Done!

Yesterday we had a session of the GURPS game. The two new people (Jesse and Nancy) had other plans, but that was okay because we didn't need them anyway. Nya.

Anyway, I'd been thinking about how to finish off the campaign once and for all since the last session, and had a plan that was only *sort* of railroading, as if they decided not to cooperate they'd just lose. But they did cooperate, and managed to more or less save the day.

And yes, we're done, and I'm not GMing the next game for this group. I don't think I want to GM GURPS again ever; it's too complicated and I don't know it well enough.

( game summary )

I got home to find that the patch download had crapped out somewhere around lunchtime, so there was 17 hours left to download. It finished in the middle of the day Saturday. Sigh.

Eq-sigh

Well, I finally got to play some Everquest II today, and...

• The graphics are glitchy. Low frame-rate, and I can't see my own health bar unless I set it to 'always red' and squint.


• UI is glitchy -- I can't double-click on things. It wants you to double click on everything as the default interactivity model, but you can use the slow and painful right-click context menus isntead.


• The crafting system is ridiculously byzantine... I'm not sure where I could ever start. I mean, literally, aside from the one recipe they gave you the ingredients for and walked you through, I couldn't find a crafting recipe that didn't need another crafting recipe that needed another crafting recipe and so on... it probably didn't help that 'Artisan Essentials Vol 3' was the earliest book in the series they offered.


• The quests are hard, in the sense that you get instructions like 'talk to these three people with these names somewhere in this zone'. They take a while to finish. The ones that involve killing things usually involve killing *lots* of things, since if it says 'kill 10 zombies and take their brains' you actually have to kill about fifty zombies, since 80% of their brains won't be usable.

I still ended up playing it all day, taking a Ratonga mage (Escha... something. I should know this. On Oasis.) up to level 9 and doing a bunch of quests to get citizenship and the Summoner class. It's not fun, but it's still compelling -- you feel like you're enslaved to it and must do just one more quest...

I think I need to get a new video card, though... that was one worry I had when I first *got* this card -- it was cheap but somewhat old and by a strange company. And it performs like shit. It never gets a good framerate, in any game I try in with -- CoH, Tron 2, EQ2... er, that's everything I've tried it with.

GRRRRRRR

I decided to try updating my video drivers to see if that'd make EQ2 suck less. The drivers took 90 minutes to download, and now it looks like since *yesterday* EQ2 has another 100 minutes worth of patching to do. WTF?