Toxically Cute

Still waiting for the Cisco equipment that I ordered over a week ago on eBay. The seller was using a defunct (as of the first of the year) payment site called BidPay for all his auctions. It wasn’t until I had sent off the certified check that he sent me an alternative online payment method. In the seller’s defense, I got the payment off late Monday last week, so it probably didn’t hit the mail system until Tuesday, and we just had MLK Jr. Day: a federal holiday. That, and I live in Texas, where the mail system is completely broken. If I don’t hear back from the guy by the end of Wednesday, I’ll shoot him an email Thursday morning to touch base. I’m just eager to get started I guess.

It was a dreary day outside, and one of those days where I felt more like sleeping, lounging around and playing with the kiddos that gaming. It’s an odd feeling – almost like I’m growing up. ;-P Clara loves to be picked up and tossed, flipped, turned upside-down and all sorts of acrobatics. I envision her being into gymnastics in a few years; she just loves the thrill of falling, flipping and tumbling. Being that cute should be illegal. Of course, I don’t mind obliging her, but after about half an hour of this I was getting tired out, so I set her down on the floor and let her tear around until bedtime while DeAnn and I lazed about on the couch.

What little gaming we did do was exploring. Being in so much endgame stuff, I nearly forgot how that feels. The new expansion has all sorts of new missions and a large-scale battle system called Campaign. Campaign is broken into two parts: Operations and Battles. Operations are generally small, simple and soloable quests that you can do quickly for small rewards and a bit of fame. You can do one per day, up to seven days worth at a time. Battles are just that – you are fighting on behalf of one of the campaigning nations against wave after wave of the hoard alliance. These battles can be longer than the operations, but still only about 30 minutes, and can net pretty decent experience points and rewards and don’t cost you experience points when you die. Both parts reward you with experience points and Allied Notes, which you can use to buy stuff and teleport around in the past. It’s the swift nature of the Campaign system that I like best. Sometimes, all I have is an hour to play, and it’s nice to get in a slug of ops or a quick battle or two. There’s always something going on.

Keri and I started with an operation called Streetsweeper I. Basically, you run around town and look for a random “Suspicious Object” point. Once you find it, get it and return back to the Ops NPC for your reward. The process takes at most 5 minutes. Unfortunately, since we hadn’t done anything with campaign since the release of the expansion, Keri’s medal (which gives you permission to do ops) had expired. She got one ops credit, but would have to wait until tomorrow before she could get another. Maybe we’ll do a bunch this weekend.

Next, we ran out to Sarutabaruta of the past to try our hand at a campaign battle. As luck would have it, a battle was underway, so we talked to the NPC at the fort and signed up. There was a large crowd of NPC fighters there to protect the fort, and several people were sitting around, too. We got there just in time for an eye and a big wave of bugs to come crashing in on us. Keri and I fought the eye until it died, then focused on one of the bugs until the NPCs blew them up with some pretty nasty spells. The whole battle, from running out to enemy retreat, took less than 10 minutes and gave about 700 experience points and 500 notes. Didn’t have to build a party, search around for someone to go on an escort quest or really anything beside show up and hit stuff. This is the kind of thing Final Fantasy XI has needed – something for the casual player. For a paltry 10 Allied Notes, we teleported back to Windurst and rolled out to the Meriphataud Mountains for a battle that was getting started. That one lasted almost half an hour, resulted in a little more death, and gave over 1800 experience points and over 1000 notes.

We rounded out the evening with a trip to the past San d’Oria. We finished one of the two storyline quests available to non-San d’Orians, the reward being one of four items needed to upgrade our inventory by 5 spaces. I turned in a bunch of Moat Carp before heading home and calling it a night.

I gotta start taking more screenshots, but in the mean time, here is some cuteness so toxic that it should be regulated. ^_^/