Best of ‘09

Yes, yes I know it’s late. It will also be brief, since I’m hugging a portable heater while typing (It gets cold in basements when it’s below zero outside!!!) and flu-bestricken so the old brain isn’t working too well either.

Without further ado:

Best Books of 2009 (Non Crime Fiction)

1. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel – Because there was not one thing about it I did not love. I rabbited on about it pre-Booker here, and will add nothing save for the advice that if you have not yet read it, do so!

2. A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore – Because some of her sentences take my breath away, because the story developed in ways I didn’t expect, and because Tassie is a great character.

3. The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood – Inventive as ever, witty as ever, forward-thinking as ever – just not as good (for my money) as Oryx and Crake to which it is a sequel of sorts.

4. Handling the Dead by John Ajvide Lindqvist – For putting a new spin on zombie-stories, for creating people with problems that are relatable, and managing to elicit both laughter and tears.

5. Life According to Lubka by Laurie Graham – not getting enough notice, this one. It’s fun, witty and smart, and should have been the noughties answer to Bridget Jones (if Bridget Jones were menopausal and American)….someone in marketing needs their butt kicking methinks.

Best Crime Books of 2009 (yikes this was hard to narrow down!)

1.Dark Places by Gillian Flynn – still in hardback at the moment, and hard to come by, this was the stand-out crime novel of the year. Nothing hackneyed about it, nothing predictable, an anti-heroine worth ten Lisbeth Salanders, and writing to die for.

2. The Twelve by Stuart Neville – near-impossible to believe this was a debut. The supernatural meets the ex-paramilitary in spectacular (and chilling) fashion, in the most vividly realised Belfast I have ever read.

3. The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Steig Larsson – for the court scenes alone it deserves a spot on the list. They make all the (many) flaws evaporate in a scene that Grisham would probably give his writing arm for. Bliss.

4. Genesis by Karin Slaughter – for making it ok that she killed off someone all her readers were fond of, by making the leads from her two series work together, and for proving that giving even the smallest characters backstory is not a bad thing if you do it as well as she does. It is rather gruesome though – be warned!

5. Dark Times in the City by Gene Kerrigan – This is true Dublin noir, real-feeling, gritty as hell and as unfair as life itself. Anyone looking for insight into the underbelly of the Fair City should start here.

Top Kids/Young Adult Books of 2009

1. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. I loved the Hunger Games, was wondering what she could possibly do in a sequel. More fool me, as the sequel blew the original out of the water. Kid, teen, adult, I don’t care – this screams “Read me!!!” (and is currently being hand-sold to beat the band by every bookseller I know).

2. Strange Angels by Lili St. Crow – Take that Stephenie Meyer!!! Dru is a feisty, independent, yet sometimes vulnerable teen who finds herself all alone after her Dad turns into something that goes bump in the night (or rather scritch-scratch, moan, in the night). For every woman looking to buy Twilight for her daughter/daughter’s friend/niece/godchild/granddaughter, buy sparkly-vampire anti-feminist claptrap if you must, but make sure they read this too. It’s a million times better.

3. Betrayals by Lili St. Crow – the second book in the Strange Angels series sees more going on that you’d expect, and if the setting of a school for vampires and werewolves makes you think “Hogwarts”, then you’re baying at the wrong moon. This blazed on to the NYT children’s bestseller lists late last year, and deserves to stay there for a good long time. As with the first book – it’s the perfect antidote to Twilight idiocy.

4. Crazy Hair by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean – Short, yes, fun, most definitely. Kids love having this read to them, and with good reason. The illustrations are amazing and the story is fodder of the best sort for the imagination. Lovely.

5. Beautiful Dead: Jonas by Eden Maguire – for doing something different with narrative verve and real-seeming characters you can’t help but care about.

Top Non-Fiction book of 2009

Going Rouge: Sarah Palin an American Nightmare edited by Richard Kim and Betsey Reid – a collection of articles about Palin that prove her own book (Going Rogue) to be a mind-melting work of staggering bullsh*t. And it’s funny too.

Turkey of the Year (all categories)
This year the “Dear God! Get it away from me before I puke!” award goes to More Than it Hurts You by Darrin Strauss, grossly manipulative, and just plain icky, I couldn’t even finish it. There has to be a better way to tell a story about Munchausens by proxy. I’m sure the writers for House MD will manage that in an episode sometimes soon. I’ll wait for that, thanks all the same.

Also, because I r geek:

Best Single-player game of 2009

Dragon Age: Origins. Yum. Interactive storytelling at it’s best. It has made me laugh, cry, and given me the willies non-stop since I installed it.

Best MMO of 2009

Fallen Earth Yes, I am a proud Wastelander, and this game punches well above the weight of the small independent company behind it. Aion was just too grindy and linear (despite the pretty) whereas FE has a sandbox style world I love to explore, and the best crafting I have ever seen in a MMO. Things like those matter to this geek.

Now, as regards 2010, here are some things to look forward to:

Fiction

The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris, which is excellent from start to finish, about a man with a near-perfect life who is afflicted by an illness that makes him constantly walk away from it all. This is one you’ll be hearing a lot about. Due in February.

Non-Fiction

The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar. Schenkar wrote my favourite biography of all time (Truly Wilde – about Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s niece) so I’m intrigued at what she’ll manage to do with the unprecedented access she was given to Highsmith’s friends, papers and diaries. By all accounts Highsmith was not a very nice woman, but with Schenkar steering things it’ll be a joy to read regardless. I’ve ordered a copy of this from the US, it’s being pubbed here sometime in Spring (I think).

Crime Fiction

Tainted, Black Run, Time of Death (or whatever they finally agree on) by Alex Barclay. In March, allegedly. The second Ren Bryce book holds the possibility of a run in with the gloriously evil Domenica from the first book, with Ren struggling under a cloud of suspicion when her psychiatrist is found murdered. Nothing is ever easy for poor Ren, now it would appear she’s lost her safety net too. Can’t wait.

I should also point out that Dark Places by Gillian Flynn is due out in paperback in summer, so look out for it then!

Spec-Fic

Lightborn by Tricia Sullivan. Want. Can’t tell you what it’s about as I’ve been avoiding spoilers like the plague, but this is one I’ve been waiting for for a good long while.

Phew! There you go.

I need more coffee stat!

Sundry stuff….

Ooops, I seem to have fallen off the blogging wagon lately.

To make up for it, here follows an epic post on good books, odd customers and sundry other items of interest I came across in the past few weeks.

Firstly the good books:

I just finished reading Lorrie Moore’s The Gate at the Stairs, having dragged the reading of it out over a fortnight or so, in order to savour it all the more. This is a good thing. It never ceases to amaze me how some short story writers can carry all the best points of that form (amazing thumbnail descriptions, imagery that makes you stop and go “woah!”, beaultifully (and unpretentiously) crafted sentences etc.) into the longer novel form.
Moore did it well in Anagrams and she does it here again. The book is the story of one Tassie Keltjin, the quasi-jewish (self-described) daughter of farmers who has left home to go to college. It follows her through a love affair and child-minding for a couple who adopt a mixed-race child, ostensibly very simple, but manages to do a whole lot more with it than that description would seem to allow.

The novel is set post 9/11, and derails itself slightly by letting that in on the plot rather than allowing it to set a mood that highlights the disconnectedness of people, but since evertything is so beautifully told, I’m inclined to forgive Moore for it. Especially since nothing goes quite how you’d expect it to, there are moments where the people and events stagger the reader as much as they do Tassie, the fulcrum around which everything turns (interestingly, Tassie is at an age where she thinks everything revolves around her anyway, so there’s an added layer there).

I don’t want to give anything away about the plot, but I will say, for anyone who likes lovely yummy meaty prose, this is what you are looking for.

On the lovely writing front, I also just finished Michel Faber’s The Courage Consort, and loved it too. It’s more novella than novel and follows the trvails of a group of singers sequestered together in a big house in Belgium rehearsing for a performance of an experimental acapella piece (which (the music) sounds horrific, which may or may not be beside the point). Faber is a master of scene-setting, and like Moore, he has a short-story writer’s ability to create whole people out of the smallest descriptions.None of his characters are of the stock variety, and the book is one you pick up and are quickly lost in, oblivious to hours flitting by. Can’t ask for more than that really.

On to the odd customers:

Christmas shopping time has been slower to take off this year than in others, with the result that people are doing a lot of close-to-the-wire shopping. This leads to a number of interesting exchanges, which we’re all pretty used to now.

For example:

Customer: I heard about this book on the radio a few weeks ago and thought it would be a great present for X. Do you have the book?
Bookseller: I’ll check for you, what’s the book called?
Customer: I don’t know.
Bookseller: Do you know who wrote it?
Customer (beginning to realise there may be a problem): No. I heard about it on the radio. (baleful look)
Bookseller: Okay, what was the book about?
Customer: Um, not sure really. But I knew X would like it.
Bookseller: Can you recall which radio program you heard it on? I could check the website for the show.
Customer: No…I don’t remember. (desperately and getting irritated) Do you have it or not.
Bookseller: (takes deep breath) Can you remember which radio station it was on?
Customer: (knows they’re in trouble and doesn’t like it) No. I listen to several. Do you have the book?
Bookseller: (calmly) I can’t answer that I’m afraid. I have no way of finding out what the book is, so I don’t know whether we have it or not. I can show you some of the more popular books this Christmas and we could see if anything rings a bell?
Customer: Oh, okay….

or:

Customer: I need 5 copies of (insert surprise hit book here).
Bookseller: We’ve sold out on that I’m afraid.
Customer: Oh, is it very popular?
Bookseller: Yes, it is. We should be getting some more copies in over the next couple of days. Would you like me to put 5 copies aside for you and call you when they come in?
Customer: No, I’ll just go somewhere else and get it.
(20 minutes later)
Customer: Hi, er, actually, could you put those books aside for me?

(This one is funny because when a book becomes a surprise Christmas hit, it is near-impossible to find it anywhere, unless you luck into walking into a shop when they’ve just taken delivery of it. Lots of customers have done the above dance with us this year. Mostly about Zest, which flies out of the shop quicker than you’d think possible).

Then there is the parade of people looking for out of print books, or the customer who has been given a list of books someone wants, except they want them all in hardback and the books are in print over a decade. Out of print people are always disappointed, but cheered by being sent off to Abe or Biblio to hunt down second-hand copies, Hardback guy was also sent there, since there was a chance he’d be able to source them there, hardback editions generally go out of print after a year or so…but some of the stuff he was looking for should be available from someone at either site (albeit with a hefty price-tag, a hardback of 1990’s back-list Stephen King is never going to be cheap). Of course for all the customers who are cheered by the chance of being able to find what they’re looking for online there are a bunch of others who will tell you that they do not “have any internets” and give you the evils as if you’re purposefully trying to stand between them and the books they want.

One thing has struck me this year though, and it seems to be a product of the recession. People do have less to spend, but they seem to be more sure of what they want to spend it on. They’re also more willing to listen to reccomendations, and less likely to quibble over everything. In contrast to Christmases past, we’re getting far more thanks for any help we provide than people complaining about random irrelevancies. Being thanked a dozen times a day is an odd feeling when you work in retail, but a most welcome one. It would seem that tightening purse-strings have reminded people that retail staff are people too, which is an unexpected side-benefit of the recession.

Lastly on random things:

I saw Avatar yesterday and learned two things.
1: I played too much WoW.
2: So did James Cameron. Really.

(Spoilers to follow)

In Avatar, the central characters avatar is one of the Na’vi, a tall, blue, big-eyed creater with large hands and feet, who is trying to become part of a tribe who live in a forest filled with glowy plants, the centrepiece of which is a giant tree called home tree.
He learns to become a hunter, gets a horse-type mount, then gets a flying mount (from a place where there are big floaty chunks of mountains in the air), and is then accepted into the tribe.
Eventually, to prove his worth and loyalty he gets an even more epic flying mount. Then there is a big battle.

In WoW you can play as a night elf, be blue and a hunter, and you run around in a start zone that is all pinky-purple with lush greenery, oh and in all night elf towns there is a big hollowed-out tree that all the important people live in. In order to get better at being a hunter you have to practice a lot (level up) and eventually you get to have a mount (night elves ride nightsabers, but even that gets covered in the movie). Once you level up a certain amount, you get a flying mount. Cough. And you get that in Outland, where there is a whole zone full of floaty mountains in the sky (it’s called Nagrand in WoW). If you grind gold, you can then have an epic flying mount, and if you grind faction rep you can get yourself a rare epic mount. Once you hit level cap, you can pootle around doing dailies, or you can go take part in big battles (raids).

Watching the film with my jaded WoW-players mindset, I was waiting for him to get his flying mount, his epic flapper, and then to have grinded enough rep to get let into a guild and start raiding, eventually becoming a raid-leader. And whaddya know….

I may have been more impressed with the visuals etc, if I hadn’t already seen them in a game. And not the Avatar game. But a game where you have an avatar.
Hmmmm. Interesting.
Luckily, the Na’vi story-line isn’t all that’s going on in the film, or I would have felt seriously let-down. The sign-posting of all the “twists” should be apparent to anyone from miles off, and the script really is clunky. However, 3D is always good, and Sigourney Weaver and Michelle Rodriguez rock. Sam Worthington is grand (if bland), and the Duke Nukem-style military baddie is lots of fun.

I just don’t think the movie is good enough to change movie-making forever, but then again, I didn’t think Titanic was all that great, and look how well that did. If it wins Best Picture at the Oscars I’ll be most upset, that honour should go to James Cameron’s ex-wife Katherine Bigelow for the gritty brilliance that is the Hurt Locker.

/end epic post.

MMOs, nerdrage and trolling.

Yeah, this is one of my relatively infrequent gaming-related posts. Feel free to skip it!

One of my favourite aspects about MMO gaming is the sociological aspect of it all. You really get thrown into a microcosm; you meet all kinds of people, from friendly to aggressive, sociable to achievement-focused, casuals to epeen strokers. As a word-nerd I also love MMOs because both in-game and on boards there’s a constant stream of new lexical input and memes.

One of my least favourite things about MMO gaming is that…well, that it’s a microcosm. The most obnoxious people shout the loudest and even those with no logical or rational point will insist on arguing for aeons on end about whatever they think they have a right to be mad about. There’s plenty of this to be found on the forums for any well-established MMO, but where it all comes to a head is usually right at the launch period.

For the past couple of years I’ve been keeping an eye on the progress of a game called Aion which has been up and running in Korean and China for about 18 months and is launching in Europe, North America and Australia in the next couple of days. I was watching it because it looked very very purty (indeed, I shall be referring to it as “the game of pretty” or TGOP so be mentally ready to translate in your own noggin), and because your character earns wings and can fly around in certain zones. Yum, I thought. The game is also a bit different in that it is player versus player versus environment (PvPvE) which is a mite more dynamic than a lot of other games around. Essentially, a lot of games are Player vs Environment (ie – you fight pixellated thingies controlled by a computer AI) with consensual player versus player in certain areas (player versus player means just that – you can be attacked and killed by players of the opposite faction). By consensual I mean, either you flag yourself for PvP combat (the MMO version of saying “Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough”) or you go to zones (areas) that are designed purely for PvP. Aion has perhaps the healthiest mix of PvP/PvE content I’ve come across so far. Also, and this is really really important: it’s fun as all get-out to play.

So yeah, fun new game! Woo!

Except for all the nerdrage.

Nerdrage example 1: Why should I have to pay for the game?
He starts out calm enough, but gets increasingly ragey/whiny as people try to explain the concept of capitalism. I actually, and in real life, facepalmed (this is a first). People who don’t play MMOs often ask why you have to pay a monthly fee to do so, but I have never yet seen someone complain about the initial investment (the only sure-fire money game companies make on MMOs is box/digital key sales, subscription fees are not guaranteed, and are needed to pay support and technical staff and keep servers running, the box sales are what pays for the 6 years + of development costs….)

Nerdrage example 2: Take this game and shove it!!!
Eeeep! Poor chap got an error message while playing in open beta (this is a slightly-restricted pre-launch TESTING period of the game, where developers allow a certain number of people to access servers early (and for free) in order to weed out bugs etc.) and /ragequit. There are a lot like him about.

If you pre-ordered Aion, you can (at this very moment and up until tomorrow morning Seattle time) reserve up to two characters on the server(s) of your choice. There are two player-controllable races in the game, the Asmodians and the Elyos. As of right now, the forums I linked to have (in one section alone) 23 pages of posts (that’s just post headers btw) with people bitching that they cannot roll the race they want on the server they want, or that they didn’t get the name they wanted, or that things happened half an hour later than advertised…you name it. I lost count of the numbers of people threatening to cancel their pre-orders because of any/all of the above. This in spite of the fact that some of the NC West Aion team have twitter accounts that were updated every couple of minutes to let people know what was going on and they all tweeted (using Liv’s tweet here ’cause I loved the “gogogo!” part) the second the servers were available.

This also in spite of the fact that the developers made it clear they would be balancing the servers from the start, so that there wouldn’t be too many Elyos or too many Asmodians on any one server. I can’t overstate how critical that point is. Anyone who played WAR will tell you that it’s no fun playing a game with player versus player content if there’s twice (or three times) as many players of one faction compared to the other. If you’re the bigger faction, you just steam-roll everything (it’s known as “zerging” in MMOs) which is hella boring, if you’re the smaller faction, you’re constantly being steam-rolled, time in-game is hell and the game is no fun, so you’ll either switch sides, or just quit playing. So to achieve a decent (and fair) balance, you have to do so from the second people are able to create their characters, otherwise, when retail launches and people who haven’t pre-ordered pick up the game and start playing, they’ll find that they’re stuck having to be part of whichever faction was least popular with those who pre-ordered, and that just wouldn’t be fair.

Fairness doesn’t seem to occur to the loudmouths though. There’s a long and banal string of posts created purely so people can vent/bitch/whine about how they’re being “isolated” from their guild-mates and being “forced” to roll a race they don’t want to play. What they’re willfully ignoring is the fact that race balance is dynamic, if they can’t roll Asmodean on a particular server, all they need to do is wait til some other people create Elyos characters, and then try again. Dynamic system is dynamic. But then again, whiners are also whiners.

What’s most interesting about all the rage and the whining, is that every single MMO launch I can remember was full of the same stuff. Go through a launch or two and you learn the following facts:

1. Things will never happen when they are supposed to happen. If a game launches at 8am, you probably won’t be able to access it til 10am, so there’s no point sitting at your keyboard getting angrier with every minute that passes. If the servers aren’t open, NOBODY is getting to play. If this is making you angry, you probably need to get out more.

2. Any patch deployed to fix something will break something else. MMOs are huge in terms of lines of code. Fixing something small often has unforeseen repercussions elsewhere. Seasoned MMO players are aware of this, and often don’t even try to play on patch days, wait a day and whatever got broken will probably have been fixed. Again, no point in getting angry.

3. No matter how many pre-sales there are for a game, it’s nigh on impossible to predict actual server loads when a game goes live (I might have Elyos characters on one server, and Asmodians on another, how are NC Soft supposed to know which side I’ll actually play most, or which I’ll play at launch?). You don’t want a bunch of servers that are crammed to the rafters and all laggy as a result, and you don’t want *any* that feel like a desert (no-one plays an MMO to run around a big empty world with no other players in sight, do they?). People will whine about server queues and lag, but too many servers is actually a bigger problem (cf WAR). I don’t mind queues at launches in fact I take ‘em for granted, but some people *really* do, guess what, it makes them angry…

4. WoW is the ten ton elephant in the corner at every new MMO launch. I’m so tired of reading about Aion compared to WoW, or how WoW has this and Aion doesn’t (and vice-versa), but it’s only to be expected. If 11 million people currently play WoW and for a lot of them it’s their only MMO experience, then it’s an easy point of reference. There’s no point in getting angry because Aion is not WoW (believe me, there are plenty of people doing this) since it is not claiming to be. It’s a different game. Different does not mean worse or better, it just means different. That last bit is important. There’s no point in bashing WoW (or WoW players) or attacking anyone who is critical of your new favourite game (this applies across the board), fanboi-ism is rampant, and unpretty. No matter how obvious all of this is, people will get furious defending one game over another….and really? They’re just games. Some people get over-invested.

5. A bunch of geniuses will power-level through all the low level content (not stopping to enjoy themselves along the way, or to eat or sleep for that matter), hit max level and then complain they have no-one to enjoy end-game with, that the game is therefore useless and they will also quit. These people are not very bright. See here for a most excellent parody of this mindset.

So yeah, you can pretty much take all the above as read for any MMO launch, and rather than get irritated by it, the best thing old fogeys like me can do is break out the popcorn, pull up a chair and watch the drama unfold while muttering about “kids these days”. Ah well, at least it gives me something to do until head-start begins on Sunday evening.

Noooooo!

*cough* Sorry.

I was off work yesterday and was hoping to spend the whole day levelling my main toon out in Northrend, but instead I got struck by some sort of lurgy wherein I am not only nauseated but have a head/face/jaw/neck/throat (delete none, they all hurt) that feels like it has been bitch-slapped by some sort of demon. Possibly a demon with a hangover bent on afflicting innocent gamers with the inability to enjoy their day off. Or just your generic mean-tempered demon spawn torturing mortals for the heck of it.

I intended to go into work today but on getting up this a.m I had an ear-ache of the vertigo type and wobbled around the flat for two hours before giving in and calling in sick. I then retreated to bed and slept until a few minutes ago. Love to say I feel better now, but I don’t really. I am instead continuing to dose myself with paracetamol and 7-up in preparation for work tomorrow. The joys.

So forget what I said about not posting til I’m level 74 (that would have me in Dalaran, where my toon does not actually (for RP reasons) ever want to go), I’m posting here at level 71, behind the curve because I’m too plague-ridden to play. Watching my toon move makes me feel ill. If I were a high-end raider I would consider this karmic punishment for too long spent playing WoW in general, but given that I’m not, I’m just calling it a bug that arrived with lousy timing.

The only solace is that I can read a bit, and so have made inroads into the new Michael Connelly (“The Brass Verdict”) which is erm, perfectly serviceable. I generally love Connelly but I’m having trouble keeping his plots in my brain after finishing his more recent books. I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what happened in “The Overlook” although I know I have read it. I’ll be remembering this one as “Bosch & Haller” but it remains to be seen if the plot is strong enough to park itself somewhere in my brain.

Last night I also started “Grace After Midnight” which is a sort-of memoir written by Felicia “Snoop” Pearson (yeah, Snoop from “The Wire”), it’s a small book emblazoned with praise for the ghostwriter (which I found a bit odd… surely they are supposed to be kind of anonymous?). From what I can see so far all the highly-praised ghostwriter did was transcribe conversations with Pearson and put things in some sort of chronological order. But maybe that’s why he’s so highly-praised since the book reads like listening to a monologue. It’s certainly an interesting read. I’ve just gotten as far as where she is arrested for manslaughter, and I presume the road to redemption is just a few pages over the horizon (mixing metaphors FTW!). For those of you who don’t know, “Snoop” is a genuine bona-fide reformed ex gang-banger and ex-con who was hired to play a small part in “The Wire” when one of the cast-members saw her in a bar. She was so good in the small scene they had planned for her that the character was expanded and ended up being very important in the final three seasons. Especially memorable is the scene where she goes shopping for a nail-gun to board up the doors of row-houses where she and Chris have been stashing bodies, she talks to a salesman who has never seen her like before, befuddles him completely by dropping a huge tip on him and generally makes shivers run down the spine of everyone watching. She comes out equipped with “the Lexus of nail-guns” and jokes with Chris about how the salesman thought Cadillacs were more impressive then Lexuses (Lexi? Who knows?). The scene is one that you won’t ever forget, and made “Snoop” (the character) one of the best villains ever portrayed on TV (up there with Richard Cross,  bonus points for anyone who knows what show he was the villain in).  So there you go, I’m reading a memoir based on the true-crime life of a now-actor who played a really memorable villain (just thinking about that hurts my brain!).

Off now for more 7-up and another snooze.

I r iz geek…

Which should come as no surprise to readers of this blog.

I’m taking a few days off nanowrimo (wordcount in the early 40k stages) in order to visit Northrend. Where? Um, yeah, well, Northrend is not a real place, but it is a whole new continent in World of Warcraft, and that is as close as I’m going to get to travelling anywhere until the new year.

In short, I have in my hand, the new expansion pack to the game that I play the most (well, it’s WoW, you kind of have to play it more than anything else…), and I am going away now to install it.

This blog may be very very quiet indeed for the next couple of weeks…

Your normal sporadic service will resume, er, sometime around level 75, whenever that is…

Too addictive…

Insanely geeky post warning…

The above explains lack of posting….

Seeing as I re-rolled Destruction, I have a lot of catching up to do in order to stay in line with the general leveling curve. Thus I am playing a LOT of Warhammer Online (WAR).

I think I’m doing ok as there is a lot of RvR (Realm vs Realm, think open warfare) going on in my tier at the moment, and keep sieges are a whole new experience for me, and a lot of fun. I’ve never been much of a PvP (player vs player) type, but there is something genuinely amazing (and more fun than you’d think) about two sets of players trying to beat the living daylights out of one another so they can gain control over a keep (and thus, for unguilded folks like me, actually get hold of our renown rewards).

I spent two whole hours last night as part of an ever-diminishing Destruction group trying to wrest control of Mandred’s Hold from a massive Order force. I threw in the towel when our warband was left with only 5 members (down from 20) since we were hopelessly outnumbered, and it really wasn’t much fun dying every 2 minutes, paying to have the penalty removed, running back, rezzing dead casters, HoT-ing them up (that’s heal-over-time, not anything kinky) and then getting mashed again, rinse and repeat.

Am looking forward to having another shot at it tonight though.

There is a lot of whining and complaining on various fora (spell-check not liking the correct plural of forum?) about the game, but truth be told, it’s just a lot of fun. If it keeps up this level of entertainment all the way through (and I don’t see why it shouldn’t, at least on Burlok which is a fairly busy server), I can’t see myself ever getting bored of it.

Mind you, you can only really play the game as it’s meant to be played during prime time, so for me that means that I’ll be spending a chunk of today solo-grinding public quests to get my influence level up (not a lot of fun) but it will leave me free to do nothing but RvR for the whole evening. Bonus!

Oh, and on a completely tangential note: this game could help you stop smoking. I smoke like a chimney while playing WoW since it’s largely player(s) vs computerised monsters in a very controlled environment (can do dailies with my eyes closed at this stage, and even manage the odd smoke in heroics etc.), but WAR is too dynamic for that, and I’ve noticed I’m smoking a lot less because I’m constantly busy keeping other players alive, and watching out for other players trying to kill me. An interesting side-effect of the game design, methinks, and one that makes me feel slightly better about being stuck in front of my computer screen for a few solid hours a night. (Rampant justification ahoy!)

Sorry…

I am a bad bad blogger, and I no doubt shall be punished for it somehow.

The reason I have been quiet is because I am a geek (as many of you know) and I have been too busy struggling against the twin evils that are an intermittent broadband connection and a dose of the flu, and the unfettered joy that is blasting away heretics as a witch hunter in Warhammer Online (geekish abandon personified) to even read anything, let alone post anything. 

Normal service may resume shortly. 

Til then, if you are a Destruction player on the Burlok server – Caleb has some accusations for you!

GOA Europe

….are a pack of sods.

I’ve been sitting on an open beta key for Warhammer Online for 4 months, and the daft sods made it impossible to register the key anywhere before today – which is also the day the open beta starts.

I’ve been trying to register mine since 10am, and it’s taken them til now to realise their system is buggered and take down the site for “maintenance” … when it’ll be back up again is anyone’s guess.

I’ve been a computer geek for many a year and  I know that you cannot expect to implement a wholly untested system JIT (just in time) when you’re expecting immense traffic. You’re asking to fail.

In GOA’s case, they asked people to shell out €90 for a special version of a game, with early access benefits, and then shafted everyone that did so. Not a very clever business decision. I’m lucky enough to have a US beta key that works (currently downloading new patch) but many others won’t be so lucky.

I’m a milimeter away from cancelling my order for the collectors edition and collecting a refund, then buying a normal US edition. Which makes no sense other than the fact that I will actually be able to play the damn thing.

Geeky rant over. Normal service will resume shortly.

Oh dear….

Now I might spend most of my time here giving out about lazy booksellers, bad authors and irritating customers – but I got sent a link a while back that was too good to ignore.

Given that I am a geek, it follows that I play World of Warcraft (how do you kill that which has no life…etc etc…) so I was most interested by the fact that the Chinese Military TV people seem to think Azeroth is real, and that some of it (at least) is located in the Middle East. In short, they used an in-game WoW map to represent Iran, Iraq and turkey. Click here for the proof.
I don’t know maybe they thought the mountains would pass as waves to the unaware, but with 10m players of the game worldwide it’s unlikely that no-one would notice.
And to answer the inevitable question from fellow wow-heads …

Or check out my armory link here since that thingy hasn’t updated itself in a while….