Via the fine folks at RPS, a wiki with more Lich King info than you can shake a stick at. I do love the British sense of conflicted humor:

There’s a hell of a lot of minute detail on supposed new skills and talents in there, which will doubtless prove the most thrilling element of this enormo-leak for dedicated WoWians, but those of us who care about more than the numbers can enjoy all the screenshots of new monsters and armours and the like. How Arthas, fallen prince of Azeroth and current Lich King (and WOTLK’s Biggest Bad) appears is in there, as are cutey-wutey clockwork gnomes, a possible demon form for Warlocks and Tauren canoes. We even get to see what Gnome Death Knight looks like. My main character was a Gnome. I could be a Gnome Death Knight NO STOP IT NO NO NO.

For once I was over in the Goodjer neck of the woods, and I was actually talking about MMOGs! So I can post it here and not feel all guilty! Hooray! Ahem.

AoC and the hypemachine, this week on the GWJ conference call.

This week a very tired Shawn Andrich (stupid Age of Conan) slacks off on the show notes so he can go to bed. On the podcast we discuss hype, Age of Conan, why Michael Zenke is awesome and your sumptuous emails.

Did you know I’ve had a personal blog for the better part of a decade? It’s true. My first post in the database for Randomdialogue.net is from … well, here:

O Brother Momento

April 16, 2001

Saw Memento and O Brother Where Art Thou over the weekend. Reviews forthcoming.
Why am I writing reviews of movies?

I promise I had more relevant conversation before that; I’ve accidentally deleted a number of posts over the years. That’s just the first post currently in the database. Anyway, I’ve been posting there very rarely since the beginning of last year. Just the same, I’ve felt a strong desire of late to start personal blogging again. If you find my writing interesting, and are looking for a bit more varied topics (ie: not games), Randomdialogue.net is the place to do it.

No cheesy reblogs this time, a real honest-and-for-true Friday Film. The past two weeks of gaming have been very fruitful, though mostly in WoW. Last week’s EQ2 session was a bust (oi so much death), and we had to give it a miss this week. On the other hand Hackworth, my UD Rogue main, is on the cusp of 60! The Monday evening instance crew had a great dash through Scarlet Monastery and Cathedral. Runetusk is 38, and my hope is to ding him to 40 before the next run; I’ve already got the cash for my mount. Yay Raptors.

The film this week is an abject failure. The week before last the Fists of Ham were in RazorFen Downs. We hadn’t finished, but we were set to call it a night. We decided to take on one last quest and … well … it turned out very, very badly.

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The early entry server list has been dropped on the official AoC site.

I’m going to be on Wiccana, and I invite you to join me.

US Servers (Early Access 17th of May)

PvE Servers
Set
Dagoth
Zug
Omm
Derketo
Thog
Wiccana
Gwahlur (recommended Oceanic)
Anu

PvP Servers
Tyranny
Bane
Deathwisper
Bloodspire (recommended Oceanic)
Doomsayer

RP-PvP Server
Cimmeria

Last week the Wrath of the Lich King information drop really brought Blizzard’s view into focus. I’ve been saying for some time now that they were holding something back - a fairly obvious comment. What I didn’t really appreciate is how informative a news reveal would be when it finally hit. I’d expected some sort of specific feature, like another Hero class or some moderate old world revamping. Instead we got … well, basically a manifesto. In between the back-of-the-box features they’ve let slip, we can see the impressions of a very specific boot tread.

Blizzard is now a company marching to battle with a very specific plan: World of Warcraft is going to be a very, very casual-friendly game. You think it’s casual now, you haven’t seen anything yet. Cameron’s already done a bangup job of commenting on this over at Massively, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t do some commentating of my own. Aside from gross generalizations, I specifically want to address a few things I noticed in the interviews with Kaplan and Chilton … things that made me very curious indeed.

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Friday I put up my third GWJ article, this one exploring the dark mirror that is Grand Theft Auto IV.

I like Niko Bellic, and I’m not sure what that says about me. Grand Theft Auto IV’s protagonist is kind of a dick, no two ways about it. While he stumbles into a situation far removed from what he was expecting, the demands placed on him soon balloon far beyond a rationale person’s tolerance. Not five hours into the game’s main storyline you’re killing people in cold blood for not much more than a verbal insult.

Still, despite it all, I like Niko. I enjoy his tale in a way that I haven’t enjoyed the story in any other GTA title, and that makes me profoundly uncomfortable. GTA is fundamentally about 3 things, and they’re all uncomfortable: violence, race, and sex. That these things speak to me is troubling and intriguing, tapping into the basest elements of humanity. It feels like there are three monkeys on my back. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil … it’s so archetypal it’s almost silly.

Ready for a peek into my subconscious? Me neither.