World of Warcraft and Woe

Well, what a crazy week it's been for me. I experienced what many people hope they never have to go through - complete and utter data loss.

How did this happen? Well, it was a total nightmare. Earlier in the week, my house got burgled, which itself is not a very pleasant experience. They only bothered nicking stuff from downstairs, and only what they could shove under their coats, it seems. Thankfully, the idiots left my Media Center PC, my 27" LCD and my huge DVD collection. Unfortunately, they took my laptop, which I'd left on the kitchen table.

"Just imagine all the data you use, need and love being ripped out from you. Disaster."

My laptop was, and is, the hub of all my activities. It's my daily work machine, and it houses all my emails, my photos, my music, my contacts, my writing, my bookmarks... absolutely everything. To lose it all was devastating. Just imagine all the data you use, need and love being ripped out from you. Disaster.

With my main rig in bits upstairs, I was left with the awful prospect of not actually having a computer to work on. More to the point, I had no way of looking up the number of the local police station to call them out to investigate. Thankfully, the HTPC stepped in here, and a quick keyboard connection later and I was Googling for 'report bastard thieves', or the like.

The moral of this story - for goodness sakes people, go and grab your nearest backup recepticle and copy out your important data!

Of course, then you call the insurance and are told that it's going to be a week before they even get around to thinking about processing your claim, and it was clear that they weren't about to help me get computing again any time soon.

So, praying to the Gods of Loss Adjustment that I'd be covered, I took a trip down to the Apple store and forked out for a new notebook. Unfortunately, it wasn't just my 15" Powerbook that had been nicked - it was my girlfriend's 12" version too - so I was in for £2700 in a single transaction.

It wasn't all bad, I suppose. My old laptop had been a 1GHz machine with 64MB Radeon 9600 graphics and, as anyone who read my disassembly guide will know, was completely knocked around. My new machine is far more spangly. It has a higher resolution display, 1.67GHz processor, 128MB Radeon 9700 graphics and a DVD burner built in. Top stuff. I resisted the temptation to turn an expensive day into a Bank-Manager-Rage-Fuelling-Armageddon by whacking on a couple of iPod nanos too, but the temptation was only just resistable.

Anyone who wants to game on the Mac is generally laughed at, since there isn't really a lot to play in the commercial sphere - for crying out loud, Doom 3 only just came out. However, with uprated graphics in my new notebook, I was keen to find something useful to play, especially since my laptop travels with me everywhere and is a crucial time-filler. To my surprise, I found that World of Warcraft ships with PC and Mac versions on the same disc, so I decided to give it ago.

This was against my better judgement. I have consciously stayed away from the game since release because I had an awful feeling that once I got into it, there's be no work getting done of any sort. I had watched bit-tech staffers fall, one by one, into its grasp. Jamie started off by spending about two months straight playing. Chris Caines decided to join him and hit level 20 in about a week of solid playing, and then Rich succumbed to its siren call. With deadlines to hit and articles to write, Warcraft was a dodgy proposition for me - but the temptation to test out my nice new graphics chip was too much.
[separator]
It's difficult, sometimes, taking a step down from what you are used to. When I'm with Tim, testing the latest graphics cards, I'm used to sticking the resolution at 1600x1200, adding some filtering and anti-aliasing and making sure all the details are on ultra, so that whatever dual-card monstrosity we're looking at gets a taxing run.

"You can un-equip all the clothes from your mage, and make her run around in her bra and a thong."

Back in the real world on my new laptop, it was a case of compromise. The resolution was scaled back from native 1440x910 to a smaller, but still widescreen, resolution of 1024x576. I then chose to run this windowed, so avoid horrid scaling issues. View distance was dropped back to minimal, although I figured that with 128MB of memory, I could afford to leave texture detail and world detail at minimum. Sure enough, jumping into the game, I was getting pretty smooth gameplay, even if I was enduring the sight of my work-cluttered desktop during my supposedly 'relaxing time'.

And, unfortunately, my worst fears have been realised. Saturday was a complete write-off, after I spent all day levelling from 6 to 9, only being dragged to a bonfire night party for an hour before returning home to sit on the sofa, perfecting my technique for targeting fast-moving wolves using the trackpad. The game is incredibly addictive, and I'm trying to pinpoint why.

Part of it is just that it's a brilliant game - it starts you off slowly, gives you some quests that are easily completable, gets you going. Part of it is the character creation and the fact that the huge amount of items and variables you can collect give you a real personal connection to your in-game self. Part of it is seeing hundreds of other people running around you, and realising that they all have their own agendas. A bigger part of it is realising that you can team up with those people and accomplish more, together, than you could alone.

It's also the sheer scale of the thing. I literally gasped when I saw the Bridge of Heroes in Stormwind for the first time. It was magnificent, and to see the enormity of the city behind it was quite gobsmacking. To then get told to go on a quest to IronForge and only then realising that the whole massive area I'd been in was but one section of a larger map, knocked me for six.

It's also little touches. Seeing someone soar overhead on a griffon and spotting that they're a million levels higher than you. Watching rabbits and sheep lollop across the landscape, then realising that if you were trained, you could skin them and cook them, and sell their pelts to another player who could tailor. If you're as puerile as me, it's discovering that you can un-equip all the clothes from your mage, and make her run around in her bra and a thong. So much amusement to be had!

Anyways, if anybody happens to be on the Bloodhoof server and runs into a hot, red-head mage called Willowtree, that's me. I have a feeling I may hit level 60 before my insurance claim actually comes through.