Games and Books

Final Fantasy XI: I am still playing Final Fantasy XI. I both love and hate the game. I like many aspects of the world, find quite a bit of the content to be well done, and generally enjoy my time spent playing the game. But then I also hate it for some of the annoying as hell quests that remind me so much of what I hated about Everquest.

An example: Tonight a group managed to suck my white mage into helping them try to get one of three keys needed to get a special air ship pass. This special air ship pass (not to be confused with the rank 5 multi-destination airship pass) takes you to part of the expansion pack area. This area is apparently the “cool” place to gank mobs over and over again for uber exp at levels 25 to mid 30s. So it becomes desirable to actually get this pass.

The NPC who issues the pass kindly offers to sell you this pass for an amount of money most people wouldn’t be able to comfortably generate until they are lvl 60+. The NPC also offers to ‘help you out’ if you bring him three keys instead if you don’t have the money. The fun part is three keys are found in three different dungeons each on different corners of the world.

So now you say to yourself… “OK… Slightly annoying. But I guess it gives me a reason to explore dungeons from other nations… sounds almost like fun.” Almost. Oblivious to the existance of this quest I was sucked into trying to find one of the keys by a random group. I felt adventurous and decided to help out. The key would not fucking drop… at all. After an hour and a half one finally dropped. After that I politely left after informing the group my dental procedure earlier in the day sounded like more fun and everyone agreed and left. I’m going to ignore the quest until I get to lvl 25. Hopefully by then I will have found a new linkshell and they will be helpful.

For me this quest highlights a few very annoying things about the game. Some of the quests are so time consuming if you don’t have the best luck and are so group dependent. Sometimes you get in a group and everyone gets lucky. I remember looking for one item for another quest with a group and we were able to get three drops in five minutes time. This stood in comparsion with the fact I camped with another group the previous night for the same item for two damn hours and no drop. ‘Little’ things like that tend to burn you out on a game.

Books: I’ve been reading a few books off and on for a while…

• Daughter of the Blood by Anne Bishop
• Heir to the Shadows by Anne Bishop
• Queen of Darkness by Anne Bishop
• Python in a Nutshell by Alex Martelli
• Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love
• Currently Reading: 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide by Matthew S. Gast