A little piece of whatever I decide to talk about

Everyone has heard of World of Warcraft. If you don’t know what it is you have been living under a rock. Basically Blizzard Entertainment has put together a game where hundreds of thousands of people can gather online and help each other perform quests, solve puzzles, and fight each other. The Massive Multiplayer Online game market has taken the world by storm.

I have a few basic principals in life. Own more automobiles than I require, relax on the couch, and don’t spend money on video games. I have never played World of Warcraft a single day in my entire life for one reason, it costs money to play every month. Blizzard relies on subscription fees to try and recoup some of the cost of keeping the servers online since they are required for the user experience. The only problem with that model, people like me don’t get to play.

I was surfing the net last Saturday night and came across an advertisement about a “Warcraft II” type game. The ad was obviously geared towards men as the girl that accompanied the link was particularly gifted. I went by the ad and started looking for some other games that might be interesting. 15 minutes later, I went back to the main website of the game and took the plunge. Needless to say, I haven’t stopped playing since.

This game is termed as a Massive Multiplayer Online Real Time Strategy game, MMORTS for short. The key difference about this game from a game like World of Warcraft is that you don’t control any units. You build a town, build resource gathering structures, upgrade town buildings, and create units. When you send a group of units to scout or attack another piece of land, you have no control over the outcome of the battle. It is based purely on how many troops you sent, the types of troops, the Hero that you sent with the troops, and the defenses/army of the land in question. This takes a lot of the grueling task away from playing the game as you don’t have to micromanage each unit in the game.

One other thing that I like about this game is that there is no client. I can play this game on any computer that has a web browser, flash, and an internet connection. Now yes, it is a flash game and that does tend to make it suck, but for the most part this game performs pretty well. There are still some bugs and glitches but the game is still relatively new so those should be ironed out over time.

Overall this game is very enjoyable. It can be a little bit boring as upgrading buildings and training units can take quite a bit of time. As you continue to progress through the game the amount of time it takes to upgrade structures goes up dramatically, from one to two minutes for a level 1 building, to 200+ hours for a level 8 building. This fact makes for some boring afternoons but it is also good in the sense that if your alliance (You are in an alliance right? Why not?) is not at war, you can click a few buttons and the game won’t require any interaction from you for the rest of the day. When you get back, you’ll have enough resources to continue the game.

The best part about this game, it’s free. There is no monetary requirement involved with playing although if you are willing to spend money you will be able to level faster by purchasing “Cents”. I don’t necessarily agree with the fact that they are capatalizing on players that don’t want to build their cities without the help of what I would call cheats, but at the same time I can’t really blame them for trying to make a buck. If you’re reading this and you haven’t signed up, what are you waiting for? If you don’t like it, there is no reason that you can’t leave the page and never return.