Gwardinen

Haven't been there yet, the only 80+ stuff I've done so far is about half of Mount Hyjal. I rolled up a worgen druid to try out the race and experience the starting area, and because I'd never actually played a druid. I'm meant to be reviewing the expansion so I'm trying to get in as many different experiences as possible. Druids move so goddamn fast anywhere, it seems. Worgen druids are perhaps even worse for it as they slap darkflight (+40% movement for a short time) on occasionally, and I'm moving at +30% speed generally in cat form. Not to mention that at level 20 I'll have my choice of either travel form or just running in worgen form at mount speed. I'm having a surprising amount of fun constantly switching from human to worgen to cat and back, I can only imagine that I'm going to look like an ADD shapeshifter once I have all the druid forms.

The snow is actually working wonders for me here in Manchester. My car was dodgy beforehand and is now totally unuseable so I've been forcing everyone to come to me instead. I don't think I've been anywhere outside of walking distance in over a week and I'm sort of enjoying it.

Trying to log in to European servers now that the full Cata has gone live... the login servers are so fucked it's unbelievable. Currently the way to get in is to repeatedly try to connect until it shows a blank black box, then you wait for up to half an hour and you might get into the queue for a server. Love MMO releases.

That quest also disappointed me more because it was the ending quest of the whole group of Malfurion quests in Darkshore, during which Malfurion does sweet fuck all. OK he's holding the vortex together with the strength of his will, but man I would have loved to actually do something WITH him. Each of the quests in the group is semi-lengthy and they're introduced along the lines of the team building quests in Mass Effect 2, I got the impression we were gathering these people in order to have a climactic cleansing of some kind of the elemental craziness around that section of Darkshore. Yet... no. We gather those dudes. They even show up next to Malfurion... and then they do nothing. I flew up on the dragon and shot a few enemy dragons for some reason, and then Malfurion just says good job and sends you on your way. The whirlwind is still there and you have seemingly affected pretty much nothing. For what is essentially the cap stone of a lengthy and multi-faceted quest chain, it really doesn't go anywhere. Maybe you're right and Darkshore ran out of development time, because it definitely feels like there are a lot of build up quests that never actually come to a satisfying conclusion.

I actually feel a little bad about saying Darkshore doesn't have exceptional moments, it does. Actually it has a few of them, but they just didn't quite hit for me as much as many of those in the Horde areas did. You get to ride an Ancient, which it sweet... but it's also short and seemingly a tad pointless. You also get to ride a dragon... but I'm a bit jaded on that since Northrend had you riding dragons every five minutes. You stealth around and listen to people! I actually quite like that. I'm a bit of a whore for dialogue. It's just a shame it's not voiced. Also Malfurion's there but he looks weird. There's something about his model that sort of bugs me. Let me know if you guys agree or if this is just me.

It's a shame Hillsbrad is only 20-25, half the length of many of the other areas, as it's easily one of the best. That said, perhaps the brevity helps it not outlast its welcome. For what little of the Alliance stuff I've done so far, Teldrassil is pretty much the same as it was but they have really streamlined and helped you out with some of the more annoying parts (like the barrow in which you have to seek various relics), and Darkshore is a decent 10-20 zone, though there aren't many genuinely exceptional moments. The new gnome early starting experience is great, and the music is fantastic, but it does play a lot. I've heard Westfall is good but haven't tried it myself yet.

I was going to link some articles I'd seen by her until I saw Hermie already had done. I don't rightly recall whether they were particularly amazingly insightful or not, but they definitely had some sensible thoughts behind them and a good knowledge of games. I would not have expected the person who wrote those articles to be the person in that top video. Perhaps she beat a hobo to death in an alley and stole the writing from him. I don't know. Alternatively, people who are blonde and have a "bubbly" personality can often be unfairly branded as being total numpties. Possibly.

It really is. Both in terms of a whole new game and the undead quest line being awesome. I have a Horde levelling group going at the moment and decided to get them all to come do the undead quest line and it is gorram awesome. We're level 30 now and I've never enjoyed it so much before. My one complaint is that we're now level 30 coming out of what is ostensibly a 20-25 zone, which means the next zone which is theoretically 25-30 is a bit pointless. What this means is we're probably going to entirely skip over the Arathi Highlands zone to go directly to the Hinterlands. Meaning we'll skip all the quests in a zone which might be incredibly awesome. Yeah, you heard me right, I am complaining about levelling too fast. What the fuck has happened to this game?

Is anyone still playing this? I just heard about it on a slightly older episode of the PC Gamer Podcast and watched the Quick Look. I'm kind of intrigued but as mentioned the price is a tad steep without having a confirmed second person. If anyone is still playing it, would you recommend it at this point?

Starting to sort of despair for books based on games. I'm reading Stormrage at the moment, a World of Warcraft book that I've heard is one of the better of its kind, but I'm having serious trouble with it. As always with Blizzard lore, I feel like the world shines pretty brightly, but the implementation of the individual stories themselves can be somewhat trite. Stormrage even seems like it has a somewhat interesting and relevant plot if you're curious about how various pre-Shattering events that are somewhat important in post-Shattering went down. But it also seems like it was written by a teenage boy. It's constantly explaining how big people are, and how great at martial arts they are, and how wise and powerful they are. When it's not harping on about their achievements it's harping about their failures! It swings wildly from convincing you that a given character is awesome to convincing you that they need to change their haircut to warn others of just how fucking emo they are. In addition, the actual writing is, to borrow a phrase from the Harry Potter discussion, crying out for an editor. The use of ellipses is insane. Nobody... talks... like this... unless... they're on... CSI... Miami... I presume it's intended to represent all the meaningful pauses that a proper emo must observe, but it's starting to become distracting. It is by no means the only issue with the writing itself, though, and when I'm semi-regularly reading a whole page before realising that I haven't taken any of it in because I've been fixating on the crazy writing it's definitely a problem. Help restore my faith in books based on games, Thumbs. There have to be good ones, right? Please recommend.

Mostly agreed, Forbin, post-Shattering WoW is better than the original in pretty much every way. There have been some niggles, though, as some of my favourite moments have been spoiled by technical difficulties or slightly dodgy design. Basically, because I'm old fashioned or whatever, I like cutscenes and cinematics and things that are non-interactive. I know the tide is starting to go the other way on this but now and then I like to lean back and just absorb something. It's for this reason, and that I'm a glutton for lore in-game, that I adore the sections that involve famous Warcraft characters turning up/being contacted in some way and just having a chat with each other. Post-Shattering has a lot of this pretty early on, and I love that. However, I do not love how it has been implemented, as I have experienced four of these instances so far and only one has worked 100% properly. First experience: new troll very early starting experience (awesome, by the way) - Vol'jin shows a vision of himself speaking to Garrosh Hellscream. Worked perfectly. One of the first things I did post-Shattering. Loved it and began to become a Blizzard fanboy once more. Second experience: still in the troll starting experience - Vol'jin contacts Thrall remotely. Except he doesn't. He stares at vision-Thrall, vision-Thrall stares back. Nobody speaks. Quite uncomfortable. Had to go to YouTube and look at Total Biscuit's video of the event in order to find out what was MEANT to happen. I think this is to do with the fact that another player was there and he had perhaps turned the quest in slightly before I had, but I'm not sure. Third experience: new gnome very early starting experience (also awesome, by the way; the new gnome music may come up a little too often but damn it's good) - Climactic final boss battle at level 5 involving High Tinker Mekkatorque! Hell yes! Except no, as it is completely unphased and can be activated at any time by anyone with the quest (at least I hope only those with the quest can activate it) so the dialogue Mekkatorque has to start with and the dialogue he has with the boss before the fight itself can be 100% missed without realising it if you just then stumble onto the battle. In addition, it doesn't even reset instantly so if someone has JUST finished it and you're looking for it, you can definitely wander past exactly where you're meant to go without realising it because the characters won't be there. What's worse is that you can wander in just as the fight's finishing and conceivably get credit for it without the build-up. You would then literally MISS dialogue completely, which just terrifies my little dialogue-devouring brain. Why did Blizzard invent phasing and then decide not to use it at all in such a perfect situation? Fourth experience: beginning of undead 10-20 experience (probably going to be awesome as Forbin says) - Sylvanas Windrunner speaks to Garrosh Hellscream. Except, again, she doesn't. Garrosh Hellscream sure speaks to her, but for some reason Sylvanas decides that she's tired of all this voice over crap at this point and just stays silent. I was with a party for this one and none of them could hear her. So it just sounded like Garrosh was berating a battered wife who was too frightened to speak up. Actually sort of disturbing. I've heard there have been a number of hotfixes already, so I'm hoping all of this sort of stuff will get cleaned up. Particularly those problems that are more technical issues than design should get fixed, but they have marked weird moments of frustration in an otherwise overwhelmingly positive return to Azeroth.

Been looking for more books to satisfy my Brandon Sanderson urge, cheers.

That's surprisingly awesome, though I do worry over how well such a great short film concept will translate into a full length picture.

Bleh, I'm already tired of the renaissance of young adult forbidden monster love genre of films. I was hoping that this was some kind of cool, gratuitously violent take off of the fairytale. Which I suppose it is (minus the coolness and the violence), just not in the direction I'd have preferred.

I just watched the first episode of Misfits and I have to say, I'm suitably surprised and impressed. It was much better than I thought it would be. I'll give it at least a few more episodes to see if it holds me. That said, does it make me an asshole that I felt better as soon as the others pointed out how annoying and stupid Kelly's manner of speech was?

I always wrote this off as well, but I have been told recently by someone who occasionally has good taste that it's worth watching. I haven't done so yet, but I am considering it. I hate to say something like this but the actors just look and sound so stupid that it makes it hard for me to actually take the plunge. I'm sure that's deliberate but knowing it doesn't help. There are a number of little changes, such as Bob being completely different, Murphy having a kid and not being blonde (weird thing to be annoyed about but it's there) or particularly short (less weird to be annoyed about because it informs a lot of her character) and a bunch of minor story changes and name changes (High Council instead of White Council, etc.). None of the changes are particularly important on their own, but they add up to contribute to a different tone in the TV series, and this is acknowledged by Butcher and the creators. I'm told the idea is that the TV series was designed to be completely separate and should be viewed as such, which is what I attempted to do - but as I previously mentioned, cutting that link to the books left me with little to actually recommend the series to me.

Why is Jim Butcher a dick? I like the book series too but know little about the author. I watched a few episodes of the TV series but pretty much came to the conclusion that it was neither good enough to watch on its own merits nor close enough to the book series to enjoy for that reason. I have no real issue with adaptations that don't follow the original medium closely, but changing it in that way made me not want to watch it simply for the sake of enjoying a new version of the books. Once that desire was gone, I found there wasn't much to hold me.

Weeds actually hasn't finished. If this had been the last season I might have actually watched it but now that I know it's continuing I feel meh towards it. Each season has gradually lost my interest.

I think I did Feel The Burn but I probably did not Take It To The Max. Also when I started it up I did not feel compelled to say "the feeling is amazing, you have to try this" while taking off a cardigan.

I'll say something for Kinect... I just finished "playing" some of Your Shape: Fitness Evolved and I'm more tired than when I finish a session at the gym! Then again... I don't usually go to the gym at midnight.

The first episode of the Walking Dead showed up on Halloween. I haven't read the comics so I'm looking at it purely as a TV show, and I can see potential, but I'm reserving judgement until it's more developed. The first episode's ending was pretty awesome, though.

So Lord of the Rings Online is free to play in Europe now as well as North America. I'm wondering if any Europeans are planning to give it a go, and of course you lot across the pond are welcome to use this thread to organise too. Right now I have an elf hunter by the name of Gwardinen on the Eldar EU realm, feel free to send me a friend request if you try it.

I have since learned exactly what the Galaxy coop entails and it does sound awful. That said, I've also heard that Super Mario Bros. Wii absolutely ruins friendships because there is collision between players?

On the upswing, if you actually do learn to make your atoms flow around the atoms of other "solids" there are actually a few non-gaming applications for that too. Secondary concern, obviously, but worth thinking about.

That's actually awesome.