I'm sorry to say it's not true - Gabriel wasn't actually able to see the film - but a healthy number of people will be watching it next week while I wail and clutch my boxed set. I clicked the link the moment I knew about it, but by that time a wave of browncoats had already crashed over the limited supply and absorbed every ticket.
I must have grieved for an hour. There is nothing I want more than to hear those beloved characters swearing in Chinese.
Those gifted with prescience or whatever, the ones who will caper and exult in the preview theaters, I hope they understand that there are some secrets propriety demands they hold until the film is actually released. I mean it. If you come up to me at San Diego and tell me "so and so is a robot" or some shit I will buy a bat'leth and I will cut you in fucking half. They sell things like that at the convention, legendary weapons, and believe me when I say that being rent stem to stern by a Klingon warblade is probably the least exotic death I could manufacture under the circumstances.
Moving on.
Some of you might be curious as to the status World of Warcraft's "Game of the Year" award, believing perhaps that we either did the right thing and should maintain the position or that we are imbeciles unworthy of a text editor. I can't really speak to the second one, but I can certainly provide you with an update.
Since withdrawing the award I have on several occasions returned to the game or sought to return to it, and my timing has often been inauspicious. On more than one occasion I have sought to re-enter Azeroth during a bout of pre or post patch server misbehavior, and I'd rather slip in there during a more "ordinary" period, or whatever passes for ordinary in a land where dragons roam free. The most recent patch added an "honor system" with the concomitant rewards for said valorous combat. That's not a type of play I typically seek out - it's the Battlegrounds, plot-based consensual combat areas they will deliver in the next patch, that I'm genuinely curious about. The award is stored in a hermetically sealed vault, pristine as the day it was bestowed, and it seems like any modern assessment might as well take this imminent feature into account. Yea, let it be done.
The honor system and the related Battlegrounds have come along fairly quickly, by WoW patch standards - and it's theorized by some that Guild Wars is responsible for that sudden spring in their step. This is probably bolstered by the fact that many employees at Arena.net were once from Blizzard. There's no doubt that the community has positioned the players in this adversarial fashion, thirsty for conflict, but these games could not be more different. Yes, I realize that they both have warriors and magic. That does not qualify as a keen insight.
Guild Wars, and I do not mean this in a pejorative sense, is a medieval Phantasy Star Online. No portion of this game is "massive" as we understand that term in relation to online role-playing games, although I would describe the elementalists' tower in Wizard's Folly as "quite large." My five hours yesterday was enjoyably invested, I look forward to additional hours in that state, collecting special abilities as one might "cards" and hand selecting the eight powers I will bear to a specific scenario. WoW snaps off some of the more annoying elements of the massive genre, but many things about it - long travel, high level grind, kill quests - circumscribe a fairly traditional experience in raw terms. I maintain that - when all cylinders are firing - is it the best example of an MMO. But when you take a game like that in one hand and then hold up a kind of swords and sorcery deathmatch in the other hand seeking to compare the two, I guess I don't know what that's meant to accomplish.
(CW)TB out.
if you're the queen of california
