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  • WoWing with Joi

    Last night Joi IMed me and asked me to come by Khadgar server and join his guild. I hopped on over and am now one of the first members of “We Know“. It seems like a decent group of people so far. Now I need to get up to his level so I can adventure with him.

  • WoW playing Mom Busts Kid

    Okay, a lesson for you kids out there. It’s very possible that your parents have more than a clue about computers these days. It’s not like my generation where most of them have no idea how to do things like “lob on”. From joystiq:

    Kid busted by WoW-playing mommy

    It used to be that a boy could play his favorite game all night and mean old Mom would be none the wiser about

    it.

    But when WoW’s so popular that Mom’s playing too, Junior runs the risk of getting busted. In the thread linked

    below, little boy Brion makes a rather innocent-sounding forum post at 3:30 AM. Trouble is, his mother notices

    because she reads that same forum. She responds:

    ”Pardon me for hijacking the thread, here..  But, Brion – if you don’t want your mother to know you were up

    and on the computer at 3:29 in the morning – DON’T post on a forum that she reads. Busted. Grounded.”

    Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
    © 2005 Weblogs, Inc.

  • Hey, You Got Your Sex In My Violence

    Though I’m sick of all the news surrounding the hidden sex scenes in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas I enjoyed this column over on sfgate.com:

    There’s Sex In My Violence!
    What’s this lame soft-core porn doing in my ultraviolent “Grand Theft Auto”? I am outraged!

    …

    Suddenly that downloadable patch you installed last night kicks in and there’s, like, a lame and badly animated sex scene, right there, right between the graphic bloody part where you bazooka’d the police helicopter and the part where the gang-banger gets his lame ass beaten with a large handgun, and suddenly you’re like, what the hell? Who stuck this lame badly animated sex in here? Where’d my soul-numbing ultraviolent racism go? I am outraged. [sfgate.com]

  • Blizzard and Coke

    Joystiq reports an ad by Blizzard and Coke for World of Warcraft and Coke. It’s pretty nifty. It would be cool if we got some ads like that.

  • PSP Review

    While I was in the hospital a package arrived at my parent’s place with a PSP (Playstation Portable). I was blown away at the gift, it was the last thing I expected anyone to get me. Now, I’m a big fan of portable gaming. I have a Gameboy Advance SP which I love. I’m still playing a fair number of games on it even after having it for over a year. And to be honest, the system I really want to try out is the Nintendo DS. I’d only been interested in the PSP as a curiosity.

    All that changed once I took it out of the box and started playing around with it. The PSP itself sports a nice shiny black finish with a decent sized screen. You’ve got standard directional buttons, the familiar playstation square, circle, triangle, and X buttons, and a joystick type controller. There’s also a left and right button at the top. It comes with a demo disk that doesn’t have any playable games, but does have trailers from games and movies. The first thing that blew me away was watching the movie trailers, the quality of the video was really nice. The trailers from the games looked really slick too.

    The PSP also multitasks quite well and, like Alton, I love a tool that multitasks. You can load photos, music, and movies onto the memory stick it comes with to view/listen to. Unfortunately the stick you get is pretty small. I’m already saving up to get a bigger one.

    So, overall, I give it two big thumbs up with some comments as to things I think they could have done better. The first is including a slightly larger memory stick. The next would be to have at least some playable demos that come with the game. The next has to do with the kind of games. My friends also got me a game called Ape Escape. Which, while fun, felt like it would work better on the PS2 than it did on the PSP. I’ve since gotten Ridge Racer, Hot-Shots Golf, and Mercury. All of which feel quite comfortable on the PSP (And which I’ll hopefully review in the next few days). Hopefully we won’t just see lots of ports of PS2 games.

    The one last thing I find myself annoyed at is the price. Though mine was a gift, if I were looking to get something for myself I’d be much more willing to just pay $150 for the Nintendo DS. I’m really not sure who Sony is trying to target with the PSP, it almost feels more like an executive toy. Especially with them releasing movies in the UMD format. Seems just the thing for the traveling businessperson.

  • Blizzard Bans Users Who Break Terms of Use

    Joystiq and Game Girl Advance both reported on Blizzard banning accounts that were used for “Gold Farming” over the weekend. For those of you not familiar with the world of MMORPGs, Gold Farming is big business. People go around, and just kill monsters for high priced items and sell it off to make in-game money. They then sell the in-game money on places like ebay for real money. This is also done with rare magic items. The practice has been going on for ages. I remember hearing about people doing the same with Ultima Online and Evercrack.

    The thing I’m finding baffling about both the posts on this is they seem to be coming down hard on Blizzard. Joystiq asks:

    So, you pay for the game, pay your monthly subscription, only for Blizzard to say “you did something we don’t want you to do, goodbye”, and they kill your account. That’s $50 wasted since, as was reported a while back, you can’t transfer the serial number. Once it’s used, it’s used. Where should the line be drawn on what you can and can’t do in a game you pay for initially, and continue to pay for every month? If people are stupid enough to buy a game’s currency for hard cash, why shouldn’t that be a legitimate activity? [Joystiq]

    The answer is simple. You are breaking the policies that Blizzard has set forth for how they will run their game. This was not some secret policy that nobody knew of. On the World of Warcraft Policy Page it’s right at the top of the announcements link. They even say what they will do to people they catch doing it (Of course, this gets to an even larger rant I have about how people don’t read any of the game policies when playing). If this had come out of the blue I’d be able to understand complaints, but it didn’t.

    What do people think? If you are providing a service, should you be able to set the rules for the use of it? Does it matter if it is a game or something like an ISP? Or should having paid money immediately mean you can do what you want with that service, regardless of any Terms of Use?

  • Turtles on Parade



    Hosted on Flickr

    I decided that I’ll try and post a World of Warcraft screenshot every few days as I get ones I like. This one was found while wandering around deep inside one of the instances.

  • Reason #4 I Dig World of Warcraft

    One of the things I love best about World of Warcraft is its sense of humor and pop culture references. I started a new undead character today and while running through starting area ran across three zombies. Their names: Daniel Ulfman, Karrel Grayves, and Stephen Bhartec. Every once in a while Daniel says things like “You really couldn’t blame him…”, “No one lives forever…”, and “Where’s the rest of the guys?”

    I couldn’t stop chuckling about it the whole time I was playing. Brilliant.

    Edit: And I just had to kill Samual Fipps.

  • World of Warcraft – Dealing with Success

    The New York Times had an interesting piece on Blizzard and their game World of Warcraft the other day. The game has blown away all sales projectections. As a result, Blizzard is having to scramble to do a level of expansion they’d plan to do over a year all at once.

    It was in the evening, right before the game was formally released on Nov. 23. Blizzard had arranged for producers and designers to sign copies of the game at midnight at a hangar-size Fry’s Electronics outlet in Fountain Valley, not far from Blizzard’s base in Irvine, 40 miles south of Los Angeles. The company had set up a similar signing for an earlier strategy game, Warcraft III, and about 700 people showed up. Planning optimistically, the company had about 2,500 copies of World of Warcraft on hand.

    “So I planned to roll over there around 11 p.m., and as I tried to get off the freeway I look over and I see this gigantic, dark, surging mass around Fry’s, and I’m like, ‘What in the world is that?’ ” said Paul Sams, 34, Blizzard’s senior vice president for business operations. It turned out that the pulsing was more than 5,000 people.

    “The cars were backed up on the off-ramp,” he said. “I parked like a mile away, and when I get there the line is looped around the building, and then looped around the parking lot. It was like a football tailgate, with the R.V.’s and barbecues in the lot and everything.”

    By the end of that first day, about 240,000 copies of the game had sold across North America, Australia and New Zealand, the product’s initial markets. The game has now sold almost 700,000 copies in those markets, and at peak hours about 250,000 people from those areas are playing the game simultaneously. [New York Times – Technology]

  • Mac Mini

    I’ve been a little quiet lately. Doing a bunch of reading and playing World of Warcraft. Somewhere in there Apple released the Mac Mini. I seriously want one. I’ve got an old B&W G3 it would replace just perfectly. I’d probably want the $599 one though. I kind of wish they offered a higher end one with the SuperDrive that wasn’t a custom build though.

    One thing I’ve found is that this has many numerous people I know who had been trying to avoid getting a mac finally take the plunge. Bout time Apple made a move like this. Btw, if you’re getting one, bump the memory up to at least 512MB if not a full gig. You’ll be happy you did.