World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (of awesome)

So the latest rumours about the latest expansion have been announced. Looks like the World of Warcraft developers are taking the game pretty much a full circle back to Azeroth and back to the old kingdoms. Cue the usual whinging about lore this and arthas that, and something about paladins (either over or underpowered). Thankfully it looks like Blizzard have grown a massive set of balls and are set to tear the old world apart and remake it which is significantly awesome. Lots of angry “lorefags” are complaining because now the story isn’t what it used to be. These are the same people that probably ended up having a psyhciatric assesment after trying to kill themselves because dumbledore died in the harry potter books and now everything wasn’t the same. Incidentally anyone reading this who is angry at changes to the story, welcome to the world of storytelling, you know where things progress and advance and change. If you want something to keep you happy here is a short story by myself “two people met and fell in love and lived happily ever after, no kids, no change of jobs, no nothing, they did exactly the same thing everyday for 74 years until they died at the same time, because if one died before the other it may have almost have made it different, they both died in their sleep, no excitement at all…”

Anyway, now that i’ve set up protection against the crying morons, the following are the details that have been released so far, with a bit of personal opinion and commentary.

RetroGamer: Elder Scrolls 4 – Oblivion

Just a quick heads up on this first of all, the RetroGamer articles are about older games that have been out for a while and are there to either encourage you to try a game thats old and probably cheaper to buy now, or head back to it and enjoy it again if you played it before.

This time round we are covering Oblivion, a delightful game from 2006 that, at the time was graphically awesome, and to be fair its something that the game has held up well and it still looks pretty damn awesome by today’s standards as well, especially on the PC where extra mods and increased graphics processing help the game look that bit better anyway. The game features all the usual mod cons, like dynamic weather, nice trees with lots of singled out leaves that don’t look like they are cardboard cutouts, and all manner of lighting, fog and visual effects. You can see an absolute mile into the distance which is particularly awesome given that in many games there is a random fog effect that suddenly obscures vision 3ft infront of your house. The only downside to this comes with the fact that at the time, the game was so demanding in terms of power that you only really got the full effect if you had a near top of the line PC, and the XBox360 version does hav a few stutters every now and then as well.

Skate 2

Emo haired kids with skateboards, is there anything that warms your heart more? Only the sight of them falling off and smashing a wrist, and that’s not something you get to see too often, because most of the time the bastards don’t actually skate on them, they just carry them around.