I started Monday evening with what I thought would be a quick trip through the level 54 job duty for the Samurai. I failed it three times. Apparently I haven’t learned nearly as much about playing the Samurai as I thought I had. The instance first has you fighting a lot of opponents simultaneously. They hit you for a lot of damage, too. Of course our fearless samurai trainer from the East just stands there and watches while you struggle. Somebody threw a regeneration heal on me, though, because I noticed my health going up occasionally. (Maybe that was the “Echo” bonus you get for subsequent tries.) (1540 words.)

Sunday afternoon I finally completed something I’ve been putting off for about six months now: The Antitower. I wasn’t planning to, it just sort of happened. I had just gotten back from the grocery store Sunday afternoon. I sat down to figure out what to do for the rest of the day. My mood was better than usual for the waning hours of a weekend, and I was wondering if instances were still broken (I had heard they weren’t but I suspected they might go bad again as server congestion ramped up), so as an experiment I queued up for my nemesis The Antitower. The stuff of nightmares. This … thing … was waiting at the end of The Antitower. (1802 words.)

You’ve probably heard that there were one or two significant technical issues with FFXIV’s Stormblood early access over the weekend. Aywren summed it up pretty well. Even outside of the Stormblood content gate where I am, most times I tried to venture into an instance of any kind (dungeon, job duty, anything except PotD for some reason), I was disconnected from the server and couldn’t log back in with that character for up to an hour because of the dreaded Error 90002. This happened to me three times I think. (1322 words.)

Glad I got the memo about the dress code here. It’s here! Well, if you pre-ordered. Upon first logging into Stormblood, I was greeted by this very prominent window explaining the new Song Gauge for the Bard job. “Here we go,” I thought, sighing heavily. This was exactly what I was afraid of: Huge changes to my class that will require mental energy and work to learn. The FFXIV equivalent of a talent point respec. I skimmed the window but didn’t really absorb any of it, so I took a screenshot, closed it, and hoped that, by ignoring it completely, it would magically go away. That didn’t work, so a bit later I decided to bite the bullet, picked a spot in the world, picked some random mobs, and started attacking them. (1207 words.)

Blatantly stolen from fracturedmmo.com In addition to the bizarre announcement of an MMORPG based on Magic: The Gathering, last Wednesday we saw our first news about another new MMORPG called Fractured. (Not to be confused with The Repopulation’s survival spinoff of the same name. Seriously, do people never even look at the names of other games anymore?) Once again, it’s way too early to say anything good, bad, or indifferent about Fractured. It’s going to be a sandbox. But better than any other sandbox. For reasons. Reasons that will certainly work out exactly the way they are planning them, because games never change in response to early player feedback. (358 words.)

Literally a screen capture of the web page, since there’s nothing else to look at. Last Wednesday, Cryptic announced they are making an MMORPG based on Magic: The Gathering with help from Wizards of the Coast. As yet it apparently doesn’t have a title. That’s basically where my interest ended but in the name of thoroughly documenting the event and making a more appropriately-sized blog post, I’ll add some more thoughts. (443 words.)

I bought Prince of Thorns back when it was relatively new on the market (a few years ago?). I read the first chapter, didn’t particularly care for it, put it away, and moved on to something else. Recently I found it again in my Kindle library after I wrote that bit about the grimdark genre, remembered that I’d only read a single chapter, and decided maybe I didn’t give it a fair shot. It’s at least popular enough to have spawned two sequels, so somebody must like it. (853 words.)

FFXIV’s Stormblood expansion is arriving on June 16 for head start players, so I figure it might be a good time to talk about it. I pre-ordered it a long time ago, but I haven’t commented much about it. I did at one point write a post about some of the early feature announcements, but naturally, I never got around to publishing it, and it’s super obsolete now. When last we left our intrepid main character back in January, she was sitting at ilvl 224, having just geared up with ilvl 230 items from The Weeping City. She was avoiding the Antitower dungeon in the Heavensward Main Scenario, and wondering if there was an easy way to upgrade her pathetic bow beyond ilvl 210. I’ve logged in for maybe a grand total of 15 minutes since then (just long enough to keep the game client updated and verify that it still works). (589 words.)

I’ve been trying to write about a movie or television show every Saturday, but I didn’t have anything ready for today. So you get an album review! I’ve mentioned before that I’m a long-time Pink Floyd fan, so when I saw that Roger Waters would be releasing a new album, I instantly clicked that pre-order button on Amazon. The CD and AutoRip MP3s both arrived yesterday, Friday, June 2. I was very nervous to hear this album. After all, Waters’ last album Amused To Death is a masterwork of musical perfection. It would be hard to top it. Also, the only criticism I ever had of ATD is that Waters’ voice didn’t sound that great compared to his earlier stuff, which I chalked up to the ravages of the aging process. That was way back in 1992. (407 words.)

After completing four Mass Effect games in a row, I fell into a rather large gaming slump in May. Many, many days had no gaming whatsoever. DiRT Rally - 13 hours Dark Souls III (The Ringed City DLC) - 7 hours Mass Effect Andromeda - 2 hours Quake Champions - 1 hour ESO - 1 hour (56 words.)