World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 112 of 139

We Have The Date

August 15, 2014 by Belghast

That’s a Lot of Fish

Last night I did something a bit different than my normal fare and actually hung out with several of my coworkers. While I hang out with Rae at least in the virtual sense almost every night, this was a bit different. For my boss’s birthday his brother took him to a thing called Rifftrax put on by the guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000. They do the same basic thing, but they do it live and stream it to theaters all over the country. Since he had such a great time he decided it would make an excellent group activity. So last night we met for dinner and then continued on to the nearby theater to watch the Matthew Broderick version of Godzilla ripped apart by the MST3K guys.

First off this is a much bigger deal than any of us realized, as we spent probably a bit too long at the restaurant and had maybe 20 minutes before the start of the film. By the time we all got to the theater and inside the place was absolutely packed. Apparently if you want to get seats together you have to arrive well ahead of time, and it almost has a tail gating mentality. Instead we all split up mostly into groups of two to find a place to sit. So this ended up with me being down on the front row leaning back in my seat and trying to watch the movie. Thankfully we didn’t really CARE about the movie… but instead the commentary. Afterwards they said that it was a bit hard to hear the dub over as you got further back in the theater so I guess the awkward angle was worth it.

This is totally something I would do again, and it has been a long while since I have laughed this hard. I guess I had completely put large sections of the Broderick film out of my memory. I mean I remember it being bad at the time, but I didn’t remember it being THIS bad. If you have the chance to see Rifftrax in a nearby theater I suggest you take up that opportunity. They do this apparently as a semi regular thing here, so I will have to follow the schedule and see what is next. It seems like the next showing is November 4th where they do that campy classic Anaconda. I will have to see what is going on but I would really like to maybe try and go.

We Have the Date

Yesterday was the big announcement for the Warlords of Draenor release date and now we know exactly when to expect it to land. Some time ago Godmother ran a contest to see who could guess the date, and I apparently came the closest along with River. I remember at the time River saying something to the effect that I looked lonely on the spreadsheet so he decided my guess was as good as any. Now that said I did have some logic behind my guess, I was not just randomly picking numbers. My general theory was that we would not see a World of Warcraft expansion until after Blizzcon. So knowing the Blizzcon dates I figured they would want to take advantage of the Blizzcon-Bump but get product out there before Thanksgiving and the holiday madness begins. I apparently was right but Blizzard threw everyone for a loop by making the release a Thursday. I don’t think anyone was expecting that.

Once again the good folks at Blizzard have managed to craft together a really awesome cinematic. Were I a horde player I would probably be cheering the awesome orc action. Instead it just seems like another really awesomely animated feature explaining the premise of the expansion. The events play out a little different than I would have thought. All along I thought that Garrosh would actually stop Grommash from drinking the blood, but it seems like good ole Grom was already making that decision. Garrosh however just gave him the backup he needed to defeat Mannorath. I feel like the events of this expansion will serve to set up for the long fabled Burning Legion expansion, since we obviously screw with the way things were supposed to work out. I figure you can’t kill a demon like Mannorath without having some pretty negative repercussions.

Overwhelming Meh

Like I said, were I a horde player I would likely be heralding in yet another overwhelmingly horde focused expansion. Thing is I am not, and I have never cared a single bit about any of the horde lore. It was just that faction filled with monstrous humanoids and a handful of people that I cared enough about to roll alts to be able to play with. Nothing about the horde is really my thing, apart from the whole “everything has spikes” aspect. I expected yesterdays event and subsequent trailer to pump me up and prepare me for what was inevitable, my temporary return to World of Warcraft. The thing is it seems to have had the opposite effect. I am even less interested in the expansion than I was going into the day, and I can’t really put my finger on the why.

I have been in Alpha/Beta for some time now, and all in total I have played somewhere between six and eight hours. During that time I have just felt like I was forcing myself to play the game. I felt obligated to test the content since friends had gotten me into it. Nothing I was doing however really did it for me, and even with the existence of some interesting ideas like the Garrisons, it all felt rehashed. The Burning Crusade was one of the most exciting expansions for me, and it was the era of so many cool things for me as a raider. I expected to be wrapped up in this whirlwind of nostalgia upon returning to it… albeit in a pre-destruction state. While Draenor is gorgeous and I can see the underpinnings of the areas I used to love… it all just feels really old at this point.

This expansion is going to be amazing for those players that are currently enthralled with the game. There are going to be a handful of other players that maybe quit wow but didn’t really play other games in the meantime… that will return and fall back in love again. However I fear for those of us who have gone nomadic and played every game that has come down the pipe… the overall game is just starting to feel its age. The systems don’t quite work as well as other games on the market, it isn’t the culmination of the best ideas any longer. Instead it is a combination of what they could get to work within the existing framework of the game. It will definitely breathe new life into the game a whole and introduce a bunch of new doodads for the players to get involved with, but so far it has all felt very hollow to me. As much as I want to be excited, I am wondering if I have actually truly outgrown the game. I had more fun doing Godmother’s survey than I have had actually playing the game in a very long time… so that tells me I was pretty much living off nostalgia to this point, and maybe that font has been exhausted.

Amazing Neighbors

August 10, 2014 by Belghast

10 Years 10 Questions AggroChat Edition

Last night was another Saturday evening which means we recorded another episode of AggroChat. This week we were joined by Rae, Ashgar, Kodra and Tam who will hopefully be becoming a much more regular member of the cast. As per my post yesterday morning, my good friend Godmother is working on a thing for the 10th Anniversary of World of Warcraft. Last night we decided to skip our normal podcast and instead took up the Alternative Chat 10 Years 10 Questions survey. As a result we ran a bit longer than our normal cast, but since we will be without Kodra next week we wanted to push through all ten questions. I have to say I really enjoyed this trip down memory lane, and even though I know a lot of the information we talked about… I still found out a few interesting things in the process. I am hoping that we gave Godmother some usable content.

I am really happy she is doing this and I look forward to reading and listening to the end result. I believe she has a master plan of doing a documentary podcast about all of this stuff and our responses. While all of us are not really current WoW players, we all owe so much to the game including our friendships. None of us would have known each other without this game and that is pretty crucial to all of us at this point. As Kodra says during the cast, we have a lot of love for each other and it is entirely thanks to this game that we may or may not want to play anymore. I figure that even among the former players we all have to give the game props for giving us so much in the process.

Amazing Neighbors

I have to say that our trip through Final Fantasy XIV just keeps getting more charming. In the 2.1 patch shortly after we quit they put in housing wards. In these semi-instanced wards you have various plots of land that you can purchase for an exorbitant amount of money. The interesting thing about this is that they become a sort of player made town as they have market boards, summoning bells and vendors on top of all of the player housing. I wrote about this some time ago but we found an amazing plot of land in a very heavily built up ward in the Limsa Lominsa area called the Mists. Just like we apparently lucked out on picking the right server we also apparently lucked out and picked one of the coolest wards. Within moments of us plunking down our house we had neighbors welcoming us to the area.

Friday night however something even cooler happened. It turns out that the other residents of the ward decided to create a neighborhood based linkshell. Now we are constantly chatting and getting to know the other awesome members of our ward including the massive guild that lives up the hill from us. It has been awesome to get to know everyone. The above screenshot is me and a member of that guild randomly breaking out into the Manderville dance while standing around at the market board. I took a bunch of screenshots because we were almost perfectly synchronized and it ended up pretty awesome to watch. The little things like this in this game just make me so happy.

It is almost as though we stepped through a time machine and found the server community that assholes forgot. Even as we have moved into harder content, the folks are still extremely chill and willing to work with the people who don’t know the fights. The end result is that even when I have good reason to gripe at someone for failing miserably to do something… I find myself NOT saying anything, or instead being supportive because I just don’t want to do anything to damage this amazing environment. The way people interact with each other reminds me of those early days of Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot… when individual player reputations still mattered and everyone held other players up to higher standards. I am so amazingly happy I decided to re-up Final Fantasy XIV.

Hard Modes with Friends

Last night after the podcast we all decided to stick around and work on some hard modes. I have to say we all kinda dreaded just how hard these might be, but in reality at the 55-60 overall gear score we were sitting out they were difficult but also very manageable. I don’t want to get too much into the various strategies because one of the biggest joys for me is figuring these things out completely cold. However I have to say I really enjoyed myself, and we managed to run Hard Mode Copperbell Mines and Hard Mode Brayfloxs Longstop. In both cases the fights were challenging but after a bit of thinking on our feet we managed to push through and succeed. I look forward to doing the other hardmodes because they were really rather awesome.

What makes them so cool is that unlike World of Warcraft heroics… these are entirely new dungeons. When you step foot into Copperbell MInes for example, there are giant holes in the wall where the mobs from the first version popped out, as well as things like a broken elevator that are the results of your last trip there. To make things even cooler the dungeon music has been changed slightly as well and is more akin to the heavy metal themes to the various primal fights. The zone I absolutely cannot wait to do is Hard Mode Haukke Manor since the original version is this awesome Castlevania like romp through a Haunted Mansion. The hard mode version absolutely has to be amazing, so maybe later this evening we can get that going. For the time being I am absolutely eating up every moment of this game, and I still have a long list of things that I want to be doing.

#FFXIV #AggroChat #Blaugust

10 Years :: 10 Questions

August 9, 2014 by Belghast

Mission for Godmother

This mornings post is going to be a little bit different than my normal fare. One of the Blaugust bloggers the acclaimed Godmother of Faff posted a challenge of her own. On her blog Alternative Chat she is wanting anyone who has played World of Warcraft at any point during the ten years it has been in progress to take a quick survery. Being a blogger… this screamed a blog post to me. I will of course post my responses into her handy google form after I have finished this process, but I wanted to share my responses with the world as well. There is hardly any gamer that has not been touched in some way by Blizzard and the World of Warcraft… so I highly suggest you all participate in the event as well.

10 Years :: 10 Questions

1. Why did you start playing Warcraft?

I was indoctrinated into the world of MMO gaming during Everquest, and from that point onwards I was always on the look out for the next awesome game. I spent three years in EQ, another three in DAoC, a year in Horizons and was playing City of Heroes when I first got my taste of beta. I admit when I first heard about World of Warcraft, I wondered how in the hell they would have enough storyline to make a game out of that. I remembered Blizzard mostly as a company that made awesome games, but with only enough storyline to keep them from absolutely falling apart. I just couldn’t imagine something as detailed as say an Everquest coming out of that company. Then I got my first taste of the game and I was hooked.

World of Warcraft was so evolutionarily better than anything out at the time. It was a pulling together of all of the best characteristics of all of the games I had played to date and melding it together with this awesome cohesive narrative. I had some bad experiences with the Everquest guild I was in, and the leader being extremely domineering, so I knew going into a new game that everyone was excited about like WoW… I didn’t want that to happen again. I figured the only way I could stop it from happening was to accept the mantle of leadership myself. Roughly a year before the game actually released we started a forum, pulling together the small pools of players that we had played with in all of the games along the way, and through it House Stalwart was born. At launch we had around fifty players, and it continues to be a large multi-gaming guild to this day.

2. What was the first ever character you rolled?

My first character was my paladin Exeter, who began his life as a dwarf. I had fallen in love with the Paladin in beta, and especially the synergy between my Paladin and the Priest my friend had been playing. The problem is by the time release came around they gutted the extremely enjoyable strike system and replaced it with the extremely cludgy seal system. I gave it the good college try and so long as I was leveling with my friends I did just fine. The problem is my ability to solo was dismal, and I felt like I was getting pulled into another “forced grouping” situation like Everquest. Then tragedy struck… there was a death in the family and I was absent from the game for a good time. When I came back all of my friends were a good 10 to 20 levels higher than me, and I knew there was no hope of catching up on the paladin.

I ended up rolling a new character a Dwarven Hunter Lodin, and with him I was able to solo until my heart was content and catch up to my friends. He was the main I never intended to have, and while fun ranged dps was never really my cup of tea. The problem is that some of my good friends had formed a raid group on our server, and they needed another hunter. From the moment I started raiding as a hunter, I felt obligated to STAY a hunter since they were going to the efforts of gearing me up. I played all of Vanilla as a survival hunter rocking the dragonbreath hand cannon for my main weapon. Belghast was not actually born until I decided that I wanted to be the best tank I could be… and rolled a warrior to level with my friends priest. But that is a story for another day.

3. Which factors determined your faction choice in game?

In truth when House Stalwart first launched we made a failed attempt to play both factions. We had House Stalwart of Argent Dawn on the Alliance side, and we had the Burning Claw of Silverhand on the Horde side. We split between the two roleplaying servers that existed at launch. For the first few months everything was fine. We pretty regularly alternated between the two sides, but the problem is as we got deeper into our characters we self sorted. A small faction of our guild preferred to play horde and the vast majority preferred the alliance. For me I have always been partial to dwarves, so it was an easy pick for which side to go on.

Because of this however I don’t really feel like I have massive faction loyalty, and ultimately would rather the factions simply not exist. Having a wall between the players feels like a poor design choice, and one that keeps getting repeated out in other games. I’ve always preferred how Everquest series handles faction, in that it is a personal choice and determines what areas you can go into… but not who you can associate with. As far as my not really playing horde regularly since… I guess I have gotten used to the easy life of the alliance. PVP only happens if you go and look for it, and since I am by nature a massive carebear I like this aspect of my faction. Additionally I have never really enjoyed playing “Monstrous Humanoids” to borrow the Dungeons and Dragons term. I would rather be a valiant knight in shining armor than a noble savage.

4. What has been your most memorable moment in Warcraft and why?

I have a whole string of memorable moments, but probably the one that will always stand out for me is the first time we killed Sindragosa in Icecrown CItadel. This was a fight that we absolutely struggled with for weeks. The raid I was helping to lead at the time, Duranub Raiding Company was aptly named. We were in fact a durable pack of nubs… which is a phrase that ties back to an even earlier raid group the Late Night Raiders. We were one of those groups that struggled to get down the basics of an encounter… then all the sudden the moment you beat it you never wipe on it again. Same was the case with Sindragosa, we struggled to deal with people getting frozen and people breaking them out. On the time we actually downed her one of our best hunters Thalen, landed the killing blow mere seconds before getting put into an iceblock himself. So the boss was down and there were 25 little icicles spread throughout the room. The above image is my “artists recreation” of the fight.

All of the most memorable moments I have from the game came either through raiding or through dungeon runs, and I have come to the realization that they have little to do with the actual game itself. Sure the game provided me a backdrop to do interesting things with other people, but it was the interaction with said people that made it interesting. From the raid singing the “Crotch Pocket” jingle anytime Furnace Master Ignis shoved someone into his belt mounted crucible, or the struggles with “OmNomNomITron” and our shouting of “KIds!” anytime the plague one would spawn adds. It was the people that made everything interesting and all of the memorable moments I have are something you can never actually get back. They were awesome but they were fleeting and you can make new memories, but you can never fully relive the old ones.

5. What is your favourite aspect of the game and has this always been the case?

My favorite aspect of World of Warcraft or any MMO for that matter are the dungeons. I love delving into ancient ruins with friends in the search for fabled treasures. For starters I have a massive bloodlust when it comes to gaming, and I will go out of my way to kill mobs. In a given night there are lots of moments where my friends will ask “Where is Bel?” and sure enough I will be a ways off killing something that we didn’t actually need to kill. So I love running dungeons with friends and during the era of WoW before the dungeon finder I used to build groups regularly from random strangers on the server. This was the primary way I met new people to join our raid and often times my guild.

The problem is with the dungeon finder the dungeons changed into something that I didn’t like very much at all. It all became about getting through them as quickly as possible and avoiding as much content as you could to rush to the end boss and “Finish”. This mentality just seemed like a travesty to me, because for me the dungeon itself was the reward and the time spent with new and interesting people in it. Unfortunately this dungeon mentality has infected so many other game communities that if you log in and run a dungeon in say Rift, they have the same expectations. While there are a few games like FFXIV that seem to have been forgotten by time and have really charming dungeon running cultures, my biggest fear is that WoW opened a Pandora’s box and ruined dungeon running in the process.

6. Do you have an area in game that you always return to?

There are a few areas of the game that I never skip, for example if I have the opportunity I will always level through Duskwood. Yes it is a frustratingly laid out zone, but I love the vibe of it. If there is a zone in a game that has werewolves, vampires or zombies… chances are I will deviate my leveling path to make sure I go through there. The problem with Duskwood however is Elwynn Forest and Westfall have so many issues. On a role-playing server, Goldshire is still ERP central… so I have long since stopped leveling any character in Elwynn. Westfall got considerably better in Cataclysm but is still a fairly boring slog in a pretty ugly zone. So generally speaking if I am working on a new character I will make a beeline to Duskwood around 20… complete the zone and then run the hell away and get back out of the human areas.

As far as areas I return to, I admit that I return to past raids often. Even though I spent three hours of every sunday for years in first Molen Core and then later Kharazan… I still enjoy soloing both zones. I am also extremely partial to the Black Temple, as I love the look and feel of the encounters. Basically if it is a raid and I can potentially solo it, I will likely do it on a semi regular basis. In a way I know I am wallowing in the nostalgia of the good times I had in that place, so once again it is less about the place itself and more about the experiences I had there. Each time I take down Nefarian for example I remember one of our paladins screaming “Use the Fucking Force” over teamspeak as all the healy paladins cast holy wrath. I have so much nostalgia tied to so many zones at this point, that revisiting any of them is enjoyable.

7. How long have you /played and has that been continuous?

I am am really hoping you mean how long we have played the game in time, not actual /played hours. Firstly it will take forever for me to compile a list of just how many hours I have played this game spread out among my army of alts. Secondly I really don’t want to confront just how big that number will be. Suffice to say I have 7 level 90 characters, 2 85+, 4 80+, 2 70+ and enough 10-30 characters scattered on so many different servers that I have long since hit my 50 character limit and have to delete something to roll anything new. Belgrave became my “main” while we were starting Crusaders Coliseum 25 and I just looked and his /played is 86 days so I cannot fathom just how many physical years I have spent when you add everything up.

As far as how long have I played… I was in beta before the launch of World of Warcraft and House Stalwart was a day one guild. I played pretty solidly until Cataclysm when I feel out of love with the game in a big way and wandered off into Rift and then a string of other games. It seems like I renew interest in the game a few times a year now. I came back at the tail end of Cataclysm and stayed for the first few months of Pandaria, long enough to raid a little bit. Then most recently I came back for about six months and raided a bit of Throne of Thunder/Siege of Orgrimmar. At which point I took back the crown of my guild and have at the very least kept my account active from that point onwards. I love the guild and the people in it, and I am always willing to log in and check in on things even though I am maybe only playing once or twice a month. It is easy to quit the game, but it is extremely hard to quit the people playing it.

8. Admit it: do you read quest text or not?

I freely admit that most of the time I do not. There are two distinct kinds of questing for me… busy work and epic quest chains. The busy work like Kill X things, deliver this to that, retrieve this doodad… I really don’t pay attention to at all. In general I try to skim every quest I get to see if it is going to be an interesting one or not. If something catches my eye in this skimming process I go ahead and read the entire thing. I have gotten really spoiled by modern games with voice acted content. I will stop and listen to every last acted word when a quest is delivered like that, however if you are giving me a wall of text I skim it for the relevant bits and then move on. The primary time I end up reading every last line is when you get one of those quests that doesn’t work the way you think it should.

If you can believe it I am actually better about reading quest text today than I used to be. During the early days of WoW I would far rather grind mobs than do quests at all. This was the side effect from coming through a long line of games where the quests didn’t really matter. Everquest was a massive misnaming of that game, because in reality you never encountered quest unless you dug for them by “hailhumping” every mob in a zone until one of them responded with a keyword that signaled there was a quest. Instead I preferred to just go out and slaughter entire zones rather than hunt for the one clue that started a quest that was more than likely just a “bring me X things” that you got from killing mobs anyways. It also depends on the game, in a game like The Secret World I read every last bit because I know not doing so will come around to bite me in the end.

9. Are there any regrets from your time in game?

I am sitting here trying to think of something, but really nothing major comes to mind. I know there have been times where I wished things had ended better with various people regarding the games. When you lead a guild and lead a raid there is always drama surrounding it. There are various events brought on by the game, and raiding that I wished would have maybe ended on better terms. However I don’t really dwell on them enough to consider them regrets. For the most part everything I have experienced through games, has lead me to be the gamer and blogger I am today. I tend to focus on the journey and not the goals. Sure there are little baubles and trinkets along the way that I kinda wish I had gotten, but for the most part I can always go back and obtain them later.

The only thing I really wish I had done was complete my shadowmourne. I am up to the part where I need to collect the various bits from the different encounters in Icecrown, but I have never actually gone back and made an effort to do it after the close of Wrath. Ultimately it just didn’t seem important enough to hassle a bunch of people into doing. It is not the sort of thing I really dwell upon but it would have been nice to complete that legendary eventually. I would still love to see a set of bindings drop for Thunderfury, but that is less about me or more about me wanting to make sure SOMEONE from LNR gets some. We raided Molten Core every single week for two years and never saw so much as a single binding drop.

10. What effects has Warcraft had on your life outside gaming?

Other than it making my wife occasionally grump and want to pull the plug from the back of my PC, I have to say overall the experience has been a positive one. There are so many friends that I would not have today were it not for this game. My blog for example started entirely out of a love of World of Warcraft and over time morphed into a love of all gaming. My twitter community, my blogger friends, the massive group of people that makes up House Stalwart and even the Blaugust event that is going on right now and is so amazingly successful… none of this would have happened were it not for World of Warcraft and the connections I made while playing it. As a result, even if I fall out of love with the game, I have to respect the effect it has had on my life and the great lives I have met in the process.

The Pause Button

July 9, 2014 by Belghast

It’s Not You, It’s Me

Right now I find myself struggling to get excited about anything in the MMO genre. I think I part I am feeling this overwhelming feeling that there are so many games that are not MMOs that I want to be playing. For years I have just defaulted to playing an MMO for so many different reasons. For starters it was more or less my social lifeline and the primary way that I kept in touch with all of my friends. The guild House Stalwart that I lead and still do lead more often than not in absentia of late… was a vessel in which I collected all of my friends in one place. During the heyday of World of Warcraft this was a glorious thing, and kept me tied to the game because it was the place I could hang out with everyone at once.

When I entered the twitter and blog community this shifted considerably, and I started wanting to hang out with new and different people and had pure hell trying to incorporate all these new friends with my old friends as well. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t and the end result has been a series of games played with a small subset of friends each time something new came out. I guess over the last few weeks I have realized that I no longer need the crutch that is MMOs as a way of capturing my friends and hanging out with them. At this point I pretty much have contact with everyone I have ever gamed with seriously outside of said MMO. Just because I am not playing the same game doesn’t mean I no longer have access to those people.

The Pause Button

At this point I really want to indulge my absolutely insane steam backlog, and start playing my way through it. In part this is because a single player game has something that an MMO will never have… a pause button. Over the last few months my wife and I have gotten more serious about exercise, especially since getting our fitbits back in March. Neither of us necessarily like doing it, but we know we need to and the payoff in the long run will be a much improved life. So much of my gaming life has been about getting home and getting everything done that needs to be done before gaming “primetime”. The problem is our exercise routine doesn’t fit into this plan, since in general we need to wait for things to cool off before going out and about. Sunday I made a walk in a heat index of 110 degrees, and that is not something I want to do again anytime soon.

What this means in reality is that I really cannot get involved in anything at all until I get back from my walk. This also means that for sake of sanity sake… this only gives me an hour or two to do anything structured and still be able to get up and around in the morning in a non-zombie state. So right now my exercise routine has pretty much destroyed my ability to do group MMO content, which is the primary reason why I plan MMOs in the first place. I don’t mean grouping to quest or grouping to PVP… but grouping to run Dungeons. Without the drive to do the next dungeon, the MMO experience I am finding is rather bland. At the very least that thing that used to drive me higher and higher in level just isn’t there right now.

The Treasure Trove

I am not saying anything dramatic like I am done with Wildstar or Elder Scrolls Online or World of Warcraft or MMOs in general. Instead I am giving myself the leverage to not care about them if I so choose. I am sitting on what feels like a gold mine of narrative games that because of the feeling of having to log in nightly to whatever my current MMO was… I did not play. So you are likely going to see a lot more single player game coverage… and significantly less multiplayer coverage. I guess this is the good thing about having a blog format that revolves around my whims and not necessarily a specific game in it. I might end up losing some readers in the process, and I guess I am okay with that. I have become known for being an “MMO Gamer” and while I won’t stop being that, I will probably focus on more of the content that I would normally talk about during Steampowered Sunday.

Right now I want to actually finish some games. I have this horrible habit of getting near the end of a game, generally within an hour or two of beating it and losing the drive to push across the finish line. It is like I had so much fun playing the game that I don’t want the experience to end, and if I never go back and finish it up… it never has to. Right now I am within two hours of being the new Wolfenstein game for example, but I have been reluctant to do so… because I really enjoyed the experience on the way to the end. I am honestly the same way with novels and my bedside table is strewn with a ton of half finished books. In games the journey has always been so much more important than the destination… so I guess I avoid finishing the journey. All of that said it is something I would very much like to change. Back in the era of Nintendo, I had challenges with friends to see who could beat a specific game the fastest… so I know that me is somewhere deep inside waiting to get out.

Autopilot Gaming

All of that said… what did I end up doing last night? Playing World of Warcraft while watching movies. I was in the mood to hang out downstairs and watch stuff off Netflix, and after making a couple of attempts to play various games I settled to playing WoW. I have lost the ability to ONLY watch Television, after having done it as an activity while I was doing something else for so long now. That said games like Divinity: Original Sin require too much of me to be able to play them and keep track of a movie at the same time. WoW on the other hand is almost pure muscle memory at this point… I don’t have to think about the game to play it. So I decided to fire up one of my army of new hordies over on Scyers and at least get one of them into my guild of horde friends Bloodmoon Chosen. For years I have made an attempt to play Horde, because I have a large number of friends over there as well as Alliance. However because of my desire to have all of my slots available for Alliance, I kept relegating the horde to an alternate account. With the merger of Argent Dawn and The Scryers server, this gives me the ability to have 11 Alliance characters and 11 Horde characters.

The first movie of the night was Odd Thomas… which was familiar sounding but I did not have a clue why. It was staring Anton Yelchin… aka Chekov from the new Star Trek series, and more or less I have liked him in everything I have seen him in so far. Turns out that maybe somewhere deep in the bowels of my mind I realized this was a book series by Dean Koontz, but when folks on twitter informed me of such last night I was surprised. I really enjoyed the movie in a more action hero Donnie Darko kind of way, which likely makes zero sense anywhere other than my own head. It was good enough that it makes me want to track down a copy of the novels and read through them. I’ve never been a huge Koontz fan, and generally I tend to consider his novels a bit on the cheesy side… but I dig this protagonist. I like the whole unlikely crusader for good aspect of the story, and it tends to be a trope I enjoy in most movies.

The second movie of the night however was not nearly as enjoyable. One of my guilty pleasures is that I like John Cusack. I am a huge fan of movies like Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity, but the unfortunate truth is that Cusack tends to play exactly the same character in every movie he is in. Edgar Allen Poe likely was a neurotic mess… but Cusack’ particular brand of neurosis doesn’t quite work here. Additionally while I can get behind the transformation of the cerebral Sherlock Holmes into the Robert Downey Jr. badass action hero… this doesn’t work at all for Cusack and Poe. I am honestly not sure what I was expecting, but after the high that was Odd Thomas I was just looking for something else and this movie showed up in one of my Netflix streams and I figured what the hell. Unless you are supremely bored and have literally watched everything else of substance in your movie feed… I would highly suggest skipping it.