bordagen

Happy Halloween to you all in reader-land!

Today is the time that ghosts and goblins come out to play and the night of tricks and treats for kiddies dressed in costumes ‘lovingly’ slaved over by their parents.

Over the weekend, I went to my brother’s Halloween gathering. It seemed to be a quite standard gathering with the lounge being fairly empty and the much smaller kitchen being the busiest room in the house. It was still a good night though, despite my having to leave early due to Liz not feeling too grand.

Tonight, I have been signed up to a WoW instance run with my guild around Scholomance. For those who do not know it is like a weird castle/boarding school infested with the dead. Quite fitting really. After that, me and my better half are going to watch Hellraiser featuring the P.E. guy from the Direct Line adverts, Doug Bradley.

Do you have any plans for tonight, or have done anything to celebrate this holiday already?

Well I’ve just finished watching the new spin-off series from Doctor Who entitled Torchwood on BBC Three.

From these two episodes I can’t really make my mind up. Personally I don’t think it’s as good as it’s parent show, ubt then again Torchwood is aimed at a different audience than Doctor Who. Torchwood is darker and a more adult show, complete with swearing and ’scenes of a sexual nature’.

As you might know, it follows the activities of Torchwood, an organisation setup to prevent alien interference with Earth and to salvage an alien technology to arm Earth for whatever invasion is headed it’s way. The team of Torchwood 3 (Cardiff base) is run by Captain Jack Harkness (from season 1/27 of Doctor Who). It has not yet been revealed how he managed to return to the 21st century from whatever century the Doctor and Rose left him in on Satellite 5/Game Station.

I’ll have to watch the next episode to see how I feel about this series, but fro mthese two I wasn’t impressed. Roll on December for the Doctor Who Christmas episode.

13 years ago I picked up a Lucasarts game called ‘Sam & Max Hit the Road’. It stars a film-noir-esque dog detective (Sam) and a homicidal, maniac rabbit (Max). The game itself was one of the last good 2D Point & Click adventure games produced by Lucasarts, and the games industry as a whole. It provided me and my mate Phil with hours upon hours of entertainment as we fought through the puzzles blocking the way to the end of the game.

A few years later, a TV series of the detective twosome was created and aired. This managed to capture a lot of the humour of the computer game and used a similar 2 dimensional cartoon style.

Now, 13 years on from the original game, many false starts and a license drop from Lucasarts, the license was picked up and an episodic game ’series’ has been created by Telltale Games. The game is, as of today, released via a site called Gametap. I just tried to sign up to this service so that I can get my most belated dose of cartoon adventure gamage only to be told that ‘This service is available only in United States’.

Denied.

I now have to wait until 1st November when Telltale Games start distributing the game via their own site for a cost of $9. Hopefully the ‘$’ is not a portent that this too will be US only.

After a few months of not really playing World of Warcraft, I recently popped online to see about completing soe quests that had been backing up my quest log for quite some time when I was invited to a guild instance run of Blackrock Depths. With Liz away I decided that I had nothing better to do so joined the party.

I now remember why the game is so good and how I could spend hours playing it.

Last night I was watching Robin Hood on BBC1 when Liz shouts me from upstairs asking if I want to go on a Molton Core run (Molton Core is a 40-man raid instance for those who aren’t in-the-know). I was torn between TV and the game, but in the end I decided to give it a go. The level of organsiation needed for one of these runs is very high indeed with specific roles and orders being handed out at various stages. My role as Paladin was a raid healer, meaning I keep an eye on everyones health (made very simple through the use of the CT_RaidAssist addon) and try to make sure that nobody dies. We were in there for around 3-4 hours and only had 1 wipe (if I can remember it was at Lucifron) and one very near (1 or 2 people managed to survive after a nasty pull at Garr and his crew.

Sadly because it was my first run with the raiding community, DOA – I could not roll on any of the epic items that dropped, but I have signed up to go again so hopefully I should be able to come out with something, but it does boil down to the luck of the roll in the game.