Tag Archives: games

Wrath of the Lich King

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It’s been awhile since my last post. In fact I meant to post this a couple weeks ago and sat on the draft for a couple weeks.

Since my last post I’ve kept myself busy with work, Japanese class, and bowling.

If were unaware two weeks a month ago on Nov 13th World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King was released to the world. Since then I’ve gotten back into playing, hit 80 and started raiding again.

I have to say that this expac is the best so far from Blizzard. While I did manage to hit 80 in about a week from release it was probably the best 10 levels of the game. I didn’t do any boring grind but did all the quests I could. See Blizzard has revamped the quest system for the xpac.

In the release version of the game it was common for many tests to involve killing x of some creature, or saving someone then going back and finding our stranded friend is right where you left him. This time around Blizzard still has the kil 10 “Rats of Doom” but has expanded the quests so that there are many more dynamic quests. There are rail shooters, quests which require you to pilot a vehicle, races, button mashers similar to God of War, ones which transform you into a monster and more. Not only that they’ve done a great job creating a cohesive story which evolves as you play.

From the start it feels like you’re making a contribution to the effort to defeat the Lich King. From the start your interactions seem to feed into various stories. This really stands out with Blizzard’s new use of their phasing technology. With phasing Blizzard can control who can see you, what enemies you can see, and what landscape you can interact with. Blizzard puts this to awesome use to let you change the world. Save that guy in a quest? He’s saved forever. Save a town from an attack? The bad guys sieging the castle are gone.

This is really put to great use in the later zones such as Icecrown were the good guys don’t even have a foothold. Over time you fight off the undead scourge and build new bases. Certain enemy infested areas become a safe harbor where you can rest and repair.

The other best use of this technology is the Wrathgate quest chain, which terminates with a fairly epic in game cutscene followed by you laying siege to a horde main city. It’s sweet and some of the greatest fun I’ve had in WoW. In fact with their use of phasing the game really starts to feel like a single player RPG.

Also the gameplay doesn’t stop with 80. By the time you hit 80 you’ll still probably have 2-3 zones worth of quests to do, many of which will continue to evolve the overall plot. You also can rerun many of the level up instance in Heroic mode, try out the new level 80 dungeons, and if you have 10 or 25 friends hit up the new raid dungeons.

My guild is also making forward progress on raiding. On the 10 man side we’ve cleared everything by Malygos but haven’t really bothered with Malygos yet due to schedule (we cleared Naxx the week after release).

On the 25 man side we’re on the last boss of Naxxramas and should have him done and start on Malygos tomorrow. Sadly progress has been slower here since we’ve been waiting for more guildies to hit level 80. We completed most of 25 man Naxx with around 22 people so I won’t complain too much about our slower progress :).

Returning to WoW has been fun so far and I highly recommend this expansion to anyone who has World of Warcraft. To my friends without this game, I’d say give it a try but it’s honestly a lot more fun from 70-80 than it is to get to 70. They’ve just improved the gameply that much in the latest xpac.

Busy Last Couple of Weeks

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Well it’s been a busy couple of weeks since my last post. In the last couple of weeks I’ve spent most of my time outside of work working on a presentation I’ll be giving at a conference in Japan come December. Even with this sort of sucking up my time I have done some interesting things this week.

My friend Mike Zenz (from here on out referred to as Zenz), came to visit last weekend. He was in town after spending the earlier part of the week presenting some poster at a neuroscience conference. We spent the weekend doing two primary activities. On Saturday we went Wine tasting (I bought more wine that I should have), and on Sunday we went to check out the UC-Berkeley Campus.

After walking around the campus I sort of regret not applying to go to school there. The whole place feels like you’re in a big park with some nice shady tree groves. The town area around the campus sort of feels like a normal college downtime and so is very similar to Madison. Those of you from WI imagine something like UW-Madison but with the campus transported to the UW Arboretum. I definitely would recommend the place over Stanford, when I visited there it seemed much more like a corporate campus than a University. To bad I’m done with school for the moment. Maybe some day I’ll go back to get a PhD or a Law Degree.

Last Tuesday, DoIT decided that I no longer needed access to the Campus IT resources and has taken away my NetID. I can no longer use my school e-mail address or access my grade/class information online. If anyone wants to get a hold of me please use my gmail account, or jthon<at>jthon.com.

I also picked up a couple of new PS 3 games this week bringing my total number of purchased PS 3 games to 4! (I also own a few PS 2 games to play on the PS 3.) I got the new Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction game, and Assassin’s Creed. So far in my limited playtime both of these games are enjoyable. I plan to write a full fledged review of each once I get a bit more playtime in.