Pucechan.co.uk

Addon Pick of the Week - Bejeweled

This new, regular feature will cover addons I find cool, useful or exciting each week. I’ll try to pick one or two addons that stand out and give a brief rundown of what they do and where to get them.

Bejeweled

The first lucky addon is an official version of Bejeweled. That’s right, as if you weren’t hooked on the game enough in the first place PopCap have created an extremely feature-packed version that works as a WoW addon.

It has everything you’d expect from Bejeweled, both Classic and Timed modes, Friends List and Guild based high score tables, the ability to auto-start a timed game when you start flying (with the duration of the game matched to your flight time). It’s essentially devised to occupy all those dull “downtime” spots in the game, flights, battleground queues, waiting for raid members to turn up, that kind of thing. And honestly it succeeds, perhaps too well. Combining two of the most addictive games around is bad for your health.

It even has fun little achievements and a Bejeweled skill that improves as you play. It serves no purpose but it’s fun to watch numbers go up.

This is probably the most professionally polished addon I’ve ever seen in World of Warcraft except for perhaps Carbonite Quest and it deserves to be downloaded and played by everyone. You can get it from PopCap’s Site HERE.

Minipet, Coconuts and Baldrick

This trio of addons all come from the same author and they all look functionally similar. As you can see on the screenshot, these addons create a button that can be placed anywhere you like on the screen. Cool, but what do these buttons do?

Minipet enables you to bring out a random vanity pet without having to root through your bags.

Coconuts does the same thing but with mounts, so you can add a bit of variety to your running around. It also gives you a bit of fine control over what you summon and where.

Both of these will come in even more useful when mounts and vanity pets no longer take bag space in the upcoming Patch 3.0.2 and Wrath of the Lich King.

Finally Baldrick displays quest items that are suitable for use, taking into account current quests and location to ease doing Daily Quests. Never again having to hunt through your bags for the [Orb of Murloc Control].

All three are lightweight, well-designed and useful, and in the case of MiniPet and Coconuts fun as well.

Why I’m Excited For Wrath

With around 6 weeks to go until WotLK launches, it’s interesting watching how playing behaviour has changed.

The Auction House is a lot emptier than usual and people don’t appear to be raiding as often, although those folk who are doing T6 content won’t appear to be replacing their gear in Northrend until 79-80.

There is a much slower paced feel in game at the moment, with people preparing their characters for Wrath rather than raiding. Levelling up professions, getting alts to 70, gearing alts up in PvP gear, the focus is definitely on the individual and not the group it seems.

People will get their first taste of Wrath when patch 3.0.2 (the Wrath Pre-Patch) hits in a few weeks, it’s currently on the PTR being tested. It essentially gives everyone all the class changes and “old world” content that is to come in Wrath.

Most classes have seen quite a heavy overhaul, with talent trees re-shuffled, new skills added, some old skills removed and a few system changes, like the +damage and +healing mechanics being replaced with a single spellpower stat.

It’ll be a fun and interesting few weeks after the 3.0.x patch as people try and min/max stats and try to work out which gear will be best going forward into Wrath.

Now this is only tangentially related to why I’m excited for Wrath of the Lich King.

I’m looking forward to Wrath for all the stuff that ISN’T in patch 3.0.2, I know that probably sounds obvious but for a lot of folk, especially the PvP crowd, the talents and skills are what matter. For me though, it’s the whole draw of a new continent, with 10 zones, each bigger than the ones in Outland, each with hundreds of quests and new and wonderful sights to see.

The fact it acts as a true continuation from the end of Warcraft 3 interests me to. Seeing what actually happened after the events of The Frozen Throne will be fun.

The main draw of the whole expansion for me (which actually comes to everyone with Patch 3.0.2) is the achievements system. Sure it’s not exactly original but it’s completely awesome.

I often find myself in a bit of a lull, where I don’t really feel like doing, say, PvP or 5-mans. The achievement system gives me a multitude of other things to aim for that are doable.

That alone will improve the game experience for me, and I for one can’t wait.

Enjoying Warcraft Again

Well the headline says it all, but I am indeed enjoying playing in the World of Warcraft again.

I’m enjoying levelling up Twigleaf so much that I’m already pre-planning what the next alt I intend to level will be.

Now that Wrath has a release date, November 13th 2008, I have a definite time frame to work inside. I reckon I can get another class to 70 before Wrath hits. It’ll be nice having 3 characters to immediate level up to the new cap of 80.

I’m in a quandary over what the third class should be though, at the moment it’s between a Paladin, Shaman or Rogue. I “think” the Shaman is just winning out the others, but I’m not sure yet.

I have plenty of time to ponder the problem though as Twigleaf will be at least another week and a half to two weeks away from 70.

Patch 3.0.2 - The Wrath Pre-Patch

So, patch 3.0.2 has gone into testing on the Public Test Realm (PTR). Patch 3.0.2 is what has become known as the Wrath Pre-Patch. It’s intended to bring those with WoW original and Burning Crusade up to the baseline of Wrath content.

Basically, any changes that affect everyone, regardless of if they own Wrath of the Lich King or not, are included.
Pretty much the only things not included are the Wrath zones and quests and levels 71-80 (and corresponding skills).

The biggest changes are the various class talent trees and skills, for most classes the trees have been rearranged and rejigged quite substantially. Some classes also get new skills, such as the druid with their much sought after regular ressurection skill, Revive.

A big change for casters is the removal of +damage and +healing, combining them into a single Spell Power stat. This change also changes a lot of gear, and potentially provides some gear overlap and choice where previously there was none.

Most of the old world map changes have taken effect too, Dalaran is no longer under it’s protective bubble in Alterac Mountains, only a HUGE crater remains now it has “flown” to Northrend. Naxxramas has vacated it’s Plaguelands home, Stormwind Harbour has appeared along with the new zeppelin towers for Horde.

Barbershops have appeared in various capital cities and you can now learn Inscription (the new “Wrath” profession) and take it to 375 skill.

A lot of the miscellaneous changes have also taken effect. The Achievements, Token and new Vanity Pet/Mount systems are in. The latter two are designed to save bag and bank space, the Token pane eliminates carrying PvP marks/Raid Badges and similar, simply showing how many you have and giving you that bag space back. The new Vanity Pet/Mount system has you learn how to summon pets and mounts when you use the old item. Meaning you can throw the item away once learnt. You simply click the relevant pet/mount from a new tab on your character sheet.

As well as these Quality of Life changes, we also have a new dynamic shadow system implemented, this looks fantastic, especially when you’ve been used to nothing more than blob shadows. It makes the world much more alive, but equally ups the power required to display it. Luckily you can disable them if your PC can’t take the strain.

It’s perhaps the biggest patch WoW has ever had due to a lot of the fundamental class changes and system alterations. Because of this it will perhaps also bring with it a lot of question from folks not understanding where things have moved to, where their marks have gone etc.

It’s also to my mind, the most exciting patch since I’ve been playing WoW, as it signifies that Wrath of the Lich King isn’t all that far away. It will be interesting to experience the new expansion from day one, rather than after the buzz has died down.

Also, to me, Northrend is much more interesting than Outland. I can’t wait!

New Comment System

I’ve altered the comment system on the site to use a system called IntenseDebate, IntenseDebate is a community-based comments system that allows for comment rating and user reputations. This excerpt is taken from the site:

“Intense Debate has a variety of innovative features to inspire your online commenting experience. Take a moment to check ‘em out!

• Users Reputations
• RSS Feeds
• Widgets
• Threaded Comments
• Tracking and Notifications
• Profiles
• Comment Voting
• Social Traffic Drive”

Ultimately, this is largely an experiment, from my little play around with it, the features are nice, being able to rate up or down good and bad comments as well as having a reputation that builds up based on those comments are pretty cool things.

If however, people don’t like it then I can quite easily return to the default system with any new comments that are made intact.

So, use that as an excuse to post comments!!!

Spore - My Thoughts

So, Spore has been hailed as the next coming in god games. The ability to create a creature at the cell level and watch it evolve into a space-faring race sounds pretty revolutionary too, but is it any good?

I love Spore, I think it’s a great game, but it does have it’s problems.

As you no doubt know, the game is split into 5 distinct phases; cell, creature, tribal, civilisation and space.

The main problems I have with the game are two-fold, firstly the camera controls are sometimes a tad finicky with the camera sometimes lurching around a bit. Secondly, the jump in complexity from Tribal to Civilisation stages seems a bit uneven, the cell and creature stages are really simple, with the civilisation and space stages being comparatively much more complex.

Anyway, let me give my impressions of each phase after the “jump” (I really hate that phrase):

More »

Google Chrome - My Thoughts

As you probably know, Google have released a beta of their contender for the browser wars crown called Google Chrome. I’ve been using Chrome for a few hours now so I thought I’d give my hastily-formed opinion of what I think so far.

Chrome has a nice straightforward and fast install, it picks up your IE or Firefox bookmarks along with browsing history and passwords based on which browser you have as default (you can import from another browser after install if you need to) which is a nice touch.

The first thing you notice after installing is how slick it looks, it has a very minimalist, google-like look to it which you’ll either love or hate. At first glance though it doesn’t look particularly different to IE7 or Firefox 3 though. But it does do a few things differently.

It has tabs along the title-bar which can be re-arranged and dragged into new windows (by dragging into the page) with ease. It has a home page which has taken the Opera “Speed Dial” idea of having your most visited sites a click away and tweaked it a little, having recent search boxes along with recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs.

The address bar, or “Omnibox” as google are calling it, takes the “Awesomebar” idea of Firefox 3 and tweaks it a bit. It’s very similar but it has a nifty search capturing ability. As you use various search boxes, say Amazon, you can do a search from there in future simply by typing A and then using Tab-complete and typing a search query. Quick and nifty.

The page rendering is pretty good, it uses the Webkit renderer and has a pretty good Acid3 standards test score of 77/100 which beats IE8 Beta 2’s 21/100 and Firefox 3’s 71/100.

It has some neat under-the-hood features too, like each tab being a seperate process meaning if a page crashes it won’t take the whole browser down with it. It’s also exceptionally memory efficient. It also has a turbo-speed javascript engine along with built in Google Gears support, making webapps like gmail much more responsive.

Everythings not quite rosy though. It’s bookmarks implementation feels half-finished, there is no efficient way to mass-organise bookmarks, having to move or edit them one at a time, no tags support either. And figuring out how to access them isn’t exactly intuitive either. Which is surprising as honestly, Bookmarks are perhaps the most used feature in a browser.

Joanne also found an odd bug with facebook where it was appending a url onto the existing url rather than replacing it causing following links to stop for obvious reasons. Despite doing the same things in Firefox/IE working as intended. But, it is beta so this kind of thing is excused, we reported it like good beta testers.

Overall, I’m very impressed, it feels faster to me on my machine than Firefox 3 which is great, FF3 isn’t exactly a slouch. I’ve had no issues with any sites so far (bar the facebook url issue) and it just feels nice to me.

It’ll be interesting to me to see where Google take this, it definitely has potential. I can see IE users flocking to it readily, as performance wise it’s no contest, hardcore Firefox users who rely on a multitude of plugins perhaps not so readily although that may change depending how the plugin situation matures with Chrome.

Demoscene Still Alive?

I’ve been a long-time fan of the demoscene, not exactly hardcore, as my math skills suck but I admire and respect the folk that manage to squeeze so much out of hardware. For those who don’t know what a “demo” is, they are essentially an aural and visual creation, much like a music video, except that they run in real-time and usually use some incredibly fancy and technical programming skills to achieve.

I wasn’t aware that NVScene ‘08 happened last week, but I came across the videos from the event today and it’s still incredible what some folks can squeeze out of current hardware. Especially in 4Kb of code.

My favourite entry came 3rd in the full Demos category, called Midnight Run, you can watch it below in all it’s surreal-ness.

The Continuing Saga…

… of Simon and MMOs.

I’m actually in a strange place right now as I haven’t really been playing anything all that much over these last few days, bitting and bobbing with Guild Wars, Maple Story and even popping into WoW now and then.

During my last foray into WoW I left the guild I was in (long story, suffice it to say I no longer feel stressed when logging in), formed a new one called “The Chosen Few” (which sounds like a really poor western) and then with Joanne’s help levelled Twigleaf to 24. I still can’t quite get “into” WoW at the minute though, although I think my sabbatical is over.

I originally wanted two level 70 characters for when Wrath of the Lich King hits, I doubt I’ll manage that now with this uber-apathy I currently have but it’d be nice to get close.

I’m still enjoying forays into Guild Wars, I recorded this brief troll farming vid about a week ago mostly for me testing various video compression settings. I thought I may as well dump it up on youtube.

So, in short, I’m back in WoW (Yay), still enjoying GW (Yay) and quite strongly apathetic at the moment (Boo).

Max Payne Trailer!

I wasn’t even aware that the Max Payne film had gotten this far into production but I have a fondness for the games and based on the trailer it actually looks like it’s being fairly faithful to the games plot. They definitely have the “noir”-like feel of the series down well.

The only slightly worrying part is the Valkyries, hopefully they are during Valkyr-induced episodes (Valkyr is the drug the game’s plot revolves around) otherwise that’s taking the series in a slightly deranged tangent.

But I’m actually pretty excited about it based on the trailer so far, it does have Mark Wahlberg in, which based on his current form could be a bad thing. But we shall see.