Fun things to do in SW:TOR

So, previous readers will recall that I had mixed feelings about the release of TOR. I'm a big Star Wars nerd, and I absolutely loved the Knights of the Old Republic games, but I'm a curmudgeon and I hate MMOs. I think they sacrifice story, the presence of other players is distracting, and I just get bored of the whole fetch-quest kind of thing that all MMOs seem to do.

In spite of this all I did in fact buy TOR. So far, I'm enjoying it although I haven't played too much so my opinion may change. However, there are enough people talking about the games strengths, weaknesses, blah blah blah. Another blog talking about that isn't fun. So instead, I shall start a series called “fun things to do in SW:TOR” that has nothing to do with what you're supposed to do.

FUN THING TO DO NUMBER ONE:

Gently troll. Go to a planet under your own level, for people much weaker than you with monster much weaker than you. Follow somebody around. Let them get into scrapes that are really tough. Sit back. Then periodically, just kill everything in the area with one click. Make them feel weak and puny. Passive aggressive? Yes. Hilarious? Also yes.

2012 Revival!

WE'RE BACK!

I have to stop taking these unannounced, super long hiatuses. Sorry guys, I feel like I need to give heads up when I take off for a while. I'm just a big flake, and I'm easily overwhelmed.

Happy New Years, everyone! Enjoy it while it lasts. If the Mayans were right, we'll all be dead soon. But they're probably not, because they couldn't even see the Spanish coming, sooo....

How's everyone doing for their "new years resolutions?" I put it in quotation marks because it's well known that these resolutions are a joke. Nobody sticks with them. They're often forgotten within a month.

I propose a new tradition! A race, to see who can abandon their resolution the fastest, and with the greatest intensity. It might look a little something like this.

Dramatization

Vampires

So Halloween is around the corner (a holiday that I love), and it got me thinking about monsters and stuff. I've always been into vampires, in a few different forms, so I usually check out all sorts of vampire fiction, from Bram Stoker to Buffy. No Twilight, because I'm not a freshman girl.

However, I DID mention vampires to a freshman girl the other day, and we got to talking about Dracula... and I thought to myself, sweet, a cute girl whose only vampire knowledge isn't stupid Edward Cullen. Then she confessed that she HAD been a huge twi-hard, and discovered older vampire stuff afterwards. Sort of a regression back down the evolutionary path of vampires in fiction. I thought that was kind of cool... especially that, having explored that path, she was able to realize how utterly stupid Twilight vampire lore is.

So I decided to sketch how utterly baffling the evolution of vampires has been.

Tuition and university... explaining the price

Sorry it's been a couple of weeks without a post - I'm not disappearing again, I just started a new school. I didn't have to move, fortunately, because my new campus is close enough to my old that I can keep my apartment. Which is amazing. Because moving is a bitch. I haven't decided which I hate more: packing or unpacking.

Anyway, my old university had a very good reputation and was relatively cheap. My new school has about the same reputation, but is ten times the price in tuition. I was wondering what explains the massive price gap. Like I said, it's not simply reputation, because both universities are about the same on that scale. I thought maybe it was the level of faculty? But no, again, about equal on that scale. So I looked into equipment and tech... labs and that sort of thing. Maybe the new school is more modern, better equipped for science kinds of things? Nope, not that either.

So it was a big mystery until I went to class for the first time. It's the campus. My old university was bland, plain, downright ugly in areas. It's a city school, so I never thought much about it. But the new campus is ridiculous. It's like a forested paradise. So that's my explanation. Ten times the cost, because the grounds are so much nicer.

And you know what? I might be ok with that.

More school - and an old game

So, apropos of my last blog, my new school offers textbook rentals. Great, thought I, this way I can save tons of cash! Only as it turns out, the rental costs almost the same as actually buying the book. Like 85-90% percent of the cost. Now, you might say that any savings are good, but not if you think about value. If I buy the book, I'm paying 10-15 dollars more, but I actually OWN the book. You can keep these things forever, or even sell them on Ebay or Amazon, and get at least half price back. Renting it, paying nearly the full amount, and getting no lasting value? Makes no effing sense.

Anyway, rant over. No comic today, because I have youtube links instead. Remember Mario is Missing? That game was awesome. Education entertainment. Edutainment. I learned all about like, Roman history when I played it. For those of you who don't know it, it was an old game from the early nineties. Mario has been captured, so you play as Luigi, travelling to different places in the world via magic portals in Bowser's castle. You'd have to wander around these cities collecting clues as to your location, and when you figure it out, you could return and confront a koopa on every floor, eventually getting access to Bowser and rescuing Mario.

Anyway, I looked it up for the sake of nostalgia. Apparently, there were some huge differences between the computer release, which I had, and the far more popular SNES release. It's the same game, as far as I can tell, but it looks totally different. Was it remade when it was ported, or what? Just thought that was kind of neat. Check out the comparison below. And check out the game! It's awesome.

CD-Rom version:


SNES version: