A little more bad-assery would be okay.

Last night, after much anticipation, I started playing World of Warcraft’s new Cataclysm expansion. I am in love.

Obviously, as a lover of werewolves I had to create a Worgen character. (I’ve had a placeholder name saved on my server of choice for months now. So you can see just how excited I’ve been.) For the most part, I was not disappointed.

The Worgen starting area is stellar. Unlike the other race starting areas, you really get a sense of story and character progression from the get-go. I don’t want to spoil too much, so I won’t go into a lot of detail. I will say that the new system that phases the world into a new orientation at certain key points is pretty spectacular. (i.e. When you complete certain quests it triggers the next part of the story and your character is seamlessly moved into another updated area.) Some of the transitions are particularly slick and really make things more interesting. For example, I turned in a quest inside of a cellar and when I came back out, the town I was in had built barricades against the coming onslaught.

I also really dug the cut scenes that have been scattered throughout my gaming time. There is one in particular that I love, but I won’t ruin it for those who haven’t played yet.

At this point I’m still in the starting area. (I’m under the weather and just couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer than a few hours.) Still, in that brief time the story managed to pull me in. The actual theme of the area is very cool and the quests seem pretty natural and relevant to the matter at hand. There were a few I found a bit baffling because they used mechanics I hadn’t experienced in the game before (vehicles and the like), but they were still pretty easy to figure out and complete. The nice thing is that this mixes the quests up a bit beyond “go kill and/or gather XX amount of things” and also prepares you for similar quests that will occur at higher levels. Think of it as a really fun tutorial.

The leveling system is also really smooth. I blasted my way up to level seven in a pretty short amount of time without having to do any overly tedious tasks. I’m playing a warrior class (which is new to me), and unfortunately I did get my ass beat once. I think the issue was that the enemy respawns were set for a larger volume of players, but since I started playing a week after the release, most of those folks had already moved on from the starting zone. There were a few times I had to “run away” ala Monty Python.

Now for what would be considered the bad news to all of this: I really don’t love the female Worgen design. As has been the case with most of the WoW races, the developers tried too hard to make the females “pretty”. Standing side by side with a male Worgen, you see just how gypped we get. We lack awesome glowing eyes, overly large fangs and pretty much any real sense of menace. We’re supposed to be cursed, furry, battling machines. A little more parity between the sexes would have suited that just fine.

The character creator for the Worgen also presents some issues. The male Worgen definitely have the cooler, beefier options, while the females are again left with softer looks. I also don’t like that when you select the face/fur shading for your Worgen, it automatically selects a face for your human counterpart. The two shading selections I really liked left me with an old lady face on my human. I also would have liked to be able to change the Worgen hair colour independently of the fur colour.

The only other issue I’ve really had to this point was a glitch with the “/laugh” command. Instead of laughing, my character starting making chicken-taunting noises. I also ran through everything on the “/silly” command (which makes your character tell jokes). Some of the jokes were pretty lame, but I did bust up when my character piped up with “at least we don’t sparkle”. That just about made my gaming experience right there.

All in all, I think the Worgen are a great addition to WoW and I’m looking forward to digging deeper into Cataclysm. Or, based on the way the world looks now, falling into it.

-

Well SyFy, you’ve done it again. You have succeeded in continuing your tradition of poorly executed original movies. This time it was with your new flick Red: Werewolf Hunter, starring Felicia Day. Here’s the down and dirty synopsis:

“Red” brings her boyfriend home to meet the family. Little does he know that werewolves exist, and more than that, his girlfriend is from a long line of those sworn to hunt werewolves. He thinks she’s full of it, wanders out into the woods, gets bitten, etc. Meanwhile, Mr. New Creepy Uncle Werewolf Leader has decided to break the treaty his pack had with the hunters. Oh, and he can change form whenever he wants and is telepathically linked to people he’s turned into werewolves. Werewolves eat people, Red finds out the love of her life is now a cursed monster, her werewolf hunting brother wants to kill him, take a shot for every werewolf cliche, get plastered a half hour in.

Nothing about this movie that was intended to be good is actually good. The effects are bad, the script is bad, the setting is bad. The only good thing about this movie is the unintentional giggles it inspires. I felt like I was running my own low-rent version of MST3K right in the comfort of my living room. I also didn’t mind Felicia Day so much either, but that might be my redheaded geek solidarity talking.

The bottom line is that SyFy is going to keep turning these movies out when what they should do is save their money and actually put in for a halfway decent original movie. Way to fail SyFy…and your name is still stupid.

-

I am actually a little surprised at how early Universal has chosen to release a second Wolfman trailer. (Maybe they kept to their original schedule as this was going to be a November release.) Unfortunately, this trailer didn’t get me jazzed nearly as much as the first one.

I’m not keen on several elements shown in this bit of footage. There’s some creepy looking Gollum critter in there, a moving statue and some topiaries that might be more at home in The Shining. I hope they don’t compromise story and character development for a bunch of uncessary “look what we can do with computer technology” moments. I’m a firm believer in special effects adding to a movie, not detracting or overruning it.

Maybe it’s a minor complaint, but the music in this trailer really turns me off. The first trailer felt very atmospheric and eerie. This one doesn’t.

The Hopkin’s dialogue in the trailer has me worried more than anything though. What he says hearkens back to the “leaked” script I read which included a twist on the Sir John Talbot character. A twist I very much disliked.

I still don’t know how to feel about this movie. A small part of me wants to get excited, but the other larger part doesn’t want to get burned again. I just hope they haven’t completely mucked it up.

-

You're lucky it was ugly anyway Xbox.

I received an article at my inbox this morning about new Halloween costumes available for your Xbox avatars, and notably one of them is a werewolf outfit. Sadly though, werewolf sexism is alive and well in the land of the 360 as it’s only for male characters.

What is up with that? In fact, what is up with werewolf items being made almost exclusively for a male demographic. Do I have so few fellow female werewolf enthusiasts? (Being in love with Jacob from Twilight doesn’t count.)

Every year I make the attempt to build a better werewolf costume. It’s nearly impossible to do so by shopping at my local Halloween superstores. Every single item (claws, noses, teeth, clothes, etc.) is made to fit a man. The only semi-counterpart to these items are feline in nature. It’s as if to say “You don’t want to be a werewolf. How about being a nice kitty cat instead? Here’s have some lingerie and a tail while you’re at it.”

I know that generally females plus werewolf equals not so sexy. I do believe it can be done though. In fact, I think I got pretty damn close if not on target at my last shoot:

So where are all the other female werewolf aficionados? I know there have to be at least a few of us out there. I say that for once we take up the angry mob side of the equation and get us some werewolf gear. I’ll be over here with my torch and pitchfork when you’re ready to join me.

-