I'll admit it. I'm sorry, very very sorry for the remarks I made to an old friend about a certain PC game, I'm ashamed to say it, but the past 4 weeks of my miserable existence have been taken up with this particular game, a game of particular rarity as it's a computer game that I can actually play on my puny PC with other people still actually playing it too... The game? Well, I'll let the screenshots speak for themselves. As always, click the thumbnails for a nice, larger view, thumbnails in no particular chronological order...


I think it was the evening of the 24th of December last year, I had nothing to do and was idly browsing the Xfire website, I had exhausted all my free games on Steam and seemed to be the only person in BF2, even Solitaire was starting to wear thin. I needed something to play. I then noticed the Xfire ranking of the top games played that day, as usual World of Warcraft was in the number 1 position, having been there for the past 4 or 5 years. "What the Hell", I thought, I'd install the free 10-day trial from trywarcraft.com, see how utterly shit this virgin-fest of a game was and then uninstall it in a fit of rage. Simples.


The first thing I had to do after downloading the tiny (although surprisingly efficient) 'streaming' game client was to login and create a new character on my newly assigned realm - Nagrand(EU). Not particularly impressed, I opted for a human rogue simply because the other characters looked unrealistic, I preferred to be a human, and I am quite a rogue after all. My first experience of the World of Warcraft began in the pleasant surroundings of Northshire Abbey, set in the green and fertile forests of Elwynn. The first thing that struck me was the fact that the game was actually in true 3rd (and as I'd discover some time later) 1st person 3D, for some reason I expected an isometric view filled with meaningless icons and lines of confusing statistical data, how wrong I was, in fact I was thinking just how bloody nice everything looked - and sounded; the chattering of a river could be heard over to the east, the tweeting of birds in the trees to the south. I was impressed. But enough gawping I thought, time to actually start my first quest.

Oh yeah. Happy new year.