I finally finished all the little delivery quests of taking a horse from the stable master and delivering to three different stables all across the map, then finished his little race around the property in under two minutes. All of that for the privilege of earning my riding skill and paying 4 gold pieces for a horse.

It was sure worth it though, I can’t believe how fast I can get across the maps now. The only downside is that I collect less ore and wood on the way since I have to dismount to do that. I’m now walking around the northern Bree-lands grinding for medium hides so that I can master my Journeyman Tailor crafting skill.

I dinged 35 last night in LoTRO with my Elven Guardian (finally!) and have just over 5 gold. I already took the horse from the fields to Bree-town and am trudging back up there. Gads, I can’t wait until I can stop having to run everywhere!

What’s that you say? I said I’d never pay monthly for a game or play a MMORPG? Well last year when Lord of the Rings Online came out I figured I’d give it a try. I’d stayed away from the WoW bug that many of my friends had but being a lifelong Tolkien fan I couldn’t pass this one up.

Eight months later I’ve got my main character leveling up nicely and also a human alt Loremaster who’s at level 18 now.  One great thing about this alt is that his crafting profession is Scholar and my main is feeding him lots of relics so that even though he’s progressing as a scholar very slowly it would be even more slow without that feed.

Speaking of Peeps my friend Darana posted a link to the Peep War game. It’s a miniature game (think D&D minis, Warhammer etc.) except you use marshmallow Peeps and jelly beans for pieces. I think I’ll download the zip file with the map and try it out while I can still buy Peeps at the grocery store.

I picked up Ticket to Ride from my local game shop to take with us to my parents’ house for vacation last week. This is an amazing game, very quick to learn but each time we played we picked up on more nuances. I really would like to find some local people to play so my wife & I don’t have to play by ourselves all the time.

I had asked my online buddies for suggestions for a board game to play with the family (Tripoley and Trivial Pursuit were getting old) and the most common suggestion was Ticket to Ride. Extra bonus: when you buy the game you get a code for six months of online play on the Days of Wonder site.

Official Ticket to Ride web site

I am a big fan of Board Game Geek and highly recommend it to anyone looking to buy a game, you can read reviews etc. before making a purchase. You can check out the Ticket to Ride page here. For geeks like me with a lot of board games it also offers a tool to track your collection.

On a related note I’m a big proponent of supporting your local shops, be they for games, hobbies or whatever. I could have bought this game online for $25 plus minimal shipping but I paid $40 plus sales tax at my local gaming shop, Pair-A-Dice Games, instead just to help them stay afloat. They offer a gaming room with different games each day (board games, Magic: The Gathering, LoTRO minis etc.)

I haven’t played Counterstrike in I don’t know how many years but I actually did a couple of times this week. How the hell could that happen you ask? It’s simple, really. I bought the Orange Box so that I could play Team Fortress 2 with my friends (not to mention that I loved TFC back on the original Half-Life engine). That came with CS for the Source engine so one night when my favorite TF2 server was full I jumped on  a CS server on a lark.

You know what? It was actually fun again. I think I just burned out on it from playing too much (I started back with Beta 4) and having too many jerks playing back in the day. The game looks much better with the new engine (not to mention my shiny new rig where I can crank up the video settings) just like TF.

This story at Financial Times says that Microsoft will write off $1 billion on extending the warranty to three years due to hardware errors on the XBox 360.

The estimated pre-tax charge of between $1.05bn-$1.15bn would cover extended warranties for 11.6m machines that have already been sold, as well as nearly 2m more that have been made but not yet sold, the company said.

I thought this was an interesting note as well:

The charge will add to sizeable losses that Microsoft has suffered in its efforts to break into the video game business. Its digital entertainment division, which is based largely on the Xbox business, has registered losses of more than $4bn since the first version of the games console was launched.

Somebody recently turned me on to Desktop Tower Defense at Hand Drawn Games and now I’m addicted. It’s one of those “simple enough to learn but hard to master” games. It’s one of the best Flash-based games I’ve played and it allows you to submit your scores and has a team feature so I can track myself against my buddies. I’m actually playing this more than I’m playing my store-bought games right now.

DTD is a puzzle/strategy game where you add defense pieces (guns) to the board to ward off waves of attackers. You start off with a small amount of money and gain more as you kill off attackers. They come in one side of the board and try to exit the other side. Your goal is to create a maze for them to follow so they’re exposed to your guns for as long as possible. You can also spend money to upgrade your guns.

Here’s a generated image for my buddies that play World of Warcraft:

If you want to make your own go here: http://worldof.leufven.se/

Who needs Xbox, I discovered an NES emulator that allows you to play the old 8-bit games right in your browser (via Java). Thanks again Mangoat!

vNES