Saturday, August 11, 2007

Games - WoW and Second Life



Got sick a couple of weeks back, had a day off work and a horribly sick weekend, and couldn't do much besides read or watch tv and wanted to play some computer games - which i generally avoid because of getting addicted and then having no time for anything else...

so i started downloading World of Warcraft, a very popular game that one of my bros has been really into at certain stages. i didn't realise it was over 3Gb, and that with our shitty 256 adsl it took 2 days to download, and then another half day of patch updates... (and if you do try the 10-day free trial, i'd suggest skipping the account details setup and downloading the whole file first so you don't lose too much of your trial time) so in the meantime i tried Second Life (which is one of those big virtual worlds i've heard about - 8.7 million 'residents' at the moment, and it was actually free and quick to download through bigpond)... just skimmed thru the interesting wiki article on second life, and came across this awesome parody page.

but Second Life really sucked, graphically it's nothing like WoW, and it's a tiny file to download anyway, so fair enough, but i just couldn't work out what you'd want to do there - i just wanted to explore, and kept getting lost around the islands that Telstra had set up as their 'free Australian area' or something, there was hardly anyone around, and the scenery was boring after a few minutes. i couldn't work out how to explore the rest of the Second Life world. and tried to get eaten by a shark which wasn't interested, checked out a nightclub and some resorty places (and got stuck in a paintball field for ages), but they seemed to be full of bogans or kids crapping on about what part of rural victoria they were from, and talking about chicks. and i felt a bit weird at those times, since i was actually a 'chick' in that world (thought i'd check out what it was like and all), and after getting 'checked out' by a couple of guys, they got hip to my gig and wondered if i was actually male (i guess my acting was pretty bad?). my wife found this all hilarious, and particularly my avatar's name, Skogg Fargis, which she thought was a terrible name for a girl. anyway, i'll stick a pic or two below of how i looked chilling out in that world, at what i assume is some sort of kanoodling point for electronic love...



and in the week or two since then my wife and i have been fighting over the computer each night to play WoW, which we are now totally hooked on - she's some sort of night-elf hunter, and i'm a undead rogue. it really is an awesome game with amazing graphics, adn so much detail in quests, characters, possibilities, 360 degree vision, etc. it's mindblowing. and totally addictive. we'll have to quit soon to reclaim our lives. i'll try and get some cool screen shots of that for a later post.