Been busy with new job and trying to get Sally a new job as well, blah blah blah we should write more.  We’re bad at keeping schedules, so it goes.

MMO trials: I love trials that you can download.  I only recently learned that Guild Wars only has trial accounts available at retail stores for a couple of bucks.  We’ve been interested in GW for a while but never could find an online trial and never stumbled across the whole “buy a CD at a store” deal.  I believe WoW has the same kind of trial deal (aside from buddy codes and the like).  It’s annoying that this information isn’t clear on their websites, especially since the main websites are primarily there to get potential new players interested in the game.  We would have tried GW out a long time ago had we known that CDs were available.

And on that note, Guild Wars: we’ve putzed around the trial for a few hours and have enjoyed what we’ve seen so far.  It’s far less MMO-y than the other stuff we’ve played and tried out, but that’s fine since we knew that going in.  To us, it’s far more visually appealing than a lot of the other more “realistic” fantasy games out there given that it’s more stylized and just a little more fun.  The avatar dances are amazing.  We may play this some more before our trial runs out, but we also got Guitar Hero 3 and might be playing around in WoW again a little bit more.  We shall see.

On Avatar Gender: As I was making my first character in GW, I realized that I had just about no interest in playing any of the male avatars.  The female avatars are more interesting in just about every aspect - better clothes, better looks, more style, more attitude.  All of my recent character choices have been female and I find it funny and a little odd.  It’s not the “I want to check out their sweet ass” syndrome that I feel often gets attached to this kind of thing.  It’s just that the male avatars are so boring and stereotypical - almost all of the males in GW are either biggish muscly men or sort of weeny, effeminate dudes.  They all strike me as very douchy and none of them speak to me at all.  I’ve always disliked the human and elf races in most MMOs (WoW, LotRO, EQ2) and tended towards the more animalistic or “grungy” races (I do like the Undead in WoW, for example, mostly because they remind me more of the people I know and like, oddly enough - that’s not to say I know too many reincarnated dead, it’s more the hair styles and body types look like actual, fun people).  I’ve never felt “at home” in the prototypical male fantasy hero body/image - it’s not who I am nor is anyone or anything I want to be.  I suppose the only way I could get into that is if those avatars sort of went over the top and became like the huge, idiotic hero in the first Discworld book by Terry Pratchett.  I have no idea what this says about me, just interesting things to notice.

I also have some thoughts on role playing stirred up by an episode of Witty Ranter that I need to write down at some point as well as a conversation Sally and I had on the relative merits of the UIs in Rock Band and Guitar Hero 3.  There’s more as well that’s totally disappeared from my brain.  Ah well.  If nothing else, a tiny update which feels like a huge achievement!