WOW bits

Most of my day is still eaten up by the menace which is currently plaguing 8 million people all over the world. World of Warcraft. I recently coerced, with 2 parts mindless reiteration, 1 part marijuana, my buddy back into the addictive gameplay of his Human Warlock, Savagei. Like Christopher Moltesanti to a freebase session, he has gobbled up all the new Burning Crusade content with reckless abandon. My main is stalled at 65 while he's been at 70 for weeks. I just hope he doesn't shoot me when he realizes that he hasn't slept in four days and still hasn't bothered to change the pants he shat when he and his guild finally bests Illidan the Betrayer in the Black Temple next month. This resurgent junkie behavior may or may not be why he hasn't blogged in two months and doesn't have a job, but who am I to judge? Judy?

I play when I can, when I'm not doing comedy or playing basketball or at my weekly D&D game. But most of my time in front of this here cubicle computer is still spent researching the little bits of lore at wowwiki.com or searching for new addons at wowace.com or wowinterface.com. A couple of months ago, I channeled my dorkosity into writing an article about the addon community and the very real possibility of mod authors burning out on what is a very volunteer project. It went up at the Escapist last week and I'm proud of how it came out.

There have been rumblings of a big announcement from the Boys at Blizzard. A new game is in the works set in the Starcraft universe. For those of you who don't know, Starcraft was an RTS made in 1999 and is the greatest computer game ever made, if you are a Korean. Seriously, this is an American game which has become a NATIONAL FUCKING SPORT in Korea complete with rockstar gamers and huge televised matches with thousands of screaming fans. Most assumed that Blizz's new game was the much anticipated Starcraft 2, a sequel which would give them a break from the MMO juggernaught of WOW and a chance to get back to their RTS roots. But today, quite a few channels link to this story, it seems that Blizzard is in fact going to announce a new Starcraft MMO at its third Worldwide Invitational in Seoul, South Korea on May 19th. The article linked above mentions "well-placed" Blizzard sources. It's anybody's guess who the fuck that is but my money's on this guy.

World of Starcraft, eh? I'd buy that for a dollar. Many people assume that it will be a clone of the WOW gameplay but I think a highly polished space economic sim like EVE Online or the crafting of SW Galaxies is the niche MMO space Blizz will be aiming at. They don't want to compete with themselves, do they? They already have LOTRO to do that.

I stumbled upon a gallery with screenshots from the alpha phase of WOW's development. It's pretty cool to see how the game changed, most of the models were replaced and the UI was redesigned several times it seems. But I wish I could find this in the game still. "You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!"

And finally in the file labeled "Why the fuck not?" Blizzard has partnered up with Visa to bring the American consumer the most needless tie-in product ever conceived by humans: The World of Warcraft Visa Credit Card. Was it really necessary to poison every transaction with the taint of your WOW obsession? I can see nerds everywhere saying, "Sure, put it on my WOW card so I can rack up gametime." Really?


Really?




I applied the day it came out...