Instead of Blogging

RUH-ROH.  I accidentally saved this post as draft on Monday evening instead of publishing it.  Silly me!

...I spent much of the weekend playing Torchlight 2 on multi-player mode with Robert.  It's another dungeon-crawler (like Fate), and it's mad fun.  Robert has played the game a bit before, but this weekend I bought a copy too and we started a game together.

I'm playing a berserker named Fur with a pet owl named Feather.  I have wolf-themed powers and use frost/ice as weapons, so I think of my entry into any situation in an ominous "winter is coming" way.  (I believe wolf is a pet choice but obviously I'm not going to have one of my own kind as a pet.  Ridiculous.)  True to my character's type, I get impatient easily and just want to start killing stuff.  Robert plays his engineer character Barilla much more methodically (esp. when it comes to making decisions about skills, equipment, etc.).  It seems like every time I turn around, he's switched out a gigantic wrench for a mace for a pair of pistols for a shotgonne for some other scary-looking steampunk weapon.  Meanwhile, I'm always dual-wielding claws like the beast I am.  It's lucky for him that friendly fire is not a possibility in Torchlight because even when I am not in a frenzy mode, my gameplay is pretty chaotic.  Click, click, click until everything is dead!  Why won't that skeleton die already?? Oh wait, that's the skeleton my owl Feather summoned (yes, we can give our pets spells, including summoning spells, that they will use autonomously -- Robert's pet is summoning some kind of silly purple imp thing these days).  At one point, I was super confused by this weird crab thing that was following us around until Robert told me he'd fed his honey badger a fish to change him into the crab.  Oh OK whatever, let's go kill more stuff now!

It's cool -- we can play it over our LAN instead of the Internet (though that's also an option), and there are no lag issues (yet).  We also use the Steam chat function to talk to each other through headsets, since he's playing on his computer upstairs and I'm down here in the office.  (Steam is the online gaming store/community we bought the game from.)

Also, I totally rock the fishing game (which I like a bit better than the one in Fate).  It is convenient because it gives me something to do in town while Robert systematically considers every piece of equipment in his inventory, tries out different combinations, examines the goods available in the shops, enchants/transforms/whatever all those merchants do.  Fishing soothes, or at least distracts, my savage inner beast, at least for a while.

Just don't ask me about the storyline -- I'm only sorta following it (and apparently it is "somehow even more nonsensical" than the one in Diablo 3, which I have not played BTW).  It's all just reasons to go kill everything, right?

In a few days, it will be the weekend again and more Torchlight 2 will be played! 

Note:  And if you're wondering, yes, Robert's character Barilla was 100% named after the brand of pasta sauce because he was looking around himself when thinking of a name and saw a jar of it on our shelves next to his computer.