World of Warcrack - Sauce'rific
January 08, 2008

Penny Arcade's recent World of Warcraft arc combined with Control-Alt-Delete's recent Everquest arc (Mind you, I hate Everquest and never got past the first level) reminded me of something. My World of Warcraft account has had a 10 day trial for the new'ish Burning Crusade add-on for quite some time. This weekend I decided to finally activate that trial and finally give it a shot.

My first intention was to get it running on my shiny new MacBook, but alas - the MacBook really is just for work related things and World of Warcraft was just too much for it. I got the Burning Crusade installer downloaded OK only to realize that it required the original World of Warcraft installed to continue. No matter, as I realized that my World of Warcraft discs were Windows and OSX compatible. In they go and they begin the hour or so install process for the delicious sauce.

Alas, my joy was short lived. On top of being really warm while installing, my precious World of Warcraft installer decided to crap out midaway through the process. It was a tad bit... aggravating when faced with the shear volume of the install.

No matter, though. I have a beefy PC around and what do PCs do moderately to poorly? That's right - play video games! In the install discs went, and I lovingly fed my machine it's scintillating input for an hour or so before it finally graced me with a login prompt. It happily prompted me for my username and password all while the dark portal raged in the background reminding me of my mis-spent youth defending and conversely attacking Azeroth and Stormwind Keep by building walls out of farms.

Nay, my friends, it does not indeed end there. For the tale would be incomplete without being replete with patching and glee! Almost eight hours later the updater had finished downloading and installing all of the patches (why Blizzard hasn't made a single massive patch is a bit beyond me, downloading and installing (again) Burning Crusade and it was finally ready to go.

I logged in and breathed the fresh air as a decidedly effeminate blood elf mage. I reminisced for a bit about the good old days of simple graphics and blocky characters before turning all of the features up. Way up. In the end, however, my poor World of Warcraft still looked like hairy bare man ass. Oh well. After about an hour of play I realized that it really didn't matter, because I was having fun. Fun.

The precocious little realm of Azeroth was very much the same as I had left it. Run here, get this, fetch that, oh you're close to leveling you'd better do some more to get there and so forth. I'm looking forward to my yearly venture into this world and exploring what new things Blizzard has to offer me. If anyone wants to endure the ardor of installing World of Warcraft to find me, my new character's name is Otani and I'm chillin' over on Dark Iron. Of course, it's Tuesday Update Day so I'm typing this post and your screenshot is not of the game - but the login screen promising access to the game. *sigh* Some things never change.