Web Articles and Reviews

Did I actually once say that I thought that I wouldn’t buy World of Warcraft?

Call me a fool. Please.

As you might have guessed I fell utterly, deeply in love with the World of Warcraft. Any time not spent researching (generally in the wee hours of the morning) was spent exploring and leveling in the amazing world that the guys at Blizzard have created.

Everything about this game is phenomenal: the quests, raids, the scenery (early in the game other players routinely said things like, “Wow, this game is beautiful”), the interface, and even the music. Sometimes I would go into a building owned by the Alliance merely to admire a certain theme in World of Warcraft.

Here we are toward the end of 2004, and what a gamers power year it has been with huge gaming releases. It will be a few years before we see the big game releases so close together like we’ve seen in the past several months. But, is this a good thing for gamers? Would gamers prefer having them spread out so they have a chance to enjoy each one? Or, do they like getting flooded just before Christmas?

Perhaps, an even better question, is if gamers prefer gameplay or graphics in their games? I believe there have been several releases that have allowed gamers to provide an answer to this very question. My analysis of Half-Life 2 and also an outsider’s impression of World of Warcraft (WoW) are below.

I just got server activity logs for the last couple of weeks for this website and, I’ve got to say, you are an impressive bunch. Because I am a statistics geek, I thought I’d share some:

Tuesday is the most popular day. What’s up with that?

8AM is the busiest hour of the day – almost twice as busy as any other time.

People from at least 11 different countries read this blog.

Almost 20% of people spend over 30 minutes on the site at a time.

A surprisingly high percentage of people who found this site via a search engine searched for “pepsi holiday spice”.

Including that last statement in this entry will probably increase that percentage.

Mozilla has released Firefox 1.0, the first formal release of their next-generation web browser. I downloaded it Friday to use on my PC at work and downloaded the Mac version at home over the weekend.

I really like it. It combines some of the best features of Safari with the stability and rendering accuracy of the Mozilla engine. Plus, like Safari, it’s fast and incorporates tabbed browsing. It has some nice features of it’s own, which I’m still learning. Right now I’m loving the really cool real-time “find” feature. Oh, and Firefox is free free.

I’ll probably still use Safari for most things at home, if for no other reason than I’m comfortable with it and it’s so nicely incorporated into OS X, but at work I’m switching to Firefox. In fact, I’m using Firefox to post this right now.