Like a lot of people, I’m finding buying Blizzcon tickets to be a LITTLE frustrating — mystery errors with multiple credit cards, captcha inputs that seem to be out of synch with the verification software.
I hope Blizzard gets this resolved before the tickets are all gone …
UPDATE: My Windows XP box at home didn’t work, but my Mac OS 10.4.9 box at work got through fine. Weird.
Apple’s pretty crappy browser, Safari, is now available for Windows. Hooray?
Mac loyalists will argue it renders faster, it’s stable, yadda yadda. Well, not really. It’s not appreciably faster than Firefox, it lacks nearly all of Firefox’s improvements (many of which have now been aped by IE7) and it can’t even render quite a few standards-based pages that both Firefox and IE can render. (It’s an issue I face here at work where Freedom folks at remote locations see a totally different page than I see with Firefox or IE.)
How about a widescreen video iPod, Jobs?
Blizzard has just announced the in-game (World of Warcraft, that is) goody for attendees at this year’s Blizzcon convention in Anaheim.
In 2005, it was the adorable pet murloc, Murky, who will sing and dance like the Looney Tunes frog when he gets bored.
This year, though, this year is so much better than another murloc baby, because it means those of us with Murky can have both rewards out at the same time: This time around, the prize is an in-game murloc suit. (Trust me, if you played WoW, you’d know how deeply awesome that is.)
OK, here’s something cool.
This is the kind of thing that continues to make me proud of my former association with Blizzard Entertainment: They just granted the wish of a boy with an almost certainly fatal brain tumor, by letting him put his fingerprints on World of Warcraft: Blizzard makes WoW wish virtual reality
For World of Warcraft players hanging out in Shadowmoon Valley last Friday, bizarre events occurred that can only be explained by a small group of people inside the headquarters of Blizzard Entertainment.
At the helm of the strangeness sat 10-year-old Ezra Chatterton, who directed Warcraft’s lead game designer Jeff Kaplan to blast ferocious-looking monsters, or “bosses,” with a single death ray. Chatterton cleared the Black Temple for a European clan to fight the volcano-summoning Supremus.
All that power. Heh, heh.
“I’m impressed with Blizzard,” said Chatterton from his wheelchair. “Bravo!”
The Riverside fifth-grader has a brain tumor. The diagnosis isn’t good; metastatic cancer. Splitting headaches started in March, which led to an emergency room visit in April. Doctors had to sedate him for the pain and he didn’t wake up for a week. Groggy and weak in the hospital, Chatterton only wanted to play the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft.
When the Make-A-Wish Foundation of America, an organization that grants wishes to children with life-threatening cases, came calling two weeks ago, Chatterton knew exactly what he wanted.
“I wished for a trip to Blizzard because I’d like to see if they could make a character and do some things for us.”
Chatterton didn’t think his wish would come true. He’s starting treatment today. And, at most, he thought it could just be a video conference call. But when he found out Blizzard was nearby, and willing, Chatterton became the envy of the 8.5 million World of Warcraft players worldwide. He not only got the chance to tour the company, but to create something new for the game.
I look forward to completing Ezra’s quest when it goes live in the game. It looks like it takes place in Thunderbluff or Bloodhoof village, judging from the pictures at the OCR site, but that’s what Horde alts are for.
The Chatterton’s character is a Tauren hunter named ePhoenix. It looks like the gear Blizzard set him up with was all Gladiator arena PVP stuff. His PVP kills record is pretty low to be set with all that gear otherwise.
Blizzard has just drop-kicked South Korea’s GDP into the toilet with its weekend announcement of StarCraft II.
(When I was at Blizzard, the company had sold enough copies of StarCraft in South Korea for one person in nine to own one, although many of those copies were for cybercafes. I can’t think of a game with comparable success in America.)
Not surprisingly, the StarCraft Battle Chest
, which includes StarCraft, the Brood War expansion (the team lead on that, incidentally, was Rob Pardo, who went on to lead Warcraft III and World of Warcraft) is back to #20 on the videogame sales chart at Amazon.com. Heck, I’m probably going to get it, since my complimentary copy that I got when I was hired there eventually found its way to my brother-in-law’s house, and has never been installed on my current computer.
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