2015 has been a great year for MMOs, for me anyway, and I find myself struggling to keep track of all the goodness ahead this Q3 and beyond! Fall tends to be the time for gamers and geeks and some of us may soon find themselves in dire need for holidays to catch up with games, movies and other shenanigans.
Awaiting in Games
FFXIV is about to drop the 3.1 content patch soon which in good old SE fashion means a lot more of everything. Wildstar is transitioning to free-to-play tomorrow and I will be swimming in the new shop currency due to my past CREDD purchases. And anyone burning for raiding and healing in GW2 just got to hear the latest news about druids coming to Tyria.
That’s only as far as MMOs go for me. I am also looking forward to Jotun releasing tomorrow (check out the beautiful trailer!) and The Witcher 3’s first expansion pack coming out October 13th! Fallout 4 is due in November of course and also, ARK is still on my list of things to check out (currently on discount via Humble Bundle). Good times.
Awaiting in Movies
I’ve not been to the movies in a while, mostly because summer is for BBQ and river baths, but am definitely going to see the following new features as soon as they hit cinemas in Switzerland (which tends to be either sooner or much later than elsewhere, it’s odd):
- The Martian (I like Matt Damon’s acting and I hear the book is great)
- The Hateful Eight (Kurt Russel in a Tarantino movie!)
- Star Wars Ep. VII: The Force Awakens (it’s Star Wars!)
Awaiting in Books
I used to read so much. In recent years, blogging, social media, podcasting and what else have left a mark on my reading schedule. I am still not an e-book person however and now that winter is slowly creeping up on us and it’s time for snuggling up in front of the fireplace again, I got around ordering a few books I’ve been meaning to read:
- Hyperbole and a Half by the awesome Allie Brosh
- Daughter of the Forest as recommended by @MMOGC
- Die Durchschnittsfalle which deals with diversity management at the workplace
The other day, the postman also delivered my Chris Riddell illustrated book set of Neil Gaiman tales, so that’s what I’ll be doing over the weekend when I’m not playing Jotun or Wildstar. Which new games, movies or books are you looking forward to this Q3-Q4?
I did the audiobook of The Martian, recommended to me by @MMOGC. It was a very intriguing, fictional “based-on-a-true-story” tale.
Thought it was funny that Matt Damon is playing another stranded interplanetary astronaut, so soon after the last one. 😛 I’ll probably go see it this weekend.
And if you get ARK, there’s a bunch of Twitter peeps playing on a private server if you want a more casual, friendly experience.
I got a couple books to finish as well before I can get to reading Press Start to Play.
Oh, and WildStar, too.
As always, too much to doooo.
Cheers about ARK, will definitely get in touch once I got it – currently more of a hardware upgrade issue.
Gotta add Press Start to Play to my list too!
Ah, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline! Highly recommended, that one. If you haven’t seen the film adaptation, get that as well – it’s easily one of the most beautifully done, painstakingly made, and touching animated pieces I’ve ever watched.
Yeah I read the book and seen the movie, don’t think I haven’t read anything by Neil Gaiman tbh. 🙂 The box collection I got because illustrations, I love collecting illustrated editions of my fav reads. I really enjoyed the movie, it was the perfect mix between dreamy fairytale and creepy.
I read The Martian recently and I really enjoyed it, but I’m not sure how well it will hold up in movie form. A lot of the fun (in my opinion) comes from reading about how Watney uses science to figure things out; I can’t see Matt Damon pretending to be smart on screen working in quite the same way. 😛
Hyperbole and a Half is adorable, though it feels way too short somehow.
As for games, my autumn will be taken up by SWTOR’s expansion coming in three weeks! Though Neverwinter’s Underdark module is also still supposed to come out at some point in the next couple of months.
Think I’ll pick up the book sometime, so much praise everywhere! It will be interesting to see how the movie holds up. If not, it was an okay excuse for popcorn 😉
Interestingly my other half, who is by no means a geek or a gamer, is the one who suggested we go see The Martian. We’ve burned our babysitting credits with her father to go see Everest last weekend (which was, well, OK) so I’m using a vacation day so we can go see it next Friday while our girls are at school. Looks like proper, hard SF from Hollywood, and directed by Ridley Scott? Well worth it.
Game-wise, I’m signed up for the SWTOR and GW2 expansions although I’ve not feeling massively over-excited by either. Maybe that’s a good thing, so I won’t be disappointed if I ‘only’ find them enjoyable. I was more enthusiastic about War Machine arriving in Marvel Heroes because, well, dude! War Machine! He’s Iron Man with MORE DAKKA!
Books – September means the next book in S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse series, and The Desert And The Blade was much closer to his top form than some of the last few. I’ve just started in on The Martian (wasn’t really aware of it before the movie publicity) and loving it – as I said about the movie, it’s good ‘proper’ SF like what I grew up with, and reads much like John Scalzi (a good thing in my book, and that means a re-read of Old Man’s War is in order). I believe Bernard Cornwell has another of his Saxon historical novels due out very soon too, so that’ll be on my virtual reading pile (I’m 99% Kindle-fied for books these days) before Christmas.
Seems The Martian is everywhere atm! =) and I meant to go watch it this Friday but turns out it won’t air for another week around here, alas! And am gonna look into those Emberverse series, cheers!
I think you’ll like the Emberverse series – so called because the first book is called ‘Dies The Fire’ and is set in 1999 when suddenly, for some reason, any technology beyond medieval stops working (no electricity, no gunpowder, no useful steam engines)… and yes, that’s a very specific set of things to go wrong, and is very bad news for a planet of 6 billion people many of whom live in large cities utterly dependent on that technology. By the latest book things have moved on a couple of generations, with most of the characters born in the world after the Change. Would make an interesting RPG setting, I think.
That sounds intriguing! I shall order a first book on amazon, methinks 🙂