cool side effect to all this work, though: Money. So much money, in fact, that I'm starting to lose track of all the money I have or am about to receive. It's a great feeling when you check your bank account and find a surprise 300 Euros and you can't fucking remember why that amount has been paid out to you in the first place! Now, don't get the wrong idea - I'm not filthy rich now or anything. But I'm used to juuuuuust about managing to pay my bills and having a little something left for food. No money to go out, order a pizza or do anything fun. And right now, well... I think we're gonna make an appointment at the register office sooner rather than later. And wedding plans aside, we can actually afford proper, real food, the odd takeaway here and there, all our bills are paid and we're pretty much debt-free. I haven't slept so well (and so much!) in years!

I have started another playthrough on Dragon Age, hoping to finish both games before Inquisition is released, even though they probably won't let us import savegames, anyway. I'm dying to play Saints Row IV, but I didn't even buy the game, knowing I wouldn't find the time. I'd cry myself to sleep every night. Argh! Oh yeah and we're also doing this:

I could fill another 28 million paragraphs about how complex this game has become since I've last played it and how they finally made all kinds of ship and character types viable. In the past, you'd play a tactical officer in an escort ship or you'd suck. But with the addition of special duty officer abilities and certain skill tweaks, it's now entirely possible to run a cruiser or a science ship and outperform any hurrdurr cannonboat escort. Which doesn't mean they suck now or anything, they're just no longer the one and only way to play.
The downside is that the Bear and I are completely nerding out over setups and builds. You need to set up a skill tree. A selection of traits. Ship gear. Item sets for ships, which grant all kinds of bonuses. Choose bridge officers, whose abilities greatly affect the way your ship performs in battle. Choose duty officers, who provide buffs to your regeneration, cooldowns, resistances and all kinds of things, depending on how you set them up. Reputation passive abilities, which may raise your shield rating or your crit chance, depending on how you specialize.

Like all Cryptic games, Star Trek Online is very casual-friendly and you don't need to look into any of that stuff in order to beat 99% of the PvE content. On the competitive side of things, however, you can spend endless amounts of time and money upgrading, fine-tuning and optimizing stuff. It's so deep, complex and full of possibilities, I can't remember the last time I've seen anything like it. Probably never, at least in an MMORPG. Everything needs to be idiot-proof, streamlined, intuitive... STO feels rather nice and refreshing with its complex ship setups. Hope that's all here to stay.

Also, spiders. We're breeding them. Sort of. Having spent several years around reptiles and their creepy, crawly live food, my phobia of spiders has more or less fixed itself. I wouldn't exactly pet one of those many-legged fuckers, but I can tolerate 'em. Which turned out to be a bad idea. You know, I'm not a huge fan of just squishing them. They're living, breathing beings, creepy or not. They have to live somewhere. Doesn't seem fair to just kill them, because they happen to hang around the house. And there's a positive side effect: We didn't have any fucking mosquitoes this year. The spiders are incredibly efficient at keeping them away. Alas, they're also rather efficient at reproduction. What started out as half a dozen or so tolerated spiders has turned into entire families of them. The problem is gonna fix itself, now that it's getting colder and all, but the whole thing did get a little out of hand. Not a big deal for the most part, but it's a bit annoying when you touch one of the fait, hairy ones instead of the light switch.

Speaking of hairy - my hair's gone! You see, I was always rather proud of my long, wild mane. It's all rawr and manly and shit. But after more than a half decade of just growing that crap and never getting a haircut, I had so many split ends, the whole thing looked so thin and flimsy and awful, I needed a reset of sorts. So Claire shaved my head. We both expected the worst and we were both surprised by what a sexy beast I still am. I have a good face. Hurray! Let's wait and see what I'll grow this time. My entire scalp is covered in manly stubbles, there are no alarming bald patches or anything, which is always good. Maybe just go for short hair this time around, like normal people. Or let it grow if it's actually still thick enough. Can't really tell before it's back. Heck, maybe we'll do a regular shave, because it actually looks kinda nice. Who woulda thunk?

Oh well. Between the start and the end of this entry, I have finished my first article for the week. Only three more to go. More money. Awesome!

-Cat

The Dark side of Games Journalism

The good thing about having to work pretty much all the time these days is having the money to pay all the bills, buy food, live. The downside is that there's so much to do, I just don't get the time to update this blog as much as I would like to. Another downside is, well... more work = more responsibility.

I like having a todo-list of sorts when it comes to my monthly work orders. On monday I gotta hand in this review, on tuesday I gotta preview that, write a guide on wednesday, post some news on saturday and so forth. But once you work for more than one publisher, it gets difficult to organize these things. And when one or several titles turn out to be downright unplayable and you need to postpone a deadline, organizing stuff becomes downright impossible.

There's also the fact that, once you write about stuff with a potentially larger fan-base and more powerful publisher than your average Korean grinder, you'll attract much more attention. And not just the good kind.
I wrote a little preview on the reboot of Final Fantasy XIV a while back. Nothing big, just a little two-pager. The game costs a monthly fee and I dared say, at the end of my preview, that I wouldn't want to pay that to play the game, as it doesn't really do anything new or groundbreaking that you can't get in plenty of Free2Play games.

Blasphemy, I know. I'm not saying the game is bad. It's a traditional MMO, which doesn't attempt to revolutionize the genre, it does exactly what it says on the package and it does a good job at it. FF-setting aside, it offers more or less the same stuff I can get on WoW. Or, if I don't like monthly fees, Rift, Everquest 2, you get the idea.
Stupid new game hype. Everyone is losing their shit about this game right now like it's the next big thing. Give it another month or two until the masses realize they're still just killing boars and farming endgame tokens (I lied, there is no endgame) in a fancy environment and the sheep will move on to Elder Scrolls Online and WildStar, once again fully believing in the "next big thing" only to feel utter disappointment within a month.

But the damage had been done, there was a 30-something page hate-thread about me and my preview on the official forums and people came up with fascinating conspiracy theories about how I hate Final Fantasy and infiltrated various gaming magazines to harm the entire franchise. Funny. I remember playing the first MMO of the series in Japanese, because I couldn't wait for the NA or EU version. It didn't just end with random nerd rage, though. Square themselves felt the need to tell me how dissatisfied they were with how I felt about their game. Which is interesting, considering I had told them exactly that in an email, weeks before I wrote that preview. To which they replied I was never supposed to write any more reviews or previews about the game. Interesting stuff. I'm not entirely sure what gives them the authority to tell me whether or not I'm allowed to review their shit, based on my personal opinion about their games.

This whole situation is new to me. I'm used to 14 year olds, whose "life-long experience with games" consists of a dozen PS3 games and clicking through a few pages on Wikipedia, telling me how much I suck at my job, that I don't have a clue what I'm writing about, they want me to get fired, blah, blah. When I was that age, I used to idolize most critics and I would have killed to have a job like that, but I guess the power of the internet can turn all of us into assholes. Zero fear of consequences and all that. But over 30 forum pages about how much I suck and an angry game publisher throwing a fit because of my preview was something else. The psycho shit their product manager had tried to pull on me for revenge could fill a whole new blog post. Stupid, manipulative asshole!

I finished my review on the game last night. And I stand by my original statement. The game does what any traditional MMO does, without adding anything new or groundbreaking, but it's worth looking into if you're not expecting the "next big thing" and you don't mind the monthly fees. Nothing more, nothing less. There will be some die-hard fans, who will demand my head on a pike, others will complain about the score being too high, the usual kinda crap. You can't please anyone on the internet and I can live with that.
What pisses me off is how much I've been fretting over the whole damn article. How petrified I was to even start writing the fucking thing. All because of some publisher telling me I "wasn't even allowed to write about their product", putting me on a guilt trip, trying to manipulate me into giving out a better final review score or staying away from a review altogether.

You can tell yourself not to care. That you won't be affected by such bullshit, just do your thing and give your honest opinion. But can you really? It's tempting to lash out when somebody tells you, "Dude, we didn't even allow you to review our game!" Then you get the usual crap like, "All the other reviewers had a much more positive opinion about our product than you did!"
I can't deal with all this nonsense. Not really. When I write about a game, it's my opinion, my personal thoughts and experience with the product. Don't give me shit about being "objective", there is no such thing as an "objective review". You can try to be fair, but in the end, personal opinion affects everything. And I can't stand having somebody trying to manipulate me into thinking I'm being too harsh or having somebody act like a total dickhole, making me want to be harsh. I can't work like this!

I think I'm done talking to publishers. Next time somebody has a problem with one of my articles, they can talk to my employers, sort it out with them. Gaming used to be about fun. All this mass market multi million dollar bullshit is turning games into a joke and the whole fucking industry with it.

-Cat