The Clan of the Cave Bague

I’m gonna have to start again. Really, I am. I seem to have missed unlocking the Colloseum in mission six and there’s no way to go back and do it again. And I lost two characters I probably shouldn’t have.

These are all, of course, the thinest of excuses. It’s a great game and I want to play it again from the beginning. That’s what it comes down to.

It’s official! Since dinging 23, Trollbert is now officially my highest level character. I’m not really a “mad rush to level 60″ person – there’s just far too much to do for all that grinding and levelling. Trollbert, for example, stayed at level 19 for ages, just doing Warsong Gulch. I have another four classes at level 19 doing the same thing.

The beauty of Warcraft is the scope of the thing. Sometimes I just go and skin things to make nice leather items. Other times I just explore. Yet other times I join a gang and go off to gank gnomes.

I daresay one of them will get to level 60 eventually, but I’m in no rush.

It’s not World of Warcraft.

Well, they’re getting all grown up now. Trollbert is level 22 and Clawbert is level 21. Popped up to Ashenvale to grab the two Horde flight paths there but, well, it’s maybe a little early. Every quest I’ve come across is essentially do-able but a lot of hard work. I generally like to fly through them pretty quickly, so I’ll likely come back at level 24-5.

In the meantime, I have tons of Barrens stuff still to do and I’m off raiding Westfall as well. Time to make the alliance pay for being, well, the alliance.

She’s a Maverick Nun, who doesn’t do things by the Good Book, and she’s out to avenge the death of, well, Jesus I suppose.

It’s like a bad cop movie!

BBC NEWS | UK | Da Vinci code nun ‘not genuine’

This is a strange book. It’s actually two, really, and although both
are set in the same world with essentially the same technology, they’re several hundreds of millions of years apart and very different in style.

The McGuffin (there’s always one, isn’t there?) is ‘The Bobbler’. It’s a device which can create a perfect sphere of stopped time – impregnable and indestructible. Initially, the device is used to humanely(!) imprison jets, nuclear warheads, and so on. Right up until the point where it’s realised that the ‘bobbles’ have a limited shelf life and, when they burst, the ‘frozen’ time rolls on as if nothing had happened. Boom!

The first ‘book’ in Across Realtime deals with a post-apocalyptic Earth where humanity has been devastated by biological and chemical warfare. A less-than-honest organisation called ‘The Peace’ is suppressing all kinds of technology in an attempt to prevent any more carnage by indescriminately bobbling anyone they don’t like.

The second ‘book’ is set in the distant future. For various reasons, groups of people have voluntarily bobbled and re-bobbled themselves in order to see the distant future. This is an empty world where the bobble travellers are the only humans left in existence. And they appear to have brought a murderer along with them.

The inventiveness in Across Realtime is some of Vernor Vinge’s best – the concept of long distance space travel being made possible by dropping a nuke behind the ship and instantly bobbling the ship so it is propelled across the void for 100,000 years is genius. The future Earth portrayed is both bleak yet unspoiled, and there are some genuinely believable evolutions fifty million years down the line.

At it’s simplest level, though, the book is both an adventure story and a detective novel, with the occasional burst of insight that most Science Fiction authors can only wish for. Across Realtime isn’t in the same epic league as Fire Upon The Deep or A Deepness In The Sky but it’s not far off.

Well, in a manner of speaking. The couple who are buying our house have finally accepted an offer on their house, so things on that front won’t be hanging in limbo. We still have no idea how to work it. Basically, we have two options:

1) The easy option. Stay where we are until it’s time to go. Pros: less hassle, don’t have to move twice, don’t have to rent. Cons: we have to stay in this god-forsaken hell hole a little longer and are likely to leave the UK with a very bad impression of it.

2) The annoying option. Sell as early as possible and rent for a few months. Pros: we get out of the horrible place we’re living. Cons: we have to rent.

I suppose it really doesn’t make much difference in the long run, but at this stage simpler==better. The less faff and hassle we have the better, as far as I’m concerned.

Anyhoo – we’ll see how things progress in the next week or so.

Some Things Just Need To Be Done(tm)

There’s a voodoo Troll bloke on Echo Isles in Southern Durotar who was the bane of Trollbert’s life at level 10. He’s a malignant git with a habit of shrinking you then ganking you.

So, I had a spare moment or two to get a bit of revenge and Pooky (a level 22 fire mage) happened to be in the area.

It’s amazing how satisfying it can be to keep the same mob sheeped for a good twenty minutes after raining fiery destruction on his whole village.

(Ignore the dodgy colours in the screenshot, by the way – it was playing on a dreadful Intel video card on my work PC, not my nice shiny laptop).

And yes, he did shrink me, but he was sheeped a lot longer than I was shrunk.

I’ve just realised I haven’t actually completed any games this year. At all.

There are a few reasons for this:

1) World of Warcraft

2) I’ve been flitting about and not really playing anything with any real seriousness

3) World of Warcraft

4) Too much other stuff going on

5) World of Warcraft.

So there we have it. Roll on the Wii!

Mooriel the druid had an epic and extremely intense session in 10-19 battlegrounds yesterday – it went on for about 50 minutes and, for once, both Horde and Alliance were more or less equally twinked. I’ve decided that big stupid cow druids are the dogs’ in Warsong Gulch.

Anyhoo, I also had to send some silver and shoes (!) to my wee lad’s Hunter (I’m not twinking him – it’s just handy to have a dad who can craft all green leather armour), so I spent ages thumping things with a big hammer to get enough leather.

It got me thinking, though, that money really is pretty hard to come by in the first ten levels. It’s fine if you’re just charging through the quests in order to get to a level where you’re useful to a group, but he had spent a bit of time exploring and had bumped into some mobs who did pretty severe damage to his equipment. Trouble is, his weapon hit zero durability so he couldn’t kill anything to get more cash. Anyway, I’ve bailed him out (this time!) so hopefully a lesson has been learned. I’m sure he’ll be level 60 before me, though, and will have a great career of n00b pwnage stretching before him.