This past weekend, I bit the bed-rail and picked up a copy of World of WarCraft. Having been a moderate EverQuest and EQ2 junkie, I’d thought I quit the MMORPG habit cold, but after seeing some statistics stating that over fifty percent of the MMORPG players worldwide are on WoW, I decided to give it a try. It seems the numerous weekends spent chained to a computer, fingers nervously twitching from an overdose of caffeine, nicotine and sleep deprivation while farming beasts to improve my leather-working skills was just not enough for me.

As with EQ, the install and initial update took well over an hour to finish and the monthly account fee is the same fifteen bucks I could be donating to save some village of crippled, blind children in Africa, but hey…I’m already going to Hell anyway.

In EQ, my main was a Wood-Elf Druid and I really got to liking the soloing capabilities of that class, so in keeping with tradition, I chose a Night-Elf Druid to be my first character. The huge Minotaur-like Tauren, Trolls, Orcs and Undead were really appealing since I generally like to keep it evil, but I decided to stick with what I know, at least for now. I’ve played Druids for about two years and I know that class’s place, alone or in groups pretty down-pat. Tree-hugger, I am not, but I know what I know.

I was very surprised to see how very similar WoW is to EQ2. The gameplay and mechanics are in many ways nearly the same. You’d think someone at Sony would’ve sued by now. Maybe they have or perhaps Sony ripped off someone else first—I’ve no idea, but the similarities had me up and running right away, killing and running all over the place.

The only real differences I see—aside from the basic stuff like graphics, races and zones is that questing seems to be better set up in WoW. I rarely finished any quests in EQ, but over the course of the weekend, I’d managed to get something over twenty complete quests under my belt in WoW. In a matter of a few hours (I did get some sleep), I managed to work my way up to level 12.

I missed MMORPGs. There’s a reason EQ was dubbed EverCrack. I’m not sure what the slang for WoW would be…”WarCrack”? I’m not sure how long I’m willing to invest in playing WoW, but for now, I’m all about it. If you’re in the neighborhood, drop me a /tell. My main’s name is Abbath (ripped straight from the Norwegian Black Metal gods, Immortal) on the Anvilmar server.

I bought a brand-spanking-fresh-copy of the FPS game, Prey, after waiting for it for almost a year. All the videos, screengrabs and rants I’d seen had me thinking it was going to be the coolest shit since duct tape.

After installing to my desktop’s XP partition (and subsequently spending 40 minutes running updates and patches since I never boot Windows anymore), I gave it a whirl and was greeted with a jerky, shitty looking game with the lowest frame-rate I’ve ever seen. A little deeper digging and I found that my NVidia GeForce 5200 wasn’t supported and closest I could get to smooth gameplay was by running at the lowest graphical settings, which were horrible. I wasn’t happy.

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A few days ago, after spending a wretched day renewing my ID at the hell that is the Brooklyn DMV, I picked up a copy of “Shadow of the Colossus” for the PS2 to brighten my day. I had no idea what it was about, but chose it because somewhere at some point I’d glanced at a review that raved about it. This is basically how I buy all games as I’ve a decided lack of patience to read gamer sites and magazines. I usually will subscribe to an RSS feed and scan the photos and titles. Games that get a bunch of posts, stick in my memory and usually end up getting purchased in moments of consumer weakness, which is often.

The format of your run-of-the-mill action game is: fight, fight, fight…boss scene. Fight the boss and then it’s back to fight, fight, fight til the next boss scene and the game eventually ends. Nothing wrong with it, I suppose but the boss fights have historically always been my least favorite parts. Give me a room with twenty little baddies that I have to kill á la God of War and I am one happy fucking camper. Games that are boss-heavy usually begin to collect dust shortly after purchase.

SotC is all bosses. There’s nothing else to the game, unless you count running from point A to B. There’s not baddies in between to slay. You go from one boss monster to another and while normally this would have me hating this game, I find myself hooked. SotC doesn’t have just any old bosses. These bastards are HUGE, gorgeously rendered behemoths that combine action, puzzle-solving and strategy to beat. The graphics, scenery and feel are hot shit. Strange, mysterious and moody. There’s little or no dialog in the game so the huge dream-like world sprawled out before you, unoccupied but for the mountainous beasts reminiscent of something out of HP Lovecraft is simply there to wonder about.

The hero of the game is this dinky little fucker, armed with only a sword and bow and a horse to ride. Pitted against giants literally fifty times larger, the little dude has to expose and attack the monster’s weak points. This is accomplished by figuring out how and managing to climb the boss, get to his weak spots and stab the fuck out of them before you lose your grip and fall. Tense shit.

There’s something to be said about a game revolving around my least enjoyed facet of the action genre that manages to completely entertain me. SotC is a great game on so many levels, from the concept to the anime-like look. It’s a short game, there being only sixteen bosses to battle, which sucks since this is a game that keeps you wanting to see more. More bosses, more areas, more everything.