Something Magical

Shipping games to and from Gamefly is very slow; it takes like two weeks from the time I return a game to the time I receive a new one. I have a two game plan so I can play one while I wait for the other to get replaced.

Recently, I sent back a game and didn't receive confirmation for two weeks, so I reported it lost. They also received my second game around that same time (which I had returned a week after the first), and reported that one returned. The day after I finally reported game #1 missing they suddenly reported they had received it. Still with me? Here's the magic. They had already sent me two games (1 for reporting game 1 missing and a second for returning game 2). When they received game 1 they sent me a THIRD GAME. Holy cow, right?

Come over to my place; we'll play Lost Planet, Crackdown AND Viva Pinata.

Impressions of WoW: Day 6

It's snowing like a crazy person out there, and I'm pretty okay with it. On the way into work today I stepped in several piles of snow that came midway up my shin; that hasn't happened in a long time. By the time I try to go home I assume it'll be up to my waist. Or chin. Should be a good night to drink hot chocolate and slaughter the innocent.

Paul will be glad to hear that WoW has picked up. I spent last Saturday making about a half-dozen new characters of all different races and classes, and I stumbled upon a race that's totally awesome. It goes without saying that the race is zombies. You can actually be a damn, stinking zed in this game! Who knew? Right off the bat I liked this race a whole lot more because they have a story. The idea is basically that they've broken off from the rest of the evil 'scourge' (which I think are like skeletons and spiders and other evil creatures), because these zombies are intelligent and can think and so forth. When you create a new character you're a recently dead human who has been granted an 'unbirth' by these zombies. The zombie race has their home in this giant crypt beneath what used to be the human capital, so there's ghost towns and all kinds of cool stuff around. This is such a better back story than "you're a dwarf".

Also, the enemies I fight are far more interesting. Rather than just fighting pigs or wolves, I'm asked to help clean up the "mindless wretches" that litter the countryside. These are basically zombies that were awakened, but had already lost their brains, and are now just brainless killers. The humans are also trying to retake their capital city, so there are various heroic human groups trying to oust us that we fight. This is so much cooler than having some dwarf chef ask me to bring him ten pig ribs so he can teach me how to cook.

The character is a warlock, and within a few levels I've learned lots of cool stuff. I can cast spells, summon demons and attack with a knife. Fighting is a lot more fun with this character, as I have more options that just clicking on an enemy and waiting until he dies. Also, having my summoned demon fighting alongside me makes things go quicker, or I can choose to take on two guys at once.

So all in all things are looking up. I think this character will hold my attention a little longer than the others - zombies are always cool.

After six days I am a level 7 Zombie Warlock.

"I'm 5,000% Sure!"

I'm embarrassed to post this, but what the hell, its Friday. Enjoy.

Signs

First of all, I put up my WoW impressions for day 2 and 3 below (sorry for the delay - things got a little crazy for a while). Second of all, I read two really strange things on the way into work today:

The first was written on the back of the seat in front of me on the train. Someone had written "Ho ever read this suck dick" in pen. What made it funny was that there was an earlier attempt there where they wrote "Ho every suck", then gone back and tried to cross out the y, then gave up and started over. They may not have great spelling or grammar skills, but they're persistent, dammit!

The second was a new, huge pair of signs in the crappy electronics store in my building that read "Absolutely Everything in the Store on Sale! *some exceptions apply". That's so silly I wonder if they're not joke signs.

Impressions of WoW: Day 3

Yesterday was videogame night, and Paul and Ted checked the game out. Ted had never seen it before either and was pretty entertained by roaming around the hills, battling random boars and bears. He and I had a pretty similar beginning experience; fun for a while, then you lose interest after you realize there's not much to do. Paul, being a veteran player, showed me a bunch of helpful things in the game (like the fact that I have a map, and I can see how hard quests are going to be before I try them, etc). Paul also showed us a couple of videos online of WoW that are famous among WoW players. One of them was pretty cool; a clan was holding a funeral in the game for a member of the clan who had died in real life. A rival clan crashed the funeral and killed all of them in a massive attack. While that may be an evil, terrible thing to do, it's pretty awesome. That's where I could see the game being really fun; you're with a bunch of your friends in the game, not expecting to be attacked, when you suddenly have to raise arms to defend yourself against an sudden onslaught. I think that'd be pretty awesome.

Paul also told me about some of the occasional game events they have. Apparently a while back they had a gigantic boss emerge from a forest, but warned the players he was coming. I guess he was so ridiculously strong that all the players on the server had to come together, and spent days preparing for his arrival, pooling items and resources to build up an army. Then they all gathered outside the forest, and when the giant guy appeared they all attacked him as a group. That sounds awesome!

I've also decided that I don't like my character. The problem with this guy is that he has a weak hand-to-hand attack, but a decent ranged attack with his gun. Also, he attacks automatically over and over (I think all characters do). This means that every single time I attack something I target it, he shoots it 2 or 3 times before it gets close, then eh starts to hit it with his axe. While he's doing all that I occasionally cast a spell or something, but I don't move and I can pretty much go get a snack once I target a guy. I'm going to try using someone with better hand-to-hand fighting, and maybe some more fun spells to throw. Also, I think I saw an option to lock the camera on a guy you've targeted (ala Zelda), which I think would make fighting more fun.

To get really into this game I think you need to really care about your character. It has to burn you up inside that you still don't have enough gold to buy the new sword, or you still haven't found the chain mail boots to complete your armor, or whatever. You need to take pride in your character and have friends who will be impressed by it. Since I really don't care about that, I doubt I'll ever really fall in love with WoW, but I'll give it another shot this weekend with a new character.

After Day 3 I'm a level 6 Dwarf hunter in the wilderness around Ironforge

Impressions of WoW: Day 2

Now that everything is installed, I was able to sit down and get right to it on day 2. I started out in the same valley that I started the game in, and did a few more of the local quests for beginners. I also tracked down and purchased some more bullets for my gun and learned a new skill or two. While trying to figure out where to buy bullets I asked a few other players where they are sold, and was either completely ignored or met with friendly people. The ones who did speak to me were pretty nice, and actually tried to help me out (none of the knew, so I ended up finding them on my own). In general, things are hard to find in this game, at least at first. In addition to those bullets, I spent about fifteen minutes trying to figure out where I could go get the stuff a little elf guy had left as his camp. His mission was to go retrieve his things, but he didn't tell you where they were, and I had to just wander around until I found tents. I'm relatively certain I'm just missing something there, though, like a pointer on my map or something.

I got antsy and set off, leaving the beginner's valley and venturing over a pass into the next valley, which contains the city of Ironforge. It seems like I did this a little too quickly, as there are many animals in the wild here that kill me pretty easily if I get too close. During this travel I was struck by how well built this game is. I've yet to find a single loading screen, only the occasional stutter as I walk through a door. It really does a great job making you feel like you're in this massive world that you can explore freely. That really plays into the social aspect of the game; I can see why adventuring around in this fantasy world would be fun with a group of friends.

What I'm coming to realize after a couple of days is that WoW is not so much a game as a framework for social groups. I expected this to be more like an off-line RPG, with a story and goals and fun stuff happening, but really all that's going on is leveling my guy up and saving money to buy new weapons. I'm only at the very beginning of things, but from what I can gather, the later quests are all still just "go get me x of these things" or "take this thing over there" or "go retrieve my what-have-you". These types of missions are typically called "fetch quests" in offline RPGs, and are hated. When you're playing a single player RPG (like Final Fantasy, for example), and you're confronted by a mission which asks you to go into a cave and find fifteen crystal shards or some crap, you're not happy about it. That's the entire WoW universe right there. Every town you go to is full of people with missions, and every one of those missions is a fetch quest. The only exception is that I guess later on you can join "raids" on dungeons and caves and so forth, where you're just killing guys to get items and money.

After my second day of playing I'm pretty bored. In fact, I described the game as "astoundingly boring" in an email to the Chicago chapter of videogame night. It turns out Paul (a founding member) was pretty into WoW a couple of years ago, so he's going to help show me what's so cool about it.

After Day 2 I'm a level 6 Dwarf hunter in Ironforge.

Impressions of WoW: Day 1

I have a long stretch home alone tonight, so I decided it was a good time to check out World of Warcraft for the first time. I popped in the disc about two and a half hours ago and I'm still in the process of installing the game. Thus far, I have installed the game, installed two patches, agreed to the terms and conditions six times, created an account, and watched status bar after status bar. I just bought this disc last weekend - why do I have to download over a GB of patches? Yikes.

As I'm waiting for the second 500 MB patch to download, I'm watching a terrible show on MTV called "Engaged and Underage". It's about two very religious kids who are getting married when they're 21. For his bachelor party the groom put on fishnet stockings, a thong and a stuffed bra (and only that) and went out to buy condoms. Totally awesome.

Alright, the second patch is installing now. Based on how long the first patch took, this should be done in about twenty minutes. Maybe after three hours I can create a character. We'll see.

UPDATE: After that patch loaded I got to accept the T&C two more times, and then start downloading a THIRD patch. I'm no brain surgeon, but it seems that maybe they could lump these things together. This one is smaller; only 159 MB, so hopefully it will be quick.

UPDATE: Yet another patch - only 4MB, but it'll mean another couple of T&Cs.

UPDATE: Alright! After three hours and ten minutes, I got to play! I made a hunter Dwarf nammed something or other (I chose a randomly generated name). Wait, I want to find out his name, hang on... Bairlis. Bairlis the dwarf hunter. He's got a pretty awesome beard, an axe and a automatic blunderbluss (pretty impressive). I leveled him up to level 4 and got one new skill.

After my first 45 minutes of playing, it's sort of fun. The place where I started was a little camp outside a castle where it looks like all the new charcters of certian types begin. The first quest is to bring this guy 8 units of wolf meat, so the snow fields around the camp are an absoultely slaughter house of dead wolves and characters on the hunt. I completed that and a couple of other quests, but they were pretty much just little quests to run from one person to another, or kill this guy, or whatever. I also spoke to one other character - a little imp thing nammed Coach. We said hi. It was exciting. It looks like tomorrow I can get into some more major quests, and hopefully get into the meat of the game a little bit.

Sorry for the long Pause

It's been a busy couple of weeks around here, so I haven't gotten my act together and posted in a long time. Not that there's anything especially interesting going on. At first this post was going to be another list of little blurbs concerning what I'm up to, but I think those posts are dumb, so I'm going to try to craft the blurbs into a captivating tale of adventure and intrigue.

It's been really cold here (as it probably has been wherever you are). It's the first time I've seen negative temperatures (before wind chill) in a good while, and I've reverted to double-stuffed pants, which I haven't used since Madison. I'm pretty happy to have some truly cold weather back - I feel like it's been a few years since we had a really cold spell. I am also getting to experience the joys of frozen mustache, which is fun and crunchy.

While the first frozen mustache is fun, other firsts have been happening too. Joe's sister (step-sister, technically, but that sounds sort of like she's evil) got married. This means Joe has posted pictures of the wedding on his website, and I have finally gotten to see what she looks like for the first time. After spending at least one full summer essentially hanging out in her room it's bizarre that I've never seen her in person. I would have like to meet her at some point, but not everything goes the way you want.

For example, way back in January I ordered a pair of pants from American Eagle. They were cheap - on sale for like $25, so I figured what the hell. Well, when they arrived the package contained not pants but some sort of flowery girls tank top. Figuring this screw-up would mean an apology followed by a quick correction, I called AE only to learn that they expected me to pay to ship this thing back to them, and once they recieved it they'd resend my order. After a few minutes of heated conversation I convinced them that perhaps they should pay for that shipping, and give me a discount for my trouble. They agreed, and promised to 1: post a refund to my card immediately, 2: ship out the pants right away and 3: pay for the shipping on the shirt. So I dropped the shirt in the mail and waited. That was about a month ago, and I've yet to see a refund or any pants at all. Their customer service is also atrocious, as I can't get anything but a canned response from them. Think twice before ordering from that store online.

Thinking twice is usually smart. Lots of people should have thought twice before they went and got addicted to World of Warcraft. I'm curious about that phenominon, so over the weekend I picked up two computer games: Command and Conquer the First Decade and World of Warcfaft. C&C was always one of my favorites growing up, and this package puts the first six games together into one thing. It's loads of fun, except for the random crashes in the first game. The WoW I bought is actually just a two-week trail version that only cost me $2; it should let me see what all the hoopla is about. I'm pretty sure this is the equivalent of the crack dealer giving you your first hit for free, but I figured I'd check it out. I've yet to try it, but I expect to walk away wondering what the big deal is. I'm trying it tonight, so just in case I do get sucked in, it's been nice knowing all of you.

Regardless of any addiction to WoW, I probably won't be posting all that frequently for a while yet because tomorrow we launch a mega-huge website at work. It's been worked on for about a year (maybe more), so everyone's pretty nervous/excited about it. If it doesn't make money I think we'll have to burn the office down for the insurance money.

We can all relate to money troubles, and with tax season right around the corner, perhaps you're hoping to get a big, juicy refund to help out. In an earlier post I threw up a link to an IRS page that discusses how you can file your taxes for free (if you make under $52k per year). I did my taxes that way, and it works fine. The place I used (H&R Block) does charge $10 to e-file your state return, but for the convince I'm okay with that.

Finally, I'm not entirely sure why, but I've been receiving quite a few pictures of Joe in tight pink pants lately. Remember when he put on Vicky's pants that one time and they fit far too well? And then we put her exercise bike outside? Man, that was dumb. Goodnight, everyone!