Oh well. Downloading the new "work" game right now, then I'll get right to it. The good thing about "extra" work (or work you didn't know you were supposed to do) is the extra money you weren't expecting. And with Valentine's day around the corner, well... maybe we should just go out. Yay!
We have rolled on some epic RL loot. I call it 'The Behemoth':
The amount of excitement this piece of furniture rouses in me makes me feel incredibly old. It's something you sit on, nothing more. It's not a fucking gaming console, it doesn't do my laundry and it's not even a new pet. It's a god damn butt shelf! But damn is it comfy!
Our living room has always been functional, if you can all it that. A comfy armchair, a small leather sofa for the bear, some wooden emergency chairs for surprise visitors and that's about it. Which is fine, we rarely have guests and there are more than enough placement options for our two asses. It just didn't allow for much more than, well, sitting.
When I caught that awful stomach bug a while back, I would have loved to stretch out for a bit. You can't really do that on an armchair. I could have done it on the little sofa, but since that doubled as Claire's computer seat, it was never really an option. Heck, even a stupid nap was problematic, because how the hell are you supposed to sleep on a little two-seater when your significant other wants to park her ass on there to check her email or do some online gaming? I always had to move to the bedroom. And that always sucked. If you doze off in front of the tv, you'll wake up after a while, you still notice what's going on around you, you're still "there". But when you nap in the bedroom, you gotta set an alarm to make sure you won't oversleep and then you toss and turn and keep counting the minutes of nap time you have left before the alarm goes off. Boo!
And how boring is it to watch a movie with a loved one when you're not even in touching distance with one another? Sure, we could have sat on the little sofa together, but that's not very enjoyable for movie night. Seriously now: If you're at home, nobody to bother you, nobody looking, on a no pants day, lazing around, having some junk food, watching the telly - are you going to sit up straight all fucking night long? Of course not! You engage bone melt mode, cat out, relax in the most ridiculously pathetic pose you can possibly assume. And to us, that usually meant one of us gets the sofa, the other one gets the chair. No fondling, no making out, no fun. Meh.
But The Behemoth changed everything. Including the arrangement of some of my bones. Our upstairs neighbour is moving out. Can't wait to see the next bunch of psychos moving in up there. Can it get any worse than the guy who grew his own weed farm up there? Or band practice at 4am guy? Or captain of the gay naked wrestling team guy? Probably. Time will tell. In the meanwhile, our current neighbour has no room for The Behemoth where she is going. She wanted to hack it to bits and throw it out. Long story short, that leathery monstrosity has been offered to us. And I thought, "Hey, how heavy can it possibly be?" when I decided to carry it downstairs with only one helper. Me going down first, so I'd get to carry most of the weight. On my arms, then, when said arms turned to bony pudding, balancing the damn thing on my head. I no longer believe it's just a regular couch. It's an elephant. They pounded it into its current shape with a sledge hammer, but it's definitely an elephant. I still feel the pain just from looking at the damn thing!
So we put Mr. Elephant where the little sofa used to be. Fun. Now we had to decide on a new spot for that old thing. The drama! The horror! I wanted to put it near The Behemoth, in a 90 degree angle, keep them close to each other, maybe put a table there, make the whole thing a bit more social. You know, in case we have guests or maybe we just wanna eat dinner off a fucking table for a change! I just like the idea of being able to sit around a table together, if only to place drinks and snacks on there or whatever.
It looked shit. It looked so unbelievably shit! It may have worked if it wasn't for our fake fireplace and how the small sofa was parked directly in front of it, but now it looked like we were trying to burn the damn thing.
Long story short - I have some kind of reading and chillout corner now. We moved the old sofa where our epic scratch post used to be - now I can hang out on there, stare at the clouds through our massive window, stretch out when watching the telly and if I feel social, I can hang join Claire on The Behemoth, which is so big that we can both relax and cuddle on there for tv or I can just sit and watch her when she's gaming. The downside to this whole setup is that we had to get rid of aforementioned scratch post. It was rather massive, took up the entire back wall of the living room, went all the way up to the ceiling and the cats had been interested in it for about two weeks. Damn thing cost over 200 Quid, we had it flown over from Germany, a real kitty daycare centre... now it has gone to the neighbour. Only seemed fair, since we got her couch and all that. Oh well.
Kinda weird to be trading stuff like that, especially since I'm really not the social type and all. I'm just not the kinda guy who goes and makes friends with the neighbours or takes any interest in the local "community", but I guess there's a first time for everything.
Speaking of first times: Remember your first ever MMORPG? I did try Everquest and Ultima Online, but the first MMORPG that got me seriously hooked, the first thing I have spent monthly fees on, that really kept me playing all night and day was Ragnarok Online. To my own defence, that was over a decade ago and back then there was absolutely nothing like it. It featured anime-ish 2d characters, which remotely resembled console RPG characters from the 16bit era. They looked a bit like what you'd see in Secret of Mana, Shining Force, that kinda thing. Then you'd explore some crude, blocky 3D worlds, listen to the cheesiest soundtrack I've ever experienced in any online game and grind, grind and grind some more. Ragnarok is the mother of all grinders, there were no real quests to speak of and you didn't even move around much. You'd stay in one zone for ten or so levels, then slowly move on to the next bit. Moving from one zone to another could easily result in instant death, because the level gaps between areas were huge.
Happy days. You started the game as a jobless 'Novice' with no particular abilities or skills and fought your way up the first few levels to earn the right to train for a basic profession. You know, the usual suspects like mage, swordsman, thief, that kinda thing. Later on, you'd upgrade your swordsman to knight or crusader, your mage would turn into a powerful wizard and so on, you'd form a guild, occupy a castle and then fight other guilds for their castles, have huge pvp raids, really fun stuff. RO couldn't possibly compete with WoW, which had been released not very long after the international launch of Ragnarok, so that pretty much put an end to my exploits on there, but being my first ever MMO, I will always remember it fondly.
When the hype slowly began to die down, the guys behind the game had begun working on Ragnarok 2. Full 3d, more features, more of everything, holy crap. Everyone got so hyped up about it! And it looked great, until it got cancelled. Then they tried to relaunch it with all kinds of weird new shit. Strange new playable races (all playable characters were human in the original RO), guns, the whole thing didn't look or feel like Ragnarok at all. Eventually, the whole thing got scrapped again and RO2 turned into a bit of a joke. They did release some early alpha client at some point, which looked rather promising, but the whole thing got leaked, people put it on freeshards with the help of server emulators and lots of folks were already playing it before the game was ready for an actual release. It was all a huge mess.
All of this happened so many years ago, I just gave up on the idea of having another Ragnarok. There were some weird spin-offs and handheld adaptions, but the franchise had been sucked dry. I still have Ragnarok Tactics, the latest bastard of the series, on my PSP. It's not a bad game, but some monster and character designs aside, the game has absolutely nothing to do with Ragnarok. It's amazing how the name still seems to sell.
Imagine my surprise when I tripped upon the open beta of the actual Ragnarok Online 2! Apparently, the whole thing had come out a few months ago and I completely missed it. To be fair, I wasn't exactly looking for anything Ragnarok and, as I have stated in my previous post, I'm getting tired of MMOs. But I couldn't resist looking into the revival of an old favourite. I only had the chance to get to level 5 or 6, but my first impression is that of a WoW-clone with RO setting, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The localization is as shitty as ever - I cannot even launch the damn game unless I set my Windows to Singaporean, which is highly annoying. And don't get me started on the ingame text. It's Ragnarok, alright.
 |
| I'm a swordsman and I'm hunting porings. Sounds and feels like RO, but looks like WoW. |
Ah yes, killing shit: Hotkeys, auto attack, also just like WoW. Not very exciting, but less awkward than the first RO. Got a so-called pandora's box off of a baddie. The key to which is sold at the cash shop. Derp. Then I got a pandora's mallet off another baddie, which cracked the box open. Got an epic ring out of it. Instant happiness. Got an epic shield out of the next one, which I'll be able to use once I upgrade my swordsman to knight. Fucking carrot on a fucking stick. I wanna be a knight. I want my own mount. I wanna be able to use that epic shield. And whenever I kill another bunch of monsters I get a new sword, some new helmet, stuff that actually shows on my toon and makes him look a little cooler. I like that. Many F2P MMOs drop little to no gear or only useless shit, RO2, at least at the early stages which I have seen, does not. Killing baddies feels rewarding that way.
I also get to distribute attribute points upon level ups, which allows for a touch of individualism, at least in theory. But since there are only so many useful choices per class, you won't see a whole plethora of "builds" per character. Same goes for the very limited skill trees. You get some small amount of viable options, the rest is simply pointless. Level up intelligence on a warrior? Make your sorcerer super strong? DPS Aura for your knight, which lowers his defence? Yeah, didn't think so.
Oh well. First impression is pretty solid, aside from the lousy localization. The grind is now neatly wrapped into short quests, the level ups have been pretty quick so far and the game looks and sounds as stomach-turningly cute as ever. I probably wouldn't go anywhere near it if I hadn't been so addicted to its predecessor. Of course the whole thing might turn out to be broken, incomplete and unfinished after the starting bit. I'll only find out if I keep playing. But now I gotta get back to work. An MMO about football. I don't like football. But the idea sounds cool enough. I'm curious.
-Cat
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