Well I’m two nights into my switch from Mountain Dew to Diet Pepsi. I need the caffeine to keep me going at work. If it wasn’t for that I would be drinking water all the time. Maybe I’ll try kicking pop all together later on.

My entry back into the world of weight lifting went off without to much trouble. The only thing I can say is my poor weak muscles are aching. The pain is good though, that means the shit is working. I’m only going to do weights every other day. I don’t want to go crazy and hurt myself.

I also need to get myself a pair of sneakers. I plan on riding my bike now and then if it’s nice out. My combat boots just don’t really cut it for that kind of thing. My only other pair of footwear happens to be sandals and that’s not really very good for that sort of thing either. Especially if I do get the motivation to do some walking. Which I may.

Writing about all this feels weird. But so far I’m three days past any other time I’ve tried to do something like this. And considering the fact my previous attempts never left the planning stages three days ain’t that bad. But I got a lot of work ahead of myself. But I only plan to take it a day at a time.

Also thanks are due to both Jordan and Ben for their words of encouragement. It really does help to hear that kind of thing. So thank you to the both of you.

Man I’ve been neglecting talking about my computer game addiction as of late. I’ve been playing two games that have been keeping me away from anything else. I do plan on getting some screen shots later on, but here is the run on these two games.

First off is Painkiller. This game is a very old school first person shooter that takes you back to the days of Doom and the original Quake, or more specifically like Serious Sam from a few years ago. It is very fast paced and it likes to throw tons of bad guy’s at you. One odd thing about it. You only have five weapons. Now each of these weapons have a primary fire and an alt fire, so in a sense you have ten weapons. It is a lot of fun. If you have a pc that can run it. The system requirements are kind of high on this one. So be warned if you get it and it plays like shit.

The second game I’m playing right now is Sacred. It is a game that has a heavy Diablo/Diablo 2 feel to it. And that’s not a bad thing in this case. It is a fun hack and slash rpg. Just don’t expect anything out of the ordinary from it and you will enjoy it. The major downside to this game as of right now is the status of the games patches. The latest patch is version 1.6 and it apparently either breaks or doesn’t fix a number of issues regarding a location you visit later in the game. Again be careful when playing this one. It may be best to leave the version first installed off of the cd on your pc until they get their shit straight with the patches.

I’ll get some decent screen shots of these two in the next couple of days and put them up when I’m not being totally lazy.

Here are some shots of Sacred. It does look and feel like the Diablo series of games. But it is 3d accelerated. The characters are all 3d and the background is 2d. Overall I think it looks ok.

It should be noted that my screen shots show blood and gore. The US version of the game has no blood and gore. To enable gore on a US version of the game you have to first find a UK exe and then use regedit to change some stuff. For complete directions on how to enable gore in Sacred head over here.

So I’m contemplating picking up City of Heroes. Let first say that I have tried 3 different games in this massively multiplayer online roleplaying game genre since I dinged 50 in Dark Age of Camelot. First I tried Horizons, then the Lineage 2 beta, and finally Final Fantasy XI. None of these games did it for me. I’ve tried to like them. It just seems either it’s more of the same as all the rest or it’s the funky control scheme that gets in my way.

I’m hoping that CoH can fill my desire to continue to play these kinds of game until World of Warcraft comes out. It should be the perfect mmorpg for me. I’m a huge comic book geek. When I was younger I had aspiration of becoming a comic book artist. But it’s some of the things that are missing from this game that keeps me from thinking this one will last, even if for a few months until WoW ships. I’ve discussed these issues with Gawain, since he is the only person I knew that had the beta. So any faulty info I blame on G.

Number one issue I have is the fact you are a super hero all the time. This is not the way it should be. Super heroes have secret identifies. That’s what makes these powerful beings human. Look at Superman. What would Superman be if he didn’t have his Clark Kent alter ego? Just another guy in tights. The act of maintaining a secret identity is one of those things that makes super heroes super heroic. The chance that you arch nemesis will find out your real identity and then put the people you care about in harms way is one of the best comic book plots.

Which brings me to issue two, the arch nemesis. Going back to my Superman example. What would Superman be without Lex Luthor? A man is judged by the quality of his enemies, a super hero doubly so. Not having your own personal bad guy with which you fight with now and then goes against every super hero comic book there is. You have no purpose otherwise other than killing mobs in a mmorpg that masquerades as a super hero themed game.

Now despite these two glaring flaws I most likely will be picking this game up at my local EB later today. It sounds like for the most part the game is big on fun. Which would be nice for a change.

Well I got to say City of Heroes is pretty fun to play. Of course I only played maybe 2 hours max today before I took my nap for work. I made level 3 already, but the chat in game says leveling is slow. But so far I’ve been having to much fun just playing the game.

Character creation is quite involved, if you spend the time on it. You can just about make any kind of super hero you can imagine. You can only tweak the costume. There no stats to adjust. But you do get to pick your primary and secondary powers. At level 6 you also get to choose from a power pool of additional powers. You gain powers every other level.

Now there are no items in this game like in your standard mmorpg. But three things do drop from mobs. Every mob you kill gives you xp (of course) and what they call influence points. You use these points to buy from the two item types from npc’s. The two item types are power enhancers and inspirationals. Power enhancers of course enhance your powers in a many different possible ways. Inspirationals are one shot items. They can do all kinds of things, buff, heal, damage add, etc.

You start in training zone which looked to me gave no exp for mobs you killed while not on a mission. But that’s only in this training zone. Missions are the games bread and butter in the same way I imagine WoW’s quests are (got to pimp WoW). You get missions from npc’s called contacts. Missions can vary from fedex type quests to patrolling an area to going into a instanced “dungeon” to kill all the mobs inside. You will find clues inside these missions that can add to the flavor of the whole super hero thing going on in the game. My three levels I’ve made are form doing missions only. You can run into mobs on the street either committing a crime or just standing around talking shit.

And the powers are kinda like Camelot’s styles/magic really. Each time you use one it costs endurance and has a short re-timer on it. You can que up two powers in advance and even set one power to auto attack.

That’s pretty much all I can think of for now. Any questions you guys got I’ll try to answer them. Uh and I may have been overly harsh in my news post. I don’t miss not having a secret identity or an arch villian at all. The game is fun as it is.