Today after lunch and before working my night shift I came across an open mine, met a priest, and told my giant blue Aladdin genie reject to beat up on some thieves while I shot black fireballs at them from twenty yards away. After I killed the thieves I took all their headbands—my personal pioneer scalps—and traded them to a knight in town for some odd pieces of silver and copper, a princely sum! With this money I was able to pay a Master Warlock to teach me not how to shoot black fireballs (I already know), but how to make the black fireballs hurt people more—how to exact an even greater amount of sickening revenge on the wild boars of the forest that so gleefully gored me a handful of hours ago (I took their livers).
Yes, it's World of Warcraft, and no, I'm not happy about it.
You see, I had told myself "Brandon," I said, "Brandon, you mother fucker, you are not playing another online RPG," and I was proud of it. Pleased! I didn't want to know what it meant to go raiding instanced dungeons, kite enemies, or wait for purple drops. The only things that I cared to hear about that involved epic mounts are ones I don't feel I'm very qualified to write about in this particular forum. They could keep it, every last idiot one of them.
But I got bored. I got bored of playing through Super Mario RPG on Virtual Console, god bless its adorable charming heart, and I needed something else. I didn't want another tired anime role-playing game where the haggard twenty-something with chin stubble has to team up with hapless magic-using twelve-year-olds that don't know any better to fight off the invading forces of the mysterious scarved cel-shaded pretty-boy. I wanted something to gobble me alive.
Confession: In high school I spent months on end—months—on end—playing Ultima Online, the King of MMORPGs, and it was horrible.
You see, I use the term "playing" in the loosest sense. My introduction to the game involved watching one of my friends who already had been playing for a while. I saw him coast around on horses and murder low level players wandering through the woods. I saw him take the reigns of his own ship, arrange the things in his castle, and arrange stacks of items like mandrake and blood root and spider silk and god knows what else in order to send horrible death in the direction of whatever moved.
But I never did any of that shit because it was impossible. Back in those days—and I only say that because I have no godforsaken idea what sort of hellish miasma it's become today—starting Ultima Online was the virtual equivalent of having your memory erased and being dropped in the middle of New York City with nothing but the clothes on your back, then being pissed on. Nothing in the game told you what you were supposed to do or how you were supposed to do it what was even going on. Before even starting you were presented with a series of bizarre options: what sort of person do you want to create? What kinds of skills will they have? How good will they be at each of these things? The game itself came with something like a hundred page manual filled with crap that meant nothing to me. It was overwhelming. It was awesome.
When I was first starting I spent study hall plotting out the arrangement of my nested bags, decided what would be my "adventuring gear" (stupid shit I could afford to lose) and what would be my "banked gear" (all the actual good items that I didn't want to die wearing and lose forever). I tried to chart out what my ideal character would be for what I wanted to do. I had myself convinced that taking up sewing in a virtual world where people were fucking shit up all around me would be pretty cool. No. It was not.
So mostly what I did was ignore all that unachievable kick-ass stuff in favor of screwing around. I made characters that could turn invisible so I could watch miners work forever to get stuff back to their horses, then I'd steal the stuff right out of their bags and run. I'd hide and wait for people to drop things to reorganize their packs and then take it. I would do basically anything to avoid doing what the game actually wanted me to do: hunt tiny rabbits and skin them so I could sell the skins for pitiful amounts of cash. (Yes, you can still kill rabbits in World of Warcraft.)
One time I even used my friend's account to make a tiny little fellow dressed entirely in red, named him "Big Red Retard" (god bless my sixteen-year-old-soul), and paraded him around in the town square begging for money to "get started." When someone gave me the money I spent it all on liquor and handed it out to everyone there. This was basically my pinnacle of Ultima Online. I did this bullshit for months.
A couple days ago, before I considered trying out World of Warcraft, I thought about going back to Ultima Online. Then I came to my fucking senses.
World of Warcraft is different because I'm exploding bandits a day after I started. I'm running across huge expanses of land with my psycho genie reject and completing quests for people that bestow upon me visible rewards—new armor, better magic, the abilities to craft new items.
But I told myself I'd never get started with these games in the first place because I know what these games do. I've experienced it first-hand and I've seen my friends piss the hell out of me blathering on and on about their pointless virtual accomplishments. No, I don't know what Evoker's Silk Battlegear is, and you can fuck off.
The thing about World of Warcraft is that you don't want to stop playing because there's so much going on there's no reason to stop! Why quit now when just on the other side of the town there's a pack of goblins I could slaughter and just three more Murloc eyes and I'll have myself another completed quest and I'd really like to get the rest of this stuff out of my inventory too. It was too much. I started a couple days ago as The Sexiest Female Warlock In History and that was basically the end for me. 17 of my last 48 hours on this planet have been spent in another one. It is actually a literal wonder I am even writing this right now.
Anyone I tell about my new World of Warcraft pursuits says the same thing: DON'T GET ADDICTED LOLMG 31 69 CHICKEN BANG ZOM!!!1234. It's insulting! Don't get addicted. When I was a kid that was the entire goddamned point, to get addicted. What's the use of a game you don't want to play? You just wasted seventy bucks on a cartridge you don't even feel compelled to drain your life with. Nice job, sucker, and enjoy what Acclaim has to offer for the next three months till you can save up for another one.
But I can feel the stink on it, heavy like pyramid schemes and body spray for adolescent males. I can page through the Warlock's menu of all the spells and fireballs and crazy weirdo lightning bolts I can learn and I know I can't last long enough to learn all that, can I? If I could, do I seriously want to? After seventeen hours I've got like a dozen spells max, including ones I upgraded. I see the gears at work here. The tiny numbers, the abacus pieces sliding back and forth. I'm manipulating a fancy visual front end to the most annoying calculator ever conceived, and I can't get enough!
In front of the auction house earlier today sat this guy on some sort of peculiar glowing beast, level 70? I think that's as high as it goes (for now, anyway), adorned with equipment and clothing so hideously offensive to the senses that I could not even fathom how someone could design this carnival of horrors. I view his profile and it's what I imagine is perfect, not that I have any tapdancing idea what any of these green numbers and strange descriptions and item information windows the size of my entire inventory mean. Is this the ultimate goal? Transformed from eminently sexy bandit-killing ass-whipper to Laughable Jester of Ridiculous Commitment? Corporal Magnificent Funkenstein of Unacceptable Fashion, all dressed up and nowhere to go? Seeing this is sort of, I imagine, like fighting your way through millions of the diseased elderly towards the fountain of youth only to reach it and be slapped across the face with a giant cock. Here's what you paid for, far worse than the most horrible of Acclaim games (okay, maybe not quite as bad).
I think, perhaps, that there is hope for me. The great glorious people in N-Sider chat (#n-sider on irc.gamecubecafe.com, please avoid it) don't play anymore and they're the ones that never shut up about it to begin with. What made them quit, I've wondered, and tried to discern the answers through their various Interweb machinations: because I realized I had wasted a month of my life, because I realized I wasn't having fun anymore, because I moved on to other games, because I got tired of it.
Surely all of these things await me in some order, which is where that proverbial rub lies: which order? Will I be one of those poor fucks who plays so long they can't remember why they even do it anymore? Will I play long after I've stopped having fun before I realize I've WASTED MY LIFE OH GOD (not a new and exciting revelation)?
The shining light here in all of this is that I've only got eight days left on my ten day free trial. I hope to those stupid Gryphons above that I'm goddamned sick of it by then. If not, it's been nice knowing you, and no, I still don't care about your purple loot (but please care about mine!).
Yes, it's World of Warcraft, and no, I'm not happy about it.
You see, I had told myself "Brandon," I said, "Brandon, you mother fucker, you are not playing another online RPG," and I was proud of it. Pleased! I didn't want to know what it meant to go raiding instanced dungeons, kite enemies, or wait for purple drops. The only things that I cared to hear about that involved epic mounts are ones I don't feel I'm very qualified to write about in this particular forum. They could keep it, every last idiot one of them.
But I got bored. I got bored of playing through Super Mario RPG on Virtual Console, god bless its adorable charming heart, and I needed something else. I didn't want another tired anime role-playing game where the haggard twenty-something with chin stubble has to team up with hapless magic-using twelve-year-olds that don't know any better to fight off the invading forces of the mysterious scarved cel-shaded pretty-boy. I wanted something to gobble me alive.
Confession: In high school I spent months on end—months—on end—playing Ultima Online, the King of MMORPGs, and it was horrible.
You see, I use the term "playing" in the loosest sense. My introduction to the game involved watching one of my friends who already had been playing for a while. I saw him coast around on horses and murder low level players wandering through the woods. I saw him take the reigns of his own ship, arrange the things in his castle, and arrange stacks of items like mandrake and blood root and spider silk and god knows what else in order to send horrible death in the direction of whatever moved.
But I never did any of that shit because it was impossible. Back in those days—and I only say that because I have no godforsaken idea what sort of hellish miasma it's become today—starting Ultima Online was the virtual equivalent of having your memory erased and being dropped in the middle of New York City with nothing but the clothes on your back, then being pissed on. Nothing in the game told you what you were supposed to do or how you were supposed to do it what was even going on. Before even starting you were presented with a series of bizarre options: what sort of person do you want to create? What kinds of skills will they have? How good will they be at each of these things? The game itself came with something like a hundred page manual filled with crap that meant nothing to me. It was overwhelming. It was awesome.
When I was first starting I spent study hall plotting out the arrangement of my nested bags, decided what would be my "adventuring gear" (stupid shit I could afford to lose) and what would be my "banked gear" (all the actual good items that I didn't want to die wearing and lose forever). I tried to chart out what my ideal character would be for what I wanted to do. I had myself convinced that taking up sewing in a virtual world where people were fucking shit up all around me would be pretty cool. No. It was not.
So mostly what I did was ignore all that unachievable kick-ass stuff in favor of screwing around. I made characters that could turn invisible so I could watch miners work forever to get stuff back to their horses, then I'd steal the stuff right out of their bags and run. I'd hide and wait for people to drop things to reorganize their packs and then take it. I would do basically anything to avoid doing what the game actually wanted me to do: hunt tiny rabbits and skin them so I could sell the skins for pitiful amounts of cash. (Yes, you can still kill rabbits in World of Warcraft.)
One time I even used my friend's account to make a tiny little fellow dressed entirely in red, named him "Big Red Retard" (god bless my sixteen-year-old-soul), and paraded him around in the town square begging for money to "get started." When someone gave me the money I spent it all on liquor and handed it out to everyone there. This was basically my pinnacle of Ultima Online. I did this bullshit for months.
A couple days ago, before I considered trying out World of Warcraft, I thought about going back to Ultima Online. Then I came to my fucking senses.
World of Warcraft is different because I'm exploding bandits a day after I started. I'm running across huge expanses of land with my psycho genie reject and completing quests for people that bestow upon me visible rewards—new armor, better magic, the abilities to craft new items.
But I told myself I'd never get started with these games in the first place because I know what these games do. I've experienced it first-hand and I've seen my friends piss the hell out of me blathering on and on about their pointless virtual accomplishments. No, I don't know what Evoker's Silk Battlegear is, and you can fuck off.
The thing about World of Warcraft is that you don't want to stop playing because there's so much going on there's no reason to stop! Why quit now when just on the other side of the town there's a pack of goblins I could slaughter and just three more Murloc eyes and I'll have myself another completed quest and I'd really like to get the rest of this stuff out of my inventory too. It was too much. I started a couple days ago as The Sexiest Female Warlock In History and that was basically the end for me. 17 of my last 48 hours on this planet have been spent in another one. It is actually a literal wonder I am even writing this right now.
Anyone I tell about my new World of Warcraft pursuits says the same thing: DON'T GET ADDICTED LOLMG 31 69 CHICKEN BANG ZOM!!!1234. It's insulting! Don't get addicted. When I was a kid that was the entire goddamned point, to get addicted. What's the use of a game you don't want to play? You just wasted seventy bucks on a cartridge you don't even feel compelled to drain your life with. Nice job, sucker, and enjoy what Acclaim has to offer for the next three months till you can save up for another one.
But I can feel the stink on it, heavy like pyramid schemes and body spray for adolescent males. I can page through the Warlock's menu of all the spells and fireballs and crazy weirdo lightning bolts I can learn and I know I can't last long enough to learn all that, can I? If I could, do I seriously want to? After seventeen hours I've got like a dozen spells max, including ones I upgraded. I see the gears at work here. The tiny numbers, the abacus pieces sliding back and forth. I'm manipulating a fancy visual front end to the most annoying calculator ever conceived, and I can't get enough!
In front of the auction house earlier today sat this guy on some sort of peculiar glowing beast, level 70? I think that's as high as it goes (for now, anyway), adorned with equipment and clothing so hideously offensive to the senses that I could not even fathom how someone could design this carnival of horrors. I view his profile and it's what I imagine is perfect, not that I have any tapdancing idea what any of these green numbers and strange descriptions and item information windows the size of my entire inventory mean. Is this the ultimate goal? Transformed from eminently sexy bandit-killing ass-whipper to Laughable Jester of Ridiculous Commitment? Corporal Magnificent Funkenstein of Unacceptable Fashion, all dressed up and nowhere to go? Seeing this is sort of, I imagine, like fighting your way through millions of the diseased elderly towards the fountain of youth only to reach it and be slapped across the face with a giant cock. Here's what you paid for, far worse than the most horrible of Acclaim games (okay, maybe not quite as bad).
I think, perhaps, that there is hope for me. The great glorious people in N-Sider chat (#n-sider on irc.gamecubecafe.com, please avoid it) don't play anymore and they're the ones that never shut up about it to begin with. What made them quit, I've wondered, and tried to discern the answers through their various Interweb machinations: because I realized I had wasted a month of my life, because I realized I wasn't having fun anymore, because I moved on to other games, because I got tired of it.
Surely all of these things await me in some order, which is where that proverbial rub lies: which order? Will I be one of those poor fucks who plays so long they can't remember why they even do it anymore? Will I play long after I've stopped having fun before I realize I've WASTED MY LIFE OH GOD (not a new and exciting revelation)?
The shining light here in all of this is that I've only got eight days left on my ten day free trial. I hope to those stupid Gryphons above that I'm goddamned sick of it by then. If not, it's been nice knowing you, and no, I still don't care about your purple loot (but please care about mine!).