For someone who plays Cafe World on facebook for a long time now – i know they said that Cafe World is still on beta – but they keep changing things every few days – this morning – i found that they changed the menu too.  Mannn!!  they really have to give it a break  – it’s disrupting when you are already used to the old pictures and the way things were going – so this time with the new menu – you can see the Cafe Points you earned in total when you cooked the said food – but really – does it matter?  Not to me though – !  usually i just check out the hours needed that suits my need – and the amount of CW coins i can earn and that’s about it.   What about you?  anyhow – enough of talk about Cafe World – i just hope they stop changing things again and again – plus it just mess up the game when one is trying to play.  Ok – i’m going to get my weight loss products before the store closes.

A few days ago after I started playing online again I was buying up some commons for my collection and noticed a lot of the bots were from MTGO Library so I went to check it out and it seems to be pretty good. Pretty straight forward, no running in ellipticals trying to figure out how to use them, you can either pay a small monthly fee to use the bots or they can charge a small percentage of your transactions. 2.5% to 3.5%, which you can buy credit in advance so that no one ever has to log in and take money direct from your bot. So far I haven’t had any sales, but it’s taken a couple days just to get the kinks worked out and get it running stable. Competition seems a lot more fierce than a couple years ago though since all the new bots are “smart bots”, they can track prices for individual cards much easier than they used to.

So while my wife shops around online for wholesale handbags, I rape & pillage the neighbours for their food, wood and precious stones. It’s all in good fun. Today someone sent one of their alliance members after me in retaliation for hitting one of their unprotected but rich towns. His little army was decimated by the raw power of my archer towers. whee.

So far I’ve been building and building and building since all new players are under 7 day protection from attacks. Once that 7 days is up I’ll find out how much fun the game still is, I just hope I can get a big enough army by then to save my ass from annihilation. There’s a good bunch of “quests” to follow which keep you cruising quite well as far as resources to. Pay 10k gold to build something and chances are you’ll get a quest reward for 10k gold or more just for building that something. It helps your first city to grow really fast.

The game world is persistent, which so far is a good thing. I go to bed at night and when I get up in he morning I have a crapload of resources which I can use to get started on new buildings and upgrades. The downside to this is that once the 7 day protection is over, I could wake up in the morning to find myself wiped out. I don’t know how the combat part is handled yet, and whether or not you can lose your city or just your soldiers. I’ll be finding that out in a few days too.

So far it’s fun and if I keep playing beyond the weekend I’ll post another update with my ‘progress’.

Then I came across Gemcraft on Kongregate (the game itself is by Armor Games) and played that quite a bit for a few days. It was pretty easy after gaining a few levels though and I figure it was only about a week until I had beaten all the secret levels and finally the big boss at the end of the game. I thought I’d be able to get back to the 360 for a while after that but noooo. I just had to go check out Armor Games and sure enough, there’s a sequel to Gemcraft out now. So I gave it a shot.

It’s a lot harder than the first one. I find myself struggling at times even on these earlier levels. The play mechanics are similar but with a lot of changes/additions. It’s more about strategy than brute force, in some levels I felt I was throwing everything but the bathroom sink at those little monsters and I lose every time. It’s frustrating sometimes but I still feel compelled to try again and again.

So far after about an hour I have a couple small gripes and that’s with the controls. Why can’t I re-map from the stupid WASD setup?! I’m a touch typist, I like to keep my fingers on the home row keys. I don’t like having to move my left hand to the left to use the stupid WASD keys for movement when it’s so much more convenient to use ESDF like I do in every other game I play. Also, how do I invert my mouselook, doesn’t seem to be an option for that either. I know they’re aiming this game at kids and casual gamers, but they could at least include an ‘advanced’ tab for those of us who know what we’re doing.

Aside from that it looks to be fun enough. There’s a wide variety of jobs you can do simply by doing the starting quests. Oh, I forgot to mention but it’s pretty obvious from the name alone, Free Realms is free to play. Of course you can pay for premium features if you choose. Extra content, extra character classes/jobs, and so on.

So far I’ve gone fighter mode and beaten up some baddies, then I put on a chef hat and baked some goodies. I haven’t read up on it much but I presume there would be other typical jobs as well, like making engagement rings as a jeweler or some armor/weapons as a blacksmith. Stuff like that. There’s 15 job types in the game and so far I’ve only done 3 of them, although I did unlock destruction derby driver. That seems crazy enough for this type of game so it wouldn’t surprise me to see other interesting stuff crop up the next time I play.

As for other fun stuff, there’s the usual bombs and awesome headgear, and a newer improved version of the explosive sheep. And a new sapper charge, cause there’s nothing quite like being a suicide bombing priest >:)

So far it looks like I might stay, and get Lich King, and when I subscribe again or use a game card, the guy who sent me the resurrection will get a free month. If I reactivate I’ll be trying to get some old friends back in as well, get me some free months too.

Then of course there are the games I haven’t even tried yet, Conan and Warhammer, both are supposed to be good games and would probably be fun to play, but it’s cheaper to just buy an expansion for a game I already own. LOTR might be worth a peek too and it’s only around $30 to buy. There’s too many to choose from!

Monster types are somewhat varied but typical. No alli eating aligators so far but I’m hoping to find some somewhere, just because. Goblins, bears, skeletons and the usual fare populate the are surrounding your starting town and quests are plentiful enough to keep you leveling at a good pace. I got drive-by buffed up by a high level dude that was in the area and proceeded to zip through 4 levels with very little effort. Overall it’s a very solid little game that should only improve as time passes and more content is added. I recommend checking it out!

The 360 is just so damn fun and I still haven’t played a lot of the games I’ve picked up. Speaking of picked up, I just snagged a carrying case for it that looks kind of like these Zero Halliburton briefcases. There’s room in it for the console, 2 controllers and a couple of games. Great for traveling, not that we travel much these days though.