Jar Of Eyeballs

Once again, the holiday for gamers by gamers has begun! If you have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, head over to Ctrl-Alt-Delete and read the entire archive. That’s right, EVERYTHING!

Okay, done? Great! So, here are my plans for Wintereenmas. One of my WoW characters is about to enter Outland and I want to celebrate Wintereenmas by kicking ass in Hellfire Ramparts. Also, I hope to get some more work on my upcoming game done so I can finally post an announcement next weekend. So everybody have fun and game on!

Music games like Guitar Hero are insanely popular. There are many similar games on the PC that don’t require the guitar controller but instead rely on the keyboard. Guitar Geek is one of them, and one of the best I have played so far.

The game follows the classical approach. Notes drop down the fretboard and you have to press the right buttons at the right time. It is played with four buttons. You can choose between ASDF, HJKL or 1234. I prefer HJKL for one simple reason: Belgium is one of the few countries that use the azerty keyboard layout instead of qwerty. I have no idea why this is, but it can cause serious headaches at times, especially with games that have the keyboard input hard coded in them and don’t allow you to customize it.

The game is quite short but very addictive. It contains six songs and has four difficulty levels: easy, normal, hard and geek. On easy, you never have to play more than one note at a time, on geek you often meet three note chords and fast solos. The songs are all instrumental rock songs and sound quite good. Some of them include Kirk Hammet-style guitar solos. The gameplay is only about hitting notes. You don’t have to strum or sustain notes. Even though it’s a bit short, it’s a very cool game. The animated guitar player during the game is hilarious.

I can’t imagine playing WoW without any addons, although I’m not going crazy and install dozens of them like some people. Here are a few of the most essential ones you just have to have:

• Bartender; this is a replacement for the action bar. It’s completely customizable (with scaling and opacity values) and you can easily assign hotkeys to it. You don’t need to set them in a menu, just hover over a button, press the hotkey you want to use and voila! And instead of a single bar with several pages on the bottom of the screen, you can have all bars active anywhere you want on the screen.
• Bagnon; this merges all your bags into a single frame. It’s especially useful for the bank, where you can have up to seven extra bags.
• Gatherer; this is a great addon for herbalists and miners. It remembers where you collected herbs or mined ore and displays it on your map, so you’ll know where you have the best chance to find stuff in the future. It can also display stuff found by members of your guild. This is a great plugin for use in Outland or Northrend, where you can just fly from one marker to the other. There are addons that do this automatically, but since these are considered bots they will get your ass banned.

The following three addons are the perfect combo for fast leveling:

• Tourguide; this is a leveling guide. It tells you exactly what quests to do in what order, and adapts itself to your own level. Usually, you’ll only stay in one area for no more than two levels, so you’ll never get bored from staying in one place too long. And to know exactly where you have to go, the next addon is great:
• Tomtom; this is a navigation tool. It tells you where to go with a floating arrow. You can set coördinates and waypoints yourself, or it can be used together with Tourguide. They integrate automatically, so Tomtom will point you exactly where to go.
• Lightheaded; this addon pulls the tips found on Wowhead and displays them in the game, so you don’t have to alt-tab out of the game to read them.

So that’s all I use. At one point I also had an addon that displays aggro, but since I’m not raiding or doing instances at the moment I disabled it. Feel free to let me know any other cool addons I just have to get!

I just realized I never talked about World of Warcraft here, while I’ve been playing it for quite a while now. I started playing a few months after Wrath of the Lich King was released, and the first character I made was a night elf hunter. Pretty classic choice, huh? Since this was my first character I had a hard time getting enough gold at first. Back then you had to be level 35 to get a mount but it wasn’t until I was almost level 40 that I got it. Yeah, it sucked! Now if only I got started on the same realm as my brother, then he could have given me some cash. Anyway, when I finally got it things sped up considerably. A while ago this hunter, named Chabuzal, reached level 80, making it my first level 80 character.

A bit of advice for new players: for your first character, pick mining and skinning for making money. Don’t combine mining and herbalism, because you’ll be switching tracking skills all the time. Oh, and a little thing you should know: at level 80, skinning becomes practically useless for making money. Mining is more profitable and you’ll be making tons of cash from daily quests. I already considered dumping it for a crafting profession.

Besides this hunter I have a few other characters. One of them is a rogue, but I only played it until level 11. Some day I’ll probably continue this character. I also have a warlock, wich is level 28 now. Haven’t played with that one in quite a while either. My main focus now is my draenei shaman. He’s level 19 now. The reason I started this character is basically that I suck big time when it comes to instances and raids, and I got a bit bored with my hunter. Oh, and I also have a death knight, but I barely played it beyond the starting area.

For the shaman, I picked herbalism and inscription. The draenei starting area is really excellent for kick-starting herbalism, I got it to about 140 before I even left the area! I’m also a bit surprised about the money making possibilities of inscription. At level 10, I was able to craft armor vellum I could sell for a very nice amount of gold!