Ok, well I broke down the other night and bought Age of Conan.  It was kind of late by the time I got it all installed and patched (about 2-hours total, with high-speed DVD and ‘net connection).  First bug was that I wasn’t getting any of the voice acting – apparently this happens to A LOT of folks and I quickly found the solution through a Google-Search (basically setting the sound to Stereo and then moving the slider bar to the highest quality possible).  I’ve only wandered my Necromancer to Tortage and haven’t done any of the quests there.  I apparently need to up my graphics settings ‘cuz it just doesn’t seem as “pretty” as I keep hearing other people say it is.  LotRO seems MUCH more graphically intense to me, so maybe I’ve got to mess around with my graphics settings a bit. I’ll try that this evening, and I’m sure I’ll have more to report sometime later this week or over the weekend.

I’m not not terribly impressed with the necro, although his spells definitely seem powerful. But like many people have noted, the games true “cool factor” shines for melee style characters. So I’ll probably crank up a Dark Templar or whatever they’re called to try my hand at melee. If I decide to stay with AoC for more than a month I’ll have to cull at least one of my other subscriptions or two – most likely under the axe would be LotRO and/or CoX – or maybe I’ll get all of my EVE characters on some 40 day or longer train and close them down for the summer.  Of course I gotta see if I’m gonna stick with either AoC or CoX for the summer.  Really I’m just killing time until Warhammer arrives.

In other news, I did get my new MP3 player, a Cowon D2.  I also got a new car stereo that takes USB, SD-cards, and Line-In inputs.  So I’ll have to review those products sometime in the near future. I will say, having 16gig SDHC cards full of music is WAY COOL!  I’ve even got some of my DVD Music Vids converted over – very cool.  Anyways, that’s about all the news so far – Enjoy!