Clark, Jim, Jon and I played our last run of Phantasy Star Universe on PS2/PC tonight.

It was fun. :) We did a bunch of Crimson Beast and Lab Recovery S2 for old times' sake, since we used to grind those missions really often (back when those were the easiest of the S2s and we were like... 100 levels smaller, or something like.)

I took a whole bunch of screenshots throughout the last couple months of our PSU playing, and made sure to get plenty tonight as well. At the end of our last mission we ran around and shot missile weapons and too screenshots like they were fireworks. We also got a group pic of the veteran Guardian crew standing together looking badass: S0YL3NT-G (Clark), Furry McGrowlson (Jim), Shirai Aires (Jon), Reina Hidalgo (me).

I also made sure to get shots of Reina's room, her final stats and equipment, and even had her do some RP monologue (probably cause I'm a dork). Reina and Shirai shared a last moment together, too. It was sweet.

Jon and I have really been bummed over the imminent closure of PSU for the PC. :( We're continuing to look into replacement games.

I did a google search and found this blog page about "where do we go now from PSU?" It gives a few Korean game suggestions that look great, though I'm a little bit wary since there's plenty of Asian-made games that look very pretty but are lacking in substance...

Of the three mentioned, I'm currently favoring Tera Online. Fun selection of races and classes, and the developers are trying to make it so that all race/gender/class combinations are available. One of their selling points is also the "targetless" gameplay, in other words more like PSU where your positioning and aiming have to be done manually.

And I am SO playing female Castanic. I've wanted to play a demon chick for a while now!! But not completely sure on a class yet. (This is something my MMO group has to work out, as ideally, I'd like us to be a well balanced team like we were in PSU.)

For 3 or 4 years now I've been playing Phantasy Star Universe every Friday and Saturday night (or most nights, anyway) with Clark, Jim and my hubby. Sometimes my sis joined in too. It was something we could look forward to doing every weekend... a constant in life.

By the end of 2009 I'd gotten my main character, Reina Hidalgo, very close to the level cap (160, or is it higher now, not sure). I maxed her levels in 6 classes: Fighgunner (still my favorite ever), Guntecher (my 2nd favorite, yay for bows!), Fortegunner, Fortefighter, Protranser (EX traps rule) and Acrofighter. I'm very close to maxing Gunmaster and was determined to start on Fighmaster next, the melee weapon equivalent to the Gunmaster class, more or less. (Spear is one of their favored weapons... I love spears!)

But now it's all going to be gone at the end of March. :( We knew this would happen, the PC/PS2 servers have such loooowww activity compared to Xbox servers. But it's sad to see. All those hours of play (over 1000), yet even if I did get an Xbox I wouldn't be able to transfer all those levels over.

So Jon and I have our hotel reservation and will be away for a couple days (as mentioned in the announcement). :)

Today was an eventful day... even though I didn't get to spend much of it doing what I had hoped to do on Sat. Couldn't even finish RPoL posts I wanted to, but that is minor, really. Was taking care of more important things!

Actually I probably did more talking with people in the past couple days than I have in a while. Hermit Sally :(

But I did get to play PSU tonight. Actually, yesterday and today was pretty awesome for PSU, we spent a long time playing. Actually got two full Boost Road runs done, after several weeks of not really playing as much due to one or the other person being tired, unavailable, lack of working account, etc.

This is a small redesign I've been wanting to do for a little while now. Returning to dark background, eliminating a great deal of cluttery links and blocks, and so on. Getting some cache modules installed. I even reduced the number of posts per page (it's actually 5 now instead of 10. That may help, or maybe not.)

For a base, I took an existing Drupal layout (it's called 'decayed' if you're interested) and tweaked a lot of stuff here and there. Jon helped me with all the photoshop manipulation here (including finding some REALLY gorgeous looking flower and butterfly brushes - he says they're free to use, if I knew where they're from I'd credit it ;.;). And I'm reminding myself how much I hate CSS! :D though it isn't quite as bad this time around. Float and clear are my friends.

Not quite done tweaking with all the details yet. I'm going to expand the Announcements section some, for example. Still need to make a final decision on what blocks go where, and how I'll make up for the info that gets cut out.

I'll be working on this more later (and possibly a real post. Maybe?!) but for now it is PSU TIME!