Oh hai my forgotten journal

Actually, it's not forgotten. I just haven't had any real motivation to update for a while, plus I've not been playing and taking pics as much of either CoH or Guild Wars.

I took a detour a couple months ago when I heard about Free Realms. It's only $5/month (and can be played free, though you are restricted from a lot of activities and classes). A family-friendly game, it attracted me because it was casual and had an entire class for exploring, something I rather enjoy. Unfortunately a major change in the economy soon after I joined that lead to a significantly less casual feel combined with their extremely restrictive chat filter sort of turned me off the game for a while, but I still have subscription time and like it enough that I'll probably play it on and off. It's a fairly new game, and they have a lot of plans for expansion already, so assuming that they don't mess it up (it's SoE, who have a sort of hit or miss thing going with their MMOs) I might be playing it for a while.

And, on the flipside, I decided to finally give Runescape a try. Like Free Realms, it's inexpensive as MMOs go ($7/month or so, depending on how you pay) and has some free play available, and like Free Realms, I subscribed for one month so I could take advantage of the subscription-only areas and skills. It's... well, it's pretty repetitive in some places, but actually it can be fairly fun. It's different from a lot of MMOs in that it's really more of an adventure game than an RPG in some ways (quests are definitely more adventure-style on average). I'm not entirely sure I like the playerbase much... there don't seem to be many older people playing and too much of the talk is effectively bragging about equipment and skills, and I got a bit bored of the skilling up, but I might go back to it off and on as well, as I do rather enjoy robust crafting systems, which it does boast.

In terms of upcoming plans, Aion is coming out in a couple months and I'm hoping they offer a free trial because both the lore/setting and the graphics look incredible. If nothing else I really, really want to play with their character creation system, which looks astoundingly robust. I'm a sucker for angel imagery and it's chock full of that. Unfortunately it also seems to be pretty heavily PvP-oriented, and that, I'm not a big fan of. Still, it does have PvE play and some of the PvP events might be the type I can get into (big world events rather than specific team play being more my style), and there's going to be a crafting system which I might find interesting (and lucrative; crafting is how I made a lot of money in WoW for instance).

Aside from that, though, we were talking about maybe fitting in some more City of Heroes before our subscription expires and/or trying to budget money to extend it... I just am still having issues that keep me from playing anything where I'd want to log on for more than hour.

As far as my free time goes, I've mostly been spending it reading and playing some Civ... I plan to get the Sims up and running again soon, though, and if my next doctor's appointment goes well maybe I'll return with a prescription for some more effective painkillers, in which case there'll be more posts.