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| Title |
Star Wars: the Old Republic |
| Developer |
Bioware |
| Type |
Massively Multi-player RPG |
| Platform(s) |
PC |
| Kelly Score ™ |
95 / 100
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Massively multi-player role playing games have, with very few exceptions, a standard motif. You create a character, complete a few “orientation” or introductory quests, and are then left to your own devices. Thousands of boring and repetitive quests combine with your character having complete lack of any perceivable impact or even place within the background story to encourage a kind of hamster like behaviour. You run in your little questing “wheel”, seeking levels or gear to help you continue to run in that wheel. Your long term goal: running in the wheel long enough and fast enough to eventually jump to the big, shiny end game hamster wheel of raid content. Raiding is where you get to spend all of your time staring at a wall, or the back end of some other person’s character, for hours on end as you beat some giant monster to get more shiny gear so you can do the next bigger raid. Most people don’t even read the story associated with each quest, and in many MMOGs that is a blessing: the stories are vanishingly thin and comically trivial. They have to be, since your character has no impact on the world whatsoever.
Star Wars: the Old Republic (SWtOR) breaks out of that motif. It plays more like a single player RPG, where your character is the hero of his or her own story. Other players and “group” dungeons (flash points, operations, and Heroics in SWtOR parlance) certainly exist, but the personal story your character is playing through is paramount. It is a refreshing and welcome change, even though the basic mechanics of the game are otherwise pretty traditional.
Continue reading Star Wars: The Old Republic
| Title |
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim |
| Developer |
Bethesda |
| Type |
RPG |
| Platform(s) |
XBox 360, PC (reviewed on XBox) |
| Kelly Score ™ |
98 / 100
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I have played a few games in the Elder Scrolls series, and each successive one seems to be a little bit better- at least in my opinion. I played Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, and now Skyrim. And, with a few caveats, Skyrim is basically the best computer RPG I’ve played to date.
Continue reading The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
Christmas is a distant speck in my rear-view mirror, and we are already most of a month into 2012. I wouldn’t really say I have any “resolutions” for the New Year, but I do have some goals. It is odd how the completely arbitrary change over of a calendar causes me to re-examine my life, but I will take advantage of it. It is time to give some thought to what I want to focus on in the next year.
Continue reading First month of 2012
I shut down the site over the weekend and upgraded / migrated to a new server operating system. Kelly’s World was running on Mandriva 2008.1 prior to today. As of now, the site is live on a Fedora 16 server. My main reason for performing the migration was to get an OS in place that could be updated more consistently.
Continue reading Server OS Upgrade
My second big motorcycle trip of the year took me down the Coastal Highway (Highway 101). Road trip #1 had already established that I enjoyed motorcycle touring, so now it was about seeing where that enjoyment would take me. I still had questions I wanted to ask myself during the ride: how far in a day is too far, are scenic roads just a little more enjoyable than “main” highways, or a lot, and is driving through unfamiliar cities on a motorbike ‘way more scary than in a car? I packed up my bike and set out on August 1 to see what new things I could learn about myself…
Continue reading Motorcycle Road Trip #2: the Coastal Highway and Computer History Museum
2011 is the year I wanted to start taking my motorcycle on some longer, multi-day trips. I had lots of questions to explore: would I figure out how to pack what I need? Would the Road Glide be comfortable for the long haul? And most important: would this kind of riding be the kind of thing I really want to do- in other words, is it “fun” for Kelly?
My first road trip of 2011 was “back home”: to Edmonton. A destination I’m familiar with, through territory I’ve experienced before in a car. I miss my friends back in Edmonton, but haven’t felt particularly like making the trip in the last half dozen years or so. I like where I live, and my friends/family come out here often enough… but the bike gave me a reason to make the trip. And so I packed up and set out on June 25…
Continue reading Motorcycle Road Trip #1: to Edmonton and back
We knew it was a possibility, perhaps even probable. But that didn’t make losing Jasmine at the end of May any easier.
Irene and I both noticed something wrong as soon as we came back from our week-long cruise. Jasmine looked “puffy” around her chest, and seemed somewhat disinterested and dull. After a few days, she seemed to be having problems breathing. An X-Ray showed fluid and a possible mass in her chest cavity. Fluid was drawn, and ultrasound performed. The mass was quite large, 4 cm by 2 cm, and looked like a tumor. The fluid drawn from the chest, which eased Jasmine’s breathing for only a day or so, was also tested: it confirmed the worse.
Continue reading And Jasmine too…
It occurred to me shortly after I bought my first motorbike last year that video taping my rides might be kind of interesting. I started investigating the various options, ranging from duct-taping or velcro-strapping an off-the rack home video camera onto my bike, through custom-built video rigs specific to motorcycling. What I settled on was probably overkill for my needs, and turned out to have some unexpected frustrations: the Race Optics EVO-HD Camera system.
Continue reading Recording my rides: the Race Optics EVO-HD Camera System
Two weeks ago I came down with a cold, and a week ago I was diagnosed with a lung and sinus infection. The doctor said it was probably a variety of “mild” pneumonia, what is sometimes called “walking pneumonia”. So I’ve been coughing, clearing my sinuses, and generally feeling crappy.
On the plus side, the weather has been generally unpleasant as well. That sounds funny, I know, but for me there is nothing worse than being sick when it is beautiful and sunny and the birds are singing: it just feels doubly unfair. There were a couple of decent days this week, today not being one of them: however, it wasn’t raining, and I was feeling a bit better. This meant that was overwhelmed by a desire to get out on my motorbike, which I did.
Continue reading Lung infection and six months on my Harley
I looked at the banner of my site today and see that Kelly’s World has broken the 1 million hits mark. Whoopee, and so forth.
Continue reading A million visitors in 8 years
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