I haven’t had the chance to play too much WoW the entire last week or two – I’ve been working on getting this site up and running, as well as spending time outside by the pool while the weather’s favorable for it.  This is regrettable in a way, since the Midsummer Fire Festival is in full swing and I still need to get a couple pets that I missed last year.  However, believe it or not, there are things more important than WoW.

That being said, I’m really looking forward to patch 3.2 for many reasons, but one of the main reasons is the redesign of druid bear and cat forms.  At long last, my tauren druid will have some rather nifty cat forms instead of the hideous abomination of a cat form that we’ve had for nearly five years.

Now, each form for each race of druid (night elf and tauren) have several different cat and bear skins, which is insanely cool!  The downside?  I think Blizzard should have just given in and let players choose whichever bear and cat skin they wish to use instead of tying it to their character’s skin or hair color.  For night elves its not such a big deal, since hair color doesn’t necessarily change your overall character.  Tauren, though, get the bum side of this deal.  We have to change our entire skin color to change the color of our cat/bear skin.  How lame!

Being an RP-er, and having written stories for my character that introduced them to Northrend, and his reason for falling off the radar for several months (during the time I had my account deactivated), I had an idea all planned in mind to have him use the polar bear and white cat forms, since he spent a lot of time in the cold of Northrend.  But no, Blizzard has to rain on my parade.  There’s no way I’m giving my druid the “albino” tauren skin color to get the white cat and polar bear skins, that would completely change who he is.

Needless to say, I’m rather excited anyway.  Here’s a video from wow.com showing the various tauren druid forms from the 3.2 PTR.

I’ll hopefully have more time to play around the time 3.2 hits the live realms to give mini-reviews of the various new features and content included in that update. Stay tuned!

It scares me. A lot. Its daunting and intimidating. Its kind of like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re going to get. Of course, it’s “home” to millions of gamers out there and, if the last outage for scheduled maintenance a few weeks ago was any indication, many of them feel lost without it.

Gamers have had the ability for voice communication while gaming for years, well before Xbox Live was introduced. The majority of my experience with voice communication over the Internet has been with Ventrilo. I used to use it quite often while playing WoW, especially back in my hardcore raiding days. Even after that, I used it quite frequently to talk to other friends and guild-mates while playing around in Azeroth. Voice communication in general isn’t the issue. The problem, for me and I’m sure many other gamers, is that, with a service like Xbox Live, you come into contact with complete strangers all the time.

Unlike a close-knit group of friends, such as a guild in an MMORPG, Xbox Live thrusts you into a world of mostly strangers. I used to be a very shy person. I still am, to some extent, but its gotten better over the last several years. I’m very cautious about jumping right in and talking shop with complete and total strangers, even in a semi-anonymous setting like this. But that, in and of itself, isn’t where my true phobia originates. What’s worse than dealing with a different set of total strangers in each different game and setting that you can find yourself in on Xbox Live? Being at the blunt end of a nerd rage attack that happens more often than not because of the aforementioned semi-anonymity of these services.

Basically, people don’t really care who they’re yelling at and don’t take anyone else into consideration, because its all about them and what they want and what they feel. True, there are rating systems in place, and if its too bad it can be reported and/or you can ignore the offender. That still doesn’t change the fact that nerd rage conniptions happen far too often. That, my friends, is why I tend to steer clear of Xbox Live communication.

Now, I’m not the sort to be offended by every little thing that someone says or does. One time, some friends and I were playing Halo 3 and, to be honest, we weren’t very good. We were playing online in the “newbie” games and having a lot of fun. Of course, even in the “newbie” games, veteran players tend to come in just to show off and stroke their own ego. In one game we finished, there was one such person with quadruple the number of kills that the best player of us four friends. We didn’t do a thing to him, besides be on the opposing team. A few minutes later we had a voice message from him telling us that we sucked. In fact, according to him we were so bad we should never play Halo again and take our game down and sell it. Now, we got a good laugh from this. It was both funny and sad at the same time.

I would like to know how lame someone’s life must be that they have to take time away from perhaps more game play or whatever, to record a voice message to send to us to tell us something we already knew – that we weren’t that good at Halo. Seriously people? How much easier it would have been to just ignore us low-scorers and continue on with your gaming. No, but this dude had to stroke his own ego by sending us a voice message telling us that we sucked.

This one instance we laughed it off. It was all the rage the rest of the night, that’s for sure. It helped matters a lot that he sounded like a 12-year-old. But, I can only imagine that it has to get to a person who is on the bum end of a nerd rage rant on a fairly frequent basis. It gets hard to laugh off eventually. And, this isn’t the only time I experienced a similar scenario.

Experiences like that are enough to “scare” me away from spending much time with my headset attached and in free-for-all voice communication with the randomness on Xbox Live, or any similar service. What can be done to curb this? Nothing, really. Jerks will be jerks, especially when given a mostly anonymous way of communication with other human beings. There’s no force in the world that can stop a stupid person from doing what it is they do. I speak from experience.

I would definitely enjoy being able to communicate verbally with those I’ve befriended, but I don’t play multi-player online games enough to have a very large friend’s list. Besides playing with friends, I tend to stay away from these experiences because the bad apples ruin it.

I’m not saying all this to diss Xbox Live, definitely not. It’s a great service and has proved quite useful on many accounts. Its boosted the gaming industry overall and helped usher in a truly new generation of how we play and experience games. However, I can’t imagine I’m the only one who feels this way – I’d rather just avoid the voice communication aspect of the service in most cases, instead of finding myself upwind from a pungent dose of nerd rage.

I want to become a better writer, and the more I write, the likelihood that I will become better is greater.  In this case, I have a bit of a back-log of games for which to write reviews.  Will I get to them all?  Eventually.  Hopefully before fall hits and I’m buried under a landslide of new games.

Here’s a list of what’s currently on my plate:

There might be a few other XBLA and PSN games thrown in there, as well…I’ll get to them eventually.  Good luck to me finding time to write all these, when the days are so nice and I’m sitting out by the pool after work.

I posted some Borderlands wallpaper yesterday.  Today its Final Fantasy XIII’s turn.  Here’s some nifty wallpaper from that game that I’ll be using to spice up my desktop here at home.

Another summer, another Mt. Dew gamer-related promotion. Last time it was Halo, this time its World of Warcraft. While I think it’s a cool idea in theory, especially awarding everyone who even bothers to go to the Mt. Dew game fuel promo site with an in-game vanity pet (assuming you have a WoW BattleNet account), I think the idea of using the promotion to sell Mt. Dew failed miserably.

The goal of any promotion like this is to sell related items on both sides – bottles/cans of Mt. Dew and copies of World of Warcraft. In my opinion, Blizzard has the upper hand in this deal. Copies of WoW and its two expansions are everywhere. Dozens of copies line the shelves of any Best Buy, Wal-Mart, GameStop, Target or any number of other software retailers, local and nation-wide. There’s no problem there and, perhaps, Blizzard might sell some copies based on this promotion.

On the other side of the coin, I can’t find either of the two WoW game fuel flavors anywhere – not at Wal-Mart, Target or two other fairly large, more localized chains. I’ve checked a few gas stations, as well…nothing. How exactly does Mt. Dew expect to sell more products if their products aren’t on store shelves? I do realize that the stores themselves determine what products they stock and the quantity, but you would think Mt. Dew would work with any retailers who get their regular products to make sure these promotional drinks are on store shelves. This also goes for special or seasonal flavors like their new Voltage and Live Wire. I don’t drink much Mt. Dew, but the Voltage flavor is my favorite ever, and I can see it disappearing because it doesn’t sell well enough. Why? Because its incredibly hard to find.

To switch gears a tiny bit, I think it’s a sneaky move by Blizzard to require everyone to convert their WoW account to a BattleNet account to be eligible to receive the in-game Battle-Bot. With as many issues as they’ve been having with these converted BattleNet accounts, it’s a bit premature to force people to switch their account over.

Taking everything into account, I feel this is a failed promotion, mostly on Mt. Dew’s end of things (or, perhaps, the stores that sell Mt. Dew?). Mt. Dew should have done more to convince the retailers stocking their regular products to also carry a decent amount of the promotional drinks. Blizzard seems to be able to sit back and watch the cash come in, not having much to do besides designing the Battle-Bot and a few other behind-the-scenes web-based connections with the Mt. Dew site.

There’s always next year, right? I wonder what game they will team up with then? Any guesses?

[Disclaimer: I don't live in a large, metropolitan area, but I don't live in hicksville, either. Its possible large areas like Chicago or St. Louis will see a larger influx of the promotional drinks just because they will be exposed to more people. This article is just from my point of view based on my location.]

PSA: If you’re looking forward to Borderlands and want to spice up your desktop with some new wallpaper, check these out. I think I might be using some of these at home and at work.

[Via Borderlands Guide.]

One of my wife’s friends thought of a perfect anniversary gift for me this year.  Probably unlike most gamers, I actually wear dress shirts and ties fairly often.  I don’t usually wear cuff-links or tie-tacks, but I’ll definitely wear these.  They were quite a nice surprise!  Take a look.

I thought they were quite fitting for a dressy gamer geek, don’t you think?

There’s few games I would be tempted to buy the limited edition (or collector’s edition, whatever you want to call it) for.  Forza 3 could quite possibly be one of those titles.  Here’s what’s included when you pre-order the limited edition at GameStop.

• Forza Motorsport 2GB USB storage device and key chain.
• Forza Motorsport VIP membership and exclusive car pack.
• Exclusive collector’s edition car pack: Five cars (in-game, duh) that have been masterfully tuned and hand-painted by the development team at Turn 10.
• Exclusive Forza Motorsport Xbox 360 dashboard theme.

All of the above you get whether you pre-order or not, you just have to pick up the limited edition, which happens to only be available at GameStop.  But, if you pre-order it, you get an extra bonus.

• Exclusive access to download the community designed and chosen Audi R8 5.2 FSI quattro.

More information on this GameStop exclusive can be found on its pre-order page.

Now, when it comes to collector’s edition swag, unless its an art book of some sort, I’m really not interested in physical products.  However, I really enjoy them giving you a few nice in-game items – in this case, cars – to use and/or to show off as you play the game.  That’s pretty cool to me and is the whole reason I’ve bought similar collector’s edition boxes in the past.

This game is shaping up nicely and looks amazing, I can’t wait to play it this fall and, perhaps, it will be the next big racing game that I’ll become sucked into.

Final Fantasy XI was the first MMO I played.  Ever.  I got into it because of the “Final Fantasy” name, of course, but was quickly sucked into the world of Vana’diel, never to look back (until I dropped it for WoW, but that’s a whole other post).  It was great at first, but slowly and surely sucked the life out of me – forced grouping, brutally losing experience upon death, a headache of a crafting system and an infuriating end-game all finally took its toll and I quit cold turkey.

Ever since FFXIV was announced at E3 a couple weeks ago, I have thought long and hard about what they can do to improve this time around.  According to the developers, they do want the game to appeal to a wider variety of people.  I take that to mean they want to steal some thunder from World of Warcraft.  That being said, targeting the more casual player is probably the way to go.

No Forced Grouping – For the love of Cloud’s spiky hair, don’t force us to group to level up quickly.  A solo leveling track for all classes from level one to whatever the level cap is would be preferred.  How they go about it really doesn’t matter, as long as it is possible.  It doesn’t always have to be questing, some can be grinding, I don’t care, as long as there is no forced grouping.

Story-Driven Questing – I loved the story segments and cut scenes in FFXI, but now they need to expand that to quests.  Give us a hundreds of easily accessible and visible quests that each tell a unique story.  Sure, there can be a few that tell the tale of an old farmer who wants you to go kill 10 wolves so his sheep will be safe, but don’t focus on those boring MMO standby quests, either.  Make things interesting.  Experience for the quests would be nice, but its not required as long as the rewards are good and they stick to my first point.

Crafting that Means Something – This gets requested with every new MMO that comes along, and I don’t think any have actually succeeded yet.  When I spend the time and in-game currency to skill up a crafting profession, I actually want it to mean something.  I want to be able to sell what I make and make more money from it that the materials cost.  I want it to be useful to my character in more ways than just a few things every now and then.  Also, please no more “you have to face this direction at this time of day and on this day of the week to yield maximum results” or losing expensive materials in a crafting failure.

Faster Travel – Finally, something that’s not such a big deal to people, but was one thing that ended up being the straw that broke the camel’s back – the speed of travel.  In FFXI, if you missed an airship, you had to wait 12 minutes just for a new one to come in, let alone the additional five minutes for it to fly to its destination.  Chocobo rental prices always fluctuated based on their use, instead of being a fixed price that people could expect and plan for.  The means of transportation is fine, because it fits in with a typical Final Fantasy world, but the time it takes is a bit on the ridiculous side.

Those are my four major hopes and dreams for this new MMO effort by Square-Enix.  Will any of them come to pass?  Only time will tell.  Rumor has it the beta may be starting this fall.  I’d like to get in on some of that action.