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Yesterday we put an end to Voltage, the World of Warcraft guild I, Anniken and some friends started. We had a great time together, but it's now over.

Espen started this trend, and I should probably make a longer list for different consoles.

These are however the games I would rank the highest:

1. Final Fantasy VI (SNES, GBA)
This game is just amazing. It takes long to play and it has an awesome storyline. It starts out with a little lost girl, Terra, whom is captured and mind controlled by the evil Empire, led by Kefka. You help her find her memories back and to find her true powers while saving the world from certain destruction. It has two of the most beautiful video game themes ever: Terra's Theme and Celes' theme.

2. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES, Wii VC)

Perhaps the greatest Zelda game ever made. One night while sleeping, you telepathically hear Zelda calling for help. Your uncle answers to the call, and tells you to stay at home where you are safe. Curious as you are, you go after him to the castle only to find him defeated and it is your duty to free Zelda from her captor which keeps her in the dungeon of Hyrule Castle. Later on you find out that the wizard Agahnim has captured the souls of 7 maidens and sent them to the Golden Land where he will use them to break the seal containing the dark wizard Ganon. A fantastic game which will keep you entertained for hours.

3. World of Warcraft (PC, Mac)

I admit it, I have played much World of Warcraft in the past, and it's not unreasoned. The game has a fantastic lore and as a hero of Azeroth you fight the toughest challenges alongside your allies. The expansions are good too, but my preferance is the vanilla version of World of Warcraft. Things were more epic then. The first time we fought against the evil Firelord Ragnaros, the first time we put an end to Nefarian's plans on creating the chromatic dragonkin and when we ended the reign of the old god C'Thun. Epic moments that I value. Also, the hunt for the legendary blade Ashbringer was one of the highlights I had as a Paladin.

4. Diablo II: Lord of Destruction (PC, Mac)

I never really played this without the expansion, so I added it for convenience. Diablo II is in many ways a predecessor of World of Warcraft. It was an adventure game where you controlled a hero of your likings. It contained five action packed levels where you hacked and slashed your way through the evil monsters Diablo and Baal tossed against you. The best thing about the game was that the map was randomly generated, meaning that if you played the game a second time, everything was placed differently around the world. When you completed Diablo II on normal mode, you got to play it on nightmare mode. When finishing it on that mode, you got to hell mode. In either of these modes, the challenge was uppened by far and so was the power of your character. With the coming Diablo III, happening about 20 years after the story of Diablo II, we will finally get to continue on the story.

5. Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (PC)

Perhaps one of the games I have played the most. The Red Alert series is set up in a different time reality, sort of a what would have happened if... reality. You control either the allies or the soviet in a great battle between the forces. The soviet are in liaison with Yuri whom can mind control other humans with his technology. In the expansion. Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 - Yuri's Revenge we get to know that he has secretly been breeding his own army and is now launching a full scale attack on other countries on the earth. A great franchise and perhaps the best game in my opinion. It's fun to play and fast as hell. The music is great too. Every game in the Red Alert franchise have a song called Hellmarch. Red Alert has Hellmarch, Red Alert 2 has Hellmarch 2, and Red Alert 3 has Hellmarch 3. In my opinion Hellmarch 2 is the best by far.

There are several other games I would like to add, but I don't have the time for it now.

I am back in Oslo! It's good to be come back to Anniken when you've been away for a week!

Yesterday went quite fast by, and we didn't do much more than to eat and sleep. We watched an episode of Poirot while we ate taco. Yum! And something amazing happened when we were going to bed. As I put my hand around Anniken's tummy, something started moving in there! What a weird and amazing feeling! The little one inside is almost 17.5 weeks old, and we're going to an ultrasound the 25th of March. I'm very anxious and eager to know what sex it is, as I haven't fully decided upon liking or disliking names. Well, not entirely true: I've disliked many names that I either don't like or associate with people I don't like. I can't for instance call a girl for Brunhild. It just doesn't seem right.

Today we've played some Lord of the Rings Online. To my disappointment, I have been unable to get it running on Linux, so I have to boot the computer into Windows in order for me to be able to play it. When we got inside the game and go to the North-Downs, I suddenly realized why I stopped playing the game. Everything is too collossal. We played it for about 1.5 hours, and in that time we did like 3 quests. 3 quests. Most of the time went by to explore the greatly oversized area, and with vague expressions such as «To the north west of here lies two graves, explore them», time went into searching, as the area to the north west covered about 10% of the total map. To put it like this: The time it takes to run from one side of the map to the other is about 30 minutes. The width of the field we had to run was about 3 minutes, and the height about the same. We had to run all the way around to find the graves, and that's like 30 minutes of running just there if we were unlucky (which we were!). If my maths aren't entirely wrong, a worst case scenario would be like 3x3x3 minutes, which is 27 minutes. The game is fun to play, but it has its serious flaws. Lastly: All the enemies we slayed during this yielded us 30-40 experience (with rested bonus giving us twice of what we should have). This wouldn't have been much of a problem, if we hadn't needed like 50 000 experience to get to the next level.

Lastly, I've been thinking of redesigning and recoding my homepage. As it is now everything is hard coded, and if I were to change my projects or my curriculum vitae, it takes some extra time. I'll see what the next week brings.