Bootstraps

I hereby swear that I will never mention my level, or the advancement thereof, in any retail game, on any blog, anywhere, at any time. 

And I don't even play WoW.  It's just that one "I finally made 60 with my *insert character class here* after playing for 2,762.3 hours straight" is much like another. 

So I've been playing the beta of LOTRO and it's just uh...taking up all my spare time! ;)

Weathertop under a full moon

Great game, with beautiful graphics.  Highly recommended to any MMORPG player. 

Test trying to reproduce the text color issue in blockquotes for Vox support issue:

Everyone talks fondly about it, but there’s never a happy story.

He's on the course...!

The stone wall...

The brush jump!...

Awwww...  lost it at the last fence.

Well let's see, m'dears...it's all starting to get a little hazy back at the beginning...

*pours a cup of tea and dodders over to sit in the rocker next to her laptop*

My first game, online or off, was early 90's on GEnie--a text-based wargame with ascii maps called Hundred Years War.  Next was Shadow of Yserbius on The Sierra Network (was that on Prodigy?  can't remember).  From there I went to Kali and Descent.  I loved that game, 3d, six degrees of freedom and it was so beautiful and graceful, but I was terrible at it. (This was so long ago that we ladies didn't say things like "I sucked." ) So I mostly hung around kali chat, beloved by default as the only female there for quite awhile.  Learned a lot about men, good and bad. (They're terrified of us. ;) )   Loved to watch the guys who were good play it, like a dance of lights and explosions.

From there it was Ultima Online.  Dan Rubenfield explains UO:

Everyone talks fondly about it, but there’s never a happy story.

It’s always the shared moment of getting slaughtered in a dungeon, losing your stuff, hiding traps in your backpack and killing people who snooped and more.

But regardless of the tone, people still loved it. The fucked up moments, the slaughter of the innocents, the absolute depths that you could sink to.

When it first released, people would break into your house, steal all of your stuff, sapping you of thousands of hours of gameplay. Then, not content with having ruined your experience, they would leave you a book on the floor of your now empty house, with a note in it.

“You Suck”

You’d get killed, lose your stuff, and they’d make fun of your ghost.

They’d put a moongate in front of you and teleport you to a desert island and make you do tricks, or put you on top of the bank in Britain. Then people would wander by and make fun of you even more for being stuck.

And it was my friends who did the teleporting.  This was really a Maid Marian and Robin Hood time for me--I was an innocent among merry outlaws.  They taught me to PvP, and I sucked, yeah, but I learned from the best and well enough to be invited to join a PK guild twice.  I'm still proud of that.  One of the best years of my life.

But all things fade, and so on to short stints in EQ, DAoC, and I don't remember...a few years of non-gaming maybe...?  Then Guild Wars, yeah.  I like GW.  I like the gameplay and I love the art.  But it's not deep enough--I miss player housing and a shared world.  I played WoW for about an hour and got bored, though doubtless I'm in the minority. 

And now I want to make a game, one for a female player base, but that's another story.