Thursday, January 24, 2008

<< BIRTH OF A BLOG >>

Delirium Vortex
Delirium - a state of violent excitement or emotion
Vortex - A place or situation regarded as drawing into its center all that surrounds it

History
So, this is my first time blogging, ever, and it just so happens to be a gaming blog. You won’t find much here besides the ramblings and stories of my gaming life. (The word gaming might be redundant) So sit back and enjoy for those who unluckily came across this site. The games I’ll be playing are pretty random. Neverwinter Nights 2, Counter Strike, Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft… I’ll be switching through them on and off depending on my mood I guess.

My reasons for writing this blog is to remember the past events of my gaming life. Later, when I’m older (let’s say… 40?) I won’t be able to play games as much, if any at all and I’ll be able to look at this blog and remember the good times of my gaming life.

This idea first came to mind when I came across this site: Travels in Vana’diel, a blog site about Final Fantasy 11 Online. I’ve played FFXI about 4 years back when it came out, and had a blast. I was forced, 3 months after I played to quit due to payment issues and missed it ever since. 2 months ago I bought the game again and rejoined. It was nostalgic, and I recruited 3 of my friends to join me as well. (At this time the 4 dollar game disc came out, with 30 days free to play) Another friend of mine who played FFXI a long time ago as well wanted to join too. And so the four of us played, but 3 quickly lost interest in the game. After 2 months of playing I decided to stop, due to an obsession with a different game (Counter-Strike).

I played Counter-Strike (1.6) 5-6 years ago when I was 9-10 on and off occasionally until the age of 12. I’ve never really thought I’d like the game again, (since I’ve always thought it was a stupid game, mostly due to the common personality type of the people who play- cursing and whining about every single thing and often bragging and insulting others) but I gained interest after being forced to play SoldierFront (an ijji fps game) when I came to my friend Henry’s house. I now play Counter-Strike (source) on a server called RowdyGuns, and I don’t play on any other server. Being a clean family-oriented server, no vulgar language or sprays are permitted and it creates a very nice community with good people. It’s run under the clan {GOB} ( Good Ole’ Boys ) a clan my older brother, Stanley, used to be in a couple of years back. He’s now joined back into the team for my sake, since I play there and now he plays with me occasionally. But of course, my obsession with CS slowly degenerated. I now play occasionally.

After a month, my birthday came up ( December 31st ) and my best friend Jason got me Neverwinter Nights 2. A game I’ve always wanted to have. I played Neverwinter Nights (1) 2 summers ago, when my 2 online friends (Troct and Raybrant) recommended it to me. I was hesitant at first, since I thought it was a sci-fi game, going to the wrong website to look at screenshots, but I bought it after a month or so later. It was only 9 dollars on amazon for a plantinum package (the original game + 2 expansion packs), which was a good deal, in my opinion. The game was old, so prices went down by a lot. When I got it, my 2 friends didn’t really play anymore. I played the campaigns and quickly fell in love with the game, being a fantasy RPG type gamer. Neverwinter Nights uses the Dungeons and Dragons system and is based on the forgotten realms campaign setting, and I was always fascinated with DnD. My friend Raybrant then joined back and we played on this server called Arelith. It was a strict Roleplay server in which we played in for 3 months. At that time I went up to about level 4-5, since I wasn’t battling very much, but instead roleplaying. You get something called an RP Rating where you’re awarded with experience points every set amount of time as a reward for good roleplaying. I met some unforgettable people there, like the elf king of Myon, Raryundil Sianodel Forlindel. (Yeah, complicated name. Can’t believe I still remember it) . He was a pretty weird guy who always misspelled everything, which made it sorta funny.

Since the expansion pack, Mask of The Betrayer came out I wasn’t able to play online, since I didn’t have it, and most servers required that you have it. I played the campaign for about 1-2 weeks. The game has a pretty intense storyline with a large variety of companions from good to evil to the ultimate customization of your character. In every single conversation with NPCs you’re able to choose many different responses that eventually affect your alignment, your influence over companions, and the course of the game itself. (This occurred about a month ago)

Well, that’s pretty much it for recent news. About World of Warcraft… I played it for 2 months in the summer. At first I never thought I would touch that game (thinking it was just a stupid monster bashing MMORPG), but after playing it at Henry’s house for a bit, I sorta liked it and decided to give it a go last summer after playing the trial for 14 days. The part about it being a monster-bashing MMORPG is still partly true, but its addicting. I mean… really addicting. I enjoyed the game mostly because of the friends I made. I created a female human protect-spec paladin named Velshyre.

At first I joined the guild that Henry was in, Bloodbath and Beyond. After gaining a few friends there and leveling up to about 40, realizing how poorly and inactive our guild leader ran the guild ( he came on about once per 3 weeks ) one of the members, (Sidyous/Revanus) decided to make his own guild. He was a good friend of mine, after running through a few instances with him, and he claimed I was the best tank he ever met. I was hesitant at first to join, even though he told me I would be given the position of 2nd in command. At this time I was in Indonesia, because my grandma was in the hospital (She’s doing good now). (Hehe, I brought my WoW CDs with me). After a few hours of thinking and some persuasion, I decided I would join and quickly told my friends (I had a few in the guild) in BBaB and as soon as I asked, they agreed. (They were pretty good friends of mine) We created the guild and it was extremely successful. I recruited a lot of members and we had over 130 members in the guild.

We had a teamspeak server hosted by my very best WoW friend Irmage and made my other best WoW friends there: Nicksham, Zulius, Anilam, nniicckk, and Idiotdroid. Nicksham was a pretty good kid that seemed pretty calm most of the time. Zulius was a foul-mouthed kid but was fun to hang out with. They were both older than me by a few months, but were in a lower grade than me : ) Anilam was the impulse guy. He would always do things on impulse, like decide to create another character on a different server and abandon his level 60 warrior. Oh right, he broke his ass one time when playing a sport. It was pretty funny. Nniicckk was the 18 year old with a wife and kid (I still find it amazing) We would hear his wife over TS a lot and make jokes about them. Good times. He would fight with Zulius a lot though, and I’d of course have to try to break it up. Idiotdroid was the 17 year old funny-story guy. He would have these retarded stories, along with anilam to tell us. His future career: rockstar. Oh, and he was the one who made me use the word lame, since he said it all the time. And Irmage was the coolest guy ever. He bought me my headset after hearing that I had no more mic and even bought me Burning Crusade after I hit 60 and was not able to buy it for myself. (60 is max level without the expansion set, whereas with it, it would be 70).

Anyway… good times. Also, Revanus had to take a leave from leadership due to schoolwork, and a vote was made as to who would be the new leader. I was made leader, but after a few weeks, I lost interest in the game at level 66, and quit (This was also due to my increasing interest in joining FFXI). Ever since then, leadership was given to Chrisblue, who was made second-in-command by Revanus. But he soon quit for a different guild, as far as I heard, and the guild slowly died away. My friends went their separate ways, but they still use the Teamspeak server, which I visit occasionally. (Summer)

And that ends my history of gaming, excluding some of the shortlived played games, which would be about 50+ free MMORPGs that I’ve tried out and abandoned after some time. (Wow, that was long… especially the WoW part)