Author: blueZhift

Now 10 days past my 14 day World of Warcraft trial, I’m very tempted to buy the game, except for one little thing… I’m too cheap and lazy to haul my ass off to the store to buy the retail box that they insist I need to convert my trial account! Why should I need the box? As near as I can tell, I’ve already got all of the code on my PC from the trial DVD and patches. All that I really need from the box is the auth code. Why can’t I just pay Blizzard for the code and skip this box thing and the messy hauling my ass out into the streets or waiting for UPS? In an age of Direct2Drive and Steam for online game distribution, making me go buy the boxed game is just another barrier to the sale. Oh well, I guess I’ll get around to buying that box sometime…

By now it is no secret that the Xbox 360 got off to a slow start in Japan. Part of this may be explained by the delay of Dead or Alive 4, which would have been a nice launch title to have. But I don’t think anyone was expecting Earth moving sales in Japan even if DoA 4 had appeared on time. Sales will probably pick up once DoA 4 comes out along with a number of titles from a number of prominent Japanese developers that Microsoft went to great lengths to sign up.

Xbox 360 will almost certainly do better in Japan than the orginal Xbox did, but that may not actually be the point at all. Consider that the U.S. video game market is bigger than the Japanese market (which has actually been in decline the last few years), and what looks like a growing European market. Plenty of money can be made with successes in the more familiar U.S. and European markets alone. So why bother with Japan?

It’s all about the games. Some of the most innovative video games are still being developed in Japan. It is likely that some of the Japanese software under development for the 360 will also make its way to U.S. shores. So even if a Japanese 360 title strikes out in Japan because of the relatively low number of 360 consoles there, it may do quite well in the U.S. and Europe. And a more well rounded line up of games, relative to the original Xbox, will only help Xbox 360 sales everywhere.

I finally managed to login to a World of Warcraft server last night to try out my trial edition of the game. I ended up logging onto one of the role playing servers (RP) since the so called "normal" servers continued to be full and I didn’t want to get killed in 5 minutes on the player versus player (PvP) servers. I figured that I could do a little role playing if need be.

Now call me crazy, creepy, or whatever, but I’ve grown fond of playing female characters in online games, so I created a lovely female night elf warrior to play as. Since the trial is only for 14 days, I chose to start as a warrior since they tend to be pretty straight forward to play and I like to mix it up anyway. Next I just jumped into the game without reading the fine manual. I wanted to see how much I could do without RTFM first.

Cutting to the chase, I had fun! Yeah, first you have to level up in the usual slaughter the small animals sort of fashion. But, I was impressed with how well the automatic help system answered my questions as they came up in the game. And it only took a few minutes to get used to using mouse and keyboard for movement after being spoiled with a gamepad in FFXI for so long. I only played for about an hour, but I’m looking forward to going back in, after I spend some quality time with the manual.

Well, with over 4 million paying subscribers, I suppose I should have expected it, nevertheless I’m still bummed out that all of the World of Warcraft servers I try to log onto are full! After a number of installation glitches followed by the expected hour or two of downloading and patching, I was finally ready to give my trial edition of World of Warcraft a whirl.

I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XI for over a year and a half now, but I hadn’t been online for a while. Upon my return, I discovered that my favorite linkshell had disbanded and feeling a bit lonely in the world, I decided to give WoW a try. But if it is always so hard to get on as it was tonight, I probably won’t be plunking down any cash for the full version any time soon. I guess at this point their holiday season marketing is a bit self-defeating.