The Stormlord Thorin

Yep.. This is a World of Warcraft post.. And one in which I plan to complain to Blizzard about the recent rounds of nurfing.. But firstly let me say that Thorim is dead!  Long live Thorim.

My guild on Whisperwind is now only the second horde guild to kill Thorim in Ulduar.  He’s a VERY tough fight.  I love it.  It took 25 people with their heads on a swivel, 100% focused with zero screw ups to make it happen.  (And even then it took us 17 tries.)

But we killed him and it was glorious!  It was an extremely difficult fight and I’m sure everyone will have a fun time with it..    Until they nurf him, of course.   Blizzard has taken it into their heads to nurf all the hard content and I wish they would STOP!

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Whack a Seal!

So, on Saturday the 11th of April, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) held an awareness gathering in World of Warcraft where they killed four quest NPC’s as a form of protest for the unethical killing of seals in real life.  Some how it got into their heads that by focusing on protecting the digital seals in a game and instead performing the far more ethical act of killing the would-be digital seal killers, it would bring awareness to the unethical killing of real world seals.

So.. let me sum up for those who can’t put this together — what they are saying is..   Kill the people who are killing the seals.

Are you fucking kidding me?!  How is that more ethical?  They honestly are saying that it’s more ethical to kill humans than it is to kill seals?  That’s their stance?  Really?

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Surfs Up!

I have been playing with the jQuery animate functionality a bit today and it occurred to me that jQuery would likely be the perfect library to build a browser based game on top of..

I did a little browsing about the web, and sure enough.. someone thought of it before me.

The games I would want to create would be less animated than this one.. but I could totally see a Masters of Orion remake as a browser based game using the jQuery library..   Or any number of other turn based games..  You could even make them multiplayer fairly easily..

As computers get faster, and as browser trend towards threaded javascript engines.. Why the hell not?! At this point I think it would be just as easy/difficult to create a game via a webbrowser as it would via any other medium..

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Empire: Total War!

So I have long been a fan of the Total War franchise created by Creative Assembly..  Their games have always been pretty fun — but most of them have been fairly buggy..  There was a lot of stuff going on and the games were generally still playable, so for the most part those bugs could be forgiven.

Empire Total War is the latest in the franchise and easily the most anticipated as well as the most well received..  All the various publications have drooled over this game and praised it for being pure liquid awesome as well as having given it a 94 meta score which pretty much assures it will be the game of the year..

I read everything I could find about it and was very much looking forward to this game — I do enjoy it for the most part.  I just don’t feel it deserves quite all the hype is has gotten.  More over I kind of wonder if the Creative Assembly folks didn’t pay for some of those favorable reviews… Either that or the reviewers didn’t play the same game they published..

I’m going to complain a bit now, but let me say that the game is good and I do like it.   It’s major failing at this point is the vast number of bugs..

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Dawn of War 2

I love Warhammer.  I have played Warhammer table top war game both fantasy and 40k pretty much since they came out.  I also have the Warhammer fantasy role playing game, the more recent Warhammer 40k role playing game and gave the Warhammer fantasy MMO a spin.

Games workshop has done a really good job at creating a compelling IP (too bad blizzard stole most of it.. but I digress).. So I was extremely excited about Dawn of War, though for whatever reason I didn’t get to play it much.

DoW looked very good and I wanted to make sure that I played DoW2!    I wasn’t about to let more Warhammer goodness slip by!

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It’s fixed!  The dreaded #134 Error is no more!   And for the most part the Blizzard tech support people are completely worthless.. But I get ahead of myself.

Firstly, what it’s not;

The blizzard folks over at their forums, as well as those you get ahold of on the phone.. and via email will try to blame everything on you.  The reason for this will come clear shortly, but in a way they are right and in a way wrong.

The World of Warcraft #134 error is so vague and broad in scope that it is the support equivalent to, “It broke!”…  It could be any number of things, but the thing they just about always tell you it is, is memory.  Read the forums and you’ll always see some asshat chiming in that it must be your memory..  The issue I had with that response is that I had run tests against my 4 gigs of memory both in linux, and in windows using multiple tools as well as testing each stick individually..  My memory was flawless every time.. even using the test blizzard suggested I use.

Once I proved that, they suddenly tried to blame some other facet of my hardware..  Long story short, everything they suggested WAS WRONG.  Period..

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