introducing Clagh

yeah, well, been playing a bit of Warcraft in my spare time... so much so that i've given up even checking email or facebook, not that there's like anything at all to reply to ever anyway... and i can rant all i like here to the zero ppl who actually know about this site and would even bother to read this far. just look at the pretty picture.

not the best picture, but it's all i've got at the moment

saw a great Insight tonight, on Freedom of Information in this country. interestign stuff indeed. then i hoped to get onto warcraft since my WIFE had finally left it, and all servers were DOWN - it's FREAKIN' TUESDAY, scheduled maintenance night. for freeeeeeak's sake. it was working fine on the weekend, why'd ya have to 'maintain' it? but it is an amazingly deep game with awesome stories, graphics and options. so easy to get addicted to. try that free 10-day demo at your own peril!

so i created a 4th character: Clagh, some sort of little (but tough) person. i think he's a gnome. and a warlock. thought i'd give that a go. my server was crashing on the weekend. he's only a level 2, only just started, so he can't do much besides inflicting death to wolves via some sort of lightning bolt. my main dude, Milah, is my undead rogue, he's getting half decent. lev26 (out of 70+) and it's awesome how he can cannibalise corpses to recover health. how good is that? he also makes potions and stuff from herbs and alchemy. then i have 2 other alts, which i hardly ever use: my hunter with mining and engineering, Darksnark, and an orc called Mudloch, named after a comic antihero i created... i can't even remember what Muddy is good at/for. he's only a noob. like Clagh. i should say at this point that Clagh is my first foray into the realms of the 'goodies', or the Alliance. so, sure, i've sold out, but it all falls under the banner of 'experiencing the many wonders of warcraft'... the other two alts and Milah fight for the Horde, go the Horde!

Update:

Well the wife adn i finally quit the fairly all-consuming WoW addiction over Easter, and looking back, it's crazy how you 'just have to' log on to finish a quest, or to check your auctions, or something, and how 15min can turn into several hours, sore eyes and getting to bed late again. still, it was a really fun game, and a great way to relax (although was occasionally frustrating, with other gamers, or stupid quests) and totally tune out from many worldly concerns - particularly since we'd just moved house and had pretty stressful situations at work at the time, etc. i don't think it's much worse than tuning out watching TV for an evening, or whatever (it is more all-consuming), but then there are good docos on TV which could be more educational. at least now i'm getting back into playing guitar more and reading books.

oh, as for a final obituary for my characters (although i think they remain playable, if we ever decide to pay up again and log back on): Milah got to the mid-30s, but i was more and more bored by him, also it takes ages to level in the 30s, you have to do more and more quests. I actually got Clagh to 40, and got a 'mount' (this hellish horse with flaming hooves), that's part of the attraction of getting to higher levels, an animal or machine to ride so you can move around faster. i think having my 'little buddies' (various demons you 'tame' and summon for battle: imp, voidwalker, succubus, etc) made the warlock more interesting to play in the end, although i did miss the ability to stealth with my rogue.

oh, and here's what the inside of a Crocolisk corpse looks like, cool huh?

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.