all made up with nowhere to go

I beat Kingdoms of Amalur! It was a lot easier than I was expecting!

( spoilers! )

Also also holy bananas the Well of Souls is the Cauldron of Bran, isn't it???? I didn't realise this until I was watching Luke and Ellen from Outside Xtra playing the start and it suddenly occurred to me. I mean, obviously Amalur's version is way more wonky though.

So yeah, despite my gripes, glad I played it, very much enjoyed it.

~

Anyway, the exciting news (unless you follow me on twitter) is that I have a new phone!

I got a call on Tuesday afternoon from the EE shop in Burnley, and was informed that I was due an early upgrade, and I probably wouldn't have to pay anything towards it, but that they didn't know for sure.

So like an idiot I went yesterday after work, because if there's one thing I love, it's a phone upgrade.

After much deliberating, I went with a Huawei P Smart, because it sounded all right, and it comes in this lovely blue colour and, well, blue's my favourite colour. It has 64Gb of internal memory, which is LOADS (esp when you consider I was just looking up the Nokia N95 because nostalgia, and that had 8Gb of memory and I thought that was a lot back in 2009).

I could have had a Samsung A40 instead, but my luck with Samsungs is not great (both of the ones I've owned previously I've had to take in for repairs. Although, I guess, third time's the charm?)

I've got it mostly set up now - I've just got to put the SIM card in, and we are go!

Today I am 32.

I realise that, in internet terms, I am practically prehistoric, but I don't care. I'm still waiting to feel like A Grown-Up.

Hasn't happened yet.

I have had a good day, although in most ways it's been a typical Saturday, except with birthday cards, money, and a crying nephew.

~*~

Last night, since I was staying up till stupid o'clock, as it was the weekend, I decided to play the Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning demo. Mainly because I wanted the items it unlocks in ME3 (since both games were released by EA), but also because I'd been reading about it, and it sounded like there were things I would like about it. Fae! Magic! Item crafting! An epic RPG!

Um, no. Well, I mean, it does have those things but. It gave me a headache. I did not like the style of the characters, and it just didn't grab me. It also reminded me a lot of that one Baldur's Gate game I played* (and also had what I think of as a "typical" Western RPG style, which I can't explain, but I know it when I see it), and that didn't win me over. It also felt to me like it wanted to be a JRPG and was failing really badly.

It was also completely not what I was expecting. I was expecting like a crusades/Middle Eastern flavoured game and that did not happen (although it gives me more fuel to work on an idea I have that's set in the Middle East).

THAT SAID.

I like some of the music (I heard some of it first on Howard Goodall's radio show on Classic FM, and that sounded Middle Eastern, so you can see where the idea came from originally). I like that even if you play a female character, the armour is not (that) stupid - it still has a breastplate with clear divisions for either breast (you know, lest we forget what gender our character is, even though women look womanly, and men look manly - I didn't like the lack of choice in the character creator. Sometimes it annoys me how long it takes to fine-tune a character in Bioware games, but I miss that, too. I like being able to make a masculine looking woman, or a feminine looking man).

I liked that time passed, from day to night, and back. For once it didn't give me Majora's Mask flashbacks, which is always a good thing (maybe, after seven years, I'm finally getting over that??)

I also liked smashing boxes and vases. And they regenerate when a new day starts! I would not actually be surprised if that's an actual way of generating money in the full game (since you will, more often than not, get a handful of coins when the boxes break).

Oh, and there was an animal design I liked! There are oxen in the main town, and they make me think of Final Fantasy Tactics era Ifrit. I also discovered that you can kill town animals for XP, but that disturbed me (and only occurred by accident).

Hmm. That was more than I thought I had to say about it, but there we go. Words. Have them!

~*~

*Dark Alliance. I found it slow, boring, repetitive, and patronising (the female PC can't carry as much as the man (weight restrictions) - I do believe she may be weaker, too; also, to date, my only acquaintance with jiggle physics *vomits*).