The pursuit of ignorance
By sweep 11 Comments
I have that familiar pit of guilt at the bottom of my stomach.
It's the cavernous, hollow sense of despair caused by my own lack of self control.
I have a lot of work to do. So damn much. And yet I continue developing contemptible ideas which drive me further and further from my alleged goals, almost as though I am catering directly to my own procrastination. Only the other night End_Boss and I began a multiplayer game of Civilization V, complete with the largest map size (the planet earth, for fucks sake) the maximum amount of city states and enemy AI and a modest difficulty setting. The game speed was set to standard. 6 hours in and we realised we had made a terrible, terrible mistake. Not only can you not change or alter the game settings once you have begun, you also cannot save your progress. One that ball starts rolling it rolls until the very end. Only in retrospect can I fully comprehend the awesome stupidity that was attempted that night. Who does something like that? This dumb fuck, apparently.Having said that, we did have an awesome game. We both picked random characters. I got Siam and, due to their unique building being a Wat which gives a decent cultural bonus, I decided to go the culture route. This meant a small amount of cities but with huge populations. I was pretty lucky to land on the top right chunk of Asia so I wasn't surrounded by aggressive opponents and was mostly left to myself to expand as I saw fit. I built only two cities and let them expand at a fairly steady rate. After I while my economy was so stable I was in an almost constant series of Gold Ages and I simply had to keep producing more buildings. I didn't even have much of an army, just some footsoldiers and a few war Elephants to keep the barbarians off my shit. Cultural victory is pretty tough, but my population was huge despite having only two cities, so my production was super intense and I was never short of food or money. I was throwing up Wonders in about 4 or 5 turns, meaning I had a ridiculous amount of culture boost. End_boss wasn't so lucky. Having to fend off a large parade of barbarian attention early in the game, I think he spent the majority of the match recovering until, at 4am, we decided enough was enough. I'm assuming I won, as I was ridiculously far ahead points-wise.
The enthusiasm to which I dismiss my education can be largely credited to World Of Warcraft.
In my last blog I spoke about how the changes introduced by the Cattackalysm have greatly enhanced the gameplay and general leveling of the game, but what's truly boggling is how consistent this feeling is. There literally isn't enough time to see everything anymore. We are now at a state where an instance can give you a full bar of XP on a normal run, and each zone will carry you 4 or 5 levels. As a result I have found myself skipping entire zones purely to prevent the mobs from becoming mindlessly trivial. I'm going up levels so fast there are little kids in Chinese sweatshops paying me to level their characters.Battlegrounds also give XP, which is equally great and frustrating. I can now hop into Warsong Gulch, do a few matches, hop out again - and find myself to have leveled beyond the current strand of quests, missing out on a load of the new content. I only got to do Wailing Caverns once. What's important here is the tone. "I only got to do Wailing Caverns once". As though that's a bad thing.
I can't actually believe I'm saying this but I might have to start another character just so I can go back and fill in all the content gaps I missed the first time round. And I mean for the Horde, let's not even get started on the Alliance quests. What the fuck is going on here? I didn't even have the fucking game installed a few days ago.
IN OTHER NEWS
- I'm about to hit my first prestige in BLOPS. This is slightly depressing as I have only just got my hands on the Commando, the first gun I have found that actually matches my playing style. Sure, I can punk you with my AK74U, but where's the fun in that?
- I'm broke as fuck. Thanks for that, Valve.
- The Walking Dead continues to entertain and frustrate in equal measure. The acting is fine, the zombies look great - but every deviation from the graphic novels slashes at my very soul.
Thanks For Reading
Love Sweep