Slashdot has a story today pointing out that there’s now a Doom Board Game. I sincerely wonder just how you translate a first person shooter into a board game… The game was certainly linear enough, and had enough sub-objectives to complete, that you could certainly turn the basic layout into a game board… But I’m just wondering about the shooter mechanics of it. Actually, I don’t know if I’d really call this a board game, since it looks more along the lines of Dungeons & Dragons than Monopoly. Still, there is a game board, so I guess it counts…

There’s a great thread over on the Blizzard boards about Warriors. While there’s an awful lot of helpful information here, there isn’t a whole lot of ass-kissing. It is nice to see a game company stand by their decisions and not give in to the whining and complaining. Definitely refreshing.

I finally got a group together to try a run through Zul Farak last night… Everyone in the guild has been whining and complaining about that instance for weeks. Nobody wanted to go back in there. There were a few of us with quests in there, but we could never convince a healer or tank to go in with us – until last night.

Zul Farak itself is a little unusual, at least compared the instanced that I’ve done so far. It is an outside instance…you can see the sky up above your head. You aren’t in some cavern or building. ZF is, basically, a troll city. The architecture was very interesting…reminded me of the South American (Incan/Mayan) ruins you see in National Geographic. It was odd to have nice, wide-open courtyards and walkways in an instance… I’m so used to smaller and more claustraphobic settings.

The critters were almost entirely trolls. All sorts of different trolls. Casting trolls, hunter trolls, troll shamen, troll warriors…every type of troll you can imagine. There may not have been a whole lot of visual variety, but there was plenty to keep us on our toes. They didn’t like to come alone, they almost always brought friends. And one of the casters kept turning folks into frogs. And the hunters had basilisks for pets. We actually wound up wiping the group once or twice…but we kept coming back for more.

Eventually we made our way to a large courtyard with a fairly small reflecting pool in the middle. At one end of that reflecting pool was a gong. We cleared out all the trolls in the courtyard and then ran up to bang the gong. Dramatic music played, and a huge 3-headed lizard called Gahz’rilla climbed up out of the pool. Very cool. He really wasn’t all that challenging though, after all the trolls we’d fought. He took a while to kill, but there was only one of him, and we were never in danger of dying. Still, he looked amazing.

After killing Gahz’rilla, we made our way to another large courtyard, with a huge stepped pyramid on one end. We climbed up to the top of the pyramid and found a number of NPC’s being held captive. We opened their cages to set them free, and were promptly attacked by a huge swarm of trolls. Wave after wave of trolls…5 or 10 in each wave…with the occasional elite thrown in for fun. It was quite possibly the hardest fight I’ve had so far in WoW, but also the most fun by far. I don’t know how many times I was saved from the brink of death by a timely heal, or dropped a monster just before it killed someone. Truly an epic battle.

By the time that battle was over, it was getting late and I needed to head to bed. But I did have just enough time to go poking my nose where I shouldn’t have been, and got myself killed by an undead troll. I just couldn’t resist opening the shallow grave I found…and its occupants were not happy to be disturbed.

Slashdot | No More Players for World of Warcraft – For Now

I find it very interesting to see a story like this posted on Slashdot… Sure, there’s plenty of gaming news on Slashdot, and I know WoW has been very popular (we’ve been sold-out at EB for about a month now, and we’ve got people asking for it daily), but I’m still surprised that something like this makes the front page of Slashdot. Seems odd that so many people would really care about whether Blizzard was able to handle the demand for their new game or not.

Got to explore a new instance last night – Uldaman. I’ve seen the outside of this place once or twice before, as I was exploring around Loch Modan with some low-level characters…but I’ve never actually been inside the instance until last night.

We had a full group running through there last night, but it wasn’t exactly the most balanced group I’ve ever seen. We had two warlocks, a rogue, a hunter, and a feral-specced druid – that’s right, no real healing. And Muppet was leading us. As you can imagine, we wound up making several corpse runs.

The instance itself was very cool… It looks like some kind of old ruined buildings or something, burried and long-forgotten, and recently uncovered by the dwarves. The scenery varied from caves and raw stone, to beautiful architecture and impressive statues.

We started out fighting Trogs, which died quite easily. Eventually we made our way to some place called the “Map Room”, which had a miniature city built on the floor. It was just like a scene from Indiana Jones… We had to use a staff on one of the buildings, and we got some nice visuals, and then this huge door opened in front of us…and a giant statue came out and attacked us. Fun stuff.

After the Trogs, we wound up fighting some generic wildlife…some scorpids that traveled in huge swarms, a basilisk or two, and some bats. Then we came across these little guys that looked like Dwarves, but not quite. They were really tough, kept putting spellbombs on us, which hurt an awful lot. I had to switch to a felhunter pet to deal with them.

We had a couple whole group wipes, and everyone died several times, but I had a great time. Got to see some really impressive stuff, got a good chunk of XP, had a great time. I’m really looking forward to going back there again sometime soon, but with a slightly more balanced group – I’d love to really do some damage to those critters.

Went on my first real raid yesterday… About 30 of us, in all levels, went to Blackrock Deeps yesterday. No, I wasn’t really high enough to do much…but there were enough level 60 folk to get the job done. I was just along to see the sights.

We met up in Loch Modan, and then ran off to the dungeon. You don’t get very good XP from killing things in a raid group, and you can’t complete most quests…but I was getting great exploration XP on the way out there. I’ve never done any hunting or exploring in the Searing Gorge, and I got nearly two bubbles off just exploration XP on the way out there.

The dungeon itself was immediately imipressive. That very first chamber as you enter the area, the Molten Span, was incredible. Huge chains supporting even bigger chunks of rock… Had to run across one of those huge chains to get where we were going. Lava everywhere. Very impressive. I was so busy seeing everything that I didn’t immediately realize that we hadn’t zoned yet – this was just the entrance area to the instance!

We killed pretty much everything that moved in Blackrock Deeps… Just sort of mauled everything we saw. It was slow going, since we had about 30 people rather than a single group. We also had some trouble with aggro since we had some very low-level people on the raid (like me). Still, we saw some incredible things. There was one neat part…we stumbled into a bar deep inside this dungeon. Everyone was neutral to us, with the occasional friendly. And there was a big golem for a bouncer, who got very angry at us when we had to break down the back door to continue. Very cool.

We eventually made it all the way to the Emperor. We had to clean out a bunch of senators, which the Emperor kept yelling about how futile our actions were. And it looked like the Princess of Ironforge was in there too…but I’m really not sure why… Anyway, we kicked the Emperor’s butt quite well, and had a lot of fun doing it.

Then, to top off the evening, we stopped by the Molten Core briefly. Very briefly. This place is apparently a level 60 raid instance, and we weren’t at all prepared for it. We mad one pull, got two mobs, and wiped the entire raid in about 10 seconds. Great fun!

We’ve recently started showing trailers for the new Alone in the Dark movie at work, and I have to say that initially it looked halfway decent. Sure, the monsters look like some kind of cheap imitation Alien… And I’m not sure why a trailer for a movie based on the Alone in the Dark games features shots of military people firing machineguns… But it did look halfway decent despite those things.

Then I discovered who was directing it – Uwe Boll. Consider yourself lucky if you don’t know the name, he’s a horrible director. He was responsible for the cinematic tragedy that was House of the Dead. Any hopes that this new movie wouldn’t suck horribly have just been shattered. The only question now is whether or not Alone in the Dark will actually suck enough to collapse into a black hole or not…