Go go go?

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After a very long wait Pokémon has finally released over here in most of Europe with the Netherlands getting added only yesterday. I had downloaded the US version on my iPhone with the help of a new US based Apple account, but with the wonkyness of the app in general and the huge security “bug” in the app on Apple phones I decided to uninstall and just wait for the official release here. Which didn’t actually take that long.
So yeah I’ve joined the Pokemon GO hype. Allthough I’m probably not as hardcore as some people I’ve already caught a neat bunch of Pokemon and am working on hatching eggs. I don’t necessarily go outside especially for this game, but I do take my phone with me if I have to go somewhere anyway and that way I’m slowly making some progress. It’s a neat little AR game and I’m mostly laughing at the Pokestops around my neighbourhood. Niantic really knows what to pick here and then and so far they have included a drawing on the wall of the school I live across and a specially painted school crossing on our nearby roads. With the lack of statues or actual symbols I guess this is the best they can do tho, otherwise people in the boring suburbs like me wouldn’t have a Pokestop anywhere!
As you can see from my screenshots I’ve chosen team Mystic (Articuno <3) and I’m only level 5 or so. And yes, I picked Bulbasaur as my starter Pokemon. Mostly a childhood nostalgia thing, when I was 8 and got Pokemon Blue I picked Bulbasaur as starter aswell. So I just went with it this time again. I’m slowly learning the ins and outs of the game and am keeping high CP Pokemon and transferring all the rest away. Basically I just keep catching everything I see, just for the candy fodder. I’ve not really come across anything rare yet, although for some reason a Ghastly popped up at my house this morning, so obviously I had to catch it.
So far I do still find the game incredibly buggy. I had a nice stroll of about 35 mins around the neighbourhood, going off into the park nearby. Unfortunately I didn’t notice that my phone was continuously trying to connect to the servers (spinny pokeball), so not only did nothing register for my eggs, absolutely no Pokemon popped up either. Oh well, atleast I walked a bit today!
I might even go out again in a few hours, since the weather is incredibly nice and it’s a shame to sit inside all day anyway.

Grinding dailies and racecourses
Next to the Pokemon Go hype I’ve been mostly engrossed in playing FFXIV and Mario Kart 7. I got the latter with a discount from the Nintendo e-shop thanks to “My Nintendo” and I’ve been having a blast playing the game. I finished 50cc and 100cc cups and am now throwing myself at the 150cc ones. I’ve been slowly unlocking all the wagons and accessories and with every 150cc cup I beat I also unlock a new character to play. I actually forgot how immensly I enjoy racing games and Mario Kart is no exception. I predict I’ll be done with the 150cc cups by the start of the weekend next week and after that it’s just perfecting them all to three stars, win all the cups in Mirror mode and grind out a retarded amount of coins if I want to 100% the game. Ohwell.

In the FF department I’ve been mostly busy with grinding items for my relic. I’m only 6 items off of upgrading as we speak and I hope to get two more by the end of the evening. If I have calculated everything right I should be done with my upgrade somewhere this week…
I can then finally start to focus on some other things like levelling my Monk and maybe some crafting classes.
I also hope to grind out the last two ranks of Brawler’s Guild I need on WoW before the patch hits on Wednesday. So far I’ve just been making silly mistakes on the bosses, causing me to ragequit here and then. I really do want that mount though, so I’ll have to suck up and just do it I guess.

 

Crafting Fever

It feels like forever since I had a chance to properly sit down and write up a blog post. With work being busy and me being upped to work 40 hour weeks I tend to neglect a lot of things I would otherwise spend time on. Blogging is one of them. But today I felt relaxed enough with my time to carve out a chunk of my evening to write a nice post that is actually longer than 200 words and mostly screenshots.

First off: I’m skipping the Gaming Goal list for July. Honestly I’m just working way too much to realistically set goals for a lot of games. Add up that in the weekends I’ll mostly be busy with either social activites and/or clearing out the house (oh my lord we have so much junk) and you can see how it seriously eats away at my already limited free time. Even though I might not formally make a gaming goal post I do have some things I want to have achieved by the end of the month, most notably upgrading my Ninja relic on Sandrian and getting my Monk on her to level 50 in FFXIV. I’m only 14 items away from upgrading the relic as of today so it should be easily doable. As for the Monk, she’s sitting at level 41 now so that should be doable aswell. Other than that this month is a complete free for all. I’ve recently started playing The Secret World and I really want to keep doing that for atleast one night a week so there’s that and in the meantime I guess I’ll be spending most of my time on my 3DS since it’s really the only gaming device I can pick up and just play. Oh and Pokémon Go… When it ever rolls out here in the EU. I will probably spend a lot of time on that.
Now what HAVE I been up to the past few weeks?

Crafting, Crafting and more Crafting
Since I get home really tired and often am not finished with dinner and everything surrounding it before 8pm I’ve resorted to doing stuff in FFXIV that is relaxing to play. So instead of stressing out over capping my Lore, gearing my characers or all that nonsense I decided to turn my attention to Gathering and Crafting on both my characters. Sandrian already has Weaver at 60 and all the other crafting and gathering classes above level 20 atleast. Sarella however was a different story. I never really got into crafting on her so I either had to make do with having to level from scratch or somewhere in the level 5-10 range. I can proudly say that all my Crafting classes are atleast level 15 now with some of them already being 20 aswell. The Ixali dailies have been most helpful with this and I’m enjoying myself, which is what matters most. Although the leveling goes in a fairly slow pace I’m still happy with the progress I’m making and I’m not worried about pressure at all. I know I’ll get all these classes to 50 and then 60 eventually, it will probably just take a bit more time than someone who pursuits the game in a more hardcore fashion.

Next to Sarella I’ve also been busy on Sandrian. As I’ve mentioned before I pushed Weaver to level 60 with the help of the Moogle dailies that were introduced with patch 3.3. As much as I hated doing the Moogle quests the first time around in the Churning Mists I have to say that the Moogle dailies aren’t a problem at all. They take about 5-10 minutes a day to do and they give a lot of experience to leveling crafters… plus a ton of items you can trade in for either Relic items or the old Blue Scrip gear to boot! With me being in relatively bad crafting gear the level 58 gear has been a real big upgrade. So much that I can actually start crafting up collectables so I can upgrade my gear even further to the Red Scrip level.
I’m not an expert crafter at all and I don’t know much about what the ideal path to gearing up is, but I would like to delve a bit deeper into the Crafting world so I can make myself nice outfits, pets, mounts and other goodies. Maybe if I learn to play the market I’ll even start earning enough gil to buy my own house! Instead of just owning a room in the FC house.
Plus, doesn’t my little Miqo’te look incredibly cute with her oversized crafting hat on?

World of Warcraft?
I have been playing a bit of WoW on and off the past weeks. I made sure I got both the toys from the Midsummer Fire Festival, moving my achievement up to 117/150 toys collected now. I know there are a lot of easy to get toys out there still but my focus hasn’t really been on there. I do want to get to max rank with atleast the Brawler’s guild though since I want that mount… And Blizzard will be shutting it down for a while, probably with the pre-Legion patch. I’ve also broken 100k gold for the first time since Cataclysm. I’m at 120k now and still steadily going up. I’m not sure if I want to use this eventually to buy game-time again or if I want to use it to buy ingame exclusive stuff like expensive mounts. For now I’m just saving up so I can start off in Legion with a decent amount of gold on my name. I can’t believe the launch is in less than two months already!

Lastly I’ve been spending most of my time on my 3DS. I have finished New Super Mario Bros 2. and am working my way through several other games. In Donkey Kong Country Returns I’ve killed the second boss and arrived at world 3: Ruins. In Pokémon X I’m well on my way to getting the thrid badge and I’ve added Mario Kart 7 to my collection where I’ve completed the 50cc races and am now slowly making my way through 100cc. And boy that is a leap up in difficulty. I really can’t wait to start doing 150cc and unlocking characters. But all things in time.
As you can see/read I am working on enough projects when it comes to gaming. Progress isn’t that fast as it could be, due to my limited amount of time, but I do get some things done and even get to finish games! For someone who has a huge backlog, that is mostly unfinished, finishing any game right now is a real achievement. Especially considering the amount of time I have to spend on games in general.