For whatever silly reason, I’ve always wanted to create my own guild, so I did so the other day with one of my alts and ended up getting a pretty good laugh out of it along the way.

In order to create a guild in World of Warcraft you need to have nine other players sign your charter before handing it in to a guild master. Only one of my friends was logged in at the time so I had him sign it and got the rest of the signatures through the fairly common practice of paying low-level, unguilded characters one gold for their signature. The particularly character I was creating the guild with in fact, has signed three or four guild charters himself. Each and every time he’s done so, it’s been with the understanding that he wouldn’t actually be a member of the guild, he was just providing his signature and would be removed from the guild once it was formed.

So it was, that once my guild had been formed, I removed all the members, which, again, I thought was a fairly common occurance. One charter signee wasn’t too happy about it though. The following are some screenshots of our conversation right after removing him from the guild…

After Removal:

About a minute after that last message from Flashpriest, I received a whisper from “Aidinn” asking me how I was doing.  I had no idea who it was and thought it may have been a friend on a new alt.  It became apparent pretty quick who it really was:

In those last two screenshots you can see someone else looking for people to sign his charter.  I wonder if he heard from Flashpriest?

Anyway, when all was said and done, I went and created a guild tabard.  The screenshot below shows my best attempt at replicating the Canadian flag:

This week’s challenge was “Boss Battles”.  I still haven’t received a full compliment of submissions from my regular submiters, but the masses are calling for this post to be published already, so here it is, minus entries from Insect and Anoco.  As always, click the thumbnail for the full view.

Grahn: Magtheridon

Kuarlos: Ragnaros

Choo: Shade of Akama

Dave: Onyxia

A theme for next week isn’t immediately jumping out at me, so I’m open to suggestions.  I should also point out that these screenshots aren’t restricted to just World of Warcraft (although that just so happens to be what we’re all playing right now).

I was in a local EB Games here yesterday killing time at lunch by browsing their ever-dwindling stock of PC games when I overheard the following conversation:

customer: (to the sales clerk) “What’s this Fallout 3 game about?”
sales clerk: “Have you ever played Oblivion?  It’s just like that, but futuristic.”
customer: “No, I’ve never played Oblivion.”
sales clerk: “Well, it’s basically one of those huge multiplayer games.”
me: (inside my head) “What?”
customer: “Ah, well I already have Socom, so I don’t need another one of those.”
sales clerk: “Yeah.”

I suppose I could have said something, but that’s just not how I roll.  I realize that just because you work in a video game store doesn’t mean you’re automatically going to know about every single game that comes out, but Fallout 3?  It just released, on all platforms, and was marketed quite heavily within the very same store I was in!  They had a giant Fallout 3 cardboard standee thing right at the entrance to the store in addition to multiple posters on the damn wall.  Do you think maybe the sales people should be up to speed on one of the biggest releases of the year?

Furthermore, to call Oblivion, and by association Fallout 3, “one of those huge multiplayer games” is just plain crazy, not to mention the fact the sales guy let the customer assume that Fallout 3 was similar to Socom.  Really?  Socom?  I’ve personally never played any Socom game, nor paid attention at all to the series, yet I’m still fully aware that just about the only similarity it has to Fallout 3 is that they’re both video games.

Anyway…  I took another break from WoW last night in favour of Oblivion (the single-player version, not the “huge multiplayer” one) and started working towards finishing the main quest line instead of the million side quests I’ve got in my journal.  I suspect I’ll be spending a lot of time in Oblivion until Wrath of the Lich King’s release.

Finally, it appears as though I’ll be delaying the publication of this weeks Screenshot Challenge (Boss Battles) given the fact that I’ve only received two submissions, my own and one from Kuarlos.  Kuarlos will automatically receive 15 bonus points for being on time.

I did something this weekend that I haven’t done in quite some time.  I took a break from World of Warcraft.  For probably the first time since I started playing WoW earlier this year, I consciously chose not to play on a weekend, and it was great.

My self-imposed exile from Azeroth came about from the simple fact that I’m a total sucker for a good game trailer.  In this case, it was the “Last Day” video for Gears of War 2.  I previously never had any interest in Gears of War, having bought my Xbox 360 for Halo 3, but this trailer sparked my interest.  I watched a few more videos and left convinced that I wanted to get Gears 2 when it came out, which of course meant that I had to check out the first game so I knew what the series was all about.

So, on Friday night I sunk into my couch and played some Gears of War, fresh out of the shrink wrap.  It was very refreshing to substitute the confines of my computer chair for the comfort of my big cushy couch, and even more refreshing to not be playing an MMO.  Consequently, any free time I had this weekend to play games was spent with my 360 instead of the PC.  Gears of War also provided a nice change of pace to the slow progression of the RPGs that I predominantly play; I guess sometimes it’s nice just to mindlessly blow stuff up.

This also got me thinking about Fallout 3.  I fully intend on buying Fallout 3 (just as soon as I finally put Oblivion to bed), and up until this weekend there was no question that I’d buy it for PC.  My couch session got me thinking though, about how much more comfortable it would be to play an RPG from a couch in front of a big TV.  Plus my computer, although able to run Oblivion just fine on mostly high settings, is now five years old (minus a newer video card) and not getting any younger.  It annoys me to no end that there’s no flippin’ demo for Fallout 3 to test whatever performance I’d get from the PC, so that also has me leaning towards the relative safety of the 360 version.

Hopefully by the time I’m finished with Oblivion (currently projected for August, 2045) it’ll be more obvious as to which platform I should get Fallout for.  In the meantime, I imagine I’ll continue to spend some quality time with my 360, probably until about November 13th, or so.