Month: January 2007

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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

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Nothing to Announce!

I had a chance to talk to R. A. Salvatore this weekend, and he was rather excited about taking storytelling online at Green Monster Games. I had forgotten that he was involved. It was one of those press release things that I see and forget in the stream of PR. The main thing I noticed about Green Monster was their recruiting Grouchy Gnome. Is it odd that I mentally skipped the announcements about Todd McFarlane and R. A. Salvatore but seized upon Ryan Shwayder? I never even played EQ, I just like his blog.

Since he brought up the subject, I asked when Green Monster Games expected to have something to announce. Two or three years, they are laying the groundwork now. You have no idea how happy that makes me. We see a lot of games announcing before they have enough funding to get them to release. We see companies writing half their code before they work out their major design documents, then try to shoehorn things together as they can. Here we have a company that is privately financed, can take the time to be satisfied before releasing, and is getting its big pieces in place before developing or announcing everything.

That is what I liked about the Earth Eternal announcement: they have the money and are not talking about vapor four years away (H/T Raph). Let’s have a cheer for companies that are not seeking useless attention!

: Zubon

Getting Warmer

wow[World of Warcraft] aka The Lukewarm Crusade: Day 3

We had a really good time playing our Blood Elves last night. The quests around Silvermoon City are quite fun. My wife continued her social experiments, this time with someone whispering to her asking if she checked her mailbox yet. She did, only to find out that she has been given gifts! Lots of gifts. Her latest says he is 35 and married with 4 kids. So perhaps his intentions are simply to help out a new player. All I know is that nobody is giving me gifts. Isn’t my Blood Elf fancy enough? At least she promised to share her gifts with me.

We had a quest to eliminate a “spy” located at the North Sanctum. We traveled out, wondering what our “spy” might look like. The orders were to eliminate the spy without being seen to avoid the shame of allowing a spy to infiltrate our little club. We arrived at the Sanctum and looked around, finding the dead body of a dwarf. Someone already got to the spy first. Good thing another spy with the same name will show up soon so we can fulfill our orders.

Continue reading Getting Warmer

Sharding Ur Purplz

wow[World of Warcraft] After a fun (not) day at work, I came home to find my house fairly calm, and decided before something went crazy, I’d attempt to get into WoW. Rule #4 in the husband handbook: Play now, for soon you shall have honey-do’s up the ying-yang. I’m paraphrasing, of course.

After getting onto WoW, without a queue I might add, I was presented with a bevy of links from guildmates showing off their new trinkets. These BC quest givers could probably solo Naxx with the armories they are dipping into.

Continue reading Sharding Ur Purplz

The Lukewarm Crusade: Day 2

wow[World of Warcraft] We revisited our Blood Elves last night with more problems. At first, the server was offline for some urgent rolling restarts. After the server appeared to be back online, it still kicked us out over and over. Finally we were able to get back on, but there was a lot of issues. Things like looting mobs and talking to quest NPCs took quite a bit of time to complete. We got disconnected a few times but it seemed like after about 30 minutes things settled down.

We did several quests, fighting a nice variety of new mobs. One quest gave us a 4 slot bag as a reward which was really nice. We did a quest that sent us into Falthrien Academy. I really enjoyed that place because it reminded me so much of some of the structures in Asheron’s Call 2. It was a sort of homecoming in a way.

Continue reading The Lukewarm Crusade: Day 2

The Lukewarm Crusade

wow[World of Warcraft] I decided to cash in some of my gift cards from Christmas and ordered online two copies of the World of Warcraft expansion, the Burning Crusade. I was surprised to get an email soon after telling me to come on in and pick them up, one for me and one for my wife. I really had expected them to be sold out. There was actually about 100 boxes still on the shelf when I got there.

I got home pretty late last night, so we decided to just upgrade our accounts and install the expansion, perhaps trying to patch before going to bed. 30 minutes later we were done. It was a beautiful thing, couldn’t have gone any better. So we decided to log in and check out the new races. We changed our realm to Doomhammer where my brother (who was already level 64!!) plays and normally encounter a huge queue in the evenings. We got right on, that was unusual.

Continue reading The Lukewarm Crusade

BC Launch: Smooth as a troll’s bottom

Since this is their first expansion, you have to give Blizzard some slack. After all, unlike the famous Kunark incident, they actually had product for sale. (Ask your long time EQ playing friends about how Sony forgot to make enough product to fulfill their preorders, much less people wandering in off the street. What a kneeslapper)

However, just because you have product out there, and paid your $39.99 (or $69.99 if you want a little dragon pet), that does not mean you get entrance to said product. See, we’re having some slight techincal issues…

Continue reading BC Launch: Smooth as a troll’s bottom

I Pity Her

I received the following message: “[Tell]NAME: do u have timothy raymand???”

Part of me wants to send an unhelpful message back, or taunt him with the fact that I know exactly what he wants but have already exhausted it. I want to explain to this poor, delicate soul what impression you create when you want something from someone but cannot be bothered to capitalize, spell it correctly, or be polite. If you are going to spam everyone in a level range, you can take the time to write out something like, “/tell $target, Excuse me, but I am looking for the Exterminator badge mission (Eliminate Kit’Vul), which I need to finish an accolade. By any chance do you have it or the contact Timothy Raymond available?” Maybe if I just mentioned the effect created by using three question marks?

But mostly I am thinking that this fellow is going to get a date someday. Some poor girl is going to look at him and think, “This is really the best that I can do.” My heart aches for her.

: Zubon

Elves in Space

Here we are on the morning of BC release. To the best of my knowledge, thus far at least, there were no pocket-protector related injuries at any of the GameStops who opened last night at midnight to sell Burning Crusade to people who simply couldn’t wait to roll their elf or lizard draenai. I found it amusing that many, including my local one, promoted this opening with “character dress contests and pie”.

Ah pie.

My server’s first Blood Elf (a mage, of course), was summoned to Orgimarrrrrrrrrr about 11:30pm CST, and then proceeded to duel everyone, while shouting “I’m an elf!”. More BC news as it becomes available, or as the servers melt down.

WoW Abducted My Wife

wow[World of Warcraft] Seriously, she is crazy. She is playing when I am at work, this is not fair! She is leveling and I can’t keep up. She is making friends and has to stop to chat every time we go on a quest together. Level 21 already! I never made it past 29 (on two characters) in all the time I played solo. We hit 21 in just a few weeks without any troubles at all. I just finished proclaiming no interest in the expansion but that was before she heard about Blood Elves. Next thing I know she’ll be bringing home two boxes and installing them herself.

Two months ago, “take a World of Warcraft break” would have meant “get off the computer already”. Now it means “we should go to the basement and play WoW for a while”.

– Ethic