97 - Woo! Back to Work!

Guh. Bah. Meh. Hum. Ho. Hom. Gah. All of these monosyllabic grunts, and more, were uttered at some point this morning while I blearily struggled into my work clothes for the first time in a fortnight.

So I didn't really accomplish anything too constructive with my time off - not that I'd planned to. I didn't really spend much time playing WoW, but instead spent a bit of time with Final Fantasy 12, which has been lying next to the DVDs in my living room for God knows how long now. It's a good game, I like the combat system, and the Licence Board and Gambit system are implemented well. You may not know much about the game, so quickly - your characters gain both Experience Points and Licence Points when they defeat an enemy. Experience Points level your characters up in the traditional sense, incrementally increasing their stats with each level. Licence points are used on the 'Licence Board' to unlock new abilities and bonuses of various kinds for each character. Annoyingly, while every character out of the six available all gain an equal amount of licence points from an enemy, even if they're not currently in your party, Experience Points are only awarded to the characters that are in your party. This can lead to a sizable difference in levels between your characters, and some of them having a quite low level because they haven't been getting Experience Points, but still have bucketloads of abilities because they have been getting Licence Points. It annoys me - either have all your characters level up the same way, even if they're not 'active', or only level up the 'active' ones. Personally this means I have to level up two teams, because I just hate having to look at the huge difference in levels.

Still, it's a cool game and I'm enjoying it. The story is pretty good, even if the protagonist, Vaan, is a wishy-washy girly boy. I've racked up almost 20 hours on it so far, just taking my time with it - I didn't see any point in rushing through it. I've just ordered a copy of the Collectors' Edition version of the Strategy Guide. I was hoping to get one cheap on EBay, but someone beat me to it, the swine. I don't intend on using the Walkthrough section of the guide - that just wouldn't be any fun at all, but there's so much there in the game that I won't be able to get at without a good guide, that my obsessions won't let me ignore it. I could always have just gone for the regular version, indeed I would have if I had been able to find it anywhere in the shops on Saturday there, but no joy I'm afraid.

While I was off I managed to get cracking on painting up more of my Death Guard figures for my new 40K army. My two main squads are almost done now, and I'll get some picture fired up once they're done. It'll probably take me another week or so. There's a fair amount of rumours going around now about a new version of the 40K rulebook coming out later this year, so I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for that one. All I need to do now is pass my driving test so I can get through to the nearest decent Wargames club on a regular basis...

I was hoping to keep the next few blogs clean from NSFW tags so that I could change my blog avatar back to something a bit cheerier, but for some reason I find myself compelled to blog about my sexual fetishes. Not today though, maybe later this week. Stay tuned.