I was a little late downloading the Too Human demo, and really I wasn't sure if I was going to download it at all.  I have the game on pre-order and with a loot based game, there is always the feeling of playing through and then losing any progression that has been achieved.  I thought that I might just tough it out and wait until mid-August, but I just couldn't resist.

From the hour of the game I played, I found out quite a bit about Too Human.  I was really excited about the Norse mythology idea and really enjoyed how that took part in the game.  Some of it felt a little bit like Halo, with the marines following Baldur around and throwing in some lame comments from time.  Some of it felt like Diablo, with the crazy amount of loot that was being dropped and the amount of enemies that are coming all at once.  The RPG elements weren't very noticable in the demo since I was only able to make it to around level 7 before getting to the end.

The graphics weren't too shabby though there were some rough spots here and there.  This could really be noticed with the helmet style static hair and with some of the shadowing.  Some of the animations were a rough as well, especially the marines.  The framerate wasn't bad, but I was surprised to find that the in game menu seemed a bit slow as well.  The equipment page is pretty noticeable when switching between tabs and even spinning the main menu seems like a chore.  It's too bad that most of this will not get touched up before the final release.

I knew that there would be tons of different loot, but I wasn't expecting to see much of it during the demo.  I was surprised to find loads of drops, I had outfitted my character with many new pieces of equipment and weapons before the demo was finished.  I am excited to see all of the different types of items that end up in the final release copy of the game, since the pieces I had all had a unique look and interesting characteristics.

I'm looking forward to the final release of Too Human.  I like the prospect of finding crazy amounts of loot and also seeing how the storyline goes.  The demo left me just enough to want to see what the rest of the game has in store and that  is exactly what a demo should do.

After playing my priest on and off for a couple of months now I have finally hit level 40.  I've leveled up a few different characters along the way, but this one I have been taking my time with.  I have been leveling pretty slowly since I'm more or less wanting to have a level 70 priest for when Wrath of the Lich King comes out and, knowing Blizzard, that probably won't be out for at least a little while.  I know a bunch of people on this server so we plan on doing some end game stuff one Wrath comes out.

Leveling up to 40 was pretty simple.  I did not die very much and the constant amount of quests made leveling go smoothly.  I have been told that leveling once a priest can get shadow form at level 40 becomes much easier, and makes leveling 1 - 40 seem like the dark ages.  After playing my character for roughly an hour or so with shadow form, I can safely assume that is a correct assumption.   That 15% extra damage and 15% less damage taken goes a long way.

I'm hoping that I will be able to make 70 in the next couple of months, but that might be a bit of a challenge at my current speed of leveling.  Once I hit 70 I plan on switching to a Holy/Disc spec so that I can start getting some better gear for raiding.  I doubt I'll do any heavy raiding before Wrath, but I do hope to get in a good few instances so that I'll at least have some experience healing.

I'm on Exodar server, Horde side.  Character name is Cogan.  If you have a character on that server be sure to let me know!

I haven't been playing Starcraft for very long and I'm already looking around for strategy guides.  Right now I'm mainly playing as the Terrans and have been looking for a good guide to use for both money maps and normal maps.  This hasn't exactly been easy, but I found a couple of sites that have been a little bit helpful:

Starcraft.org has a bunch of information.  There are a few good strategies here and I learned a bunch about micromanaging flight and ground units here.  The site has strategies split up by a few different options, such as by difficulty and by whether or not it's a strategy for a money map.  There are also ratings from the users on how good of a strategy it is.

RTS Professionals is a site that I found today that has some videos showing some different strategies.  The big problem with this site is that some of the strategies have to be purchased for a couple of bucks, so I've only watched the demos videos for some of them.  They seem to have solid strategies from what I've seen, but I'm not going to start paying cash to learn them.

That's pretty well it.  I'm going to keep on tweaking the way I've been playing and hopefully I'll be able to beat my friends at the game soon enough!  I'm getting closer and closer, but during some of out larger free for all games I usually am not being able to hold out.  I'm going to try including more science vessels and air units into my strategy and see where that takes me. 

First blog post on a brand new site.  Wow!  Giant Bomb is looking like it will be my home to chat about video games for a good long while!

I've mainly only been playing Blizzard products these past couple of weeks.  Starcraft, Diablo II and World of Warcraft are all on my PC and I've been giving them all a piece of my time.  I started playing Starcraft for the first time last week.  Yup, just a little late getting my hands onto that game.  I was able to pick up Starcraft and the Brood Wars expansion for all of $15 on the Blizzard website and I think I've gotten my moneys worth out of it already.  I jumped right into multiplayer with a couple of my friends and have learned quite a bit about the game in a few short days.  I have been playing as the Terrans and am still trying to find a good strategy.  I've mainly been relying on air units, lots of battlecruisers for offence and siege / marines for defense.  It has been working fairly well, but I still have problems with this strategy.  Mainly I am not able to build cruisers fast enough once they are destroyed.  I read a strategy that said to have somewhere around 12 starports, but the map that we're using probably wouldn't be able to fit more than 6 or 8 in my area.  I'll probably try out some different strategies once I start playing the campaign.

I've been playing Diablo II for a couple of weeks and am at level 21 with my Paladin on Battle.Net.  One of my friends has also been playing and is at level 21 with his Necromancer.  We've just started Act III and the game has been pretty fun.  The boss encounters have been memorable and I'm looking forward to seeing how the story in the game progresses. 

World of Warcraft has been an addiction of mine for awhile, but it isn't as bad as it once was!  Honest!  After leveling up a Rogue and a Mage a long while ago, I'm now working on a Priest.  I had played a priest before on and off, but this is the first time that I've wanted to level one up for end game play.  I started my character on the Horde side of Exodar around a month ago and am now at level 39.  I'm not really rushing to level up this character, but I do look forward to be using a healing class in high level instances.  I probably won't be able to hit 70 for another couple of months at this rate though.

I'll probably be more hours into my Xbox 360 once a few more new games come out for it.  I'm looking forward to Too Human coming out next month for the 360, as well as NHL 09, Gears of War 2, Fable 2 and Fallout 3 coming out later in the year; but until then, Blizzard games are all I play.