Well fladdle my fleddle it’s been a fortnight since I last updated so without further ado!

My Pulse arrived (confirming sadly that I’m not one of the undead) and it’s a rather nice phone. As my first Android phone I’m pretty impressed at it’s capabilities and might well try and program “something” for it at some point… The only slight disappointment is it’s battery life, but I gather that’s an issue with most smartphones.

I’m still managing to do a picture a day for my PAD2010 project which I’m rather pleased about. Focus and not getting sidetracked by shiny things are my adversaries.

I’m currently not playing WoW… I’d kinda gotten fed up with certain individuals attitude and lack of commitment and just all round gotten a bit fed up with it. I still love the game but just fancied one of my WoW breaks, I’ll be back into WoW before Cataclysm hits I’m sure.

In the meantime I’ve been playing a Lord of the Rings Online trial (which runs out on Tuesday) and it’s been pretty fun although it suffers like WoW whilst levelling in that you rarely see folk.

I like how it does certain things, it’s class system and group-specific move system (Conjunctions) are pretty unique and clever. How it weaves it’s story around events in the books is clever and seeing a lot of people and places from the books come alive is fun in itself.

I don’t like how bland and landscape-less most of the land (so far) appears, I know it’s being true to the books and it DOES look pretty but it’s just seeing rolling green hills and empty green fields of the Shire and Bree-land ALL the time (At least upto level 21, I’m about to head into the Lone Lands which should hopefully make a graphical detour) that gets a bit boring. (Although to be fair I imagine the Elven and Dwarven areas to be slightly more exciting, Hobbits aren’t known for their interesting-ness)

I know, I know, it’s exactly as the book describes and it does a fantastic job of recreating Tolkien’s masterwork, I’m just fairly sure Turbine could’ve found ways of breaking it up with a bit more variety.

There is also a massive over-abundance of fetching and returning OVER and OVER to the same places in early questing which just drags. Also I’m a bit said that the main quest-line (the so-called Books) are reliant on grouping so much, I KNOW it’s an MMO and I’m definitely not adverse to grouping but having the early levels require grouping so much means you end up ignoring them until you way out-level it and then going back and doing them, just because there is a lack of low-level population to group with.

I’m fairly sure it’ll get much better at higher levels as you venture into places with more players, but the low-level game is honestly not that thrilling so far. (Although I also acknowledge that it’s not great in WoW either, I’m just numb to it in that game through the amount of time playing it…)

I’m REALLY interested in what they’ve done with Moria and Mirkwood but I’ll only see those if I upgrade from the trial (which for £20 I might well do, we shall see come Tuesday…) as I doubt I’ll hit level 40-50 by Tuesday.

I haven’t touched upon LOTRO’s PvP (or PvMP as it’s called) or the new Skirmish system as I’m not quite high enough level for that yet, but they seem like interesting plays on other games systems.

I actually REALLY like LOTRO (despite the vibe that probably comes from this post), so we’ll see how we go!