Leeeeeeroy Jenkins (and some Rock Band)

Short post tonight. Sadly, with all the packing and side projects I'm engaging in these days, my game time has been limited.

However, today I did get to engage in some Rock Band and some World of Warcraft CCG gaming.

Rock Band was fun. It was the first time I'd played it completely sober with strangers. And these strangers were quite good. I'm still shocked at how bad the game shell UI is (especially if you just want to quickly dive into a song and start playing) and at how poorly the Easy and Medium difficulty levels are calibrated. Yet I still had a blast. The social aspect of the game gave me the strength to struggle through the multiple failures until I was able to at least keep up and not ruin the game for my band mates.

The World of Warcraft CCG session was fun and refreshing at the same time. We did the raid on Onyxia -- a barbarians at the gate scenario where 4 of us played cooperatively against the DM. One of us had never played WoW before, I had played for a few weeks (capped at about level 27) and the other 3 players (2 team mates & the DM) were all hard core WoW players (we were at a party celebrating the one year anniversary of their guild -- and they even had a tabard-decorated cake).

We all ended up having fun. We didn't get into any really cool combos or complex social interactions, but it was clear that the game would require strategic cooperation to win the quest. Unfortunately we needed to call the game off before it finished (I had to rush off to a hockey game) but it was clear that we were about to be decimated.

Funnily enough, one of my companions had the Leroy Jenkins card and got a chance to play it during the game. It did exactly what you'd expect it to do: Screw down all your allies while buffing you for a heroic attack. Well done, Blizzard.