Okay. So two weeks ago, the northeastern United States suffered from the wrath of Hurricane Sandy. I happen to live in the northeastern United States, specifically Long Island, New York, which was pounded by this storm. People lost their homes, whole towns on the water lie in ruins. Luckily enough for me, I live enough in the middle of the island that the insane flooding was never a concern. We knew we were going to lose the power, the question was for how long. Last year, when Irene hit our coast, my house lost power for an entire week. That is nuts considering the damage, while bad, was not severe. This time though, the damage was severe, and I had no power for 11 days this go-around. In that time, the temperature started to drop, fast. High winds and no sun will certainly do that, granted, but this was also the end of October/start of November. Shit would get cold all on its own, didn’t need the help of a hurricane. In that time, I got sick. Heavy coughing, generally crappy feeling, the usual. However, I seem to be susceptible to a secondary effect of being sick like this. My vocal chords blow the fuck out from all the coughing and I lose the ability to speak for 3-4 days.

Now let’s talk about my job. Not this. This is a hobby that I would love to turn into a job. At my job, I am on a phone all day. All god damn day. That is my job. I work in car insurance, helping people who were in accidents. I currently have no voice. I have already been out of work due to being sick, and now apparently I have to be out longer because I am not able to work due to my voice being the sole way I communicate with people. So really, what do I have to do with my time being sick? Play video games! I guess then I should go over what I was playing, some new stuff, some old. One I even just wrote a review for, go read it.

Lunar: Silver Star Harmony: Again, I gave this game a full review. However, it is one of the two handheld games I played while I had no power, so I feel like this bared a second mention. Actually I didn’t even bring up why I finally finished this game so recently. Knowing I was not going to have power, I made sure all of my handheld systems were charged up and ready to go. The PSP is simply what I grabbed first and actually beat Lunar the day…after the hurricane? I don’t exactly remember, things get hazy about that time. You don’t need to see my thoughts on this here, just read the article before this one.

Pokemon Emerald: It will never cease to amaze me that not only Word Press recognizes Pokemon as a word, it will correct it if I spell it wrong. The Game Boy Advance was the workhorse of my blackout, exactly as I intended it to be. The battery life on that thing is long and great. My game of choice during this time was one of the more mindless choices I could have made, but that was for a reason. I was sick, and really just lying down and playing this really helped me waste a lot of time. Also as a side note, I often forget how fun these games really can be. Granted, they have not changed since the original red/blue carts for the Game Boy in style, but this series just taps into something so simple that it is really hard to put it down once you get going. Another side note, I still hate Zubat. Always have, always will. Fuck you Zubat.

Mark of the Ninja: What an awesome fucking game. This is easily my indy darling of 2012. Made by the Shank people, this game has sucked me in like a high-priced hooker running a special. I am not even normally someone who plays stealth games, finding them to typically be too slow and boring for me (The next game on this list doesn’t count, as it quickly goes from stealth to blood-covered mess), but this game is different. It may be the fact the 2-D graphics give such a definite and binary way of seeing the world around you. I never have to guess with Mark of the Ninja, I know how everything should end up as long as I do my shit correctly. That has been a theme in games lately; as long as you play right you should succeed. Take games like Super Meat Boy and Trials HD. Failure is your fault, and your fault alone. this is a welcome change to things, and lies really in direct opposition to things like the Kinect, where you can never be sure if it’s you, or the hardware. Give me a game like Mark of the Ninja any time. This may in fact be my Bastion of 2012.

Assassin’s Creed 3: This is the one game I have been waiting all year for. Granted the hurricane put off my start on Connor’s kill-spree, but I was able to jump into this game finally, and I have not been disappointed. Oddly enough at first, I was not enjoying the game. I liked the start with Haytham, with the reveal actually coming as a complete surprise, which is now paying dividends as I get deeper into the story proper. However, it was a bit long, and Connor’s intro was way too long. Not many of the abilites needed full mission explanations, let alone things like hide-and-seek to teach you how to examine clues, then have you learn to examine clues again while learning to hunt. A bit redundant, and just takes you away from getting to the main game. Once I got past that though, it was really smooth sailing, and falling back into a comfortable routine with running around the cities, as well as the surprisingly fun frontier.

Ubisoft may have gone ahead and made the combat too much fun in this game. Granted, it can still be played on the same old counter/kill relationship, but AC3 wants you to be a little more proactive in your killing approaches. The system they have in place now is very reminiscent of the Rocksteady Batman games, only complimented with a lot more tomahawks buried in skulls. If you know what you’re doing, you can take out an entire group of 20 in under a minute, and look damn cool while doing so. There is also enough variety in the enemy types to where I find myself not getting bored, and actually watching for things like Redcoats setting up musket firing lines, and heavies swinging their giant axes in close quarters. Really I have very few complaints about this game, and I may end up doing a longer review of it, so let’s leave the Assassin Order for now and go on to the final game that has been keeping me sane while I have been sick.

Torchlight 2: I bought this game by Runic a while ago, but it has been sitting around on my Steam library for some time because I was still suffering from slight Diablo 3 burnout. It’s a shame it took me this long to get to this great title. As far as a clicky-Heaven goes, this is where it’s at. I am in…Chapter 2 I think. I don’t know, this game is not usually played sober, but it is still awesomely enjoyable. Drunk or sober. Where D3 tries to make the story more center-stage in the game, TL2 barely bothers, getting you out and killing constantly. I love the colorful palette the game has, and the customization of your character is a great alternative to how D3 changed the game with level-ups. If you thought Diablo 3 should have been more of a simple extension from 2, get this game.

Well fuck, it seems I am better now and am back at work. I need to lose my voice again, I got a lot of gaming in. This time reminded me why I love gaming, and writing about it. I actually feel invigorated about my writing, for the first time in a while.

I am always a fan of daily quests. Since the Shattered Sun in Burning Crusade, they have felt like the glue that holds together the rest of an endgame experience. Between dungeon running and raiding, there is that way to make steady money, get rep with a faction or two. It is also a way to push a story along, let us see how our actions in dungeons send consequences throughout the larger, non-instanced world. Cataclysm as a whole did not have a lot of these daily quest hubs, Tol Barad being the only huge one, with a dash of Wildhammer/Dragonmaw added for flavor. Really otherwise, it was all dungeon running/raiding all the time. This seemed to be a complaint with a certain subset of WoW’s playerbase, saying there was not enough to do, once valor was capped. To some degree, I can see this being true. Besides starting and leveling an alt, or gearing other level 85 alts, WoW did not have much to do with your main once they hit 85 and got geared. This was in the era of Cataclysm though, and that time is done. Deathwing is dead, and now we’re hanging out in a Furry’s dream of a continent. With this change of geography comes a wealth of options at the new level 90 cap. The list of things to do can be pretty exhausting, and they drag you in for the long haul. If you are interested in actually participating in the endgame that Mists has in it, this long haul is unfortunately mandatory.

A lot of this issue comes in the form of reputation grinds. Every expansion has had these, since the dawn of World of Warcraft, with varying degrees of ease, and accessibility. The height of ease when it came to the rep grinds in WoW undoubtedly was in the Wrath of the Lich King era. The expansion before stuck with an idea a tabard for a faction was a reward for hitting exalted with them. Wrath turned that on its head, giving you the tabards after you say hi to their designated representative for the first time. These tabards also ditched the idea of being a cosmetic item only, now giving reputation associated with the faction you got the tabard from. Wrath still had some dailies for the factions, allowing for a healthy, and relatively fast mix of daily grind and dungeon grind that allowed any character to hit exalted with expediency. Cataclysm continued this tradition, as we know, however it may have been a bit light on the dailies. This made dungeon running really the only viable option for rep grinds, unless you were going for Therazine, Wildhammer, or eventually the Hyjal rep. However, the rep gained while doing the normal questing was noticeably high; high enough to where the dungeon runs did not need to be so numerous. As a human with the rep bonus, I was well into revered with the Guardians of Hyjal after finishing the zone, making the rest of the rep a leisurely trip through heroics.

Cataclysm was pretty much the most maligned expansion in the history of the game however. With that came no shortage of criticism, and demands for change. Blizzard listened, and they made changes for Mists of Pandaria. Most of these for the best, but not all. One major complaint about Cata was that the endgame content was lacking, which seems to be where the majority of Blizzard’s focused laid in this expansion. However, one of the ways of ameliorating this situation rings very…hollow and artificial. Another is just plain annoying. The annoying one being the removal of dungeon rep gain from wearing a faction tabard. What the hell? After two expansions of a relatively smooth grind from mixing dailies, quests and tabard rep, Blizzard throws all that out the window and makes it where you can only gain rep for Pandaria’s many factions from dailies and sometimes a quest chain. This makes the game feel so much longer at points, and closes off one of the fucking vaunted options that Pandaria was supposed to be all about.

That other change? That hollow and artificial one? It’s something I have seen lately also complained about; not just by me. Why in the fuck does each daily give such a paltry amount of reputation? As a human, I get like…120 Golden Lotus rep per quest? Maybe? 240 for the final one. Granted, it ends up being a lot in the day because there are roughly 15 quests to do for the Golden Lotus per day. But still, I would much rather cut that down to 7-10, and give as much rep, as the grind takes forever to do, even in the random group pairings I sometimes luck into. Now note also, this is a faction you start at neutral with, and don’t have all those dailies up front, you need to earn your right to more rep by gaining rep. Ugh, dammit. What makes this the worst is that thig grind is required for getting the other two Panda factions, the Shado-Pan and August Celestials. This endless slog through daily hell, especially for the raid-ready “required” reps is just making me not want to play the game. The Golden Lotus is making me not want to play the game.

I have to imagine there are ways to fix this. Blizzard is rolling out some rep changes in 5.1 to make revered-exalted easier, as well as make any alt rep grinds easier. However, they should really just increase the rep across the board. Even 50 rep per daily would make a huge difference. Or give 10 valor points instead of the almost meaningless 5 we get. I know this sounds nitpicky, especially since dailies never gave out such a reward before, but with the number of dailies that need to be done to keep in good standing; at least at the start of this expansion, the rep/point reward per hour does not seem to add up on my end to something worthwhile. It leads to something way too gated and boring. A reward for a slow rep grind should not be more rep grinds. My simplest solution: Bring back tabard rep, nerf it a bit, and give us actual choice back on how we get to be besties with the denizens of Azeroth.

-Ray Grohosky

I am someone who writes his own gaming blog on a Word Press site. Now, I get some views, not a ton, but I enjoy writing regardless. However, This community seems to be active, and a good place to try and put down some extra roots. To that end, I am going to start throwing my blog posts here. But before I do I should introduce myself.

Hey there! I'm Ray and I like vidja games. I sit around at a pointless desk job all day and think about games when I am not playing them. I drink too much, play too many games and cry for my wallet whenever a Steam sale comes around. I am one of those people who wishes they could write about games full time, making half the money I currently make, living in some crappy apartment but doing what I love. Until such a day when I either give up, or actually make that want come true, I will continue to write in this capacity. Hope you enjoy it, or don't. I don't really care.