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Touring Zangarmarsh

Despite the thorn-vine airlock on the edge of the Hellfire Peninsula, the transition is rather jarring. You move from a devastated plain of red to an azure woodland of giant mushrooms. I accept this as a part of being in a shattered dimension beyond the Dark Portal and move on.

The visuals here are great. It is an above-ground underwater zone, with flying manta rays and ridiculously huge, hovering jellyfish. They must be gas-filled to stay up like that. Combine it with an above-ground underground zone, as there are giant mushrooms, mushroom grottos, mushroom people…

Somewhere in that process it goes downhill. This is the reverse of the Hellfire Peninsula: the initial impression is great, but it quickly becomes wearying and tedious, despite the lack of boars.

Continue reading Touring Zangarmarsh

Smart but not pretty

Everyone’s going gaga over Fallen Earth, which is a good thing. Allah loves variety. I’m glad to hear the game takes some deviations, that it is engaging and I keep hearing good things about the crafting (not that I give a darn about crafting, but I keep hearing about it).

Sounds nice, and I wish everyone involved 101% super happy success time. However, I won’t play it. Just looking at the screenshots turns me off. It looks really unappealing to me, visually. Of course I’m not arguing to make it pretty and full of saccharine; it’s supposed to be post-apocalyptic. It is what it must be. But I look at that world, and I see the way it looks, and I have zero desire to spend time in that. The screenshots I’ve seen around range from unengaging to depressing, so why would I go there? I wouldn’t.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gameplay over graphics all you want. But my days of biting hard candies just to get to the (small) creamy nougat center of fun are over. I’m glad there’s fun in it. I’m glad it’s new. I just wish it wasn’t so ugly (in my view).

Touring the Hellfire Peninsula

“Welcome to the expansion pack. It’s a whole new world! Go kill some boars.” I know, they are hellboars, and don’t think that my Paladin does not appreciate their being classified as demons rather than beasts. And those little guys in the cave just outside the welcoming town, the jawa-looking ones, they are totally not kobolds, because they do not have candles on their heads.

That said, the new models can be pretty spectacular. The leaders of the totally-not-kobolds are great steampunk things with whirling blades and tubes that glow malignantly. We have souped up versions of kenku and hooked horrors. The ravagers are exactly the sort of wandering beast you would expect in a hell dimension. Elite crystal giants that split into many smaller giants, with corpses you can mine? Fun.

Continue reading Touring the Hellfire Peninsula

Stupid Bureaucrats

An oxymoron, I know. I was watching one of my favorite shows, The Unit, today and one of the characters said something to the effect of ‘bureaucrats won’t leave a meeting until no one is happy.’  I saw Tobold and Syp talk about the upcoming FTC changes that will affect bloggers that choose to review products, when the reviews are endorsed.  “Endorsement” is the key word to the whole scenario, and while the FTC tries to muddy the waters with their examples, it sounds bigger than it is.

An “endorsement” that runs afoul of the FTC requires an undisclosed material connection, where the material connection caused the speech.  In other words, if an unsolicited copy of a game shows up on my doorstep, and I choose to review it, I am not necessarily endorsing the game according to the FTC (see footnote 21).  Now if the game company kept sending me unsolicited games, and I kept reviewing them… well there might be grounds for that material connection.  If the game company said they would send me a free copy if I review it, then I would be endorsing it, according to the FTC, even if my review was a scalding 2/10.

Blogging is based on trust.  I don’t read blogs very often from bloggers whose quality of thoughts seem bought.   Now, I agree that a blogger should disclose a review in exchange for free product, but I think the FTC is pretty stupid to make that required.  They really don’t have anything else to do with their time than monitor blogs?  Glad my tax dollars are hard at work trying to chill free speech on the internet of all places.

–Ravious
the death of all sound work

Platefail

did she put on assless chaps backwards WTF kind of plate armor leggings are these? It is some kind of fetish wear for people who like stockings and garters? How is that “plate”? “Murkblood Avenger’s Legplates” are insufficiently coherent to imply odd things about murkblood.

: Zubon

Learning the Watcher

My hardcore casual kinship started Squiddy Saturday’s last weekend where we are learning to take down the 12-man Watcher in the Water raid.  Most of our core officers were present to learn from a benevolent Loremaster saint.  We were running button hooks and other maneuvers just outside the Vile Maw’s door.  I imagine it was a humorous spectacle to the hardcore groups that passed by.  After almost 2 hours of discussion, we went in… and died.

Our benefactor said that the raid was rife with random occurrences some that are nearly impossible to overcome.  Our first time, someone got hit by a dangler (a tentacle that grabs a player and hangs them in the air until it is killed) next to a first stage tentacle.  The Watcher screamed and half the raid died.  Two runs later we almost beat the second phase.  This time the other captain got hit by a dangler in the shark pool (insta-kill roaming tentacles people lovingly call sharks), and I mistimed a shark while trying to free him.  The patron Loremaster was still pleased with the progress, and so were we.

This is my first time really learning a multi-phase boss fight, and during our two hour lecture I kept wondering what I got in to.  In the end it was quite fun to have multiple strategies and stages.  Our benefactor believed that we might be able to down him next weekend with discussion and practice.  Now our only problem is finding ~12 people to meet consistently on Squidurdays.

–Ravious
but you still have Zoidberg

Code 43 Bleg

Any recommendations?
I turned off my monitor and walked AFK. When I turned it on again, the screen was unresponsive. After a hard boot, “Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)” The device is a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT, and I am using 32-bit Vista. Updating the video drivers did not help. I probably would have flashed the BIOS by now if the ASUS update tool was being more helpful. I should sleep before doing anything more destructive, but I am pondering whether it is more expensive to test a new video card or a new motherboard.

Alternately, what’s the current sweet spot for price/performance on video cards these days? If it is a dead video card, I will be shopping.
Or I could spend less time online. Or I could swipe my wife’s laptop.

: Zubon

We’re good with software around here, not hardware.

Thoughts at Level 70

One merit the Burning Crusade has over classic WoW is being compact. I understand that a quest chain sending you to five zones across both coasts of both continents is supposed to feel epic, but it is just a lot of travel. BC also benefits from contrast with “things to keep you busy at 60” versus content you are supposed to move through. For much of the level 60 classic content, I stopped considering it before even calculating how much grind there was. As a latecomer, I get to skip that. Sorry, veterans.

There is far more content in BC than you need for 10 levels. I went through 4 zones with 0 instances, which was about 9 levels. I entered at 60.5 (from playing around at 60 in classic zones) and dipped into a fifth zone to hit 70. I stepped into one of the other zones for a “talk to this guy” quest, and I have yet to see the seventh. Wasn’t the experience curve re-adjusted? Even considering that, content is profuse.

During level 69, I began to notice the “things to do at 70” more as I looked through the neat things I wanted to do before leaving Outland. I have these bombing run achievements: not available until 70. What about those daily quests I heard so much about? Not until 70. Can I start — not until 70. Guys, you can lower the minimum level for level 70 content now. People are leaving for Northrend at 68 as it is. (When I finally got to do my first daily bombing run, I was disappointed with Fires over Skettis. I was hoping for something like the Hellfire Peninsula bombing run.)

I presume BC has all these factions to give you something to grind. I like making imaginary friends, but not when it starts to feel like an absurd grind. It is like the LotRO legendary items: at first, it is really neat to have extra numbers appearing every time you do anything. Capping out the first one is awesome! Then you hit seven of them that are 500/10,000 and why am I doing this?

Being able to fly trivializes some of the content by letting you bypass defenders. I don’t care. It is a great way to experience the content, and it lets you bypass trash mobs to get to the point. If you want to slaughter hordes of the enemy, land, do so.

See previously on why the rather high item levels make much absurd. I will address the experience for each zone throughout the week. And to warn you, I do not expect to post “at 80” for a while, as I have a lot of offline time coming up.

: Zubon

Visiting the Exodar

This has an interesting, ethereal vibe. The layout will take some getting used to, but so did Stormwind, and it’s not as though I have any reason to come here often. The crystals are kind of neat and — why is there a laser light show in the big chamber? Not, like, mystic images, these are holograms of demonic foes. And there is some kind of giant light being in the basement.

Part of me thinks that this is perfectly proper. The Burning Legion is a bunch of demons, the forces of darkness, and they are opposed by the forces of light. Going literal is actually pretty creative, rather than taking the traditional Western path of having angels in opposition. (Does that make Aion creative for taking the standard Western path in a Korean game?) All this time people were talking about being blessed by the Light, and here it is. Part of me wonders why aliens on spaceships with lasers are in a fantasy setting.

Part of me thinks of Robert Asprin and “demon” as basically another word for “alien from another dimension.”

: Zubon

I like their towns in Outland more.