Warcraft Blues

Jen is a World of Warcraft fan. She played it a lot before we met. Not long after we met she wanted to play again and I said I'd play with her. I like games where you get to kill lots of stuff. It's fun.

We played occasionally for a while and then scrapped it in favor of Warhammer Online. The games were virtually identical. The graphics on Warhammer were a little better. Jen likes to say that Warcraft is cartoonie. That's an accurate description. They were equally as violent, but Warhammer was a little more graphic with splashing blood and what not.

The downside of Warhammer is that while it was really popular right after it's release, it is losing subscribers at a seemingly fast clip. Every time we log in we get a message saying that the server we logged in to has been merged with some other server. It sounds to us like there aren't enough people playing to justify the hardware. (I suppose it could be due to outright hardware failure, but that doesn't seem as likely.)

So Jen decided she wanted to go back to Warcraft and it's 11,000,000 subscribers. (that's eleven million) The other night she installed it onto her Macbook. I installed it onto my laptop which runs Windows 7. It doesn't work. The launcher opens up and starts patching and crashes at 612KB every single time. Okay, screw Windows. Jen then takes on the awesome challenge of installing the game onto Ubuntu. She gets Wine running, she jumps through a few dozen hoops and gets Warcraft installed and it starts patching. When we ran it last night though... the graphics card and the Ubuntu drivers can't seem to keep up with it and nothing renders much at all. I was so impressed with how far she got that I was swooning. I love that woman, and her mad hacking skills are only one of the billion or so reasons. Still... in a nerdy way, it was sexy as all hell.

Next we're going to try and just dump a fully patched and installed Windows version of Warcraft onto an external drive and dump again onto my laptop. Some people have posted on WoW forums that they successfully used this method to get the game running on Windows 7. If that works I'll just play on my desktop while she plays anywhere she pleases on her macbook. It's just a matter of time before we're killin' stuff again.