Category: Tech

The Warcraft Post

January 26, 2012

It had been about 2.5 years since I last played World of Warcraft and a lot had happened in the game during that time. Specifically, an expansion (Cataclysm) and four major content patches. I had missed a lot!

For about two years of that time my interest in the game was dulled, but during last semester I began to have pinings, and since I received Cataclysm for Christmas I eagerly reinstalled and resubscribed to the game upon arriving back from Australia and am now back on the wagon.

That’s the first of the two possible starting zones that I explored – an underwater zone called Vashj’ir. The screenshot is taken on my new iMac, which I bought when I started playing since the game ran poorly on my old one (they updated the system requirements for the Mac client to no longer fully support pre-Lion OS). The underwater zone was a lot of fun, but I think a poor showcase for Cataclysm as a whole. Compared to the other new zones, it is graphically the worst by far. Check out these shots of Uldum, a lvl 85 zone:

Or another high level zone, The Twilight Highlands:

Or the elemental earth plane, Deepholm:

Beautiful aren’t they? Since I’ve always loved Warcraft’s graphics, and exploring, a lot of my thrill of playing again is to see all the new zones and the amazing Blizzard art direction.

It took me about 5 days to get to level 85 (the new cap), playing a bit like a madman. By then I had only explored 2.5 of the 5 new questing zones, so I suspect since I am coming in on the tail end of an expansion the leveling curve has been reduced somewhat.

Blizzard has also added a great deal of mechanisms to speed up the gear aquisition process and make the game less of a grind. As such, I was able – the day after hitting 85 – to enter the new end-game raid ‘The Madness of Deathwing’ and even take down the final boss. Such things would have been inconceivable in the WoW of old:

I was still very poorly equipped – notice my apalling DPS in the above shot 🙂

Level 85 is magnitudes more powerful than level 80. I was able to easily solo the entire Molten Core (an old level 60 raid) and even fight this guy with a tiny raid containing only 3 or 4 meaningful dps-ers:

I’m enjoying the game a lot though. Even though I’ve beaten Deathwing (once!), there’s still much more to do and items to get. I guess I’m going to stay on the wagon for a while longer…

Caverns Of Minos

January 18, 2012

Jeff Minter’s new iOS game is out, and (no surprises) it’s great:

I described it to KLS as “a cross between Thrust, Scramble and ‘Minotaur rescue’ games”…

It features nifty graphics, great control and fun scoring:

And the usual Minter weirdness/brilliance…

For $2, it’s a no-brainer!

Glenrock Lagoon

January 10, 2012

Yesterday, Sue and I did the Glenrock Lagoon bushwalk. This is a 2 km stroll down through a heavily wooded valley alongside a creek that eventually becomes a lagoon and connects to the ocean at Dudley Beach.

At the top end (near the carpark), the walk is level and shaded and easy and looks like this:

Wonderful! Imagine the sounds of bellbirds and whipbirds as you walk these paths.Soon enough you encounter the creek, which is now not exactly rushing with water:

And then about a third of the way down to the beach there is a waterfall as the creek flows over a rocky edge:

Somewhere shortly after this point we met a shy friend:

He was pretty big. We tried to sneak up to get a better look, but some joggers ran past and scared him away 🙂

A lookout is at the halfway point, showing how beautiful the valley is and how much farther one must continue walking to reach the lagoon outlet:

The white buildings on the right side in this photo belong to a permanent scout camp. The walk alongside the lagoon goes along the left side in the above photo. There was some sort of meeting going on at the camp, and music was loudly blaring as we walked down toward the beach. Here’s what it looks like down there:

To get back the walk must be repeated in reverse. This meant the casual downhill stride switched to a taxing uphill battle. Sue took the camera for the return trip, and took many lovely shots of the expatriot looking tired 🙂

Here’s me at the top of that waterfall, shot from a distant lookout:

From my vantage point I could look down the impressive drop onto a large flat rock on which several water dragons were basking. They ranged in size from about 15 to 60 cm, and ran and skittered nervously when they heard me yelling at Sue. Since she had the camera, I was unable to take photographs.

After Glenrock we were knackered, and a quick lunch of kebabs led to a bit of this:

And even this:

At this point, the technorati amongst you will be saying “What what what??!?!?”

The answer is simple: today I borrowed Bernard’s fully waterproof camera, and all of the photos in this entry were taken with it. They look good, don’t they?

Robot Claw