Tag Archives: wow

The Android can't be arsed with a real topic (Weekend)

Grab-Bag for the weekend!

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So hi guys, just going to throw something up real quick for the weekend! We’ve been extremely busy with videogames as usual, but even more than usual somehow, so here’s what I’ve been playing lately!

World of Warcraft Yep, still immersed in Pandaland, although these days I can at least drag myself away to play other games for a bit. It’s amazing how great this expac is though, one of Blizzard’s finest hours since the WC2/SC/D2 era. And I want a big strong Klaxxi to chirrup gently while I play with his antennae.

The Walking Dead I know I said there’d be a proper post on this, and I still intend to do that but I am astonishingly lazy so that post is not this post! Still, it’s a genuinely brilliant adventure game set in The Walking Dead world which doesn’t shy away from the sort of grim stuff in the comics and TV show, and it has a whole bunch of well-written and interesting characters, some of who you get really attached to. And then they die.

Liberal Crime Squad This was a game Toady One made before he became obsessed with Dwarf Fortress and, like that game, this is a pretty spergy and incredibly addictive devourer of time. It is a (very) satirical game based on American politics where, as the titular LCS, you set out to demonstrate to the country why the Arch-Conservative trend sweeping the country is a bad idea and to instead institute Elite Liberal laws. The big draw is the sheer variety of ways to achieve this. Break into a Corporate HQ and steal evidence of misdeeds, hack into government websites and deface them, seduce Judges so they act in your favor, go out into the street and protest, the list goes on and on.

Sweet Baby Jesus this kid is hot

Assassin’s Creed III This long-awaited continuation of the AC series is proving to be pretty much everything Pike and myself hoped it would be. It’s an expansion of pretty much everything the previous games had, just as II built on the original massively. It’s also a game in no real hurry; you don’t even get control of Connor until several hours in (But that’s okay because the guy you are instead, Haythem Kenway, is a superbly debonair gentleman) and the game isn’t afraid of throwing some considerable soliloquies at you. The best of which has to be Ben Franklin’s musing on his Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress and why cougars are totally great.

Also there’s some sprinklings of FTL and Project Zomboid in there!

What have you readers been playing lately, and are planning on playing this weekend? Do share your thoughts in the comments below!

The Android's Mother's Basement (MMO), The Android's Nonsensical Gibberish (It is too hot today/we are lazy)

WoW races that need to be playable

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As it turned out Pandas was a great idea, so with that in mind I hope for greater open-mindedness from Blizz regarding new playable races to be introduced over the coming years. Here are some suggestions that I, with input from Pike, would especially like Blizzard to consider:

1) Tuskarr. These are top of the list, and should have been playable since Wrath instead of adding DKs. They are The Best Race. They are big fat Walrusmans who build big Walrusman moai and I forget to finish my sentences AND they have the best lines! “Visit again when you can!”
2) Ethereals. They are the Second Best Race, and I can’t even begin to fathom why they’re not playable because they’re blatantly superior to everything else that isn’t a walrusmans.
(everything after this point is in no particular order)
3) Ogres. They really should have been playable since Day One, let’s be honest here.
4) Mantids. These guys look metal as all hell and I’d very much like to be able to say things like “It’s time to swarm.” or “I must speak with the Adjunct!”.
5) Grummles. I love them and their constant talk about luckydos is amazing. I especially like how their name is their luckiest luckydo, so some of them have names like “Half-eaten Fish” and “Wooden Spoon”.
6) Naga. The quests in Vash’jir where you are a Naga Battlemaiden are great, because you get to see how cool as heck Naga are. Turns out they’re refined, treat their underlings reasonably, and act with respect and decorum! Also they have that crazy spinny-blade blender move that minces everything.
7) Iron Vrykul and Iron Dwarves. Rock-based robots covered in baller glower runes? Yep I’m okay with that sign me up please.
8) Tol’vir. Yesssss these guys are also baller as hell. Hanging out in Uldum being big old cat-taurs looking like they really do deserve to be in charge? Do want.
9) Arakkoa. I wanted to be one of these bird-people when I first saw one in Hellfire Peninsula all those years ago, and I still want to. Because creepy bird-people.
10) Aqir. Yes more bugs. I like being a bug! I want to be a bug leader of a gigantic, terrifying hive-mind that consumes the world, deal with it!
11) Faceless Ones. Tentacles and a complete inability to have pronounceable names add together for a pretty amazing race.

Blizz please make Wilford Brimley playable.

What about the rest of you guys? Any races in particular from the WoW setting you want to run around doing dailies as?

The Android's Aural Receptors (Music/Sound), The Android's Mother's Basement (MMO)

Kick! Punch! It’s all in the mind!

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For obvious reasons Dwarfs make the best Brewmasters, so when Pike and I rolled a couple of Monks I chose Dorf as my race. I quickly found that the best reference to anything in WoW is sitting down there in Coldridge Valley.

This is a reference to Parappa the Rapper in the Year of Our Lord 2012.

Based on this alone I’d be quite happy to call Pandamans a shining success, but as it turns out absolutely everything about this expansion I’ve seen so far is solid goddamn gold. I’ve no doubt my dear co-blogger Pike will have a lot more to say on the subject seeing as she is the one who is actually good at this videogame, so I shan’t go into it in too much detail, but I cannot stop playing this freaking game. Would you like to know more? Well then, let’s consider that the Panda Inn music is peerless:

Just wait until the kazoo kicks in.

Oh, and Pokewow? The thing I long scorned as a shameless gimmick intended to bring in people who would otherwise have no interest in the game? I was COMPLETELY WRONG in every way. Pet Battles is absolutely freaking insanely brilliant and addictive and anytime I find myself at a loss for other stuff to do, welp, time to set REAPER PRIME on some chumps. (REAPER PRIME is a Tiny Harvester about ten inches tall.) And I think that’s the key to what MoP has done right – there’s a huge variety of things to do open to you and a lot of them require minimal investment of time to get started. For all the old man “danged kids” lamenting Pike and myself do I have to admit I’m pretty glad to see the narrow idea of what endgame is in the past.

I should go play some bad games so I stop fanboying over stuff but, heck, I just want to enthuse about how great videogames are so here we are, with constant posts about great games!

The Android's Mother's Basement (MMO)

Oops! I Did It Again

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If you are anything like myself or Mister Adequate, then you will be well-acquainted with that obnoxious insect that comes around every six months or so and nibbles on you and makes you nostalgic for World of Warcraft and won’t stop nibbling until you actually re-sub. This invariably results in a few weeks of playing little else but WoW until the bug is satiated and flies away– for the time being, anyway.

I was visited by this bug about a week back and after several days of trying to ignore it and swat it away while it hummed the Karazhan theme in my ear, I recently caved and re-downloaded the game. I know, I know.

Now I haven’t played in months and months and one of the things that I always felt bad about was that I left my long-time main, Tawyn, rather unceremoniously dumped in Stormwind in a bunch of greens from the new Cataclysm content– basically I played for about a month after Cata launch and then realized “You know what, I’m still bored of raiding and heroics” and logged out and didn’t return. So poor Tawyn wasn’t retired in her level 70 epics or her level 80 epics– no, she was retired wearing [Boring Uldum Pants of the Whale] and such. Obviously this wasn’t going to do, so the very first thing I did was transmogrify into old stuff from my favorite ever raid instance, Karazhan, and various assorted BC heroics. For the first time in years, Tawyn matched my figureprint of her and the mental image I have when I think of her. I… really can’t express how good this felt.

Suddenly, playing my character was fun again. Because suddenly, I didn’t look like a scrub in greens. Nor did I look like a mishmash of epics from the current content. Rather, I looked like my character— something I was proud of.

Don’t get me wrong. I still don’t feel like raiding or doing heroics or really any sort of endgame. But at least I can deal with dailies and things like leveling once MoP comes out (should I get the expac– I’m still not sure if I will.)

The new patch comes out tomorrow and it gets rid of hunter stat sticks, which means I’ll lose my lovely Sonic Spear and I won’t be able to sport my Legacy in the future. But you’ll have to pry Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle out of my cold, dead, purple hands.

The Android's Mother's Basement (MMO)

Two for the Price of One! Obligatory Panda Edition

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Hey guys, Pike here. For today’s blog post I thought we’d try something new: this post will contain the thoughts of both myself and Mister Adequate, all in one spot! I’ll say something on a topic and then my esteemed colleague will give his own opinion. Heck, if this works out well we might do it even more in the future. For now, though, I thought we’d talk about something that is big news in the gaming world right now: Blizzcon.

I probably don’t need to inform our audience of the new World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria, but just in case you’re an alien species who has just landed on Earth and decided to check our blog first thing, here’s a link.

Here’s our first impressions:

Pike’s Thoughts:

I think the first thing that struck me was total amusement. I’d heard the rumors of “Mists of Pandaria”, of course, but wrote it off largely because it seems like the Pandaren idea was one of those things that Blizzard never quiiiiite took seriously, to the point that they’d had the idea in the past and nixed it. (Am I the only one who remembers the Pandaren rumors flying around back before BC? Metzen’s statement that they were originally slated for BC and then replaced with Draenei did not surprise me in the slightest for that reason.)

Once the initial amusement faded away I decided that there were a lot of promising things here. The whole idea of having a neutral race that chooses its destiny at level ten is, in my mind, brilliant and long overdue and should have been done a long time ago with goblins. I love the idea of Pandaren as a race in general. I love the idea of a monk class and a brewmaster spec, and especially that dorfs can be said class/spec.

There were other things that didn’t excite me quite so much. The focus on a Horde/Alliance conflict didn’t really effect me either way, beyond Metzen’s enigmatic comparison to Warcraft 2 which caught my attention because I’m a geek like that. The idea that talent trees are essentially going away is something I’m iffy on, but I can see where they’re coming from. Pokemon Pets sounds like a fun idea on paper but in practicality it sounds like one of those things that is going to be too much of a hassle for me to bother getting into (see also: archaeology, spirit beast collecting, most holiday achievements, and all the other things WoW has introduced over the years that are great and all but which I have no interest in).

Anyways, ultimately my reaction to the expansion was roughly 50% “This sounds GREAT” and about 50% “This sounds meh/could go either way”, which, to be honest, is pretty good considering that there was really no “I HATE this” involved. That said, my overall interest in WoW remains low. As long-time readers know, my WoW playing over the past year and a half or so has been very off and on and largely dependent on whether I deem messing around on an alt for a few hours a week to be worth $15/month at any given moment. I love me some pandas, but I don’t even think they’re going to change anything for me, personally. Not when I’ve got so many other games to play!

Got all that, Spike?

Mister Adequate’s Thoughts:

M.o.P.

The funny thing about MoP is that it gets abbreviated to MoP. The other funny thing is that I actually think Pandaria is a really cool addition and I’m all for it. I was hoping they would show up in a much earlier expansion. I am definitely very excited by the fact they can choose which side to join, and I’m seriously hoping (but not at all expecting) that the “Alliance vs. Horde” thing bears some fruit because for a game called Warcraft there’s a distinct lack of, well, War.

I’m also massively excited for the new Monk class. I’ve always been a bit perplexed by their reluctance to add new classes – it’s not like the current ones have ever been balanced anyway. So it’s hugely exciting to see a new one on the way and quite honestly I think that alone will be enough to sell MoP to me.

But aside from what I outline above I’m quite a bit more pessimistic about it than Pike is. I’m not at all convinced that the pokemon angle is a sensible one, for a start. I’m not aware of all the details yet of course but I’m tremendously suspicious of the new talent changes. I’d been wanting them to return to how they used to be, and then become considerably MORE complex and in-depth, not reduced to something that’s barely an afterthought and gets introduced at Blizzcon as “Talents are gone!” The game needs to stop pandaren to customizing appearances and get back to customizing your characters as combatants. And if they do care about appearances so much, just rip off City of Heroes.

So I can’t say I’m desperately enthused about the expansion at this point. It’s got a couple of core things I really, really like, and a bunch of ancillary stuff I’m either disinterested in or downright skeptical of.

(Also if you are the aforementioned alien species can we borrow your spaceship?)

The Android's Mother's Basement (MMO)

This Is One of The Dorkiest Things I’ve Ever Done

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As I recently recounted, Mister Adequate gifted me with a Scroll of Resurrection and I used it to claim a free week of WoW.

During that week, I messed around a bit, mostly on alts, and I had a little bit of fun, but not quite enough to warrant resubscribing. I let my free week run out, satisfied that I’d gotten my WoW fix for a little while.

Then I remembered that I’d just put a whole bunch of crap on the auction house right before my time expired.

…

So I resubbed for a month. For no other reason than to ensure that a bunch of virtual gold doesn’t have to rot in a virtual mailbox.

I’m… not the only one who has done this, right?

…right?

The Android's Mother's Basement (MMO)

You Have Awakened Me Too Soon, Scroll of Resurrection!

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So last week, Mister Adequate resubbed to World of Warcraft, and then promptly tossed me a Scroll of Resurrection (at my request, I won’t deny it). This was despite a lot of warnings from people that I’d get pulled back into it and that it would eat up all my time. Still, I went ahead and activated my free week and logged in.

The first thing I noticed was that my poor neglected main was still buffed with a buff from the Lunar Festival which just goes to show you how long it’s been since I logged in.

The second thing I noticed was that I’d apparently been kicked from my guild for inactivity, which didn’t bother me too much because last I checked most of the cool people had either moved to a new guild or quit playing.

Upon flying to the training dummies I noticed a third thing, which was that I somehow still remembered all of my keybinds. That tickled me a little bit.

Anyways, then I got bored and logged out for the rest of the day.

The next morning I was feeling nostalgic for Burning Crusade so I picked a random alt that was in Outlands and did some quests. I did that for about 45 minutes and I felt proud that I still sort of knew how to play a hunter. And you know, it was fun for a little bit. But then I got bored again and logged out and spent the rest of the day playing Civ.

My reaction to that decision

The third day I logged into a completely different alt, one who was in the midst of the re-done Cataclysm quests in Ashenvale (this particular alt still had the Christmas gnome buff from December). Again, I messed around for about an hour and then it was off to other things, both games and otherwise.

So, you may be wondering where I’m going with this. Believe me, I don’t intend this to be some sort of WoW or MMO bash. As far as I’m concerned WoW is still the best MMO on the market today, and the majority of my memories of the game are fond ones. But I think I attempted to come back to it too soon. My interest in it simply has not been rekindled in my absence. You have awakened me too soon, Scroll of Resurrection!

Yes, that is a pony Ragnaros.

I think I’ll resub for a month, just to get Mister Adequate his free month for the Scroll of Resurrection, but I can’t envision myself doing anything beyond messing around with alts for a few hours each week. You never know, of course, but more and more I’m thinking I should let the game lie for a bit longer.

There’s more to WoW than endgame, of course, and my particular playstyle at the moment– derping around on alts for a few hours a week– is certainly a valid one, but is it worth the $15/month when you’re as broke as I am? I’ve yet to decide. Currently I’m leaning toward “no”. But we’ll see, I suppose. We’ll see.

The Android's Mother's Basement (MMO)

Just when I thought I was out…

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… they pull me back in.

Yes, I’m talking about that old standby that nobody ever truly escapes from, the game that both codified MMOs and redefined what they could commercially and culturally achieve – World of Warcraft. Now, our dear Pike has as most of you will know been a very long-time player of WoW, and played solidly for years, which is of course where her delightful Aspect of the Hare arose from. In fact I first played the game considerably before she ever touched it (I got it just as Patch 1.6 came out.), but unlike her I come and go in waves. I play for a few months, then put it aside for a few months, repeat. Apparently ad nauseum. I had thought I had escaped for good; I last played in early Spring if I recall correctly.

But here I am, and I know the signs by now. I’ve started reading the WoW forums. I keep an eye on the patch notes. I’ve updated to the latest version. I’m looking for the best current plugins to use. Sooner or later, no matter how long and hard I resist it, I’m going to give Blizzard yet more of my altogether too scarce money and I am going to spend an extraordinary amount of time playing World of Warcraft.

Again. And I’m sure I’ll drag Pike along with me, because she’s susceptible to that sort of thing and hearing me ooh-ing and ah-ing over some mediocre Green I just found will make her itch to play it.

Goldshire, my body is ready!

Are there any games, MMO or otherwise, which just seem to always manage to call you back to them, an irresistible siren song that must inexorably conquer you despite your best efforts?

Also how is WoW these days, to those who still play?

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Ponies, Pop Culture, and Games

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There is no cow level.

There is, however, a pony level in Diablo 3, if the datamining is correct.

The blog's official response.

Now our initial idea with this post was to semi-jokingly rescind any previous doubts we’ve expressed regarding this game, and leave it at that, but I actually think I can turn this into a more in-depth blog post, so here we go:

I’ve heard some people express dismay at developers who throw too many knowing pop culture references into otherwise immersive games. Blizzard is a good example here; most of us played Cataclysm when it first came out, even if you quit directly after reaching level 85 the way Mister Adequate and I did.

Mister Adequate actually rerolled entirely and leveled to 85 from scratch rather than playing his existing level 80 draenei, presumably because he breaks out in hives when he is not playing a tauren warrior. Picture is related.

Cataclysm, as I’m sure you’re all aware, is chock-full of references, jabs, and full-on homages to pop culture. Uldum is pretty much entirely dedicated to it, between the Indiana Jones storyline, the Katamari Damacy quest, the Hackers references, and anything else I’ve forgotten. Actually, I’m pretty certain that there were more playful pokes at culture than there weren’t.

There were a lot of people who weren’t exactly fond of this, feeling that an MMORPG should be more immersive and that what WoW was doing here was purposefully pulling players out of the world that they had so carefully crafted. Others thought it was all in good fun and point out that, come on, Blizzard has pretty much always had their tongue firmly in cheek.

This isn't Warcraft in Space!

I tend to sit somewhere in the middle; I like my games full of rich lore but it doesn’t always have to be super-serious business. It might say something about me that Uldum was my favorite zone in Cataclysm by far. And ultimately, for me, it comes down to the gameplay. Civilization isn’t exactly the world’s most accurate history simulator– in the game Mister Adequate and I are currently playing, my civ just discovered an ancient manuscript containing the secrets of nuclear fission– but it’s sure as heck fun.

What do you guys think?

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

When Too Much is Too Much

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The other day I was having a discussion with someone on a forum about video game addiction and how one might be able to discern the difference between being “addicted” and merely playing a lot. This is the way I put it:

I’m pretty sure there was a period in my life where I could have called myself legitimately addicted to WoW. The reason I feel that I was addicted was that a.) I seriously was not ever thinking about anything else, and b.) if I didn’t play WoW for at least a few hours a day I would go to bed feeling distressed and unfulfilled.

I feel that this was different from your typical, average “I want to play a lot of videogames” mentality that I’ve always possessed. Sure, I’ve been madly in love with games before– I still get that way– and “ONE MORE TURN” syndrome is certainly not something I am unfamiliar with. :P But if it skews your worldview to the point that it occupies every waking thought for months on end and you plan your entire life around it and you play even if you don’t feel like it because it drives you to fits if you don’t, then you might have an issue.

It was weird to look back on that period of my life and admit to myself that I probably could have fallen under the category of being addicted to a game. Fortunately, however, I didn’t have it nearly as bad as some other people do, and I was able to move on from it.

This is a bit of a tricky subject to talk about, though, whichever way you slice it. Certainly not all MMO players are addicted, and even among those who could probably be classed as such, not all are having their life seriously impaired by it. Without really starting to dig into a very deep subject, I feel that “healthy addiction” isn’t entirely impossible here.

I also think that, as avid game players, we frequently have a knee-jerk “BUT I’M NOT LIKE THAT” response when this sort of thing is brought up, lest our hobby be looked down upon more than it already frequently is.

…but on the other hand, it’s probably something to keep in the back of your mind as a valid phenomena and one that you or someone you know might be familiar with. One can become addicted to anything, and games are not an exception.

The funny thing is that, for me anyway, I don’t look back at my WoW-playing-time as something that took time away from the rest of my “life”. Rather, it was something that took time away from dozens of other games that I could have been playing. Variety is, as they say, the spice of life.

And so I turn the floor over to you, readers! Ever been where I’ve been?