The Elder Scrolls Online Beta: Sign Ups Open!

Chances are if you're interested in The Elder Scrolls Online, you have already heard about it and if not, you're freaking out, opening another window and looking for it right now. Needless to say I dropped everything I was doing and went right away to work on signing up as soon as I saw it pop up in my facebook news feed and then watched the cinematic trailer that was released with the announcement after.

The beta sign up page is pretty straight forward and had the nice touch of offering a "current closed beta selection chance rating" meter that increased depending on the amount and information you gave.

New Female Worgen Models Are Here!

So I've been impatiently awaiting the female worgen models ever since I got into the World of Warcraft Cataclysm Beta. There have been a few picture floating around out there of the Worgen models but it was not yet in the final stages. Here's the wolf barbie-esque image.

Today I logged into the Beta (with a bug of character models not loading) and noticed the icon for female worgen modification changed. (previously it was a symbol of the picture above). After clearing game cache (both cache folders for anyone else with the problem) I re-logged into the game and was greeted with the new female worgen model.

"31 Point" Talent Trees are Here!

When I heard about how these were coming the other day I first thought to myself, "Noes! That last blog I just wrote was a lie then!". Luckily I wasn't entirely off and now I can give a more accurate description.

OVERVIEW OF TALENTS

The new talents trees are smaller, you have less points to spend, so this makes sense. I am unsure of the rate at which you gain talents points to spend. After spending my 36 points I had at level 80, I had a message at the top of my tree informing me that my next talent point would be "earned at level 81". (Yeah I still haven't leveled yet) The new trees also force a "primary spec". By that I mean it is no longer possible to be classified as "Hybrid" (take a look at some WoW Armory profiles).


"31 POINT" TALENT TREES

I put the 31 in quotes simply because you do not only have 31 points to spend at the max level. However the 31 points are what you MUST spend in a tree before you are even allowed to think about putting points into another tree. (Personally, that is going to force me have to re-think my dual wield tanking). The other trees will remain grayed out until you have spent 31 talent points in the tree you chose from the first talent menu.

Stat Changes on Items and How it Affects Tanking

This blog is mostly for the lovely Demeternoth to better explain/show how the stats on items will affect tanking. (Be sure to check out her blog as well and she should have some more detailed information coming from the Beta soon!)

Basically I noticed after doing a couple quests (and already replacing my heroic and and non-heroic tier gear with greens) that there has been an overall change in item stats. Overall I think the change can be good albeit being extremely annoying on another level.

Before I go on I'd like to mention a small detail

The Effect of Cataclysm on my Death Knight Tank Thus Far

I know that most people are probably hoping for (and expecting) specific details about high-end etc when they look up information on Cataclysm, let me just say right now that this isn't where I'm going with these blogs.

While I may include some specific details about items etc, my blogs will generally be from the perspective of a casual player (keep in mind I'm the mother of a 2 year old and have various other online duties I attend to in my gaming communities) to give and overall opinion on things.
Sadly I haven't had the opportunity so far to play as much as I would like due to time constraints and server stability issues for the EU server but I have already formed some thoughts an opinions.

After a lot of problems even copying my character into the Beta (due to language selection affecting account and DNS cache issues for a reloading transfer page that did nothing), I logged in eager to explore what I could right away.

WoW Cataclysm Beta!

I've actually been away for a week in Amsterdam.. so I'm getting to this late.

The other day I was checkin' my email. "checkin mah email, checkin' mah email, checkin' checkin'.." (ok enough of that for now, reference) when I saw I had something that said: World of Warcraft(r): Cataclysm(TM) Beta Test Invitation, I got a little excited until I considered that it was probably one of those phishing scams that I receive in my e-mail on a daily basis.. except this one was different.. it actually came to the e-mail that I have connected to my WoW account (I forward a lot of email addresses to one address, but my wow email is special) not like the ones I usually receive the scams at.


I read it and figured it was pretty legit

Giving Away: Blur Beta Tokens!

Due to positive feed back from the beta multiplayer demo of Blur, Blur has sent me tokens to give away.

I have TWO tokens that I will be giving away today at about 7pm GMT +1.

Choosing who to give them to will be hard but you can help make it easier!

What I want you to do is post a comment on my Blur Multiplayer Demo: A Promising Outlook blog entry and tell me why you would be interested in playing Blur. What features interest you and your expectations for the game.

I will then decide who is more "deserving" of the tokens based on reason and creativity.

Please leave me a way to contact you in case you are chosen, twitter is preferred if possible, or log in with an account in the comment section that has a way for me to contact you.

Sadly no one expressed interest in this contest, therefore I have given the tokens to some of my friends, maybe another time and another contest

Blur Multiplayer Beta Demo: A Promising Outlook

(This blog is based on the beta demo and is not representative of the final quality/product as the game is still in development)

So today I received a beta key for the Blur Multiplayer Beta Demo on xbox live. (you can still try to get beta keys!) I actually didn't know anything about this game until I received an e-mail from my local gaming store offering me one a week ago. I checked out the site and thought the game looked interesting enough to give it a shot.

Blur is a racing game by Bizarre Creations and Activision. I wouldn't limit it so much to a "racing game" as there is a bit more to it than that but this is the easiest genre I can find to label this game with.

At first glance (and even after playing it) I'm reminded of some old games I loved to play with my brothers: Extreme G racing (1 and 2), San Fransisco Rush 2049 battle mode (both N64 games) with a mix of Burn Out Revenge. This is actually a good thing as I have a lot of fond memories of multiplayer mode on these games and probably why I'm already looking forward to the full release of Blur.