I have to say that I really enjoy this game. I think for the same reason that lots of people (like myself) who don’t actually know how to play the guitar. It really gives you the impression you know what you’re doing with a guitar. I mean, if you play the note wrong it sounds bad, just like a real guitar! So yeah, If you were to hand me a real guitar I’d have no idea what to do with it, either way I’m fine with that.

I’ve finished I think all but 3 songs on medium and now I’m branching out to “hard” and let me tell you. I find it super irritating that they don’t really ease you into the orange button. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about. The Guitar is the controler for the game and there are 5 fret buttons at the top. On easy mode you just use the first 3 buttons, being Green, Red, and Yellow. Medium difficulty throws in the Blue button. in the beginning I found the blue button to be just as impossible as the orange button. Anyway, so there are still 2 more difficulty levels, Hard, and Expert. My thinking is that they’d sort of ease you into the 5th button with hard and then really kick it into high gear with Expert. Well so one of the things that I guess I’ve found tough to get around are all the transitions that they throw into hard that my fingers haven’t quite figured out how to do. I dunno maybe its just the “culture shock” of going into hard after getting so used to the tempo of medium and also the lack of the 5th button. If any of you have suggestions on how to get around that whole “oh hey check it out there is a 5th button” thing I’d be more than happy to listen.

Ok so lemme bring you up to speed here.

I have a really good excuse reason for why I’ve not written other than “not writing anything”. Ok so last week I was hopped up on Percocet and antibiotics because I had a super bad sinus infection. I guess it was in the sinus part back behind my eyes. It was super painful and the headaches sucked too. So I was kickin it goof ball style and trying to not think about being in pain. My Doctor wasn’t sure what was up directly so I went and got a CT scan. He was pretty sure it was the sinus infection but we were just making double sure. So yeah…sinus infection and not a tumor or something.

So my birthday was on the 11th and to add insult to injury I got hives on the night of the 10th. Why, I have no freakin idea, I just know that it was super itchy. I got some Claritin or some kind of something and it made it go away pretty quick. which as you can guess was nice.

In continuing with the “wow talk” I have to say that I’m really starting to get tired of that game. I suppose after 4 years that it only makes sense. I’ve been talking with quite a few of my friends lately who are also getting the same feeling. I’ve thought about it and I think it comes down to the fact that their plans to fix the end game really screwed up the end game. What I mean by that is their intention was to make the game more accessable to more casual guilds. So they lower the group requirement to 5 and 10 man instances. From speaking with other guilds and friends who are in other guilds, this seems to have in a nutshell destroyed a number of their guilds. How it did that was by quickly creating the “A” and “B” team groups in guilds. See before TBC you had people running 20 and 40 man instances. If the guilds were running them enough you had a pretty good shot at having a good number of your guild decked out. Sure you had your main damage dealers and tanks and healers and such but they were one of a whole mob of people and if the whole guild was making those runs. The raids were the thing that really made the most sense for getting guild participation. Now, what has happened is those who were hardcore in the guilds really only want to do the heroics or other things that aren’t the early instances that they had been doing.

So guilds split up. TBC really looked like it had promise. I mean the 60 to 70 quests and such were pretty good but once you got that final “Ding” your mission from then on is to grind rep. That’s whats killing me. Doing the same instances over and over and over again only so I can get keyed to go to some other dungeon so that I can run that a billion times so that I can get keyed to run something else over and over and over again….for some reason. Don’t get me wrong I love my guild and I enjoy playing the game but I’m really finding a draw back to my lower level alts because even though I’ve done the content a number of times, Its not instance overload. I find when I play my main I do more mining than anything else. The time frame that is required for instance runs is too long for me especially on a school night. I also don’t see an end to this any time soon. The main reason I say that is because of the word bouncing around that the next expansion is going to be Northrend. That map there tells me everything I need to know about the next expansion. Its going to be exactly the same as TBC. Lots of little zones where you run from one to the next gathering rep and such from 70 to 80 only to hit the same ceiling. More instances. I’m really not interested in that. Blizzard when it started was a way different company than they are now. The designers were different then than they are now and its clear as day that they are different groups. I really think at this point that they’re in over their heads with what to do with WoW and they’re just scrambling to keep people around. Hell run any instance and you’ll see what I’m talking about…bullshit time sink pull after bullshit time sink pull. The pulls before Darkheart in Shadowlabs are a great example of that.

The biggest problem here and I suppose at the end of the day its not really a problem for Blizzard, is that they could have millions of people cancel their accounts and it wouldn’t matter. Most of the MMOs out there are lucky to get a million or more concurrent users. Base level, Its been a good run but Wow is really falling to the wayside. Trust that I’ll more than likely go on about this later…

So remember how I said that Puzzle Quest was what helped me “get” the DS…right well, I think that only kind of helped, the real thing that has helped me to “get” the DS is the new Pokemon game. I’ve been a fan of the series for some time and man…its good! Sure I’m doing the exact same thing I’ve done in the other games but I don’t mind it so much. Its interesting how in one hand I find little value in going to run instances over and over agian but I have no problem gathering gym badges in pokemon and also capturing said pokemon. Anywho I have this number that I can tell you if you are playing pokemon Diamond or Pearl and we can trade I guess…Yeah I don’t know, anyway send me an e-mail if you’re playing pokemon and we’ll work something out.