The Undersea Railroad?

I haven't really played WoW for some time now. In fact I haven't even logged in to see the 2.4 patch. I did get to hear about some of the dailies from people who do play. Apparently one of the dailies needed you to free the murloc slaves.

It was when I heard that I felt morally conflicted.

From my knowledge, murlocs were the bane of a WoW player's existence. The annoying war cry, the constant need to bring every other murloc in a 5 mile radius just because you sneezed too loudly, and even a particular CM from way back who had a murloc forum avatar. For all I knew it was poetic justice that murlocs become the slaves of naga. This of course made me very confused.

At this point I realized that it would amuse me to see MLK's famous "I Have a Dream" speech done by a murloc in the garbled murloc sounds. Even stranger was the connection to Mr. King and murlocs themselves. Take the phonetic sound of murloc and take away some letters. Mur-Lo-K. That's a little weird and I'm sure that certifies me as a conspiracy theorist.

Now that I'm done with the weirdness I think I should go and get some fresh air. This is odd even for me.

Should Gaming Future Be Multiplayer?

I was reading this article the other day and I started wondering about the state of gaming. If you look around, you'll see games making a shift into the online multiplayer medium. We've got MMOs, Internet games such as Web 2.0 and Whirled, and even services on consoles for multiplayer (Xbox Live). If this keeps up, what are we looking at in the next 5-10 years? Will single player games go the way of the dodo?

It's a phenomenon really. A MMO is a game you play where you essentially go on forever. It's a very time consuming game where the only "Game Over" point is determined by the player themselves. At some point you come to the realization that you're living a second life of sorts, and that's your reality. You will be living and working in the game just as you would in real life, albeit for marginally different goals. The fascinating part about this alternate lifestyle in a digital world is that thanks to big titles like WoW, LoTRO, and EQ we're getting more developers going in for the MMO scene.

For a very long time now most of my gaming was spent in MMOs like WoW or some other online such as Puzzle Pirates. At a certain point you're stuck needing to work with other players, and I've already given my opinion on that. It's been a couple months since I've seriously played any of those games. In the recent days I've gone back to my roots and started replaying all those old single player games I played as a kid. Believe it or not, but I was having genuine fun.

Yes, I said it. Fun. Sure I was still mucking about raging mass murder on anything that so much as sneezed, but it was entertaining. I had a story that was going somewhere instead of some insignificant text in a quest log. I had characters I could play and get into instead of some nameless vagabond who has no real impact on much of anything. When I beat the baddest bugger around I didn't have to go back and beat him senseless week after week until I left him a broken man. I picked up another of my old games and followed a new story. It's a very strange concept I can't believe I had forgotten from playing MMOs.

So that's what worries me. I see more games coming out for the high school cafeteria style of play rather than the intimate candlelit dinner under the stars style I grew up playing.

Huzzah!

Inktank is back! For those who don't know, Inktank was the site where I found the wonderful Angst Technology webcomic.

What are you waiting for? Go read some funny.

If Shaft Were A Chicken...

He'd be one baaaaad mother clucker.

Shut yo' mouth!

I'm just talking about Shaft.

The Best And Worst Thing About The Internet

People.

I'm going to start off from that very special quote in the linked article.

"The best thing about MMOs is that you can play with other people.

The worst thing about MMOs is that you have to play with other people."

This is true. I've played online since 2004 and this is a good summation of the MMO spectrum. Let's see if I can explain.

I was once a officer in a WoW raiding guild. I wound up raiding the entry level dungeon for about a year or so before my group actually cleared it. For those new to an MMO, that's a horrible clear time. Why did I do it? The people. The first generation of WoW players came from EQ. If you left a guild for progression you would get dirty looks like nobody's business. For some silly reason I had the moral of loyalty ingrained into me.

So then, I'm stuck in a guild. Why did I stay as a regular raider in a dead end guild that was clearly going nowhere fast instead of just pulling my power cable out? The people. For some silly reason it was genuinely entertaining to simply hang out with online people I could crack jokes to. That's why you play games right? To have fun? Silly concept. That's the main reason I play in forums too. Go figure.

So I've attempted to cover the good of people. Let's try the bad.

I want you, dear reader, to find a MMO's website and then look at their forums. You will find a compilation of people spewing vitriolic barbs of text at each other like you've never before seen. That's only the forums. The people in the game itself are far worse, it's real-time. Hell, I could probably watch a typical political debate over live television or a episode of Springer and just go "Meh, that's not a heated argument.". It's a veritable Murphy's Law of MMO players, "If you ever meet a random player during your gameplay, odds are they'll make you weep for humanity.".

So here we are. You play a MMO to swim through the muck and mire of awful people just to find the gems that give you hope. Sometimes you'll luck out on the first shot, sometimes you won't. That's really just one of the genre's features.

Personally I find the best kicker of the whole thing to be the fact that you're paying every month to enjoy this wonderful experience. So long as you get your new magical sword with glitter effects you can put up with anything.

*Munch* *Munch*

I found this article a little bit ago. It looks particularly interesting when comparing not only expenditures, but also the amount of fresh to packaged food of each picture. I would love to know what kinds of things the Cairo family cooks up on a typical day.

Hooray!

I have just recently learned that there's a possibility of one of my favorite shows airing more than once a week.



Okay, it's a kid's show and I'm in my 20s. So what? It's got awesome jokes and levels of corny that I like. I haven't seen this kind of humor since Pinky and the Brain back in the day. I loved that show. Animaniacs was great too.

*sigh*

No time to nostalgia, must get back to topic. So now that kicks my number of television shows I like to watch up to 2. The other being QI.........which doesn't air in the US so I have to scrounge the internet.

Here's a QI clip compilation for those who don't know of it.


You know, despite the fact I prefer somewhat educational shows with humor I still can't find a girl. Maybe I need to lower my standards.

*sigh*

When does American Idol and Survivor air?

Twingity Twangity Twong

It appears I have run out of random things to think about for the time being. The main thing I'm stuck with this week is comical songs. I guess that will have to do given as how someone has managed to get me back in the groove of inventing song lyrics. I'll have to get back to you on the lyrics bit, but here's a summary of the stuff I've been listening to this week.

Thank you, by the way, random person who introduced me to more comical musicians. I only knew of Lynch and Weird Al. Conchords is new to me.

I was first shown this:


Which led to me finding this:


And of course that reminded me of Lynch......


Which brought me back to playing the guitar with soul.....


There's several versions of that song out there, but my favorite is this one. You just don't hear songs these days on the radio with that kind of soul, you know? It's a shame really.

The Great Outside

So I was watching this show last night about how NASA was using that probe to take pictures of the surface of one of Saturn's moons. I was rather surprised that they were already up to sending a exploration probe to anywhere beyond Mars. Maybe sometime in this century they'll have taken surface photos of all the planets. I wonder if Pluto will be stripped of it's planet title again by the time they get to it.

This has led me to wonder about the possibility of sentient life out there. I'm guessing that we're not going to find any advanced civilizations due to the fact that our space probes haven't run into alien space probes. Maybe the aliens are still in the industrial era on Neptune or something. I would love to see a probe to Neptune sending back pictures of a Model T car. Even better, I'd want to see Ford try to make a case for copyright infringement against said invention.

Our supposed first contact is going to rock.