Space Adventures!

I can see Finland from here!

It's the Star Trek Online open beta and I'm getting rather excited already. My bf showed me the new Trek film a couple weeks back, which happened to wake up the hibernating trekkie in me (used to watch TNG and DS9 as a kid), which in turn made me watch the Original Series and fall in love with Spock the whole series again. Some of the folks I know in LotRO have been going on about the upcoming ST Online and I managed to sneak myself in the open beta - and I'm having a good time.


I played around a little with the character creator, which allows you to make delightedly odd-looking aliens in addition to canon races. I rolled a wonderful motley-faced alien with the biggest ears ever, but the servers disconnected before I could save him/her/it and when I got back I just quickly rolled a Vulcan girl to get into the game before the next disconnect.



There are some nice little details here and there, like the floating dead borg dude outside the window.

I must say I really love the audio in STO. The sound effects are spot on and the music is very nice. Sadly that's not something I can convey through screenshots, but I can guarantee the atmosphere really feels like Trek :D.





Space combat was very difficult for me at first, since I've never actually played any kind of flying game (kept trying to strafe with Q and E all the time - which just caused my ship to slow to a crawl). I did get better at it after some practice, and had lots of fun when I warped to a certain system and found myself in a group with other players, trying to fight off tons of enemy ships.




U.S.S. Cheeseprobe, ready for action!

*waits for launch*

Castle Hall

Next time you run Sammath Gúl, Barad Gúlaran or the new raid, remember to play Ayreon - The Castle Hall.


Here's a Spotify link too.


To be played after each wipe in the new raid, when you're climbing the stairs one more time: Ayreon - Tower of Hope.

Vilamona's Adventures and Screenie Secrets

A certain stolen sheep got only more confused when it ran into a pond.. and it never got out.

My tiny hobbit lass is starting to turn into one dreadful little questing and killing machine... specialising in Shire's plentiful delivery and retrieval quests. Be it a lost lamb, spoiled pie or late mail, Vilamona will deliver it faster than you can sneeze.


(Vilamona? Vilma? all my characters have pet names... but usually they're of the opposite sex, so I'll have to come up with something exotic here)


Midnight delivery!

I've also got some questions regarding my screenshots, how I take them and most often, what kind of system I have. To be honest, there's no big secret other than Very High Textures and Dx10 light - they're what makes LotRO look so good. On my desktop computer I'm running Ultra High settings at 1900x1200 resolution, so when I crop and resize from that to 600px width for this blog, they look very nice, crisp and detailed. I use IrfanView for all my quick image editing needs - for blog screenies I just crop, sharpen and resize - Ctrl+Y, Shift+S, Ctrl+R and then save away :).

Snapshot Henchman has some very good tips for screenshot-taking, and although they focus on Guild Wars, the advice applies to any game. Don't forget to check out the screenshot galleries there, they're really worth looking!

Raiding the Tower

The following post contains images of the new LotRO raid, so if you don't want be spoiled, don't look :).



I've now seen all the bosses of the new Dol Guldur raid, and I must say it's a very fresh and welcome change to the previous, more claustrophobic DN raid. DN is "pink tunnel after pink tunnel", with bosses that are just clones of each other, but the new raid has a more traditional "evil tower" look that appeals more to fantasy geeks like me. Most of the monster and environment art is recycled from older instances, but the overall look is much more impressive and massive. Although there are just three boss fights, as opposed to the six in good old Rift and DN, the fights are very challenging and interesting. Actually, the trash there is also very tough, and I think we've wiped as much on bad pulls as on the last boss now :D.


The tower features a lot of running, and you can actually mount up in a specific spot in the second boss room... but it's just a bug apparently, since the mounts move at a seriously slowed speed.


At the top - they really should add a rail there between the stairs, it's so easy to fall down.


I feel something approaching...


It's rather funny looking at the mighty melee warriors running after the big beast!


It's less funny when it's coming at you!

Awesome security.

Ravious of Kill 10 Rats sums up the recent NCSoft fuck-up pretty nicely.

I wouldn't even post about this, but reading the linked threads I just remember I did once log into my Aion account and saw someone else's name there.

EDIT. I had to log my GW account to see if my stuff is still there, and luckily enough it was. Also one of my characters had just been awarded the most awesome minipet: