Currently Playing

• World of Warcraft
• Metal Gear Solid 4
• Audiosurf
  

My first regular post in a while that's not a review is going to bring me to a place I've never really properly gone before, and that's into world of warcraft.

Some quick backstory into that: I promised myself I'd never get into/pay for an MMO. The risk of addiction plus a monthy subscription plus a technically endless game equals disaster for many people... so I wanted to avoid it altogether.

However, Blizzard offers a free 10-day trial to battlenet members who aren't WoW subscribers. So, I decided to take about a week's worth of time and document my experiences into what many consider one of the most popular games ever released.

A short list of my initial experiences in the first couple hours is as follows.

• The end-user license agreement requires you to scroll to the bottom before hitting "accept". I love developers that actually think doing this gets you to read through the agreement more.
• Making a character. No, I don't want to be a cow.
  
• Character creation was... interesting. Ended up being a human mage. I know, pretty boring.
• Quests are a bit difficult to figure out... tutorials are straightforward enough, but knowing where to go and when is a bit boggling at first. Finally wrapped my head around navigating through quests and such.
• Just slaughtered eight sick wolves with a bunch of level one characters ALSO out to slaughter eight sick wolves.
  
• I keep aimlessly running around and not understanding what I'm doing, where my active quest is, etc. Would love to figure out this whole fast travel thing.
  
• Ding!
• Combat is EASY. ...with the right opponent. The right opponent = a creature at least 3 levels below you!
• Found my first inn. Upon entering, I had several strangers cast spells on me to increase my attack power, boost my defence, and give me a mr. T mohawk for an hour.
• It took me a good 20 minutes to figure out how to sell items to a merchant. That was just silly.
• I have learned about "/dance" and have taken to dancing in this inn. An owl and a devil-looking creature and a giant cow showed up to keep me company. The cow is dancing too.
• I've started a dance party in the inn.
  
• This party that I've started is getting out of hand. That lady's minion seems to be doing inappropriate things to her. I'm going to leave for tonight.
  

At the end of the night I've reached level four, and I can't wait to reach level six and buy some decent spells (I only have one fireball attack spell and it's sort of boring. Right now the only strategy is "point at thing you want to kill and mash 1 until dead", and "if you point at a thing that isn't a wolf or a bunny, it will murder you".

I'm going to go more in-depth into this later, but this game is not exactly geared toward the layman. I couldn't find many helpful humans around to teach me much of anything, and the game's help system is confusing enough. This is all coming from a pretty learned computer game user. Once I figured out how to do things it was sensible enough, but accomplishing some tasks are not exactly what one would call intuitive.

Stay tuned...