Wrath of the Lich King Now in Beta

The next expansion to World of Warcraft — named Wrath of the Lich King — is now in Beta. This means it’s likely to be released by Christmas! MMO-Champion.com has tons of information on the upcoming changes.

Looks like Xenomech will be coming out of Stasis in a few months.

X-COM: Apocalypse on Windows XP

I think I finally got one of my favorite old DOS games — X-COM: Apocalypse — playable on Windows XP. The traditional way to get this game running on newer machines is to use a cool DOS emulator called DOSBox, but the times I’ve tried it in the past have been unsatisfactory…namely because the sound was poor and stuttered a lot.

But I came across a new way to get this game running and I tried it myself. I haven’t officially been able to test out the game since I did the installation of it by remote, but when I get home I’ll try it.

In case you are interested in trying this yourself, these are the steps I followed:

1. Download and Install Microsoft Virtual PC 2007
2. Create a new Windows 98 virtual machine.
3. Install the Windows 98 operating system on the virtual machine. I recommend creating an ISO image from your Windows 98 installation CD and mounting that image within the vm. The free program ImgBurn is great for making ISO images.
4. Install X-COM: Apocalypse on the virtual machine. Again, an ISO image of the original CD is recommended. However, as with the OS install, you can just use the real CD in your optical disc drive and tell the vm to use that.

And that’s it. The game is ready to go within the virtual machine!

A couple of caveats on the X-COM installer, though: when first running the installer, it sat at a black screen for a while. Just be patient. Also, after the installation is complete, the installer may sit at a black screen indefinitely. You can safely just kill the process at that point.

Cool New Frogger Game

Interesting…a Frogger arcade game utilizing a Dance Dance Revolution type user interface. That would be pretty fun.

April Fools!

The folks at Blizzard Entertainment put out crazy news items relating to their famous MMORPG World of Warcraft every April Fools day. This year, however, they’ve outdone themselves! Check out these new joke articles:

• World of Warcraft: Molten Core for the Atari 2600

• New “Bard” class

Bravo, guys! Well done!

It’s Pac-Man Time!

Woo! My custom-made Pac-man watch just came in the mail!

I designed the face myself and ordered it from ArtsNow, an online, Hong Kong based, custom-swag shop.

You can order your own Pac-man watch — exactly like mine — right now! ($15.99 + $3.00 S/H)

If I can manage to get some people to buy a few of these watches, I might be motivated enough to design a few more based on other, vintage arcade games. ;-)

Death Sausage - Week 1

The first week of the third arena season went pretty well for Death Sausage, I must say.  We were a little shaky out of the gate — combatting improper interface settings and defective voice chat communication — but we managed to win 50% of our matches.  A respectable achievement for our second week playing as a team.

World of Warcraft v2.3 Redux

It’s been a couple of weeks since the 2.3 WoW patch, so I think it’s time to revisit the list of the comments I made in an earlier post:

1. The Retribution Tree is now viable for the Paladin class.

Still true. I’m loving ret.

2. Alterac Valley sucks now.

Well, AV doesn’t suck as much anymore, but it is still not as good as it used to be. It’s nice to finally see Horde defense — something that was relatively rare pre-2.3. I like the improved strategic value of the towers in the game, but the loss of the faction lieutenants hurts. The bonus honor for the wingcommanders who reach safety is nice. Also, the queues are lightning fast, and you can rack up honor points much faster than before, with the typical game lasting 15 minutes or less. Still, the loss of the “giant PvP instance” feel hurts the battleground.

3. Daily quests are a great idea.

Wrong. Daily quests are an excellent idea. It’s ridiculously easy to make gold to buy expensive gear and enchants now. Sweet!

Death Sausage

Death Pizza is old news. Kel and I have formed a new 3-man arena team with our other friend Darren: Death Sausage. Our team now consists of a warrior, paladin, and a priest.

We played ten games last weekend — the last weekend of arena season two — and managed to win two of them. Not bad for a first batch of matches, considering Kel is undergeared and we’re all new at working together in a PvP setting.

The third arena season begins today. Let’s see how well we do.

Death Pizza

My buddy Kel and I have reformed our two-man arena team for WoW, called Death Pizza.  My pally and his warrior played our first ten matches on the weekend, winning two of them!  This was quite an accomplishment given our lack of arena experience together and Kel’s lackluster gear.  I’m not sure how my new ret-spec is going to affect how well our team will do, but I hope we’ll be able to secure a few wins each week to keep us in the 1400 point range for the time being.

World of Warcraft v2.3

After week of playing on the 2.3 patch of WoW, I have a couple of opinions to share.

1. The Retribution Tree is now viable for the Paladin class.

I used to play a ret-pally until about March or April when a friend convinced me to go prot after a patch nerfed the retribution tree a bit. I had a good spec (18/43/0, I think) and was pretty much indestructible, but it took forever to take down anything. With the changes in the 2.3 patch — like longer-lasting Vengeance and a six-second Crusader Strike cooldown — the temptation to return to the ret tree was too much. Yesterday I respecced to 20/0/41 (bye bye Avenger’s Shield, *sniff*…hello Crusader Strike!) and am loving the speed at which I can dish out the pain now. So, I’m back to playing the most disrespected spec of the most despised class: the ret-pally!

2. Alterac Valley sucks now.

Blizzard made a huge mistake in changing AV, in my opinion. It was the best battleground; a unique mix of PvE and PvP. Sadly, they took out all the lieutenants, changed the way marshals/warmasters worked, and messed up the honor rewards. It’s just not as much fun as it used to be. Oh well, maybe I’ll start to like it again in a week when I’ll need to start earning honor again (blasted 75,000 honor cap!).

3. Daily quests are a great idea.

The addition of more daily quests for the battlegrounds, dungeons, and cooking(!) gives players a reason to experience a wider variety of gameplay. Personally I think the daily quest mechanic (or some improved form of it) will most likely be what keeps the game alive in the long term (in addition to new content and system improvements, of course).

All in all, the 2.3 patch gets two huge thumbs up from me. These improvements — not to mention the new ten-man raid instance and the introduction guild banks — have, overall, made the game more enjoyable.