Recently in gaming + toys Category

man the summer seems to fly right by.  i wonder if there's ever going to be a way to combine the shit i toss on facebook with this journal.  that would be swell...and convenient!  well anyway...for this particular catch-up post, i won't bother with catch-ups. it's just been too long since the last real entry.  i ate, drank, went out...etc etc.  i was going to write about my travails with women too, but i'll save that for it's own post.  it's categorically comical anyway.

what i will post on though is that beauty up above...woot figureprints!  it's been nearly six years since i started playing world of warcraft, and i no longer feel the need to justify nor explain why i play and why i've played for this long.  my life is dandy, i'm not a proverbial basement dweller, and my social life is more than adequately healthy.  that being said, it's always been hard to quantify the near six years spent playing the game in a physical form i could hold, until figureprints came around.  for a nominal fee, they'll take any of your characters and print out a 3d statue of it.  so i thought for a brief second, then went...fuck yea, i want one.  it was meant as a birthday present to myself...but i got another present for myself anyway (i'll get to that later).  and this was the first cycle/expansion where i'd been part of a group that has cleared through all the content (still currently working on hard modes), so i thought it fitting to commemorate that in statue form. anyway...whatever.  it rocks.  tho i will admit...damn sonatine looks scrawny.  anorexic blood elfs don't look so intimidating in statue form...*shrug*.  my armory pose still looks infinitely more heroic. 

oh right...and in addition to this, i also got myself a big 50" plasma.  there's that too...woot.

perusing today's penny arcade and then reading the subsequent story (i'm not a console gamer, so it's all news to me) reminded again that there is a vast sea of dickery out there in the gaming world.  for the most part it's easy to avoid, or in my particular case of warcraft gaming, the instances of dickery are usually so infantile that it's easy to channel out. 

i found it coincidental then that i had to deal with my own dickery as recently as yesterday.  as any wow gamer knows, the daily pug (pick-up group for the uninitiated) is a ritual many go thru to get their shiny emblems.  i usually get mine out of the way early in the evening before a raid or just logging off and heading out the door.  i've been lucky, in that the groups i'm usually tossed into have been amiable.  yesterday pretty much shit all over that semi-flawless track record.  the run itself started off pretty bad.  upon zoning in (cos), the healer states he needs to break for 5 minutes to go shit.  i go "wtf", while the tank decides to just leave.  awesome.  a new tank arrives shortly, but starts bitching about the length of the "role-play" until he notices that we're already well into the dialogue.  red flags go up however as he liberally tosses out "fag" and "shit" in his typical communiqué.  fine, whatever.  we get thru the first half, and then the healer decides to bail too all of a sudden.  maybe he was clairvoyant. 

a replacement arrives and we continue on.  the tank wants to do an achievement, and dishes out vague and retarded directions to the rogue to do so and so.  the rogue does as he's told, and we don't get the achievement.  more "fags" are tossed about in party chat.  i tell him to shut the fuck up.  he immediately retorts with "no you" (oh shit), and proceeds to go on a diatribe about how i'm fat (hardly) and a nerd (possibly) and have never seen a vagina (i have...they're nice).  i'm unaccustomed to being bombared with 3rd grade insults, so i just tell him to stop breathing and point out that he's a fucking idiot for calling others nerds while within an online game.  he continues on about people not having seen vaginas and butchering the use of "your" vs "you're".  its intolerable.  i'm mashing the 'vote to kick' option but we're in combat.  by the time i can however, we're at the last boss, and i think "fuck it".  we jump on the last boss, i notice the little dick's not tanking...so i proceed to tank and kill the boss with little to worry about.  i type out a last message suggesting he's a failure at many things, including this game and life, and leave immediately.  in hindsight (of course), i...and we as a party, could've probably 1. gotten him killed on the last boss, 2. had him kicked properly, or 3. track down his personal info and hire professional hitmen to torment him and anyone he's associated with.  the first and second didn't happen for various reasons, and the third option can be costly and possibly illegal.  so i just put in a ticket to a gm to have him suspended.  hopefully we'll hear good news today!

you know what today is?  it's the 5th anniversary of me having sold my soul to the dark overlord of world of warcraft.  ya, it's been 5 years since i started this cocaine of mmo's.  i'm not sure who could've guessed back then how big it would get.  people anticipated the game to be a massive success...but, yea...i'm not sure they knew just how massive.  prior to wow coming out, everquest was considered a success at a "whopping" 400,000+ subscribers.  wow currently sits at over 11 million subscribers and counting.  and given that it's shown no signs of letting up, i thought it'd be fun to celebrate this 5th anniversary by giving a thorough historical recap of my time with the game, for all two of you out there who give a fucking shit.

VANILLA WOW
so the year was 2004, and the world was different.  the "horseless carriage" had just been introduced, and there were talks of "flying contraptions"....just kidding.  it was a different world tho.  the economy didn't suck, but we did have a halfwit for president. as a result, the world was pretty bleh, so it was the perfect time to introduce an mmo where people could escape to.  fonz, mike, and i jumped on board on launch day, along with a few bajillion people around the country.  we were tossed onto the realm "khadgar", where i rolled a perky human mage and went about toasting hapless sheep with fireballs.  then the server (along with a couple others) promptly shit itself under the strain of a thousand nerds.  damnit.  we got a message saying that the server would most likely be "shit" for a while, so we headed to another server, "llane".  this was a brand new "second day" east coast server, one of a couple they brought online to handle the crush of people apparently trying to escape the real world.  i rolled a night elf hunter this time, slapped on the name "moya" (my last character in morrowind was moya, hence i reused it as legacy), and off i went.

dear god this trailer for halo 3: odst is totally boss. it's directed by rupert sanders, the same guy who made the halo 3 commercials. the halo franchise seriously has had some of the best advertisements.

heres something to geek over...

hrm, yea...there's a reason why fighting games keep the japanese. ;p

one of my new favorite sites to waste time at...shmups! its a site for classic shoot'em-ups (shmups, duh), and i can't help but get nostalgic going thru some of the classics. and when i say classics, i mean classics of my era. i'm not talking about dinky atari or collecovision. we're in the sega genesis, snes, and dreamcast era. definitely a formative era of gaming. i was a big fan of the side-scrollers back when i had a sega genesis (1st gen too). thunderforce iii, gaiares, hellfire, and one of my all-time favorites to this day, musha, one of the best shooters...evar. i fucking hate that i sold my entire genesis collection. wtf was i thinking?!?! what makes it even more painful was that i used to enjoy taking out the box art and replacing it with my own hand-drawn versions...golden axe, altered beast, revenge of shinobi, streets of rage. god i wish i still had those. now all those memories are relegated to uploaded videos on youtube.

i'll admit, i shed a tear watching the intro and ending. *sniff*

mmm...nostalgia.

via gizmodo