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Perfect Ten: My favorite classes
Forget raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens; a few of my favorite classes have nothing to do with such musical nonsense. Of course, now that I've started thinking about that song, my brain has to finish it before I can do anything else. Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens, yup. Brown paper packages tied up with strings, uh huh. These are a few of my favorite things. OK, can I move on now? Seriously, how boring was life in the 1940s that tied-up brown packages were worth singing about? I've played a lot of MMOs over the past decade or so, and in each of them I've agonized about which class I would make my main. Sometimes this resulted in me creating a wide selection of possible candidates, each vying for my affection while I cruelly sentenced the losers to permanent deletion. But in the end, here are 10 classes from 10 separate MMOs that tickled my fancy and totally kicked woolen mittens in the interest department.
Enter at Your Own Rift: Six things I learned about leveling via instant adventures
With a few weeks to blow before Storm Legion arrives to give us a wealth of new content to explore, I decided to roll up an alt in RIFT and see just how far I could get him in the meantime. The character is a mage, and the Harbinger soul looks wicked awesome, so I figured, why not? I wasn't that interested in going back through all of the quests and zones, however. I've done them, explored them, and made peace with them, and I knew that chugging back through all of those quests would drive me nuts (and take too long!). So instead, I figured I might as well try a new tactic: I resolved to just use instant adventures augmented by dungeon runs for the entirety of my leveling experience. It's a huge plus in RIFT's favor that this is an actual option, and I quite enjoy IAs anyway, so that choice felt right. Over the past week of doing this, I've learned a few interesting lessons about chugging through IAs as a character's sole source of XP, loot, and advancement. For anyone who might be following this path, I'd like to share those lessons.
Enter at Your Own Rift: Why update 1.9 could be the best one yet
In the most recent Enter at Your Own Rift, we looked at Conquest, an exciting new opportunity for instanced three-faction PvP. It's been generating a lot of buzz, and players have had two chances to check it out its development on the test server. Conquest is scheduled to be part of RIFT's Update 1.9, which is probably just around the corner if past update schedules are any indication. But that's not all that's planned for the next game update, and there are two additions that I think could very well be gamechangers for RIFT. The first is a mentoring system, and the second is the addition of lower-level instant adventures. In this week's column, we'll look at both through last week's test event and explore why they could make update 1.9 the best one yet.
Star Wars: The Old Republic pits the Jedi Consular against the Imperial Agent
Ladies and gentlemen, this match is scheduled for one fall! In the blue corner, weighing in at 200 pounds of pure Force, we have the Jedi Consular. In the red corner, we have the conniving Imperial Agent. Who will come out on top? Well, that's for you to decide, but the folks at BioWare want to make sure everyone is making informed decisions. In light of that, the studio has released a new Star Wars: The Old Republic video in which a number of devs (verbally) duke it out in hopes of proving that their class is the best class. So jump past the cut and check it out, then decide for yourself who comes out on top (protip: it's the Agent). Oh, and while you're at it, don't forget that you can now preorder The Old Republic peripherals, so if you're in the market for a new mouse, keyboard, or headset, you can declare your allegiance for the Empire or Republic with a new gadget. For the full details, hit the SWTOR official site.
Intelligent space robots to dig around, throw raves on their own by 2020
Let's face it -- we owe a great deal of gratitude to the robots that get up each and every morning to explore far reaches of the universe that we humans are just incapable of landing on. But there's still the problem of we humans having to tell these things what to do from our humble laboratories here on Earth. The brilliantly named Wolfgang Fink, a physicist and senior researcher at the California Institute of Technology, has plans to remedy said quandary by creating autonomous spacecrafts "that will be able to analyze data about points of interest as it passes and then make quick decisions about what needs to be investigated." In essence, he's looking to remove the Earthlings from the equation, which would enable smart robots to explore on their own and possibly discover new pools of purified water, REEM-B's long lost siblings or the real most innovative NES-in-a-whatever mod. 2020 folks, mark it down.[Image courtesy of NASA]
