My war(craft) journal #2 - the wander years

So If you read yesterdays entry , you'll know I'm playing World of Warcraft at the mo...whats that? Warcraft? ...sigh, right go read this and come back as I'm not typing it all out again.
Up to speed? good.

Are you experienced..

So on day one I'm a fresh out of the box new player (commonly reffered to as a newbie if you're nice and a OMGUFuckinN00b! if you're not),I'm shaky on my legs and if anything so much as sneezes at me I'm dead.My first aim here is to toughen myself up .How do I do this?Well in most RPG games you start off as a pissweak level 1 character...you cant do much damage to anyone, you definitely cant take much damage before dying , and you're not really useful to have around yet. However as you play the game you gain experience,(known herafter as XP) .When you gain enough experience you gain a level .With each level you gain your ability to actually hit things goes up , as does your ability to take damage, plus if you're playing as a healer type guy (like I am ) you gain new abilities that other people find useful such as healing them , or adding to their armour , or knowing where to order a decent pizza,(one of these may not be true).
So how do you get XP? , well by killing things , but also by running errands for in game characters .These are actually called Quests , but lets face it , for your first few weeks quests will consist of killing chickens, finding lost grannies and delivering parcels, which are more errand boy than epic hero. Lastly(and I like this) you get xp for finding new areas , not much but enough to actually make a bit of a difference for your first few levels.

So I spent my first 5 or 6 hours exploring the local area.Mulgore (as the region is known) is, I suppose, based on native american culture , with teepes , totems ,and lots of those Dreamcatcher type things .It's (compared to other parts I've seen since) actually the kind of place you wouldnt mind walking around in real life (except for all the rabid wolves) .You start out in the south west in a sheltered valley , and as you wander around on quests and exploring , come to a camp overlooking a lake ,(called bloodhoof) , keep heading north and eventually you come to a winding mountain path that takes finishes with a weird open wooden elevator that climbs vertically up the mountain.Take this to the top and you come to your first big city , Thunderbluff! Spread out in to several sections , each one sperated by a gorge spanning rope bridge , you can spend a few hours just wandering around the different shops and buildings.Dont assume , however that you cant fall off the bridges ,by the way , I managed it about three times, falling to my death got me a great view , but was it was a pain in the getting back to the city afterwards (more about dying next time, believe me I did enough of it).
Exploring is a pretty important part of the game at lower levels .I know after a while I'll have seen everything and will be solely a merciless killing machine , but right now its fun .One of the biggest thrills I got was when I made my way a few miles to the east and found my way into a desert town (called the crossroads , its in the slightly threatening looking "barrens"area), and was able to hire a griffen to fly me back to thunderbluff.It took about 3 minutes , but I got an amazing view of the area as I flew "home" on its back .It would have been easier to just program it so you magically teleported to the area you wanted to go to when you did this , but the fact that you get the scenic route is something I'm enjoying right now..

next time :something about the other players , oh and some action , no more about the scenery I promise

Son of 'Summat for Nowt'

A while back I posted a few online PC games that were available for free, and I received an amazing amount of comments on the subject .Unfortunately all of it was spam for online casinos.Even so, I thought I'd post some more.'Cos I'm nice like that and everything.

Anarchy Online:

Get it here

Interesting one this, traditionally MMORPGS (the term for games like 'Everquest' and 'Star Wars:Galaxies' where large groups of people play role player games on a single server, for those of you still interested it stands for Massively multiplayer online role player games), are rarely free, in fact they're the opposite as you have to pay for both the game and then a monthly fee for the privilege of using it.
Anarchy online is an exception in that, if you're prepared to play the "vanilla” version of the game you can download it for free and pay nothing for a year.
How does this work? Well in essence it acts as a "shareware" version of the game, you can do many things and go to certain areas in the game, but after a while if you want to try a certain weapon or go to a more exotic area you're told you have to have one of the add-ons to do it .You have to pay for these and to use them there’s a monthly fee. This is fair enough, as FunCom (the company behind AO) need to make money, and it’s quite possible to play the game without ever getting to an area that requires you start shelling out.
The game also has a unique enough twist in that rather than the beardy goblin bashing of everquest etc, its Sci Fi led with a great back-story.
BUT , but, but, but, but!! I have to mention how many problems I had with A.O.
I found the controls to be really awkward and while the other players seemed decent enough it wasn’t that much fun. The second day of playing the servers were shut down for what was supposed to be 3 hours but ended up being about 8.Then the game informed me that it needed a patch, which it downloaded, installed, then informed me that it needed to download the (already downloaded!) patch, which then timed out...did a full download of the manual patch (after downloading a totally mislabelled one first) this time when I ran it and it had unpacked all the data, told me that it had to download the patch from the AO server which then timed out, and so on ...
Eventually from an unnofficial forum I found out that the fix to this was to download the manual patch, extract all the data from it using a zip program, manually run a file, then edit a config file in the game files so that the version number was changed >then< run AO.
At that stage I had it working but was too pissed off to bother playing.
A few days later I decided to give it another try, ran the game, which then informed me there was another patch to be installed. Ran that and it bombed out 1/2 way through and any attempt to run the game again to patch it gave me an error that "the game had corrupt files and needed to be reinstalled".
Cue me deleting it from my hard drive. I may have been unlucky though so if you fancy playing this type of game but don’t want to spend money give the link above a try

Runescape:

Get it here
If you're on a dial up connection/rubbish PC or if you don’t want to commit to installing a large client then Runescape might be the one for you.
It runs from a java client on the runscape webpage (...er www.runescape.com), and uses a basic 3D graphics engine that’s scalable for use on lower end pcs.There's no charge to play, and although there is a premium version that you can pay a few quid a month to play, you'd have just as much fun playing the free version. Game play wise its probably closest to a somewhat basic version of Baldur’s gate or possibly Diablo. Kill things/ buy armour/ learn spells/mine/blacksmith/do quests, all from a simple mouse based control system.
Faults? Well Its because its designed to run on as many pcs as possible its horribly ugly. It can get a bit repetitive at times. Worst of all, because it’s free it tends to attract the kind of gamers who can’t afford to pay a monthly fee for gaming. I.e. kids. Quite often you'll feel like the only person above 12 on the server, and you probably will be. Plus expect outbreaks of "STFUn00b" and "OMGWTFLOL!!1!" every few minutes .If you'd seen some of the garbage these kids say to each other you'd weep for our future, I know I did.

Torus trooper

Get it here
From the guy who brought you Tumiki Fighters (mentioned last time) its torus trooper!! , 'Wipeout' meets 'Tempest' on happy drugs as you fly along a wire frame ...er torus shooting other wire frame yokes ..Amazingly fun twitch gaming, and free!!

Well that’s the lot for now, me? I'm off to play World of Warcraft, which not only costs money, also costs you something much more important, all your free time (as its that bloody addictive!!)

My war(craft) journal #1

Seeing as for reasons mentioned before I don’t really tend to write much about my life (as I don’t want to get fired from my job/my girlfriend's privacy/but mainly the fact that its really really b-o-r-i-n-g), I figured I might try an alternative kind of diary.
Recently I've taken the plunge and signed up to play "world of Warcraft" online.
WoW (as I’m now going to refer to it as its too much to be typing each time) is a totally online role player game where you play together with (or against) thousands of other ner...I mean players. Its a more involved type of game than say Quake/C.S as you play on the same server with the same people all the time, plus your character becomes more experienced the more you play allowing you greater powers, so the type of game you play after say 2 months will be different than the one you started with.
Just as an exercise I'm going to try and document some of the stuff I do, and how I progress. I promise If I find myself writing about any beardy goblin bashing and useless stats I'll delete the lot straight away ...honest*
First up here’s me in the game:

-see I'm waving!

A bit of background, Warcraft* was originally a vaguely tolkienesq war strategy game, pitting human and orc armies against each other. Sequels added other races and a fairly in-depth story line.W.O.W is very different from the earlier Warcraft games in that you only control one character (as opposed to a whole army) and get to see the Warcraft universe from a very different angle.

Warcraft III
I'd avoided 3D online rpgs up until now as I'd got completely hooked on their primitive text based predecessors(MUDS) when I was in college, to the point where I was spending 8+ hours a day playing them. But I figured that I'm a lot older and a bit wiser so I should be able to show restraint now. I'd seen it getting dome good previews of WoW from a few of the better PC mags , and the guys that run penny arcade seem to like it , so that’s good enough for me. To round things off a mate of mine, Lex had bought it on the day of release and promised to help me out in game so that sealed the deal.
On installing the game (4 disks! 3.1gb!)And finding my authentication key (tucked behind one of the cds), I was ready to register my account details and start playing.
Except I couldn’t.
Due to the fact I'd picked the weekend that 250,000 new copies of WOW had been issued to shops to start playing, I couldn’t connect to the web server to register, as it was well, broken due to the vast amounts of new users .I'm going to gloss over the wait here, but some long hours later I was allowed the privilege of giving them my credit card details.

So now I'm ready to create my online character, my avatar, my alter ego .
I chose the name Luas ,(nothing to do with trams honestly)as amonst other things its easy to type ..(the keyboard still has some use in the game and you dont want to have to type things like' /heal bhrian de'bloodaxe' in a pinch now do you?)
I'd decided to go for the "bad" faction 'the horde' (as opposed to the federation styled human "alliance") as my friend Lex was planning on playing as them..After dallying for a while with the idea of picking a member of the undead race to play as, I decided to go with the tauren, who are big (and I mean BIG!! 7-8ft in height) and Minotaur like. Whether this was because I favoured their strength and look, or because I was compensating for being a bit of a short arse in real life I'm not sure. You have a choice of different classes to pick from as well depending on what you fancy doing in the game, whether it be helping other players/dealing damage/casting spells etc. I chose the druid profession as you can do a bit of everything with that
For technical reasons there are 20 or 30 different WoW different EU servers to create characters on, .I guess you could think of them as "alternate realities" .I chose one called "frostwhisper" as it wasnt stuffed to the gills with players like some other servers, I liked the name and ,well, because the game recommended it!

So a few minutes later I’m "standing" in a grassland plain surrounded by Native American style Tepees ready to do battle. I give my mate Lex a shout in game (As he's created a character there too) and ask him to meet me. Which he sets about doing, although because he's "geographically” about a hundred odd miles away in the game, this ends up taking about 2 days.
Ok that’s all for now, next up I'll be talking about the first couple of days, the people I played alongside, the skills I learned and mostly how I died ...a lot.

*the warcraft games are around 10+ years now which is the tenuous link I'm using to be able to write about this in a "retro" blog...yeah, very tenuous I know