Getting back (however briefly) into World of WarCraft exposes me to all sorts of WoW related things.
For instance, the Steelseries World of WarCraft MMO gaming mouse, which has no less than 15 programmable buttons.
Which is a lot of buttons, but I guess enough buttons to be the official World of WarCraft mouse. Continue reading
We were playing an engagement party gig that had gone on for a solid three hours. It was three in the morning and the air is thick with solid beams of light, blues and greens and reds made manifest in the swirling fog. Our vocalist Lisa wants to sing Rebel Girl by Bikini Kill and I nod because she’s angry and drunk enough to do it justice tonight.
I know she’s there because I can hear her, but I can’t see her through the milky white. I don’t have time to think about it because I’m playing lead guitar and it’s complicated. Maybe we should have practiced more, but now it’s too late and we’re playing.
Then the strobes hit and I see the crowd, floating faces lit up by the light show and made bodiless by the too thick cloud that fills the too small space.
We finish strong and Lisa, her voice raw from the performance, asks if we can do it again.
Someone shouts Aqualung from the back of the family room.
And I knew then in the fog and the lights and roar of the half dozen or so people that were there that evening on the couch, that we could never go back to playing Rock Band 1.
–Â Praxis Loki, Memoirs of a Rock Band
Rock Band 2 is simply an improvement to the Rock Band interface. That said, they also made some changes to the administration of the band. I’ve heard that they also changed how you unlock songs, but since we play to party, we pretty much punch in the unlock code and then play whatever we want.
It’s not about the game man, it’s about the music. Continue reading
Azeroth, of course, being the mythical land that World of WarCraft is set.
From a purely technical standpoint, they’ve streamlined a lot of things. I’ve played a Warlock to the mid teens and was surprised at how much they’ve removed from the experience. Just as an example, they’ve removed demon trainers from the game entirely. Previously, you would have to purchase grimoires to teach your demon minions new skills. Now, they just learn them as they level up with you.
That makes a lot of sense to me, from a gameplay standpoint. I can definitely spend that virtual money on something else, and it removes another treadmill from the game. I’d rather be cursing things and setting my demon minions on them. I don’t have the time nor the impetus to teach them how to do that.
Also, from a sound design standpoint, they’ve decided to give them voices, instead of text chat, so that was surprising to me when I heard my voidwalker speak for the first time. In a way, I preferred them to be silent and creepy, but this new characterization of the voidwalker isn’t a bad thing.
I haven’t gone back to my level 44 rogue, I just feel like the rogue class is something I’ll have to ease back into. With the warlock, I didn’t have anything to unlearn from having a mid teen warlock from before. On the other hand, trying to figure out the gameplay differences from two expansions and dozens of patches for one of my highest level characters would have been something else.
They did seem to speed up the leveling process, as I have only really played for a couple of sessions, and having leveled up two entirely different characters past 10 is fairly exciting to me. I definitely ran into that wall the last time I played WoW.
Can’t post now about Mien Yu, Rock Band’s Fog machine, and how awesome Singstar is (again) with the right people. Â
I’ll be back tomorrow.
They drag me back in.
Well, in for a 10 day trial anyway. Playing a bit of World of WarCraft. 11.5 Million people can be wrong. I just want to see the changes and then see if my characters are still there.
So far, it’s still fun and there’s a lot of streamlining that’s gone on since launch. I may pick up a time card and hang out for a bit.
Still have a sweet spot for the aesthetics, it’s beautiful.