009 - No Pandas For Me

From what I can tell, there's been a bit of a buzz in certain circles the last couple of weeks, as anticipation for a particular release has increased. Today is the day that many people have likely called in sick, eager to get in plenty of time with a new game they've been waiting to play since it was announced last year.

That's right, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria hits the shelves today, and will have shot to the top of the best-selling games list as thousands of people rushed out to grab a copy. I wasn't one of them.

I haven't logged into my WoW account for over three years now. I'm not sure if they keep your characters on their servers forever, or if my once cherished characters Davarnus, Laveur, Valexia and Soddit might have been deleted by Blizzard in a cleanup of inactive accounts. I quit the game around the time that I moved in with my girlfriend, and although that change of circumstances was what forced me to stop, in truth I'd been burned out a fair while before then.

I'd been Guild Leader for Heroes of the Alliance for a couple of years, and I'm proud of the fact that I revived a dying guild from only 10 or so members into a thriving guild with over 100 members and an active casual raiding scene. I'm even prouder of the fact that the guild is still going strong three years later, with many of the same old faces running the show! I have very fond memories of raid-leading our initial forays into Karazhan, and our guild's first kill of Prince Malchezzar which netted me the first Tier 4 helmet in our guild. I have fonder memories of our first attempts to build a 25-man raid team, and our hard-won kills of Maulgar, Grull and Magtheridon.

We were late to the raiding party, so we didn't get much further in Burning Crusade. I played through Wrath of the Liche King, but had started to become tired of the effort required to keep up to date with the game, and I didn't get far into the level 80 end-game. The time that was required to maintain your equipment, level up, and then spend an entire evening raiding was, although always enjoyable, very demanding.

I'm going to say it straight. World of Warcraft was the best game I've ever played, and still is, but I have mixed feelings about the game. One part of me wants to go out and buy the expansion right now and dive back in, reunite with Heroes of the Alliance, and explore everything that I've missed out on since I left. To hell with free time. The other part of me recognises that this particular game has a knack of becoming rather all-encompassing, and before long I'd be spending far more time on it than I'd intend to. I'm not just talking about time in-game, but time spent thinking about the game, planning, theorising and generally lacking focus elsewhere in life. All that time added up, and it left little room for other things.

At the end of the day though, I have other hobbies now, and (unless against all odds my girlfriend decides she'd like to create a WoW character and give the game a try) I think I'm better off sticking to them.

To everyone returning to Azeroth today, I wish you good luck and happy exploring. Watch out for the pandas.

008 - Game of Thrones & Homeland

A few TV shows finished their 2012 runs recently, and I thought I’d share my thoughts on what I’ve been watching recently. The following will contain spoilers, so read on at your own peril!

Game of Thrones
Season 2 wrapped up with an incredible pair of episodes. I haven't yet gotten around to reading the novels (although the first one may be coming on holiday with me next week), so I’m not in a position to criticize or commend the inconsistencies between the two that I've heard exist. All I know is that on its own merits, GoT the television show has a consistently engaging and surprising storyline, excellent characterisation, and the best production values of any series I've ever watched. Parts of the battle for Kings Landing in the penultimate episode wouldn't have looked out of place in a multi-million dollar film epic, and that's no mean feat. In fact the explosive surprise, the sneaky rearguard action and the cavalry rescue were so similar to the main battle scene in the second part of a particular fantasy film trilogy that I’m surprised the George R.R. Martin didn’t find himself facing charges of plagiarism!

The final scenes which set the tone nicely for Season 3, were equally impressive. The makeup on the White Walker leader in the cliffhanger ending was top notch, and I'm excited to see where the series goes next.

Homeland
I watched this on the recommendation of a colleague at work, and definitely wasn’t disappointed. The central characters of Brody and Carrie are unlike archetype I’ve seen in other shows before – the apparently shell-shocked military POW and the brilliant but bipolar CIA analyst. At first I thought it might be treading similar ground to 24 or Sleeper Cell, it quickly established its own niche by clouding the question of whether Brody was or wasn’t working with his terrorist former captors.

I felt the season sagged a bit in the middle, around the point when the two leads became intimate and Tom Walker appeared on the scene (I did warn you there would be spoilers!). It became a little bit of a “hunt the terrorist” a la 24 - a couple of episodes passed without much happening and I couldn’t help but think that CTU would probably have caught Tom Walker within an hour (moles notwithstanding). Once again, a fantastic season finale – I’ve been a fan of Damien Lewis for a fair while now and his scenes in the bunker were incredibly acted.

Season 2 is nicely set up, with Brody poised to run for senator, with his daughter aware of his other loyalties, and Carrie likely to be a little worse for wear following her brains tangle with several thousand volts of “therapy”. Lucky for me that the next season starts in only a couple of months – a benefit of being late to the party!

Future Viewing
Now that everything I’ve been watching has finished, I’m left with a bit of a gap in my TV viewing until new things start again in the fall: Homeland S2, Breaking Bad S5 and Dexter S7 are all due to start in the next couple of months. I’m going to fill the gap by giving a try to Touch, Modern Family, Grimm, and perhaps Alphas.

007 - Not every story has to be epic

I've just finished the single player story of Assassin's Creed: Revelations which I mostly enjoyed up until the last 10 minutes.

I played all the previous games as they were released over the last few years, including sinking an obscene amount of time into Brotherhood's perfect and unique multiplayer mode, but in my opinion the story has gotten progressively worse with each game.

For the uninitiated, the action of the game takes place in a historical setting: Crusades-era Jerusalem and Acre, Renaissance Venice, Rome and Constantinople. The main character, a member of the brotherhood of Assassins, runs and jumps his way across the roofs and streets of faithfully recreated facsimiles of these iconic places, interacting with famous historical figures, fulfilling assassination contracts and building his influence in each city.

You might think this would make for a great story, and it does, but Ubisoft decided to add a twist. Every action you take as one of the historical assassins is revealed to be part of a sophisticated virtual reality simulation played out by one of their descendants in the present day, and occasionally you can have him unplug from the simulator and have a wander round the lab. In itself, this isn't bad - it frames the story as a kind of archeological or historical investigation rather than taking on the actual role of the assassin.

The writers should have stopped here, but they didn't - I have a feeling that they thought that even this time spanning idea wasn't high-concept enough.

So the characters start interacting with Jupiter and Minerva, God-like sole survivors of a pre-human civilisation that was wiped out by an apocalyptic solar flare, which threatens to again wipe out life on Earth, unless the descendant can find and unlock "the Vault" using memories pieced together from his assassin ancestors' meetings with the Roman gods. Utterly ridiculous. And I had to go to Wikipedia to learn that since it's so badly and briefly explained in the last ten minutes of the game. It's never mentioned up to that point, just like how it was crowbarred into the end of previous editions, it's completely unnecessary, and it spoils the game.

The same thing spoiled every Final Fantasy game since FF8 and I really wish the writers wouldn't do it. They must think it makes for clever storytelling, but it doesn't, and I'd rather they didn't try so hard.

/end rant

006 - Tabletop

You may already be familiar with the new YouTube channel "Geek and Sundry" which launched last week. Put together in the main by Felicia Day, it will play host to a variety of regular web-shows, one of which is Tabletop.

Hosted by Wil Wheaton (of Star Trek TNG, Stand by Me and Big Bang Theory fame), the 30 minute show gathers a few geek-culture "celebs" to play a different board game each week, and films the ensuing fun alongside explanations of the action.

In the inaugural episode this week, Tabletop demos the game Small World for Grant Imahara, Sean Plott and Jenna Busch.



I very much enjoyed watching this, and despite never having played Small World before, I now feel like I have a pretty good grasp of the rules and am itching to try it out with someone. My local games group has been known to play from time to time so I may try and get in on the action, or perhaps invest in my own copy if it looks like I could gather a group of players.

Tabletop goes through the game turn by turn, explaining the rules as things progress much in the same way as a person running a demo game would. The production values are off the scale, and Wheaton is a lively host that brings enthusiasm and fun to the table.

The next episode will feature Settlers of Catan, another game I've never played but heard good things about. If they keep the quality as high as episode 1, I'll be watching regularly.

In related news, I've just finished off Season 2 of The Guild. I know I know, late to the party and all that, but I've blitzed the first two seasons and am catching up fast. I'm hoping that Zaboo tones down the annoying as things progress as he's a very irritating character thus far, but other than that I can't fault it. I'm becoming a big fan of Felicia Day and her work, after only being vaguely aware of her up until recently.

I'll be checking out the other Geek and Sundry shows when I get chance.

005 - The Final Few Thousand

I spent an afternoon at Yorkshire Wildlife Park a couple of Sundays ago, and it was an enjoyable day out. I was surprised to find though that one enclosure in particular actually affected me pretty emotionally, and I was unable to think of much else for the rest of the day. I'm not usually one to have such reactions, but I guess some things are difficult to take in your stride.

The park had recently acquired two Amur tigers, which were relaxing nearby an impressive waterfall. We spent some time admiring the animals as they snoozed, and Charlotte snapped a couple of nice photos. The enclosure was surrounded by a wealth of information displays describing worldwide conservation efforts for the species.

I suspect I'm not alone when I say that sometimes, inevitably due to what feels like a constant barrage of charitable requests, whether coming from TV or the high street, I tend to tune out the details. It's become reduced to a vague notion that there are "millions of people" suffering in a foreign country, or that "billions of pounds" is needed to solve a world problem. Problems of immense scale, seemingly intractable and certainly difficult to fully comprehend. In contrast, two of the facts displayed on the wall of the tiger enclosure punched through the desensitisation.

1) There are only around 3200 tigers (all 5 species combined) alive in the wild today

2) Poachers in Asia kill around 300 wild tigers per year

For me, these numbers shine a bright light on what it really means to be an endangered species. Three thousand two hundred is a very small number. It's well within my ability to visualise 3200 tigers. And there are people who, in full knowledge of this number, care so little that they're willing to kill around 10% of the total population annually? Absolutely. Sickening.

And once again the reason that humans are systematically wiping out such a majestic and iconic animal? Irrational mumbo-jumbo Chinese traditional medicine, which believes that powdered tiger bone has regenerative properties. Even if this were true (and it's demonstrably not!), it would not be close to an excuse for the mass killing. Once this animal is gone, it won't be coming back, ever.

Maybe I'm being naive. Maybe you need to kill that tiger so you can earn the $50,000 it's reported to be worth on the black market in order to feed your family. Even if you were in that horrible, desperate situation, there would be alternatives. Somehow I doubt it's anything but pure profiteering though.

Until it manages to rise above all the superstitious nonsensical, harmful claptrap, I truly despair for humanity.

Thanks for reading. Now go here: Save Tigers Now

Mike

004 - Disappointingly Dull Dexter

Spoiler Alert: This post contains spoilers for some of Jeff Lindsay's Dexter novels. If you plan to read them and don't want them spoiling, please do not read the whole of this post. However, it is worth skipping to the final (spoiler-free) paragraph for my summary verdict on the first novel.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter, by Jeff Lindsay, was a Christmas present from my girlfriend, who knew I'd grown to be a massive fan of the show since discovering it around six months ago. I flew through the book, which was surprisingly short, but came out the other side feeling sorely disappointed that it didn't come close to living up to the TV series that it inspired.

My main issues are threefold:

a) Nothing happens! I appreciate that the TV series had to flesh out the story to 10 episodes, but they seem to have put in a lot of stuff that I was expecting to have come from the book, and so was disappointed to not find. With the novel being so short, there was no room for side-plots of any sort. Rita barely features at all, Dexter doesn't go on the journey to discover his past, and there's barely any of the cat-and-mouse mind game between Dexter and the killer that made the TV series so great. All the character except for Dexter himself are one-dimensional characatures, and novel-Dexter has none of the likeabilty that makes TV-Dexter so watchable despite his "hobby".

b) The killer doesn't appear until the last 15 or so pages, (most of which are given over to a long speech he makes before randomly killing a main character and disappearing. There's no tension in the scene, which ends abruptly with no closure offered.

c) Too many pages are given over to Dexter's dreams and their potential symbolism, and to his misplaced belief that he might be carrying out the murders himself in his sleep. I don't think it's because I already knew that this wasn't the case, that it felt like a waste of time having him muse so much on a possibilty that wasn't even close to plausible.

Knowing that I don't plan to ever read the subsequent books in the series, I went online to read some plot synopses and I couldn't believe what I found. Future plots include Dexter realising that Astor and Cody are potentially as screwed up as him and so training them to kill, the "Dark Passenger" being revealed as some sort of supernatural Old God, and a scene which combines the two, culminating in Astor killing the high priest of the cult of Moloch in an ancient underground temple. If you've watched the series but not read the books, you might think I'm making that up, but I assure you I'm not - the book series appears to have absolutely no grounding in reality.

Potentially the book might have been fine if read with no pre-conceptions, although apart from the central conceit of a serial-killer with a moral code, I can't say it has anything unique to say. If you, like me, are coming from the TV show and expecting this to be anything like a novelisation of Season 1, then don't say I didn't warn you. It's very different, has nowhere near the depth of story or character, and is just dull by comparison.

Stay away.

003 - There goes January

What is it about Januarys that makes them the most depressing month of the year? I wonder if it's just me, but I seem to get this feeling at the start of every year and it's hard to describe. I think it's to do with the fact that the "new beginning" of the year is such an anti-climax and all that's left after the "excitement" of New Year is the realisation that it's just the beginning of the same cycle with little changed since last year. Here we go again.

So, what have I been up to in the first one-twelfth of the year?

On the gaming front, I finally managed to finish the excellent Fallout 3, and being a massive achievement-whore, complete all the trophies to 100%. It's the first time in ages that I've felt motivated to fully complete a game, which is testament to the inspired open world setting and the vast number of things to do. My only complaint? The bug that freezes the game and crashes your PS3 on a regular basis once you reach higher levels (and the game save file grows above 500Mb. Incredibly this is too big for a current generation console to handle!). Perseverance and the conditioned behaviour of saving the game every 5 minutes got me through, but not without massive annoyance at every reboot.

I'm a little worried that Skyrim will have the same issues. It's been suggested in the media that the same bug is there in Skyrim but even at lower levels, and that the patch released to fix it only makes the problem worse. I haven't seen strong evidence of this yet, but I'm only a few hours in so far. Yes, you heard it right! Straight after finishing a 100+ hour game, I launched into an even longer one! My other games sit on the shelf for months at a time, wondering when they'll get a look in. Sorry guys, for the forseeable future I'll be killing dragons and listening to the woes of guards who used to be just like me, until they took an over-used meme in the knee.

Along with the rest of the country I really enjoyed the three Sherlock episodes earlier in the month. I loved the way Andrew Scott channelled Heath Ledger's Joker in portraying Moriarty. It might not have been deliberate but that was the vibe I was getting. Such an improvement on the tired and boring Moriarty from the recent Downey Jnr film. That guy, with his plans to profit from starting a war was only one white cat away from being a Bond villain cliche. My only gripe with Sherlock - we need more of it more often. Make the episodes shorter if necessary.

I've moved onto Dexter in the last couple of weeks, but I'm still playing catch up as I didn't start watching it until last year. Currently I'm half way into Season 5 and very much enjoying it - might post my thoughts on that in the future. Alongside that I'm reading the original novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter, which the missus got me for Christmas.

Speaking of reading, last week I finished off the first Gaunts Ghosts omnibus by Dan Abnett. Nobody writes Warhammer 40K stories like that guy, and his Ghosts characters are really likeable. I might think the game itself is garbage these days, but the 40K background and setting make for amazing fiction.

That's about all I've been up to this month (apart from a disastrously timed car breakdown and the ensuing financial problems! Mostly under control now though). Currently hoping that February features a bit of good fortune to raise my spirits!

Mike