Sydney Tower Runup

For those who aren't from Sydney, the tallest building in Sydney is Sydney Tower. It is one of those impractical observation type buildings that people only go to the top of to waste time looking at things.

Anyway, someone thought it would be fun to have a work team join in.

I volunteered for some unfathomable reason and found myself at the bottom of 1504 steps with no choice but to climb to the top. I can't say I have ever really attempted to run up slimy, dimly lit steps in claustrophobic, stinky hot conditions for minutes on end before, but now that I have, I can't really recommend it.

It wasn't long into it and I was pretty sure that I was going to die on the stairs, making them a rather literal stairway to heaven.

Unfortunately I survived and ruined the chance for an interesting comment on my headstone.

I got to the top in 16.59, which was a lot less than my goal of 20 minutes, so I am pretty happy with it in the end. Especially as I was far to lazy to train.

They run a run-up every year so if you fancy some serious self torture, sign up for 2009. I will be there to laugh at you as you set off.

Cheers

G.

Wordscraper

I have been playing a little game on Facebook called Wordscraper lately. It is essentially a ripoff of Scrabble you can play against your friends and it is quite good fun.

Anyway, while playing a quick late night game with my better half I nailed an awesome word, "cellar". Normally worth bugger all, my carefull placement over two 4 times multiples scored me a ridiculous 128 points!!!! It is so damn cool I had to blog about it.


Cheers

G.

Warhammer Online doesn't actually suck!

Well, the Warhammer Online preview is over.

For those who have very short attention spans... it isn't half bad and I certainly had more fun with it that I had with the early levels of WoW.

While the preview was only 3 days, it gave me enough time level three characters up to around rank 12, do a whole bunch of quests, play some RvR and generally get a feel for the game.

First up, and most importantly imo, is the game does a pretty good job of capturing the feel of the Warhammer universe. There is a lot of funny dialogue with the quests that really 'fits' with the feel. The six races all fit well too and with the exception of the typical elven sorceress getting around in her knickers, everything looks neat.

Every class has their own custom gear, so there is no chance of a witcher ending up looking like a Chaos Knight. While the gear is typically generic, you are able to dye it pretty simply a nice range of colors so you can keep your character a bit unique.

The classes are also really well defined in their role (eg, Tank, Melee DPS, Healer etc) and this works really well. While some of the races are unfortunately missing a tank generally in RvR you are with multiple races and don't miss them that much.

I tested out a Tank (Dwarf Ironbreaker), Melee DPS (Empire Witcher) and Healer (Chaos Zealot). All fitted in their roles perfectly and did the job they were supposed to. They all worked pretty well solo as well. I play Vamp Counts at the moment in tabletop Warhammer so I am honestly a little diasppointed they didn't make the game, but will probably be playing and Empire Witcher becuase they were the most fun in my brief play and easily look the coolest.

Graphics aren't great, but they are good enough to get the job done and run really well at max settings. Everything looks really nice though, especially character models.

Questing is good and well paced. While there is only so much you can do with a quest, they have some nice stories attached to them and pull together well as well as some genunilet funny dialogue. The game also introduces public quests. These are multi-part, multi-objective quests for a group. Simple wander into the quest area and you get the quest and can join right in. They reset every ten minutes or so, so you can dive in quickly and are great fun. They also give you access to somer eally nice loot.

RvR at the moment is a bit hit and miss. On the server I played on (Aussie) destruction outnumbered Order by two to one and they were overrunning some of the open RvR areas by the end of the week. It was almost impossible to hold them back.

It is still early days and I have Beta access so I will be able to get another taste come 7 September before the game goes live on the 18th.

If you aren't excited about Warhammer Online, check out the awsome new trailer here.

Cheers

G.

Right...

Seems I picked up the ball so I could drop it again.

Oh the irony.

I won't even attempt to indicate the likelihood that, I might, somehow, at some point, post with something approaching semi-regularity. You wouldn't believe me anyway. So umm... yeah.

Anyway, apparently there is a 'preview' for Warhammer Online this weekend and I got an invite.

Downloading the client was pretty ridiculous (10 GB!!!!) but didn't take that long (thanks fileplanet). Now I just need to wait for the server to go live.

Cheers

G.