Gaming

well, I am running out of space and I've yet to get anywhere with Witcher II so... I might get it at some point but not now...

Mable in the wood, currently free on GoG:
www.gog.com/game/mable_the_wood

Free on Steam right now until Monday are Tomb Raider (2013), and Lara Croft: Temple of Osiris.

so when is it Guild Wars G er... Gunday? Want any pointer for races and names and such? I hate it when people name their characters laowfksre or dhdhdhdhd - just so you know...

uhm, well that'd be your username... Your characters have their own names, you know... My username is Vanadis something (some numbers I can never remember) - it's the account and you see other people's user names if you group with them or if you chat in the forums. But if you solo play you'll only see the character names.

As for group oriented... doesn't have to be. When you play through the intro for a character (unique for each race) there might be other new characters around or just NPCs. Depends on your timing I guess Later on, they have random events that anyone can join in - and since some give good loot you'll find lots of players joining sometimes. The events are scaled according to the amount of players (more players = harder) but some of them are difficult to manage all alone. Then again they do repeat, so... you don't miss anything forever. Also, your level scales down if you go to low-level areas, so you never become "all powerful" either, which means that even if you've leveled up in one race's home areas, you can still enjoy the low level quests in he other "home areas".

Each character has their own story line, based on the choices you make during character creation, and that you can play perfectly fine all by yourself. There are loads of choices for each race, so basically each character can be unique. (Unless you make too many - I'm still able to make unique choices though, at 13 characters.)

if that all, above, was too much to read, I suggest you save this post for a later time

But something about the races:
All races can be any of the professions. Each character can also have 2 crafting skills (though you can change if you want to).

Humans... well, not much special to say. You get to choose from being a noble, a commoner or an orphan. You can choose things like "always regretted not joining the circus". (It's the only one I remember right now - I do have all choices listed in an excel file though ) I guess any human sounding name will work fine. Personally I've chosen to give them surnames based on where they're from, so "ya Korna" means from Korna which was an area in GW1, now inaccessible. Liv Phinney is names after Phinneys ridge, in the human starting area, and Karla Rooks is named for Rooks lane? uhm, something rooks - in the poor quarters of town (her being my orphan).

Norns - Look like humans but are bigger. Kind of viking inspired and like the cold. They have made an art of bragging. And drinking. They have guards called Wolfborn, and such. My character names are based on old Norse, so I have Embla Rimgalder and uhm... Well, I remember I noticed I'd named the youngest Alfrida - which I didn't recall doing.

Sylvari are plant based but names seem to be from celtic and gael, so that's what I've used for naming. Only "Tamzin" seems super common so I used some made up spelling of that.. And I think one of the names translates as strawberry syrup or something Ohhh I have one called Caipin ("Cap") who has a mushroom cap instead of er... leaves, on her head...

Charr are big cats with 4 ears and horns. They are kind of the games cyberpunk race, being atheist and mechanic-minded I guess. They tend to have names based on their forging and mining, like Brimstone (an NPC) or Cinders Ironclaw (my charr - she's Iron Legion so she got a surname that reflects that and well, names including teeth, claws, tails and such work well for them too)

And Asura are small creepy cute geniuses, probably planning to take over the world. They use a lot of bots and technology and are responsible for the network of waypoints you can use for swifter travel, when needed. They tend to have single, short names like Blipp or Rox. Apparently having a double letter in there is common. My first one was named Picca (after magpie, Pica Pica, and yes, she's a thief... though apparently magpies are not )

Just hoping this might help you some. I think in the free game you can have up to 3 characters. (But you can always delete and start over if you just wanna try all of the races or professions.) Also you probably can't do the revenant profession in the free game. (I have one but I haven't played her enough to quite get my head around the fighting skills available...)

If you like having pets, you should go for ranger btw. You get a start-out pet and then you can collect more when coming across "Juveline animal" in the wild.