My Alter Ego

La Super la Fun = World of WarCraft played in the dark with the sound cranked up

Not finding a Nintendo Wii on sale anywhere, and this is after of over a year of resistance, I finally broke down and bought the World of Warcraft or WoW (not to be confused with the Women of Wrestling). It had come down in price to a mere $20, which at first seems quite reasonable for a game but that $20.00 only allows you to play the game for a month. To keep playing you keep paying. Every month.

Blizzard, the company that makes the game, makes it pretty easy to bill the game play directly to your credit card. In fact you cannot install and play the game without entering your credit card number unless you buy a pre-paid two month gaming card (ranging from $30-$40 CAN). It's something they don't mention on the box. The billing is a automatically reoccurring cost. I'm not so sure that I'm thrilled with that.

To save from being billed on your credit card you can always cancel your game service before the free 30 days run out. But seriously who remembers to turn off the card at the right time. Chances are they'll ding you for at least an extra month's game play because you missed the stop date by a day.

The Hook

It's kind of like crack. The first hit is free, more or less, after that you pay, pay, pay. What? You have friends? Blizzard gives you two coupons that have serial numbers that work for 10 days so your friends can install the software using your CDs and play for free.

It took a total of five hours to install. You have to install the game from 5 CDs then once it's done you may have to, depending on the version that is on your CDs, download a few patches to get your software up to the current version. The game takes up about 6 gigabytes of hard drive space.

The Good stuff

WoW is huge. The map is incredibly large. UncaringBear has been playing this thing for at least a year and still plays. There is no way you could finish this game in one night, one week, and that's if you play 24 hours a day. The immense size of the game is almost worth the game play fee and unlike TV cable you can actually talk to your friends across the world (literally). The game not only has a chat module built in but you can also send WoW currency to other players with a note attached to it via mail. This is good if the other player is not online.

The End Result

Hopefully this won't take over my life but it seems with just the few hours I've played this there's a good chance of that happening. Not since Diablo II have I played an RPG this entertaining. Kind of reminds me of the old days when UncaringBear and I played MarioKart until the sun came up. My fingers were cramped for at least three days after that.