Oct

28

2008

The Albino Drake is mine!

Following on from last week’s ‘Achievapalooza 2008!‘ post, where I basically admitted defeat and realised that Blizzard had added yet another hook in my gullet with their Achievements system (not that they really needed more hooks in there - I’m considering starting my own tackle shop with the collection they’ve bestowed on me already), I thought it was worth rah-rah’ing about a recent and more ‘tangible’ reward I’ve collected.

Since the patch went live, I’ve quickly racked up the achievements related to various daily quests, a bunch of the event themed achievements (this last week or so being ‘Hallow’s End‘, WoW’s Halloween-esque celebration of the Forsaken breaking free of the Lich King) and the rather easy fishing and cooking achievements. Being an all-rounder pays off as one of the cooking profession quests (’The Cake Is Not A Lie‘ - a cute reference to Valve’s excellent game, Portal) requires you to prepare a Delicious Chocolate Cake, the recipe for which is a random drop reward from a Fishing daily quest in Outland.

The new ability to track low-level quests on the mini-map means that my pre-TBC character now has ‘exalted’ reputation with all the old Azerothian home factions and sports the impressive sounding Ambassador title displayed in front of his name. Post-TBC chars pretty much get free rep for sneezing so it was a little more work than new characters would be expected to do but I wanted the title and sailing through level 10-20 quests while you’re a level 70 character isn’t exactly what you’d call brain surgery.

The achievement I’m happiest with is the one called ‘Leading the Cavalry‘ and requires the player to obtain 50 unique mounts (ground based or flying). It really should be called ‘How much gold can you spare?’ as it’s basically an exercise in purchasing power, visiting various vendors and snapping up their entire range of mounts. Of course, one of the first things you need to do is make sure you can purchase other race’s mounts - which is where being exalted with their faction pays off.

Long story short, I’m now riding about on a huge albino drake… behold!

To fill out the impressive effect, my character is also sporting the latest in Hallow’s End couture… the ninja costume courtesy of trick of treating an inn keeper.

Tags / achievements / blizzard / Gaming / patch / pc / portal / the burning crusade / valve / world of warcraft / wrath of the lich king /

Oct

24

2008

Extended Watchmen trailer

That March 2009 release date of Watchmen can’t come fast enough and to make sure you count every single damn second, that bastard Zack Snyder put together an extended version of the original trailer for Spike’s Scream Awards. The peeps over at FirstShowing.net were kind enough to have a wobbly cam footage of it but have recently updated their page with a lovely high quality direct feed version. Enjoy.

Featuring a few extra scenes shuffled amongst the ones from the previous trailer, this new preview certainly helps cement my faith that the finished product will be a definite step up from previous translations of Alan Moore’s work to the big screen. Sure, the tank scene looks like it might have been sponsered by Airfix but the new footage featuring Rorschach is excellent. You actually get to see his mask close enough to notice it changing patterns, something I hoped they wouldn’t mess up. And they haven’t.

So roll on March 2009, as I for one can’t wait to be watching the Watchmen.

Tags / comic book movie / trailer / watchmen / zack snyder /

Oct

21

2008

Achievapalooza 2008!

According to the rather disturbing countdown clock on WOW Insider, Blizzard’s second expansion for World Of Warcraft - Wrath Of The Lich King, is due in just under a month (okay, okay, 23 days, 3 hours, 56 minutes and 6 seconds at the time of writing. See, I told you it was rather disturbing… who needs to be that fixated on an expansion’s launch?). I have mixed feelings about the launch day. On the one hand, I’m excited by the prospect of exploring all new lands and running away from all new critters but I also remember the launch of The Burning Crusade, the last expansion. The starting areas were flooded with players just as excited and due to a tweak in respawn timers (to ensure people weren’t sat around waiting for mobs to reappear, or more likely, at each other’s throats for ‘kill stealing’), you could down a critter and before your attack animation had ceased, a replacement had spawned and already be kicking your ass. It was a little… um… hectic, those first few days.

One of the things that I was rather looking forward to and something I’d talked about in the past, was the achievements. Well, a few weeks (months?) ago they announced that they were rolling some things previously assumed to be part of WotLK forward (such as pet revamps/class revamps, vanity pet/mount interface shuffle and the incription profession). Well, in the Tue/Wed 3.0.2 patch last week, they all arrived along with the new achievements feature.

Achievements boil the game down to it’s most basic of tick-box orientated gameplay. Visited all the areas in Durotar? Well done, you earn some points. Beaten seven shades of shinola out of Edwin VanCleef? More points for you! These are just some of the easy-peasy achievements. They also combine into sets so your Durotar wanderings add to your overall Explorer achievement for East Kingdoms, Kalimdor, Outland and Northrend. Your dungeon boss killing spree counts towards your various ‘Dungeonmaster‘ achievements. Some of these achievements will even earn you some lightweight rewards like titles, tabards and vanity pets. There’s tougher achievements in the mix, some that require long-term commitments and some that acknowledge bouts of luck such as rare kills/drops. All in all, that’s one helluva list (750 achievements… currently) of boxes to tick.

Me, I’m going all OCD on the easy ones. I’ve decided that the rest are going to have to be happy accidents if I get them or I’ll end up driving myself batty like the dopes on the forums. I have to admit, it’s kinda nice going about your business, playing the game as usual then seeing the whoosh of an achievement occur. Even reviewing your ‘progress’ on some of the others tempts you into focusing your gameplay a little more.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to infiltrate an enemy faction city and spend countless hours trying to catch a rare fish, all the while getting my ass handed to me by players trying to earn that bizarre “kill-then-/hug-emote-the-corpse” achievement…

Tags / achievements / blizzard / expansion / Gaming / patch / pc / the burning crusade / world of warcraft / wrath of the lich king /