While my serious playtime in EVE happens on a juiced up Vista gaming tower, my daily computer of choice has long been a MacBook Pro. So when the OSX client came out last year, it gained a permanent spot in my OSX Dock. Once the lagging performance and crash issues got worked out, it even became viable for (non PVP) play.

The only downside? No Premium graphics. Moving back and forth between my Mac and Vista systems was a tiny bit painful as a result – while the gaming itself was still fun, the immersion brought on the by stellar (pun!) Premium graphics pack was just unbeatable.

So now, according to Macworld…us long slighted OSX users at last get the full graphics in all their glory!

Mac support of “Premium” graphics was promised, and was ultimately delayed while CCP Games and its Mac development partner, TransGaming, addressed numerous underpinning issues. The release of Apocrypha—which will be a free update for all users—marks the official introduction of Premium graphics support for the Mac (it’s already been in a public beta on CCP Games’ staging server).

I’d heard rumors about this but haven’t been actively following the Dev Blog. Oh…so nice!

Even gave away one of my nicely-skilled alts which could have fetched over a billion ISK on the market.

DuckSoup, dammit I miss you!

This last time I just shut down the game and tried to ignore it. Quit the corp my main was in, set up shop back in my old haunts in Amarr empire space, and just shut down the ol’ gaming ‘puter. And it worked, for a few months.

Yet now…yeah, I just logged back in to run a few missions and reset some skills. Rescued a few damsels, stopped a few thieves, and killed a few dozen pirate battleships to do my part for rendering a small slice of Amarr safe yet again.

And you know what? It felt good. Dammit it all, it did. I even fired up both accounts and tested out a two-ship level 4 mission setup for the first time.

Sigh.

Seriously EVE, why can’t I quit you?

See you all in space!

“What the…

Where in the HELL am I?!?

WHO ARE YOU!!!”

Alright, so I admit grabbing the med techs left foot out from under him, sending him smashing to the deck clutching the terri-cloth robe he was planning to give me for warmth just moments ago…wasn’t the most civil of things I could have done. At least that’s what I took away from the rather angry stare I was receiving from the security guard at the far side of the room. But damn, it was the tech’s fault he didn’t stand back for a moment until I collected my thoughts. Right? On the upside, I think he only sustained a mild concussion. Nothing some juiced up Quafe couldn’t cure.

A robe. Why was he holding a robe? And why was I sitting up, naked except for a thick sheen of repulsively transparent goo covering my body, in metallic-smelling room loaded down with oppressively obnoxious track lighting? And is that retro-funk playing over the comms? I hate retro-funk.

Clone. Damn, I must be in a jump clone. Or death clone. Let’s hope for the former and assume the best. But where did I clone in from? Why does it feel like ages since I’ve made a note in my mental log like this? And who the hell is going to get me that damn robe so I don’t freeze to death??

Well, look at that. July 25th. My last blog post. I got off to a nice start blogging about EVE, then fell off the face of the planet. What happened exactly? Well, it turns out that starting a new blogging project with twin 2-month olds in the house is not the smartest of ideas. My EVE play time rapidly collapsed as Dad duties plus stressful RL work kicked in. However, I have managed to sneak in some play time, and hope to again with more frequency in the future.

So here’s the update:

Daniella has been mostly biding her time, though she did take her one-woman Empire corp into the Caldari Militia for a week or so to partake in the Tama pew-pew. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of ships my militia mates flew – no more T1 frigate gangs like I saw back in Amarr space in the early FW days when Furious dipped his toes into the 24th Imperial Crusade. Honest to God well fit HAC, ‘cepter, and Hictor gangs roaming about. That said, FW is just really not for me. At least not as a semi-solo effort. So Daniella is back to missioning and soaking up the passive income from her five Level 4 research agents.

Furious, now he’s been on a wild ride. Despite my earlier reservations about ever going back to 0.0 full time, I signed him up with an established corp living the alliance life in the Drone Regions. Why? Well, good RL community the corp belongs to, and hey, I’ve never played in the Drone Regions.

They are cash cows, btw, if you belong to a corp with good minerals-buying policies and infrastructure. Anyway, that corp left one alliance and moved into another Drone hideaway with a new one. Settling in, getting used to actually ratting in my Apoc (they work WONDERS against drones), and flying in the hone defense gangs whenever I can get time online. Interesting.

Hope to update here again with some frequency, but I’ll keep my ambitions as modest as my playtime for now.

I have been thinking of penning a series of short stories about the life of the little guys (non-capsuleers) aboard a station somewhere. We’ll see.

By MMO standards, the place is enormous. You can career out in EVE without ever leaving a relatively small section of space, given the depth of content and geography in every star system. I generally have, over time, ended up mostly in Amarr space and the Tash-Murkon and Domain regions (mid-southwest on that map) and those could provide me with a lifetime of gaming fun if I so chose. I so happen to have “lived” in a dozen or so other regions in all four corners of the galaxy, and that alone illustrates why this is a paradox:

By game design, EVE really is a small place. Thanks to interplanetary warp drives and interstellar warp gates you can traverse dozens (or more?) star systems in less than an hour. You can, in effect, crisscross the map of the entire galaxy in an afternoon. This leads to some weird gameplay effects that really stretch the “realism” of the experience – massive “roaming gangs” of ships who randomly decided out of boredom or ambition to go kill some other folks on the other side of the galaxy, and yet be home before the six-pack runs out. Or, for example, the massive economic focus on one star system, Jita. These wouldn’t be possible without the hyper-efficient means of interstellar travel built into the game.

While convenient, it really highlights the one thing that I love in good space games and yet fled from me after a couple weeks of playing EVE – the awe-inspiring vastness of space.

Playing Freelancer a few years back, I got some of that. The core, safer systems had travel means similar to EVE and you could almost get around as fast. But the outer systems required you to mosey along outside of travel lanes at a relative snails pace. When you were out there, the time, distance, and mixture of great atmospheric graphics just screamed “damn, this place is eerily big”.

In EVE, that feeling is definitely there when you first try it – early missions may have you go one or two jumps from home, which seem like a big deal especially when you fire up the galaxy map and see the thousands of star systems that await you later on. But play for a bit, and you realize that running a few hundred or thousand light years, sprinting through 2-3 dozen star systems on the way to a trade hub is the in-game equivalent of running to the corner store to buy some milk – albeit in a particular nasty part of town.

I miss the empty, chilling, awe-inspiring vastness of space in EVE.

One great thing I got out of CK’s speedlink – a new blog to read in EVE’s Weekend Warrior (and his guide to can-flipping for fun and profit. Although I thought the point of it was to entice people into combat…?).

I need to start up a pirate alt sometime – my guys are all goody goodies and maintain positive sec standings. Must unleash the darkness! I also must play more this week – I start a blog, and then work and family kick in immediately to impede my ability to actually play. Fun.

By MMO standards, the place is enormous. You can career out in EVE without ever leaving a relatively small section of space, given the depth of content and geography in every star system. I generally have, over time, ended up mostly in Amarr space and the Tash-Murkon and Domain regions (mid-southwest on that map) and those could provide me with a lifetime of gaming fun if I so chose. I so happen to have “lived” in a dozen or so other regions in all four corners of the galaxy, and that alone illustrates why this is a paradox:

By game design, EVE really is a small place. Thanks to interplanetary warp drives and interstellar warp gates you can traverse dozens (or more?) star systems in less than an hour. You can, in effect, crisscross the map of the entire galaxy in an afternoon. This leads to some weird gameplay effects that really stretch the “realism” of the experience – massive “roaming gangs” of ships who randomly decided out of boredom or ambition to go kill some other folks on the other side of the galaxy, and yet be home before the six-pack runs out. Or, for example, the massive economic focus on one star system, Jita. These wouldn’t be possible without the hyper-efficient means of interstellar travel built into the game.

While convenient, it really highlights the one thing that I love in good space games and yet fled from me after a couple weeks of playing EVE – the awe-inspiring vastness of space.

Playing Freelancer a few years back, I got some of that. The core, safer systems had travel means similar to EVE and you could almost get around as fast. But the outer systems required you to mosey along outside of travel lanes at a relative snails pace. When you were out there, the time, distance, and mixture of great atmospheric graphics just screamed “damn, this place is eerily big”.

In EVE, that feeling is definitely there when you first try it – early missions may have you go one or two jumps from home, which seem like a big deal especially when you fire up the galaxy map and see the thousands of star systems that await you later on. But play for a bit, and you realize that running a few hundred or thousand light years, sprinting through 2-3 dozen star systems on the way to a trade hub is the in-game equivalent of running to the corner store to buy some milk – albeit in a particular nasty part of town.

I miss the empty, chilling, awe-inspiring vastness of space in EVE.