The Top 10 Most Dangerous World PvP Areas of WoW
Going outside. It’s quite dangerous. Just ask a World of Warcraft player. Gang fights, turf disputes, trade swindling, imposing authorities, Mr. T. – and we’re not even talking about WoW yet.
So imagine what happens when you mix those things, rampant drug and alcohol usage, internet anonymity, a cross between GTA-style violence and Harry Potter-style witchery, 13-year-olds, and good old FPS teabagging. You get a rather dangerous place called a “PvP Realm.” Roughly translated for those who haven’t yet mastered WoW-speak, it means “open season on your ass.” But since Blizzard has yet to debut its patented in-game butt cup (available soon for only $10, limit one per account) to shield your character (aka toon) from unwanted posterior intrusions, you’ll have to settle with my $5 “Don’t-even-think-about-going-there” tour guide, provided to you free of charge.
So, without further adieu, I bring you, ranging from “hunting guide for Dick Cheney” to “sparring partner for Chuck Norris,” the top 10 most dangerous world PvP areas of WoW.
[A quick note to WoW players not yet accustomed to the sheer lunacy of PvP realms:
PvEers - pretend every zone not exclusively controlled by your faction is simply one of those magical places you call a "battleground," only with flight paths.
RPers - replace "you" with "thou," and "teabagging" with "a sampling of ye olde family jewels."]
#10 – Karazhan
Above: A typical Tuesday night outside Karazhan in 2007.
The old level-70, 10-man raid instance from Burning Crusade may be responsible for many things – starting a new approach that made making raid instances more accessible, causing Blizzard to incorporate 10-man options for all of its raid content in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion – but it will always be known for giving us one startling revelation above all: meeting stones and ganking go together like hookers and the clap.
Sure, Karazhan may not be much of a hot spot anymore, what with the level cap being raised to 80 and all, but back before WoW’s second expansion launched you couldn’t hover around the instance’s meeting stone on a weekday night for more than 10 seconds (let alone during the weekend) without getting gang raped by numerous members of the opposing faction.
The fact that both Horde and Alliance had to summon their raid members face-to-face while some dickweed rogue decided to run his own Sap-a-thon would often cause an arms race that rivaled the Soviet/American nuclear weapons buildup during the Cold War. The first side to amass a full 10-man group – or simply a larger group during more pressing moments – instantly waged full-scale war on the other side.
Beer, weed, energy drinks and A.D.D. all combined with impatience over waiting on that last raid member who just wouldn’t seem to get out of Warsong Gulch no matter how many times you told him. And when more raid groups started showing up, it simply boiled down to who wanted it the most, and who simply wanted some Tier 4.
But assuming your raid somehow succeeded in neutralizing all nearby hostiles, you’d still end up waiting on that supposed second tank your resto druid said he found in trade chat over 30 minutes ago. Thankfully, you could always fall back on dueling your guildies while you waited.
Chances of teabagging: medium.
Are We Really the Idiots They Say We Are?
I just suffered through one of the worst movies I have seen in a long time. I wasn’t planning on writing anything about it; I was just going to let it pass and hide my shame for even having voluntarily seen the film because I should have known better. However the filmmakers appear to have a huge marketing budget that they’re using to push the damn movie relentlessly through posters at every bus stop and an ad during every commercial break. The movie is “Gamer,” and being one myself, it got me thinking about what the film says about this very unique and diverse classification of people.
Before “Gamer” I had never seen any other films by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor who’d both written and directed it and I had no idea that they already had a reputation, of sorts. Their previous movies are Crank, and Crank: High Voltage which I’ve heard many describe simply as “hectic.” (They are also currently working on Crank 3, said to be in 3D, and finishing up Jonah Hex, which IMDb has explained like this: “In the Wild West, a scarred bounty hunter tracks a voodoo practitioner bent on liberating the South by raising an army of the undead.”)
In the special features of the “Gamer” DVD they themselves said, “Watching [our movies] is like audience torture. We were talking about this the other day, like, not only do we torture our characters [...] but we torture our audience. It’s like hitting them over the head with a ball pein hammer for 90 minutes.”
It sounds like they are both very committed artists of the cinema. Intellectually, I am guessing they must be real geniuses too. Taylor and Neveldine, again from the “Gamer” DVD’s special features:
“I think, at times, they wanted us to pull a lot of the creepy, weird, wild stuff that we do out of that -”
“- and we battled and we kept as much as we could in.”
“And that, at the end of the day, is the big difference between making a cheap movie and an expensive movie. …Is the kind of, like, how far can you push it? How far can you go? You want it to be more accessible, for a bigger audience.”
Of course while they say this the “making of” featurette editor cuts to some behind-the-scenes footage from one of the film’s sets. In the footage you see an actor asking the camera and production crew for some direction, all while he’s wearing skin-tight white spandex from head to toe and doing pelvic thrusts into another guy suspended from the ceiling in a harness.
So just to make sure I have this straight you two – you’re saying the difference between a cheap movie and an expensive one is how much money you spend on it, and on how great of a job you do in making it creepy, weird, and wild? And further, loading it up with that kind of stuff and pushing cultural boundaries also just happens to be how you make a film more accessible and appeal to a bigger audience?
Golly, that’s so difficult to wrap my mind around that it just has to be smart!
Nintendo: GTA Chinatown Wars sales ‘frustrating’
Nintendo’s focus on “evergreen” titles has been a staple of the publisher for years now, with marketing support lasting longer than ever with this generation’s major releases. So it surprised us last April when the company said it hoped “word of mouth” would help push GTA: Chinatown Wars‘ lackluster initial sales higher as the months progressed. However, when executive vice president Cammie Dunaway recently spoke with MTV Multiplayer, Nintendo’s traditional message quickly returned. “Part of what’s needed is you have to continue to put marketing support behind these titles.”
She also called sales “frustrating, quite frankly,” but declined to comment on Rockstar’s marketing surrounding the release of the game. Dunaway remained diplomatic through the conversation though, only offering, “The old dynamic of ‘throw it on television for a few weeks and then move on and forget it’ just doesn’t work,” giving us little more than a taste of her real feelings behind the release’s marketing push. Check out the whole clip after the break.
Continue reading Nintendo: GTA Chinatown Wars sales ‘frustrating’
Nintendo: GTA Chinatown Wars sales ‘frustrating’ originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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COP: The Recruit takes you to an urban open world on the DS
Nintendo has just announced COP: The Recruit, created by Ubisoft, for the DS at their E3 press conference. It’s an open-world third-person urban crime game with an anime edge — you play as a street racer who’s been cuffed, and has to choose between working for the police or returning to your criminal ways. The short video they showed was reminiscent of both Driver and GTA — running, shooting, committing acts that would normally get you locked up, all on the DS’s dual screens.
We’ve got no date at all for when this might actually appear on store shelves, but we’re guessing it’ll be some point in the future. Sometime after this exact second right now.
COP: The Recruit takes you to an urban open world on the DS originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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GTA: Chinatown Wars jacks more wallets, sells 74K in April
In its first month of release, GTA: Chinatown Wars managed to only sell 89,000 copies in the US, according to the NPD. Now that the figures for April have come in, Gamasutra reports the game has managed to sell another 74,000 copies. Mind you, we’re no mathematicians (well, not all of us), but by our calculations, that means GTA: Chinatown Wars has managed to sell a total of 163,000 copies in the US so far, which is a lot lower than what most analysts predicted the game would sell in its first month.
We guess that South Park bump didn’t do the game much good …
GTA: Chinatown Wars jacks more wallets, sells 74K in April originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 18 May 2009 11:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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CNBC ponders a Grand Theft Auto slowdown
CNBC is wondering if slow sales for The Lost and the Damned and Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars are pointing to an overall slowdown for the series. The site points to analysts’ estimates that only 1 million of those 13 million who bought GTA IV picked up the first DLC for the game, and to the crummy 89,000 units the DS title moved in March.
We’re not sure we’re on board with CNBC’s theory just yet, though. The market for GTA IV’s DLC was already split because of its 360 exclusivity and Chinatown Wars is a hardcore game on what’s largely thought of as a casual system. What do you think?
CNBC ponders a Grand Theft Auto slowdown originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 04 May 2009 20:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Nintendo: Don’t panic, Chinatown Wars will do just fine … probably
Nintendo isn’t afraid of low sales numbers for the M-rated DS outing of the GTA series, GTA: Chinatown Wars. In fact, the company believes the game will have “long legs” — continuing to sell for the months to come rather than the usual cycle of big launch and steady decline. Speaking with MTV Multiplayer last week, Nintendo vice president of licensing Steve Singer said, “Chinatown Wars is performing in line with AAA titles that have come to our platform like Spore [Creatures] or Lego Star Wars.”
And the sales numbers of those titles seem corroborate his point. Spore Creatures has sold nearly one million units worldwide at this point and Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga has moved just over two and a half million, though each title sold less than half of Chinatown’s numbers in their first two weeks at retail (released March 17, the March NPD numbers only recorded the first two weeks of the games sales). We’re not sure what the future holds for the critically lauded title but Singer believes “word of mouth” will help to keep GTA: Chinatown Wars steady in the future. We’ll certainly see after April’s NPD numbers arrive in a few weeks.
Nintendo: Don’t panic, Chinatown Wars will do just fine … probably originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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No, really? Analyst believes GTA: Chinatown Wars will move 2M in US
Doug Creutz, an analyst at the firm, is quoted as saying, “Although the handheld platform has a younger-skewing installed base, we believe many core gamers own the DS.” Hmm. We see, please continue. “The strong critical rating will likely increase the game’s chances of becoming a commercial hit.” So, good scores equal good sales? Not always the case.
We’d like to take a moment to go as far out on the limb as Cowen and make a few crazy predictions of our own. No. 1: In 10 years, people will still need water. No. 2: Parachute pants will never come back into style. No. 3: We’ll never make as much as these analysts do for our predictions.
No, really? Analyst believes GTA: Chinatown Wars will move 2M in US originally appeared on Joystiq Nintendo on Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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DS Lite gets gangsta-fied for GTA: Chinatown Wars release
As part of the push to promote GTA: Chinatown Wars, the Nintendo World Store had a custom DS Lite on display for those who bothered to show up for the game’s midnight release Monday night, which you can see via this flickr stream. While we’ll admit that the combination of almost-black blue and fire truck red aren’t the most pleasing from a visual standpoint, we definitely wouldn’t mind snagging some of those awesome little GTA figurines next to it.
What do you think? Yay or nay on this DS?
Gallery: The best (and worst) handheld mods
[Via Tiny Cartridge]
DS Lite gets gangsta-fied for GTA: Chinatown Wars release originally appeared on Joystiq Nintendo on Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Video: This is how you snipe in GTA: Chinatown Wars
If the first trailer for Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars didn’t supply enough in-game footage, perhaps this latest trailer will do the job.
Embedded after the break is a new gameplay clip of Chinatown Wars, featuring the hacking process and the delightful act of sniping. We’ll be the first to admit that having to actually assemble the sniper rifle is all kinds of awesome, though we remember the process being somewhat more challenging on our last trip to the grassy knoll.
Continue reading Video: This is how you snipe in GTA: Chinatown Wars
Video: This is how you snipe in GTA: Chinatown Wars originally appeared on Joystiq Nintendo on Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Top 10 Best Selling Games
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