I can’t type. I Just managed to delete my entire blog content dir and plugins. This means all of my images and any uploaded zips are gone.
Also, my company has recently had to make some dramatic changes that I’m still coping with. I am still employed, but I’m not much in the mood to continue with any of my previous article series at present.
On the bright side, this gives me an excuse upgrade to WP2.9 and dig through my 250+ post archive and clean things up.
Please excuse the mess while I unbork everything. Happy new year.
Well, five weeks in a row was pretty good. I’m going to have to take a break from this series until some time after the new year for reasons of not making my wife hate me over the holiday 
I plan on making my Florensia update some time next week and hope to resume regular posting for most of January.
Time was actually short this week. I spent a lot of time alternatively between work, a closed beta, and Borderlands. Lots of Borderlands. And some Dawn of War, come to think of it… but anyhow.
The game I had wanted to look at this week is Gatheryn. They’re nominally in “open” beta, but put testers under a clickthrough NDA. So… they go on the list with all of my other closed beta games of interest in stead.
After a lot of debate and consideration, I’ve decided to just go ahead and give Florensia a shot and be done with it.
Week 5: Florensia
Florensia looks like a pretty generic Asian sort of MMO. The Western publication of the game is handled by the same folks who’re publishing Ragnarok Online and Hello Kitty Online in english, so I figure it’s worth a look for that reason alone.
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So I’ve actually got a game I want to report on this week. Holiday didn’t allow me to pick up a new F2P game and the first rule of Closed Beta is well, yeah. But Steam had an evil sale on like 300 games, so I buckled and snagged a few.
Fallen Earth is not free to play, and it is not in beta any more. But it was on sale for 50% off last week, so that – combined with the recent comments I’ve been reading on GamerDNA was good enough for me.
Well, that, and there were 15-day trial keys available from The Escapist last weekend. So… close enough 
Week 4: Fallen Earth
I’d tried FE near the end of their beta cycle… and hated it. The controls were brittle and confusing. It was easy to inadvertently unwield your weapons, etc… and I died twice and never finished the intro. The experience was frustrating enough that I played the game for two hours before giving up on it entirely.
Thankfully, they’ve fixed a LOT since then. It’s playable. There are still some rough edges, but they’re manageable.
Unlike the previous games I’ve looked at, Fallen Earth is actually rated M (17+) for subject matter and language. I have not encountered anything overtly objectionable yet, and the violence is downright cartoonish for an M title these days, but it’s a harsh wilderness out there…
This might read a bit differently from my previous mmo-a-week reports because I didn’t actually take notes this time – I was too busy just playing the game Also, I played equally on two different machines, so my screenshots are in two different resolutions (some are full 1920×1080 HD behemoths), so be warned when you click.
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