Lots of ground to cover.

So there I was linking my Twitter with my blog when I saw the date of my last blog :-( (hey, I've never claimed 'frequent blogger' miles!)

Well we've got alot to cover and hopefully not a ton of words to do it, apologies if details get missed in the brevity

Eve:
Yep still playing Eve, managed to get in on the Bob vs. Goon action (I'm not saying which side I'm on) lots of fun and no complaints about the outcome. That said it's been a bit boring since then but my other characters empire wars and wormhole fights has been making up for it - back to feeling a little burnt out though these last few weeks - One of my group wants us to go play Aion, but I suspect it'll be horribly grindy thanks to it's Korean origins (assuming my aging rig can run it with all the pretty effects I see on YouTube)

SWG:
There was a free reactivate recently for the SWG birthday (don't ask me which year as I'm past caring). This time I actually decided to try it, made it from the site of my old house back to Mos Eisley before logging, the accelerated animations just terrible, Traders are still gimped and the game is a ghost town - call me when you launch 'classic' (i.e. pre-NGE) servers SOE

In other news I'm sad to comment that Jeff Freeman/Dundee of NGE fame took his own life some time ago. I'm not aware of the circumstances around this but I'd like to say that my criticism of him was purely professional.

Matrix Online:
Sadly this closed down recently, while the game play was fairly dull the hand to hand system was novel for an MMO. Unfortunately another example of an excellent virtual world environment flushed down the tubes by SOE (although in this case by not really bothering to develop it rather than over developing it like SWG) - Station Access just got less appealing but I'm not aware of it being made any cheaper

Planetside:
European server is being merged with the remaining US server so thats had a free reactivation too. Played it the other night but the Terrans are still outclassed unless they get decent numbers (which they don't) and I couldn't work out what the new capacitor thing on the Terran MAX is (if its a shield it certainly isn't a very good one). Got pushed off every continent we fought on. Had some good fights but mainly we were just zerging into hostile fire due to lack of numbers.

I wonder what the ping will be like for us Europeans on the US server (the free period runs out 1 day after the merge so I'll see if I remember) and will this be the next SOE game to be shut down?

Neocron 2:
I'm not 100% clear on this but I think it's currently free (to existing account holders anyway, even if they weren't subscribed) due to some financial issues with the parent company. Hasn't been a patch for ages though so the game play is probably exactly as last described.