Hillsbrad Grave Site, and an Update on Crildor - 2010-07-28 17:20:30
I always appreciate it when people drop into the comments on old posts to update me on things or pass along information. For instance, I had a post on Crildor, a night elf that paths around Darnassus, that I wrote back in 2008. Back then there wasn't any detail on who exactly Crildor was, only rumors that he was supposed to be a memorial for someone. I was a tad skeptical because back then every other npc with the slightest bit of mystery would have a commenter on Wowhead or Thottbot saying that "the character is a memorial to a dead programmer/friend/etc." Well now there's a WowWiki page and a name. Check the post for an update at the end.
One of the things I'm trying to do before Cataclysm is to tour the land and visit places that either may not exist or may change somehow. Or that I just haven't gotten around to visiting - yes, there are still some left! The post about Crildor reminded me, because one of those places is the grave of Anthony Stark.
You'll find the place just south of Dun Garok, and if you've never been there (I somehow hadn't), it's just across the street from Durnhold Keep - there's even a path to take you there. I'm sure there's a Horde quest I've missed that would have sent me there to gather items and kill dwarves. (Note to self, remember to locate these quests, killing dwarves sounds fun. That link gives links to quests at Dun Garok, by the way. I now realize that I missed them because I never finished the Battle of Hillsbrad quest chain or the Elixir one either. Now restraining self from going into a Why I Don't Bother Finishing Some Chains tangent!*)
More..... 0 CommentsBack and Silly Over Pets and Tallstriders Again - 2010-07-28 15:50:23
Yup, I was on a Wow break for a bit - not because I wasn't into the game, just because there were a lot of other projects I was working on. Also there was a bit of traveling to be done, you know, in the real world. Like other Wow bloggers my jaw dropped over the whole "let's all start giving our real names" business some weeks ago - but at the same time it wasn't a deal breaker for me - I was just never going to post anything on the forums ever again. And I thought it was a silly move - I do not play Wow to have another Facebook (ugh) type social thing, and I don't want my real name all over the place for simple privacy issues. Such as I don't think future employers need to know everything about my life - not that I'm embarrassed about my Wow playing, just that I dislike having my life be an open book that way.
Anyhow I was reading the various blogs on the Cataclysm beta and wouldn't you know it, the Wow bug hit me and boom, I jumped back in game last night. And blame (not really!) where it's due - I read Mania's post about the fox pet. Ohhhh I do want a pet fox, especially a blue one. It's actually the first of the new pets that have made me say that - here's the Petopia page of new pet looks in Cataclysm. I'm going to be REALLY interested to see if Grunter stays with the look of a hellboar, because I've long wished that we were able to tame them. I'm totally "meh" about the other new pets - not interested in any of the looks so far. The crabs are interesting, but I'm not at all a fan of the monkey or the mastiff. However since the mastiff is the new starter pet for the worgen I suppose I'll get used to one - because yes, I must have a worgen hunter.
Anyhow, the short version is that Mania is in the beta and I am so thankful! I have a ton of things I am/should be working on at the moment and so I'm delighted to not be in the Beta at the moment. (Seriously!) Er, not that I'm not signed up and all. Meanwhile I'm delighted to be peeking over Mania's shoulder and reading the Petopia Cataclysm Forums to see what's in the Beta for hunters. And anyone who's interested in what the pets and places look like.
And now for the (hopefully) amusing "Batgrl Fails In Reading For Detail" story.
So I have a new pet now - a turquoise tallstrider to match the flamingo. I've gushed about that tallstrider before, so this isn't a surprise - but my fear was that - gasp! - the Clutchmother hadn't been sighted in the Beta! Oh no, it'll be gone and I must tame one now!
Now this sudden need for the turquoise bird gave me a problem - my stable slots are all full and which pet should I release?
More..... 0 CommentsCar Shopping and Gaming: Playing with the Advertising! Part one - Honda - 2010-05-05 21:21:43
Where have I been of late? Well my 14 year old car was really showing its age and we knew that it was going to start getting cranky in an expensive way just from the sound of the engine. (Not to mention that the thing lumbered along the road like a rhino with rheumatism.) But that SUV'd been an annoying, fussy vehicle all its life and it was a joy to get rid of it. So one thing I've been doing over the past few months was researching cars online - and the result was a surprise. Besides reading information on various car models I also found a hidden nest of gaming on the car websites. I know, who'da thought? It was the last place I thought I'd end up playing the online equivalent of video games.
I'm just going to cover two vehicle manufacturers because - well, you'll see the amount of screenshots I took from just those two. Short answer: quite a few. (38 in total, I think.) I'm not about to try and document the entire field of new models. (Unless one of my old academic chums wants to do a paper, I need to email her...) Plus I've noticed that some companies seem to put out one of these games for each vehicle, or at least for the new 2010 models. I should probably explain what I mean by "game." From the short perusal (a mini content analysis I might call it, were I to put on my old academic hat) of a few websites I'd say the majority of the games we're looking at are Flash games - or so I think (I'd not know Flash from other code if it were to bite me on an extremity). And none of these games were what I'd call revolutionary in design - they're the kind you'll have seen before if you've played any of the free online Flash games you'll find all over the web. The only thing that makes these (the two I'll discuss in this post) particularly interesting is that 1) they're games made to sell a specific model of car and 2) judging from the look and artwork someone has spent a good deal of time creating a unique story/idea for them. And that gives us an excuse to play Analyze That Content!
We're going with Honda first because I did have a favorite out of all these games, and I'm basing this solely on the artwork and the weirdness of the storyline. I'll admit up front that this is the car I ended up buying - but the website had nothing to do with my final decision (more on that later).
The Honda Fit
The website for the Honda Fit describes the car in a way that makes it sound more like a superhero than a vehicle. Examples: "Super-Metro Champion!" "Hyper Usability!" "Fierce Defender!" Those are just headings - for details on how the car is all of those things read the website. Frankly all of this Super Talk made me feel as though I was a tad old to be considering this vehicle (though I did once collect Batman comics), but I ended up looking it the whole thing as a spoof - a kind of "we know how foolish this sounds, nudge, wink" form of advertising.
Now you might not notice the link to the game on that page - you'll find it by clicking this image (right hand column, scroll down a bit to find it):
If you want to go play it now go try it - meanwhile I'll proceed with the spoilers! At this point I'll just say that I was highly amused with the monsters/villains.
More..... 0 CommentsVoodoo Gnome Mob: What to Do With That Pygmy Oil - 2010-03-23 21:25:43
If no one's told you about this, then you really need to get yourself a stack of Pygmy Oil (made by Alchemists) and drink it. You'll need to drink several (around 8 of them) before you get the full effect. And it's extra fun if you have a bunch of friends drink up as well...
No idea why you always turn into a female gnome. Female gnomes have more voodoo in 'em than male gnomes? Maybe gnomes have a secret all female tribe like Amazons? It's a mystery.
Also notice that if your group all has a non combat pet out the size of the group will seem larger. Not to mention that it turns the volume up on the weird factor.
I still have several alts with bags full of this oil in their banks - waiting another such occasion for humor.
- Combine with Baby Spice and Small Feast (apparently it will stack) for miniature Voodoo Gnomes.
- If you want to try and stack it with Noggenfogger be sure to drink the Nog first and get the miniature buff, then drink the Pygmy Oil, then try the Baby Spice and Small Feast. And try adding the World Enlarger if you're an engineer.
- Once you are a Pygmy you can refresh the buff by drinking another oil.
- If you have the Tiny Voodoo Mask trinket you'll have your own Voodoo Gnome Posse to match. Sad that the drop rate on that isn't higher.
- When someone uses the Noblegarden Spring Flowers to give you bunny ears, the voodoo mask is removed and your gnome will get the ears!
- As a druid, shapeshifting will remove the Pygmy transformation.
Meanwhile...
Is it just me or does it seem to you as though the gorilla pet is about to attack the gnome with the Mr. T head?!
Voodoo gnomes like to gather in secret underground chambers to have their meetings. This may or may not be the basement of the Slaughtered Lamb.
1 CommentsX-52 Rocket Helm: The Current Slightly Less Fun Version - 2010-03-23 20:38:44
So back in March of 2009 I posted about the X-52 Rocket Helm as a Must Have quest item. Ah but sadly that was before the Great Nerfing. The Rocket Helm now has the the text "Launch yourself from Outland to the stars." And while once, even though it says that, you could still use it to blast around Dalaran, this is true no longer. You can't blast off in Dalaran or Northrend any more. Which I think is particularly sad.
So I decided to post about a guild event we had with the Rocket Helm, just for nostalgia's sake. Of course before we could have a group blast off I "had" to spend quite a bit of time testing the blast off effects. That was my excuse anyway.
I'm sure it also has something to do with the fact that I like to set my gnomes on fire.
More..... 0 CommentsWhat Do Video Games Have to Do With This Banana? - 2010-03-23 06:24:48
This was one of those odd "wait, what?!" moments where I stop and realize that advertising has indeed gotten weirder on me in the last decade. So I love bananas, and I'm used to seeing that colorful oval sticker on the fruit, indicating the company that exports it. When much younger I'd either stick it onto my own forehead or attempt to attach it to a friend's. Er, this might have been in college when I was a bit too old to do that.
Anyway, the point is, I'm used to pondering that sticker as I eat the banana. And this week the sticker went all different on me. Gone was the anthropomorphic banana-lady wearing a fruit hat, and instead...
The Chiquita website led me to the Sega website where I learned more about Super Monkey Ball than I probably wanted to know. I should note that whoever chose the font for the "Step & Roll" part of the sticker design gets a fail - it's not easy to read and the color or design seems to have mis-printed somehow, blurring it even more. And randomly I found that on this Chiquita website I could place the sticker on my forehead and send them a photo of it. Which I'm not going to do, though I notice other people are.
Nothing earth-shattering about any of this. Just an odd snacking moment where I suddenly found myself thinking about video games when I least expected to.
But instead of coming away with any thought of purchasing any Sega product, I instead started wondering about the character of Chiquita Banana. For those of you who don't know of her, here's the wikipedia rundown:
"The trademark logo mascot, Chiquita Banana, was created by Dik Browne, who is best known for his Hägar the Horrible comic strip. 1940s vocalist Patti Clayton was the original 1944 voice of Chiquita Banana, followed by Elsa Miranda, June Valli and Monica Lewis. Advertisements featured the banana character wearing a fruit hat. The banana was changed into a woman in the 1980s."
Which explains why I hadn't seen Chiquita on a sticker in ages. Not in banana creature form anyway.
Once there were Chiquita banana cartoons that were shown as short films before the main feature at movie theaters. (Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, children!) I knew of this since elementary school because someone would show us such cartoons - obviously from a stash of all sorts of weird films, some like the great "educational documentaries" that MST3K would eventually riff on. We were only rarely shown these films - the occasional holiday or rainy day - but they really stuck in my memory. (I wish I'd asked where they got the films!) It was odd going to elementary school in the 70s and yet seeing all these films and cartoons from the 40s. Great background to have when I got into Film Studies in college though.
Filmography: Chiquita Banana Theatrical Commercials
ASIFA - Hollywood Animation Archive, May 25, 2006
Multiple stills of a Chiquita commercial film here. (Note that there is a racist character in one of the images there - but part of media history is remembering that used to exist. Of course the character of Chiquita was also a stereotype herself, but that's an essay in itself.)
And thanks to YouTube, here's the film itself:
Yes, once upon a time American consumers had to be told NOT to put the bananas in the fridge. (For more Chiquita advertising, try this archive at the corporate site.)
TV Acres, Advertising Mascots: Miss Chiquita
That TV Acres link gives you a look at Chiquita in her fruit hat. Which I remember used to bother me with its illogic - she's a fruit creature, but she's wearing other fruit as a hat. But then she's also encouraging people to eat bananas, so she's practically a cannibal banana creature. Then again, all the bananas seem to like the idea of being consumed rather than spending their time planning escape. It's a very surreal world.
So apparently the moral of all this is that the banana is not a vehicle to use if you want to influence me to purchase a video game. Or wait, no - the moral is that even though I may think it's weird to suddenly find my banana advertising a video game - it's still not as freaky as a singing banana-lady. I needed that reality check, I think.
Just in case you think I can't tie this into Warcraft (ah ha! I can!) - don't forget the Civilization of the Banana Tribe on that yet undiscovered island (that I gleefully documented in March of 2008), which we learned of thanks to the Damp Diary pages. Yes, you can still fish strange stuff out of the ocean, if you're lucky. And the lines
"I now know what matters. The bananas are after me."
still make me laugh.
0 CommentsThe Borderlands Saga, Or Where I Was a Few Weeks Ago - 2010-03-21 19:47:11
When I go through lulls when I'm not blogging I'm still probably playing video games. Still taking screenshots and saving them up in a computer folder somewhere, and just needing to make time to actually stop and write about the games. If not for Wow (which I've come to think of as a sort of multitude of games that I play within one MMO) I'd probably spend a lot of time playing other video games. In the past I'd usually pick up whatever game the husband had grown tired of and wasn't playing at the moment - if not because the game itself interested me then out of simple curiosity. And hey, we already owned it, why not try it?
It's been some time since I picked up a first person shooter - but it's not because I don't like them. Granted, I'm NOT very good at them, but I do enjoy the shooting, especially if the guns are ridiculously large and result in satisfying explosions or lightning or some such spectacle. Back in the day (1990s) I was a huge Doom fan. I will readily admit that I would set the game on God Mode because I simply liked killing off the demons - and it's deeply fun being invincible when mobs of beasties are attempting to chew off your face. Being invincible was definitely a great way to blow off steam after a stressful day. (As is chopping up giant mechanical spiders with a chainsaw. But then I really have a hate for spiders in video games.) I also really enjoyed Hellgate London back in 2007 - for a while, until the quests became way too similar, and I lost interest. Of course most of my enjoyment of that game was due to the fun of recognizing and exploring areas of London that I'd actually visited (like the British Museum) - and then fighting demons there. Oh and the guns - somehow the guns in Wow just aren't quite as exciting - not enough explosive-lightning-let-me-melt-that-lampost-just-for-fun moments. But then that's the sci fi genre for you, it's always good for lasers and zappy type weaponry.
Short version - sometimes I like to just shoot stuff.
So when the husband got into Borderlands a few months ago and then kept playing it for weeks I figured I should look into it, and then perhaps if it was fun perhaps I'd get a second copy and we could do some two-man scenarios. I'm only sociable in Wow, in other games I usually prefer it be me and the AI. But I'd read interesting reviews about Borderlands, so I thought, why not try it? And at least the husband can get a kick out of seeing how badly I play a shooter. (I can't remember the WW2 shooter he and I used to play, but he was forever killing me, and always easily - and it was funny. This was about 5 years ago, probably one of the Battlefield games.)
Your view as a Sniper/Hunter. Not my original character, but one I created just to take some quick screenshots today.
So in Borderlands you start playing in a sort of junkyard somewhere in the desert. The place isn't much to look at - the game is set in one of those future dystopias that's not really a place you'd want to hang around, given a choice. The art style was interesting - or so I thought at first. So I chose a character, settled in, and spent a good 4 or 5 hours playing one night. (I should add here, randomly, that I'm playing all my games on PC.)
And that was the last night I played video games for a few weeks.
More..... 3 CommentsA Recipe Fit for the Bizarre Gourmet: Dig Rat Stew - 2010-03-20 21:40:58
This is one of those quests that you can easily miss unless you somehow manage to bump into it - or unless you wonder "what the heck are these Dig Rats and why can I loot them?!" and end up Googling for more information. Ah, remember the days when there were no Wow online databases and it was all a matter of luck if you ever discovered this sort of thing? Nope, I don't miss that at all!
First of all, the Dig Rats can be found in Bael Modan, which is that dwarven quarry in the very southern part of the Barrens. These rats are unique among in game rodents (and among critters, who don't often have loot) for actually dropping loot when you kill them: Dig Rat. And sometimes - something like 2% of the time - when killed a Dig Rat may drop: Unconscious Dig Rat.
"Use: This dig rat is still struggling, why don't you let it go?"
You can then carry that Unconscious Dig Rat in your bag and eventually set it loose anywhere you choose. I can think of many fun things to do with that sort of rat - but annoyingly the drop rate keeps me from amassing a large collection of Unconscious Dig Rats. (Because I'd totally do that - can you imagine...."Hey! Where'd these 20 rats come from in the middle of our raid?!!!!) And the Once-Unconscious-Then-Released-Dig-Rat, once killed, will be lootable for more Dig Rat meat.
What do you do with Dig Rat meat? Well, first you have to find a certain culinary connoisseur in the Barrens.
His name is Grub and you'll find him in this building, near the Crossroads in the Barrens.
More..... 3 CommentsA Must Do Troll Quest: Hanging Out with Doctor Bom'bay - 2010-03-20 20:37:18
I have a huge backlog of screenshots with my horde alts, so expect to see many such posts! Frankly I can't understand why people wouldn't try at least some of the quests on the alternate faction - if only to explore the cities and see what the npc chatter is like over there. (Hey, we do have time while we wait for that expansion, right?!) And Doctor Bom'bay is definitely worth the time to look up.
You'll find him in the troll Sen'jin Village in southern Durotar - which is right next door to the area where all level 1 orcs and trolls start the game. First the pop cultural moment - his name is a reference to the television show Bewitched (though not the only in game reference!). Specifically Dr. Bombay who was the family "witch doctor" - get it? (Actually on the tv show he was a warlock, but the pun just had to be made.)
Anyway the troll Bom'bay won't offer to treat your illness until you complete a quest first. Ah, but it's not a quest that he'll give you - it's one of the trolls near him that's the questgiver. Get the quest Zalazane from Master Gadrin. It's requires that you be at least a level 4 and will have you facing an evil level 10 troll. Once you finish and turn it in, suddenly Bom'bay will talk to you if you click him:
Then choose your ailment and then brace yourself for Bom'bay's treatment.
