This has been a slow weekend for me, I worked Saturday, which put pay to doing anything of interest... Though the wife and I were happy to go for a walk with the dogs and see the Council, or some other benefactor, had been out and cleared all the shrub and scrub from the Erewash washlands.
Now, I know the washlands well, I lived in the area for 10 years between 2001 and 2011, and recently bought a second home close by them again. And never in that time had I seen much in the way of repair to the place, sure they repaired the wooden stand bridge and replaced the dilapidated World War 2 era concrete bridge, but they never tended the banks, or cleared the scrub.
It was a sight to behold to see the river from the raised walk way on the Western side...
Sunday however was more my time, no gaming, not even a stitch of interest on the computer, though the wife and mother-in-law did sit down and play Monopoly... Yes a board game... I'm tempted to try them on a copy of the Red Box... but I don't think 2D+4 against Fort will go down like passing go and collecting £200.
The only other thing I got up to was clearing the loft out... An interesting time, the loft area is an office, it's only accessible through a loft ladder, but it is a room, but since we moved in it has been utterly overrun with mess. Boxes, wires, and a hell of a lot of stuff...
Today, I spend 5 hours clearing it out, and sorting the stuff... There was loads of stuff to be thrown out, including my first primer on C++ which had been eaten by a parrot, covered in ash, and torn to shreds in places... Why is this important? Well, up there now is I hope going to be a place I can escape myself to, to play games away from the prying eye of the wife...
But up there is already a small shrine to my gaming past... My old P4 machine, the first machine I played World of Warcraft on... I hand built this machine with the last of my cash from my crash and burn job in Matlock... It was a then top of the line P4 motherboard, with 1.5Gb of top end ram with coolers, a custom cooler stack, a P4 2.4Ghz (HT) so my first dual core machine, and a pair (yes two) GeForce 8800 GTX... top of the line at the time.
I built it for other things, but I ended up living most all my World of Warcraft life in there...
Yes, I'm still thinking about going to play WoW... I don't want to, I just miss the old days, the level 60 days, the original and best WoW. I even went as far as downloading the "Starter Edition" of Wow and playing a new Worgen character on that Free to Play starter edition... But, I got the chap from level 1 to 10 in like 15 minutes... And you know what, I didn't read or think about a single quest...
This was new content, this was new quests, in a new area, with a new back story, and... It just passed me by in 15 minutes.
What an utter and total shame.
I mean, I was pointed where to go on the map, they highlighted blue areas on the map to find the mobs to hit, they pointed to quest hand-ins, they even added the items to click (from my inventory) to the right of the quest listing on the right of the screen, so I didn't even have to open my bag to do things...
Then I noticed leveling up, they just gave me my skills, they just came to me, no need for a trainer... I mean, my first WoW character was a Human Warrior, and I remember the pleasure of running all the way back to Goldshire to around the back of the Smithy to train up, and lending a guild member 10 silver to buy their skills.... I miss those days....
I miss the endless running, and running, and getting level 40 and then selecting where to run to get your mount from... Do I try one from Elwynn Forest?... Do I go to Menethil?... Do I go mad and try taking the boat from Menethil to see what they have across the pond?....
Yeah, that's what I miss...
My guild, Arx... And original Wow...
Chaplin I know you're there, I miss Chaplin the Dwarf Warrior... Or even the Rogue ;)
Eesu, yes Sue I even miss you....
Eve, aye Nick not spoke to you in yonks, missing you telling us about Pork Belly....
Nightwisp...
Now, Nightwisp, I ran into him in WarThunder recently, which was nice... Wish I'd have made a note of your user name.
There are the others to... Hulalu, the first Druid I met... Yes I played in an era when Humans were in the forest and Westshire then Darkshire, long before Nightelves ventured far enough to meet us... Dwarves sometimes took the risk of legging it from Loch Modan over the Blasted Lands to meet up, and yes I remember going and opening that tunnel for people time and again....
The old tales of Wow are the best, I might try and find some of my old screenshots and put them up here, there seem to be a fair few YouTubers whom are making a good following around telling old tales, I'm pretty sure no-one who knows me would argue I played this game so much, I lived it, literally. I knew every inch of the overworld and nearly every inch of every dungeon.
And believe it or not at level 60 I went back and found later raids to all the original content raids to complete the set... But I was so sad to see all the gear and effort and time melt away.
I mean my level 60 warrior had about 90 days played, solid days... played in about 6 hour stints... It took over a year to get to this state... a year to 60... And I loved it... Then 18 months in I rolled my first alt... It was slow, it was fun... It was life.
So, if I miss it so much, why am I not back in there now... Well, firstly, I won't have the time, the wife won't let me play the amount of life away... I wish we could go back to the old days and she'd then play with me, but she'd not get it now with the hundreds of thousands of health and gear demands...
Also, the link above includes my appearance on "Shut up We're Talking"... I miss SUWT... But in this podcast I'd just quit playing, recorded in 2010 I'd been cold turkey since about December 2009... I had met the now wife in June 2009, she'd seen me playing as the "Tree waving its hands", but the good old days were already gone then... Burning Crusade was an okay, even possibly good expansion, by Wrath just had me furious.
And I point this out with numbers about the gear levels, and my predictions were right, you can see the massive health pools and silly high gear levels... I remember when level 50 gear on level 60 folks was the norm, and seeing a hunter in Dragon armour (level 65) at 60 was just amazing... I never was that swinging dick, but I saw the appeal of it.... Blizzard pretty much sold out the game I'd sold my soul to, so I quit, I griped (as you can hear) and then I met my wife and got on with life...
Could a different arc in the progress of Wow have affected my life?... You know what, I think it could... But that's perhaps a topic for another day.
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