Keen and Graev and Rift and Szechuan

Daily Ramble 162: Keen and Graev and Rift and Szechuan

Today I ramble all over the place from the 4th degree of my latest Six Degrees to McDonald’s to Rift and I hope it’s not too incoherent.

For starters I take a look at Keen and Graev’s Gaming Blog to see what they’re up to and I really like what I saw. They’re dipping into games like the environmental planet building game called ECO and anticipating the new EverQuest progression server. But they even go beyond the standard PC and console games to visit Disney and the new Star Wars VR game. Not only do these brothers have a neat blog, they’ve got a whole gaming community and Discord server to get their followers together in the games they play…pretty cool.

After visiting them, I headed over to Trion to learn more about the proposed Rift Prime server. This thing is coming next month and I think I’m actually gonna sign up to get the beginner experience in Rift again. I always enjoyed their class mechanic.

Finally, though I hate McDonald’s, I have to mention the fact that they’re trying to bring back the Rick and Morty Szechuan Sauce again. Hopefully they do things better this time.

Keen And Graev

Keen and Graev are a couple of brothers who’ve got a good thing going with their blog. It seems to be pretty popular since I’ve seen many of the sites I follow like to them and I’ve even joined up on their Discord server to keep up to speed on new things they’ve got going on. In any case, Keen and Grave’s Gaming Blog falls in my 4th degree in this trip though I’m sure it is actually much closer.

Things that they’ve covered lately are pretty diverse but are all interesting. At the time I’m writing this, their most recent post talks about Diablo 3 and a bunch of rumors about Blizzard which hopefully come true. The idea of being able to play Diablo 3 on my Switch is cool and I’d love to revisit the world of Warcraft 3…it seems like it’s been FOREVER since Blizzard came out with a real Warcraft game.

Along the same concept of time, Keen actually thinks it’s time for another EverQuest progression server. Well, I suppose he doesn’t necessarily think so, but he’s already got a part of players who’re gonna brave the starting zones once again. For me, I played EverQuest a little but never leveled beyond 20 or so. It was a fun game but there wasn’t much of a hook to grab me since I started when there were already so many other games out there. I do remember talking to people in line waiting to see Star Wars: The Phantom Menace about how much they loved EQ, but I didn’t try it out for a few more years. I lasted a month or so and moved on, but I’ve gone back a few times when new progression servers have been announced or it went f2p. This server, Coirnay is promoted as a “one PC – on character” server which I kinda think is good. From what I’ve heard many of the progression servers have been plagued with multiboxers. While I’m not against multiboxers per se, I do like the idea for a new server to limit the possibility of exploits in a game that was built multiple CPU generations ago.

So with the most recent posts talking about games that are decades old, the next post discusses ECO, a game which is still in early access. But this early access may be one I could tolerate trying out. The game seems to revolve around a meteor that is gonna crash into the game’s planet and starting from a primitive civilization, your job is to stop armageddon. And you’ve really should try not to destroy the planet as you go…yup, the game tracks pollution, toxic waste, and all kinds of crappy environmental stuff that could destroy the planet just as much as the meteor. The concept is pretty cool and it seems to work kinda like Minecraft so I could see this working pretty well. From what Keen mentions about his civilization, they’ve progressed from their primitive roots to the industrial age. They’re working on getting consistent electricity to everyone and have basically focused on stopping the meteor rather than trying to prevent environmental collapse. It sounds really cool.

Finally, Keen takes a break from gaming on his PC/console and heads over to Downtown Disney to try out the new Virtual Reality Star Wars game, Secrets of the Empire. Oooohhh, I am sooo jealous! From the way he describes it, this is a fully immersive VR experience with a physical blaster, vest, and shoulderpads. It may be a bit shorter than he wanted, but he’s had the opportunity many gamers would love to have. One of these days, I’m gonna have to take the trek up the 5 Freeway to experience this myself, but I enjoyed living vicariously through Keen’s blog post.

In all, I really enjoyed my trip over to Keen and Graev’s Gaming Blog and I’m gonna make sure I revisit often to see how things are going in their ECO server and perhaps I’ll see about getting the game so I can join in next time.

This has been an installment of my Six Degrees 2018 series in which I take a look at the wonderful blogs that surround Beyond Tannhauser Gate. The blogosphere is large but there are so many friends to be found within Six Degrees.

Rift Prime

I have to admit that I am looking forward to March 7th to get started on the new Rift Prime server. I was a bit wary of the progression server but then they announced that the characters you create on the Prime server will be rolled back into the normal servers at the end of the progression. That makes me feel that I won’t just be leveling in a vacuum and going nowhere. The Devs have also indicated that they’ll keep moving the normal servers forward, hopefully with a new expansion, so I think it’ll feel good to get a new character moving through the original game and then carrying them forward once the progression ends.

This for me, will make me come back and pay for a Rift subscription.

Szechuan Sauce

I really hate McDonald’s. In all reality, I do not even eat hamburgers and haven’t had one in probably 30 years. But I do love Rick and Morty and one thing that McDonald’s knows how to do is to capitalize on a cult favorite. Actually though, they kinda failed at it last year and so are gonna try again starting next week.

Starting February 26th Szechuan Sauce will again be available at McDonald’s.

I will not eat there, but I will gladly purchase some McNuggets and some Szechuan sauce for Mrs. Redshirt, though I expect lines on Monday.