What to expect from Mists of Pandaria: Preview

What is behind a great MMORPG? Blizzard's World of Warcraft stands tall as the leader on the market for Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, but is there something that's missing recently? With the Mists of Pandaria expansion that's up and coming in the fall, the outcries of the WoW fan base have been louder than ever. Sure there's always been dissatisfaction among the fans whenever a change has been introduced to the game, but this time it seems the angst has reached an all-time high. So what can we honestly expect from the expansion?



                                             Mists of Pandaria Preview Trailer

Here's a list of the changes:

- new continent in Azeroth
- new race, shared by both the Horde and Allience - Pandaren
- new class - Monk
- a completely new Talents System
- abandoned stats 
- new levels of duifficulty for dungeons
- entirely new Vanity Pet Combat System and random exploration vanity pet encounters

Seems like a lot, but Blizzard has shown a tremendous dedication to putting out new content in a timely manner, when it comes to World of Warcraft. Starting from the last point on the list, the new Pet Combat System is something the several million WoW players have been stupefied by from day one. The associations with Pokemon are inevitable. From the point of view of my current experience of WoW I could never imagine myself standing in the middle of Stormwind, engaged in an epic duel between a Mini Diablo and a Mini Tyrael. But then again I could not imagine myself, back when Wrath of the Lich King first came out, chasing after achievements just for the sake of it. In hindsight I've got a couple 85 characters and one of them has pretty much every achievement that doesn't require raiding. I made World Explorer in a single day, right after I got my Red Drake mount. I've also spent countless hours (unsuccessfully) fishing for a Sea Turtle mount in Northrend.

Apple Anounces the new iPad: Retina Display, Better Camera and A5 Chip

Apple has announced today that they're going to be launching the new iPad on the 23rd of March. The new tablet is going to have retina display, the Apple A5 chip sporting quad-core and the new better camera that we've already seen in the iPhone 4S. On top of that the old iPad 2 is going to go down in price to 399 US dollars for the base version. The price of the new model is going to start from 629 USD for the 16GB version.

apple.com front page

The new iPad is also going to come with some updates to already-existing apps such as iMovies which will now have the option to create trailers for your home movies, with customized music etc. and iPhotos.








I'm as excited as anyone since I tried retina display on my iPhone 4, I've always been held back from purchasing an iPad, because of the inferior screen resolution. The new iPad will come with 2048 by 1536 screen resolution and a 44 percent upgrade in the screen saturation. For anyone who ever complained that reading on the iPad is a straining and unpleasant experience, this should come as a relief.

http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/

Watch out for a video of the Apple keynote on apple.com as they have made a habit of releasing them as recordings in the past. Also the new version of the iPad is now available for pre-order as should be the old version at the discounted price, as soon as the Apple Store has been updated. 

Fight Club: The movie your parents didn't want you to see.

Fight Club is a 1999 movie by David Fincher, starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, about a man who struggles to make sense of the reality he's forced upon himself. The fighting club from the title though, is nothing like your regular underground kickboxing ring, it's a philosophical movie, about the way corporate reality has changed the definition of what a man is, how he should act and behave in society, how he should lead his life. The philosophy of Fight Club can be portrayed best in one simple line: "How much can you really know about yourself, if you've never been in a fight?"

WoW Battleground Weekend: Isle of Conquest

Last time I did this sort of update it was Alterac Valley weekend, this week it's Isle of Conquest and there's still a few hours left before the event is closed. So even though I've been playing mostly Diablo 3 beta giveaway for the past two days, I have some tips on how to win this one. 


Simmilarly to Alterac Valley the key here is speed and organization. As Allience usually what we do is head straight for the docks. As soon as we've captured those, one part goes with the catapults to jump the enemy's gates and start placing bombs on the left door of the keep, the other uses the glaives to finish the gate off.

If we're lucky the Horde will not be defending too much, and their gate will fall a few seconds before ours does. Then all rush in to kill the boss and we win. The problem is that while we do that the Horde are getting siege engines which have a lot more health than the glaives. Two or three hordies fighting a glaive can kill it within a few seconds. So really, everybody has to pull their weight in defending them if we stand any chance to win.

Field Marshal's Raiment PvP set

Field Marshal's Raiment PvP set

Diablo 3 Beta Key: First Impressions of the Gameplay

Since I've posted about GameTrailers giving away Diablo III beta keys yesterday, I've been playing the game and I've managed to do a play-through of the entire quest-line that is available in the beta content.  So here's some first impression notes, before I review every detail of the game separately. (More info on how to get a beta key: Diablo 3 Beta Code Giveaway)


The Quest-Chain, available for the beta, starts in New Tristram, located near the Ruins of Tristram in Westmarch, which is entirely over-ran by the undead as a result of a strange occurrence. A Fallen Star has descended upon the old Tristram Cathedral (which we know from the first Diablo game) and your role is to find out what happened. As it turns out the Fallen Star is a meteorite that has crashed through the several layers of the Cathedral, leaving it hollowed out. There's also a Skeleton King involved and the Crown of Leoric, though from the somewhat rushed playthrough I couldn't really understand what their role was other that it is connected to the Fallen Star episode. I'll look into that the second time around, as the beta allows you to take your character and run it through the quest-chain as many times as you like.

Diablo 3 Beta Code Giveaway

Diablo 3 is coming out soon, and currently it's in closed beta, but I've managed to swipe a free beta code from the GameTrailers Facebook page. They're currently doing a giveaway, where they'll be handing out one hundred codes for the game every day, at undisclosed times through their FB page and Twitter.

A tip if you want one: lurk their Facebook page, where they're periodically posting the codes in heaps of 10-30. As soon as you see the first post chances are they're going to be gone within the first minute or two, so have your Battle.net account open on the Add/Upgrade game page. Start refreshing Facebook, for the next 15 minutes to an hour, more are sure to come. Stay tuned for more codes this weekend, and I'll also be doing a review on the beta content.

http://www.facebook.com/gametrailers

Twitter @Sidemission

Minecraft 1.2 is OUT!

Granted this is the first Minecraft Update I've been excited about in a long time, but the list of features that have been added to the game is amazing! Now you can build twice as high, there's stone golems, and it goes on!