Amateur Documentary ‘IRL’ Tackles Online Game Addiction

Via Scoop.it — Shezcrafti

Count­less doc­u­men­taries have inves­ti­gated gam­ing addic­tion and the sup­posed dan­gers lurk­ing in mas­sively mul­ti­player titles, but it’s not often that some­one who’s expe­ri­enced an addic­tion talks about it him­self. Third year film stu­dent and ex World of War­craft junkie Anthony Ros­ner looks back on his six years in the game in a new short doc­u­men­tary on the effects of MMO addic­tion. With help from friends Dave Novis and Arron Amo, Anthony pro­duced, directed, wrote, and edited the film him­self, ensur­ing that he had the oppor­tu­nity to tell his whole story and tell it from his own per­spec­tive.
Via massively.joystiq.com

5 Reasons Why the World of Warcraft Movie will Suck

Despite yesterday’s major geek­gasm news that Sam Raimi will be tak­ing up reigns as direc­tor of the highly-anticipated movie World of War­craft , I remain pessimistic.

The World of War­craft movie will suck, and here’s why:

1. First, let’s get the obvi­ous out of the way.  As a gen­eral rule, movies based on video games suck.

   Need proof?
   – S uper Mario Bros. sucked
   – Res­i­dent Evil (all of them) sucked
   – House of the Dead sucked
   – Silent Hill sucked
   – Laura Croft: Tomb Raider 1 & 2 sucked
   – Dou­ble Dragon sucked
   – Mor­tal Kom­bat 1 & 2 sucked
   – Street Fighter (both of ‘em) sucked

   …I could go on, but this post would get very long very quick.

2. The actual World of War­craft sucks nowa­days.  And things are only going to get worse as Bliz­zard scram­bles to main­tain its revolv­ing door player base.  Bliz­zard may claim to have some­where in the neigh­bor­hood of 11 mil­lion sub­scribers, but for all the new peo­ple sign­ing up, there’s a whole lot of vet­er­ans and hard­core gamers leav­ing Aze­roth, who are dis­en­chanted with many of Blizzard’s recent “fuck you” deci­sions that tend to favor its own pock­ets over those of pay­ing cus­tomers.  With the new Star Wars MMO loom­ing on the hori­zon, Bliz­zard knows it must milk the WoW cash cow for all its worth–in the form of paid fac­tion trans­fers and over­hyped expansions.
3. I like Sam Raimi, I really do.   But just watch Spider-Man 3, and var­i­ous other films Raimi has fucked up.  When it comes to direct­ing, he’s kind of a hack who’s for­tu­nate enough to have cult status/geek cred with the Evil Dead fran­chise.  Sure he makes some damn enter­tain­ing pop­corn hor­ror movies, but is he capa­ble of pulling off an epic fan­tasy film?  I hope his work on Leg­end of the Seeker isn’t an indi­ca­tion…  Check out Raimi’s over-saturated IMDB page , where he’s cur­rently listed to have over 20 projects in pro­duc­tion, includ­ing Spi­der­man 4.
4. It will be told from an Alliance per­spec­tive.  Snore.  I guess even out­side the game the Horde gets no love.  That aside, there are a zil­lion pos­si­ble sto­ry­lines in the World of War­craft upon which to base a movie.  Why choose lamestream Alliance?  I guess two mil­lion Night Elves can’t be wrong.
5. Last year, I included the long-rumored World of War­craft movie on my list of  Top 5 Most Antic­i­pated Fan­tasy Films of 2009 , which up until recently, Bliz­zard has main­tained would be the film’s year of release.  (I hope they didn’t really expect us to believe that! ) So it wasn’t at all supris­ing to hear that World of War­craft: The Movie is now slated for release in 2012.  TWENTY TWELVE!  Will WoW still be as pop­u­lar three years from now as it is today?

Hope I’m wrong!

Temple of Storms + Levitate = Awesome

One of the best things about Lev­i­tate?  Jump­ing from extremely high ele­va­tions.  Tonight while quest­ing in The Storm Peaks, I found a new win­ner: The Tem­ple of Storms.  This place is so high up you can’t see the ground from the top.  Perfect.

It’s lonely at the top.

Con­tem­plat­ing death.

Tak­ing the plunge.

Free fallin’.

It’s a loooooooong way down…

Bonus points if you can land in Engine of the Makers.

Know of any other awe­some places to jump?

The murloc suit: possibly the best quest ever.

“Mrglr­glr­glr­glrgl!”

Yep, that’s me dressed up as a murloc.

I know at level 75 I’m unfash­ion­ably late to be report­ing how cool this level 71 quest is, but that’s what I get for play­ing WoW on one of the most heav­ily pop­u­lated servers.  Now that the shiny new­ness of Wrath of the Lich King has had a few weeks to wear off, I can actu­ally get the Borean Tun­dra quests done with­out them being camped as hell.

To pick up this quest, head to Win­terfin Retreat in Borean Tun­dra and talk to King Mrgl-Mrgl.  He’ll start you on a chain quest begin­ning with Oh Noes, the Tad­poles! and end­ing with the actual suit part Surrender…Not! .  Trag­i­cally, the suit is only wear­able in this part of the zone.

Oh, and in case you were won­der­ing, here’s the back:

“Blarghrghrghrgh!”

Gotta love the heart print under­pants.  Not that I was looking…