Stingite . . . and the State of His Gaming: Part 1 -- Everquest

About two months ago I started a blog post that I never finished, and it said this:

"Everquest . . . yes Everquest . . . has me firmly held by the hand . . . and I'm completely in love with it all over again. I'm in a new guild. I'm two-boxing. I'm grinding for xp.

Someone send help.

I love it, it's weird graphics, and GOSH DANGIT THIS GAME IS HARD. I don't even want to talk about the number of times I've died.  It's literally been two steps forward, one step back for the majority of the time."

I don't know what happened to that blog post. Maybe it was just the time wasn't right.  Maybe it said too much, or maybe I just wasn't confident enough that I was really ALL IN on Everquest again.

Let me cut the suspense short -- I'm not really playing Everquest right now and haven't logged on for a month.  That said I did grab 90 or so screenshots from my time playing.  Here are a few of the highlights:

1- This screenshot comes from a new Heroic Instance (well "new to me") where you help out all of bixie-kind with various problems. I was clearing out spiders, ousting spys, and even jumping into war-zone trenches for these dudes. I was soloing or "moloing" (that's soloing with the help of a mercenary) this instance and dying . .  a lot. I later found out that you really should group up to do these instances. I'm not much of a grouper, so . . .

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2- Here I am in a dangerously safe tunnel in a zone called . . . I believe . . . The Foundation? Yup. The Foundation. A lot of my first five levels beyond the Heroic Character stages was done here because they now have these great experience quests that are level banded. I honestly don't know why Daybreak doesn't make these quests repeatable for a premium currency price like they do in DC Universe Online. I would have shelled out a lot of money. (This is my character's werewolf form btw and sporting my guild tag.)

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3- I purchased a "hoard pack" like item that gives you a random roll on loot. You think wiz packs are bad? You only get two items for about 4 times the price. Anyway, I got a pretty weird looking hand to hand weapon, so I snapped a picture of me looking strong in the guild hall.

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4- I snapped this picture in a zone I can't even remember the name of. *shrug* There were sea turtles under the water I needed to hunt for a quest, and you could walk on the floating islands and bridges above. I mainly just loved the alien blue ocean here.  Strangely pretty.

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5- There's a zone called "Fear Itself" that is a remake of an old classic Everquest zone. In fact, that seems to be how they mostly operate here 20 years later.  Step one - take an old zone that's pretty much immortalized. Step two -- slightly redo it. Different skybox. A few different landscape touches. done. Step three -- fill it with super insane mobs and bosses. Step four -- itemize those with up to date drops. Step five -- write a few new collection and hunting quests. Step six -- profit. (ok ok . . . there may be just a bit more to it than that.)

In this shot I was giggling over the fact that Baron Bigdeal was trying to pick up on an undead turmoil toad.  Hey baby . . . wanna come back to my lily pad?

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6- So, to make some money -- and you WILL need money. I would head over to an oldy but a goody -- I remember raiding this area with a guild ten years ago. There were a few drops here that people really wanted to buy -- did I say people? I meant CRAFTERS. Crafters in Everquest are only kind-of people. I believe they're demi-gods of infinite patience and bottomless bank accounts. Anyway, nothing quite like a giant fountain of blood in a land infested with Vampires. *click* That's a screenshot moment!

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7- Oh look, I'm back in the "Fear Itself" zone here . . . It was Gorgonrific. Soon after taking this shot I was pretty much done with the zone, which was sad . . . it was probably one of my favorite places to die.

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8- I'm a lizard Luke riding my lizard Taun-Taun on Hoth! Naahhhhh . . . this was again a redone old zone. I can't even remember what it was called, but it was over in the old "Scars of Velious" area. Again, a redone classic zone made new again. There were giant wooly mammoths here that were scaled up to around 90th something level. Good times.

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9- This may be what killed Everquest for me . . . or a possibly it was just a sign of my interest in Everquest dying again. I got bored around level 96 (there's 105 levels) and went back to do something super pointless -- level up "monster forms."  At some point Everquest released an expansion where you could level up your character as a low level monster -- you work your way through a class of monsters. The only problem is they never updated the levels on them. There's no badges associated with leveling them . . . and while a neat different way of visualizing your character . . . it's ultimately un-rewarding.

I WANTED these monster-forms to be something cool so badly when they were first released. I even wrote up some weird role-playing event about them at the time. I'm so drawn to wanting to play as the monster, but it just didn't click in Everquest, and Sony (and now Daybreak) stopped spending time and money on developing the system (understandably so). So, here I am as a wandering eye . . . one of the last things I ever did in my recent addiction to Everquest. Griding to unlock forms for this wasn't fun. bye.

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That's about all I have time to write this morning, so I'm going to call it here. Part 2 and maybe Part 3 coming soon.

Thanks to my new Everquest guild for being super cool. Thanks to Daybreak for keeping this game alive and running for 20 years. I may be back again in the future, but for now . . . I'm OUT.  It was a fun couple of months though for sure. :)

Happy Dueling

Neosteam, can your kids play it?

Well, I started playing a new game called Neosteam about two weeks ago just to see how it was. I'd read a little bit about it in the latest Beckett's and thought I'd try my hand.

I'm now a level 22 Lupine Strider, and I'm actually having a lot of fun playing this game. I mean, I'm basically a furry wolf guy brandishing a giant sword and towing around an animated golem pet I call Gumby (whom I captured inside the belly of a land whale believe it or not).



I mean, yeah, that's fun right? It certainly looks like my kid would like that.

And yeah I stepped inside an AT-ST type of machine and blew away ten ant sized bad guys.



Of course that's fun! It's Star Wars! Kids love that stuff! I certainly did when I was a kid.

I mean, who wouldn't want to play a free (so far) game-that-shall-not-be-named-clone with more technology than a golem engineer in the aforementioned game can shake a stick at? Sure the soundtrack is horrible and the font is ugly, but it's free and looks awesome on my computer. Right?

ahem.

Excuse me while I take the subway train in Neosteam to another train of thought.



Well, here's the deal, after watching the general chat fly by and having my eyes burned by what was being said and seeing that you can buy the female avatars bikinis with RMT . . . I figured this is a game that I'm really only going to be playing before the kids are up or after they go to bed for the most part. Or I may just have to play it real careful.

Here's something you can do as a parent if you're trying to filter out some text.



So luckily, by clicking those buttons you can turn off certain zones of chat (usually World Chat is where the majority of eye burn happens), but I don't think I can do anything to clothe the bikini-clad, which I've yet to run into. ;-) RUN AWAY FROM THE BIKINI CLAD!

General play seems safe enough so far, but I don't think I really want the kids to be playing this one a lot. As amber would call these elves on neosteam, they are "sexy ladies." LOL.

Just FYI, that's how I see it as of today . . .

. . . and we now return you to your regular posts about Wizard101! If I do any more reporting on Neosteam, it'll be over on my other blog, which has been collecting a lot of dust lately. In fact I may just repost this over there.

Happy Dueling!

I AM IRONMAN . . . I mean, STINGITE

So I've been getting some questions as to where the handle "Stingite" comes from. No, it doesn't come from some strange adoration of the singer Sting. Although, good on him for trying to take on the ballads of John Dowland. And, no, it is not some equally strange worship of Bilbo Baggin's knife named "Sting."

So, sit back and relax while I tell you of the origins of my handle Stingite.

Stingite originally is this fella.



That's Stingite standing tall in a place known as the Plane of Time in the game Everquest. Though there were a couple MMO's before Everquest (or EQ), EQ is the father of a lot of these MMO games, or sometimes called a first generation MMORPG.

Around the time Amber Deathsong was born (in real life) there was a fantastic expansion to the game of Everquest called, The Shadows of Luclin. I had played a cleric class up to that point, but I knew that I really wanted to play a new class that was released with the Luclin expansion called "The Beastlord."

Oh man, they were awesome. Everyone in my guild (that's a big group of people that hang together under a name and get a private channel between friends) was pretty irked that I had switched classes from a cleric to a beastlord, but they hadn't had to suffer the indignation of staring at their spellbook for a year while they all ran around hitting stuff. (you used to have to sit and stare at a really dumb spellbook graphic to regain your mana faster.)

I also knew that I wanted to be an iksar. I mean, who doesn't want to be a scaley lizardman character at least once in their life? Not only that, my favorite starting area of any Everquest land (and believe me, there were tons of starting areas) was the field of bone, which was dominated by iksars. The field of bone was overrun by tons of these guys, scorpions.



So, knowing that the land my character was birthed in had a lot of those scorpions, I called myself STING-ite . . . or "of the sting." And it just kind of stuck from there. The following four or five years that I played Everquest just kind of solidified that name for me. I mean, when every time you log in and say hello in guild chat and everyone says, "STINGER!" or "STINGI!" or "STING!" it just kind of becomes a big part of your online persona. I AM STINGITE!

Of course I took the name on to other games like World of Warcraft (hunter character with a spider pet named "rimshot").



or Guild Wars (ranger beastmaster build with a lizard pet named "shoes") . . .



Or Lord of the Rings (champion, dual wielder major aoe dps man)



And pretty much any save file I do on any console game . . .

It just kind of became my handle online, which reminds me . . . I need to go reserve that name in free realms. If only Wizard 101 would find a way to approve that name for me somehow. That would be awesome. I'd drop "Thomas Lionblood" in an instant.

So that, my friends, is where the name Stingite comes from . . . a lizard man character in the game of Everquest who grew up in a land of scorpions.

Happy Dueling!