Yes, folks, the time many of us have been waiting for is nearly here. Now, you may ask me, “Greg, you’ve been playing FFXI for months! Why are you excited?” Well, truth be told, I haven’t played FFXI in 3 or 4 months. As well and good as it is to learn Japanese, it’s hard to enjoy the story when you really don’t have enough working knowledge of the language to get through it. That, and it’s kind of hard to group up with people who don’t speak english. Sure, I could say a few basic phrases, and pick out an item name here or there, but it was a huge detractor from the game. Also, I had no real drive to play. Yeah, leveling is fun, but I want to PLAY, dammit. :)
So, it is thus that last night, in preparation for the release of the English Version, I cancelled my Japanese account. I would have kept it to test whether or not it could be used with the english version, but I realized that as my account would have to eventually be cancelled through the PlayOnline browser, I wouldn’t have access to it after I uninstalled the Japanese client (As I’ve mentioned before, this game is a behemoth. I don’t have enough room for both clients on my HD). Plus, I was on the Ragnarok server … a Japanese server. I didn’t want to encourage too many people to import, because I felt really bad about flooding the server with english speakers. Now, I can start fresh on a new server, and my friends will be able to play, too. Liz and I can form a group of players who will explore the world a lot more than we ever did. And once I get enough cash together in-game, I plan on starting the official Real Life Linkshell (it’s like a guild).
It’s funny… even though I’ve been playing this game for a while, this still feels like a new beginning of sorts. And I can’t help but get myself giddy about it. Hopefully I’ll see a lot of you in the game, too.
Also, ever since using the docks with my mac theme, I’ve found myself obsessed with making icons for all the programs I don’t have large-format icons for. So far I’ve made one for Ultima Online, as well as the PlayOnline Browser (which is used for launching FFXI, as you’ll soon discover. I also have one of the Real Life Oval. The Oval and POL Browser icons are in the shiny aqua style. I’m still getting my feet wet with it. And the neat thing about these icons is that they’re windows-xp compatible, so they’ll scale depending on the size of icons used on your desktop. They go from the miniscule 16×16, to 32×32, to 48×48, to 128×128, all in one file. Hard to explain, but you know how the windows xp system icons always look good no matter how big or small they are? Yeah, I figured out how to do that. I’ll post the icons I’ve made thus far here later.
Oh, as a side note… all future posts will be made like this, with newer posts showing up below the older posts. Makes more sense this way.
