Pirates Pre-Order on Shelves and More Hellgate

I just wanted to make a quick post to point out that the Pre-Order boxes for Pirates of the Burning Sea went on shelves yesterday at game stores across the country. If you have even a passing interest in this game, I suggest you go drop the five bucks on it. Can't beat getting a 15 day head start, a CD soundtrack, game map, parrot pet, and a special weapon all for pre-ordering.

If you never get into beta, the 5 bucks will give you 15 days of playing to decide if you want to buy the game before it hits shelves on January 22nd. Really, there's no reason not to pre-order. As much as I'm enjoying WoW at the moment, this game is still teasing and taunting me from off the starboard bow... can't wait for January 7th (head start date).

Get out there and get the box!

Also, though I'm sure you lot are getting tired of me talking about Hellgate, I just have to write about my play-session last night. I played another of the two classes I'd barely experienced, the Summoner. The early levels with this class start out a bit less interesting than the others, as he doesn't have much fire-power, and his lone Fire Elemental minion is fairly week to boot. But by level 3 I had two elementals and one carnagor (tank pet)... and things began to get pretty damned fun. By level 7, I had 5 elemental pets, the carnagor, and an additional 10% fire damage added onto the fireballs my elementals hurled. Like the hokey ads for the US Army say, I was an army of one.

Equipment wise I was wielding a rocket pistol in my left hand which sends out small missles towards enemies that explode after a couple of seconds being lodged in their flesh, and in my right I had what they call a Focus Item, usable only by the Cabalist classes. It functions much like a pistol but seems to do some sort of magical damage as opposed to straight up physical. All I know is that it looked cool and killed things... that is if my minions didn't kill them first.

The Summoner is a wildly different class to play than the Guardian I played the night before, and even surprisingly different than the game's other pet class, the Engineer. The Engineer relies mainly on his own skills with guns to kill things while his pets are just there to help, while the Summoner's fire power IS his pets. That may sound boring, like playing a Summoner leaves you will little to do, but trust me it's anything but. There are enough monsters in levels once you're done with the beginner stages, that you'll always be kept on your toes, re-summoning elementals and downing what mobs you can while they work the rest. It's a very active class, more so than I was expecting.

That makes all 6 classes tested to around level 10 at least... and I still can't pick one. Looks like altism strikes again.

More later, folks.