I recently started to play a game called Velvet Assassin..well I can only really say ‘started’ because that’s as far as I got. Started of well, I used to enjoy games allot but now I try to play one I just cant stop thinking ‘this is stupid and would never happen in real life’. Basically you play a female soldier, who sounds American, who is probably an Assassin. Reminded my so much of Metal Gear Solid, the first mission you even have to find your bag because it got caught in a tree….just like MGS. I got as far as stabbing a drunk German guy in the shoulder…to me that isn’t a deadly blow.

Blind?

I cant seem to get into games as much as I used to, I just don’t play them anymore. The last game I played allot was World of Warcraft, perhaps there is nothing after quitting WoW ? After quitting WoW I played games like Call of Duty…and well that’s it, but that was pretty fun, I guess because it has a feasible storyline unlike some games out there. Nowadays I am too busy writing blogs, messing around with Photoshop, and doing other non-game related activities. Is this Game Over for my gaming life? I used to consider myself a gamer.. I even used to think I will never give up gaming, I used to think the guys from Pure Pwnage were actual Gods (until they announced their real names aren’t FPS Doug etc). I used to tell people that I will be a Gamer for life..and that Gaming isn’t for kids, but have I grown out of it ?

He still owns

Pure Pwnage show actually owns, even though I don’t follow gaming as much as I used to. I even bought their T-Shirts…

Yes yes, I am an ex-World of Warcraft player, I confess it. I used to love playing a bit (hell of a lot) of WoW. I played it for three years, started playing it at 16 years old, in the middle of my GCSE’s which is not a good idea. World of Warcraft has been heavily criticized for its addictiveness, and when the news is not talking about emo’s, chav’s or Princess Diana (still), they talk about how dangerous it is to play World of Warcraft. This is what I hate about the news, the way they try to scare us. Like in the famous documentary made by Micheal Moore (I cant remember which one, they are all good) he mentions how, in America, they bombard the nation with fearful news headlines, hardly any positive headlines are published. Its always about murders and shootings and other depressing crap. Back to WoW, I saw a news broadcast about a ‘WoW addict’ who plays it 24/7, now the news has got all the Mothers in the UK worried that their child is an addict too. Same with the outburst of emo headlines, the Mothers got worried about their child self harming. And with the Chav headlines which lasted about 3 years before people realized that these Chavs aren’t dangerous, they are only 12 years old with 3 kids under their belt.

I hated calling it an addiction, an addiction is something that you consume, like drugs, or food. But with WoW, I preferred to call it an obsession. When playing WoW, it is very competitive because of it being a MMORPG (massive multi-player online role playing game), there is thousands of players on each server of whom to compete against. You always had to get better gear than the other player, had to beat players in PVP (player verses player). Because of this, WoW really does become a full time job. If you stop playing for a week, you drop behind other players because they have one weeks more experience, or gear than you. It sounds pretty lame now that I think back to what I used to be like. I stopped playing WoW in September 2007, I got up that day like normal, a day off from college, getting up early to play WoW. 15 hours later and the days gone, and I just thought, why am I even bothering to play this anymore. It was like I had grown out of it, it just felt right to stop playing. I do miss the people I met, they were awesome, and that is why WoW is so successful, which brings us to my first point:

Things I miss:

Community

The community inside World of Warcraft is very strong, and the one of the reasons why people play it for so long. If the game was one player, and not online, it would be pretty boring and you would end up getting annoyed by the graphics. But with a strong sense of community, it makes it all worthwhile.

Let the lag begin..

The sense of achievement

The World of Warcraft is an easy way to get a sense of achievement. When working as a team with your friends to kill a boss is what most high end players do. Even little things, like getting a cool item you have been waiting for gives you a nice feeling inside that probably causes the addictiveness of this game.

The players

Sure you get some assholes, but most of them were great to play with. And probably the thing I miss most from World of Warcraft. When I quit it was like I was abandoning a whole bunch of friends. Even though we had never met in real life, but after playing WoW with the same people for three years you grow strong bonds with certain players.

That is actually all I can think off that I miss from it..

Things I do not miss:

Everything else

I guess I can sum up everything I do not miss by just saying everything else. Blizzard, the creators of World of Warcraft deliberately made World of Warcraft the way it is to make people play it ALOT and keep on paying monthly. I do not like Blizzard for this, they claim that WoW is a game where anybody can play it, the casual gamer can just log on for a short period of time to play for a little bit, whereas the hardcore gamer can play for hours too. This is just untrue in my eyes, you cant play WoW for a short period of time and get anything significant done. An instance can take hours, quests can take hours too. All the casual gamers in WoW suck because they do not play it enough to get into a proper raiding guild.

The graphics are nothing to rave about, but as I said before, the graphics do not matter when your playing with a community.  I hate how much time of my life WoW consumed, I honestly believe I could have done better in my GCSE exams if I hadn’t have played WoW so much.

There is one other thing I didn’t like about WoW. Its nerdy-ness, WoW is a very nerdy game, and I am not insulting everyone who plays WoW, it is just geeky, and maybe that isn’t a bad thing.