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Thursday, 04 August 2005, 9:30:25 EDT

Yesterday was the last day of class for the Summer semester. Summer semester is a nine week semester, half the time of a regular semester. I took Calculus II for the semester and made an A in the course. As a reward for my accomplishment I went by GameStop on my way home and purchased a copy of Guild Wars. If I didn't earn the luxury to buy a game by getting an A in Calculus II the first time then I don't know what would warrant the luxury.

Guild Wars is a game that I have been wanting to play for quite some time now. I played the alpha when they made it available way back in 2003 and found it to be quite enjoyable. That alpha didn't do the game justice; this game is really cool. I played it for six hours yesterday, made level seven, and finished a prelude that I didn't even realize was a prelude. There are plenty of quests for a solo player to have quite a bit of fun, thought it gets exponentially harder after the prelude, and it has something that World of Warcraft doesn't [aside from no monthly fee] — the ability to multi-class. Multi-classing is something I dearly wished WoW had whilst I was playing it; multi-classing makes characters much more interesting, especially in a player versus player environment. When a character only has the option of one class the characters get stale rather quickly. There is generally one really popular way to make a character and that style character will abound. Multi-classing allows people to be a bit more creative with their characters. For example, the first character I have created in Guild Wars is a warrior/monk. I focus most of my skill points into the warrior class, which is my primary and thus strongest class, while rounding him out with the monk abilities. The warrior abilities give my character some serious damaging dealing ability while the monk abilities deflect damage being inflicted to him. In the first PvP battle I participated in last night I totally rocked the other team because 1) I was "bringing the pain" and 2) I could immediately heal the damage they were inflicting on me. So, yeah, I like multi-classing; it is fun.

I haven't played the game enough to really speak about it too much but I can see that I will enjoy it. It would be nice to have some friends to adventure with, especially in the PvP areas, but I am enjoying it well enough as is. I won't have a whole lot of time to play in a few weeks any way. Fall semester starts on August 22 and I have a full schedule lined up: Calculus III on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; Smart Bodies [gym] on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; and Introductory Linear Algebra on Tuesday and Thursday. I am not looking forward to that.