scrit

Gad, I feel all itchy.

I popped downstairs to the coffee bar for my morning latté and bumped into an old colleague who I haven’t spoken to for a few years. He is just getting over a bout of Chicken Pox, courtesy his kids and while he is pretty much over it (and no longer contagious), his baldy pate and face looks as though someone has peppered him with both barrels of buckshot at close range.

I know it’s psychosomatic, but I am still all itchy and I don’t have access to a backscratcher here at work, or better, a tree.

scrit

Gad, I feel all itchy.

I popped downstairs to the coffee bar for my morning latté and bumped into an old colleague who I haven’t spoken to for a few years. He is just getting over a bout of Chicken Pox, courtesy his kids and while he is pretty much over it (and no longer contagious), his baldy pate and face looks as though someone has peppered him with both barrels of buckshot at close range.

I know it’s psychosomatic, but I am still all itchy and I don’t have access to a backscratcher here at work, or better, a tree.

Warcrack Whim

Over Easter I decided on a whim to explore World of Warcraft, seeing as ellefurtle has played it for a long time and a number of my friends play it as well.

I have never been a fan of computer games beyond the odd bout of Civilization, Simm City or a succession of Championship Manager games. I certainly never understood the appeal of ‘shoot ‘em up’ games and pretty much everything just left me cold. Back in the Clapham garret days I would watch and sometimes ‘help’ colonel_maxim and/or romney from time to time, but I never loaded anything onto my PC. This means of course, that apart from never developing the requisite skills, reaction time or intuitive knowledge of how the interfaces work, that I am also far behind anyone else in such stuff as character levels.

So anyway. I opened a trial account and biffled around for a while working out which buttons to press. Then Furtle thought it might be fun to open a full account for a month or so, so I could see the full features of the game and so she could have characters interact with mine and so it goes.

So far, so good.

Now I have two observations: firstly, the game can be quite fun – more so if you have someone to play with, but still okay on your own and I can readily see how people can fritter away their lives on them. I had the same problem in the early days of Civ when it was a case of ‘just one more unit, found just one more city…’ and so forth. Last night I spent a lot longer failing a single (simple) quest than I intended (multiple times). Well, I shall keep an eye on that; I don’t intend to waste every spare moment on the game - though you should bookmark that assertion for comparison with the reality that emerges over a couple of months.

The second observation is that it is clear that big gaming companies like Blizzard give less of a toss than even I supposed. The trial version of the game worked fine. Downloading the full version took forever (more of a broadband issue) and then just hung at 70% installation. It transpired that one of the patches, which it automatically directs you to and starts downloading, is incompatible with er… almost everything.

It took me most of 36 hours to install the bloody game and get it running. And to do that I had to uninstall (and remove) my firewall, reload and install the game and then reinstall the firewall over the top before setting it to allow the game access to the intarwebs.

It’s working now and I am enjoying playing the game, but by crackey, the buggers don’t make it easy, do they?

Warcrack Whim

Over Easter I decided on a whim to explore World of Warcraft, seeing as ellefurtle has played it for a long time and a number of my friends play it as well.

I have never been a fan of computer games beyond the odd bout of Civilization, Simm City or a succession of Championship Manager games. I certainly never understood the appeal of ‘shoot ‘em up’ games and pretty much everything just left me cold. Back in the Clapham garret days I would watch and sometimes ‘help’ colonel_maxim and/or romney from time to time, but I never loaded anything onto my PC. This means of course, that apart from never developing the requisite skills, reaction time or intuitive knowledge of how the interfaces work, that I am also far behind anyone else in such stuff as character levels.

So anyway. I opened a trial account and biffled around for a while working out which buttons to press. Then Furtle thought it might be fun to open a full account for a month or so, so I could see the full features of the game and so she could have characters interact with mine and so it goes.

So far, so good.

Now I have two observations: firstly, the game can be quite fun – more so if you have someone to play with, but still okay on your own and I can readily see how people can fritter away their lives on them. I had the same problem in the early days of Civ when it was a case of ‘just one more unit, found just one more city…’ and so forth. Last night I spent a lot longer failing a single (simple) quest than I intended (multiple times). Well, I shall keep an eye on that; I don’t intend to waste every spare moment on the game - though you should bookmark that assertion for comparison with the reality that emerges over a couple of months.

The second observation is that it is clear that big gaming companies like Blizzard give less of a toss than even I supposed. The trial version of the game worked fine. Downloading the full version took forever (more of a broadband issue) and then just hung at 70% installation. It transpired that one of the patches, which it automatically directs you to and starts downloading, is incompatible with er… almost everything.

It took me most of 36 hours to install the bloody game and get it running. And to do that I had to uninstall (and remove) my firewall, reload and install the game and then reinstall the firewall over the top before setting it to allow the game access to the intarwebs.

It’s working now and I am enjoying playing the game, but by crackey, the buggers don’t make it easy, do they?