The Dord of Darien

Musings from the Mayor of the Internet

Happy Wottleock day

The day is finally here — Wrath of the Lich King has arrived. My Collector’s Edition hit this afternoon right as I was getting ready for work, so I haven’t had time to play with it yet; I started the install and left. I did rat through the box, though, and I played with all the contents, and some of it’s pretty groovy. I dig the artbook, and the mousepad is keen, albeit useless. I’ve played the card game before and didn’t find it particularly compelling; it’s pretty much a Magic ripoff with an added sheen of complexity and a WoW theme. No doubt I’ll give it another stab now that I have a bunch of new cards.

What’s everybody else think? Have any interesting experiences getting your copy?


November 13th, 2008 Posted by | World of Warcraft | no comments

More Final Fantasy IV

Here’s a quick little game to play:

Yang

Hold your hand over this image so that everything below the nose is covered up, and look at it for a minute. Then move your hand so you’re covering everything above the eyes and look at it again. You see what I mean? Without the mustache, he looks like a crazy karate monk. Without the braid, he looks like a tough-as-nails army colonel. With both of them, though, he doesn’t much look like a tough-as-nails karate monk army colonel; instead, he looks like your dad trying out a hip, experimental hairstyle.

Yang aside, one thing that’s getting me about the new Final Fantasy IV is the things that are mechanically different from the old version, but don’t give you any advance warning. Here’s an insiders tip for anyone who remembers the SNES game and means to play this one: Bahamut’s mega flare attack is no longer reflectable. It is entirely possible to find yourself absorbing the thick end of it and then being unable to heal before the next one comes down because all of your characters have goddamn Wall on. I mean, it could happen, in theory. Not that I know anybody that did happen to. Oh, another fun fact: there are no save points in that cave. But, on the bright side, Kain can still solo that fight, so I didn’t suffer too badly for it. Uh, I mean, theoretically.

On the subject of Kain, he’s gotten nerfed a bit (jump seems to take WAY longer to land than it used to, and for some reason they’ve tanked the accuracy on spears, so I tend to have him fight with an axe instead), and all of his dialogue has about fifteen pounds of pointless angst tacked on to it, but he’s still my favourite character. Because he r00lz, obviously. Edge is now way more of a penis than he used to be, though, and I find myself wishing I could jettison him from my party in favour of the Mustache Monk.

Quick fact: yes, there are minigames. Yes, they suck. However, they are completely ancillary to the actual game and you don’t need to play them ever.


November 13th, 2008 Posted by | Games | 6 comments