More F2P MMO's and God Of War 3

Have played a few more free2play mmo's and overall they have mostly been good and enjoyable but the last week I have spent more time playing God of War 3 which I finished and enjoyed alot and I also decided it would be a good time to finish the second game on PS2 since i was near the end anyway. There great games and I hope to see more from the developers along these lines, maybe set in some other mythical era or age :)

Free2Play MMO's

While I am still playing WoW in the evenings for raiding, (7 bosses down on 25man heroic ICC), I find that I dont feel like playing it during the day leveling or grinding on my alts. While looking over forum posts to do with 3d modelling I came across shots and a video link for a game called Allods Online, after some research I downloaded it and gave it a go and found it to be pretty decent, good graphics and nice class design, but then a patch hit that for awhile made the game unstable so while I waited for a fix I started to look at what other f2p mmo's are out there. As it happens there are hundreds of them, from well known ones like Runes of magic and silkroad, to lesser known ones.

I have given a few a go, Runes of magic is ok but I wanted something alittle less wow like, enter Jade Dynasty, an oriental styled mmo with very impressive graphics for a free game and a nice clean interface design. Have found myself playing this a fair few hours and while I have basicly been soloing everything its felt fresh and new. Will be looking at more of these free2play games in the future as it seems some of them are very enjoyable even if you never go near there cash shops.

More Experiments in Blender

Been having some more fun with blender, made a sort of demon head sculpt then started to mess around with the materials and created this render, makes my basic model look pretty cool.

For a free application its a very powerful tool, there's far more to learn such as textures and lighting but its fun to mess about with and see what i can do.

Blender

Having been looking for a 3d modelling software and trying a few out, I decided to give blender a go since there working on a new version, while the 2.5 release is currently alpha 2 it seems abit unstable, so I installed the older 2.49 release. The interface is not like anything I have used before but after some hunting around for information and a few tweaks to get myself a quad view going, i have had a fw quick goes at making something. Havent yet worked out all the polygon modelling side but I already like the multi-res mesh sculpting mode.

Here's a shot of my interface and a quick sculpt test.

Hopefully given a bit of time I can learn to make more interesting stuff, but for a free application its fun to mess around with.

March already !!!

Been a fairly long time again since last update, spent alot of time playing WoW again. Currently an officer in the guild i am in and we have everything but the Lich King down on both 10 and 25man raids, tho we focus more on 25mans and have only had about 4hours on the Lich King in 10man.
Since there's little else for me to do I am atleast now only playing WoW by night so have the rest of the day to do other stuff.

Which brings me to my PS3 and Xbox360, there are so many good games for them that I havent played, I got my PS3 with Uncharted:Drakes Fortune, what an amazing game, very cool and still looks good for being such an early release.

Then there's my JRPG's that I have been playing, wish I could focus on one game alittle more but I seem to bounce around abit, currently have about 20hrs on Eternal Sonata, about the same on Star Ocean and Last Remnant, then I got Lost Oddessey for £9 so started playing that :D
Then they launch Final Fantasy 13 and I want to play that but I think it can wait a little bit ;)

Hopefully I can find some time to start alittle coding again, even if its just messing around learning Opengl or Directx stuff, I miss making demo effects while learning new stuff so it would be nice to do some again.

Long Time No Update

Well its a new year and a long time since I posted an update on here. Havent done much of any coding the last few months which I hope to slowly change over the next few, still spending alot of time playing WoW, its been great fun and helps fill the time of day but now I am at the stage were I dont need to grind so much so can allocate time to doing other things. Which thanks to a wonderful sale on steam over xmas means I have several new games to play.

Speaking of which, Overlord 1 & 2 are some of the most fun games I have played in a while were you get to be the bad guy, the humor reminds me of some of the early Bullfrog stuff. Makes me think about trying to get the old Dungeon Keeper games going again as well :)