Thursday, January 23, 2014

Death Knight Love Story

I was looking at WoW Insider a couple of days ago and saw an article about Death Knight Love Story. Seeing as I am a big fan of DKs I took a look. As the title suggests this machinanima is a love story with Death Knights. It was only part 1, but was 15 minutes long. Sadly there is no real ETA on part 2, other than roughly six months and no guarantee there.

I was pretty impressed with DKLS. I'm biased because I just adore the DK lore and story, as you can tell from my main and my own fan fics. DKLS had an excellent story and the filming/acting was done with a combo of motion capture and a variety of expensive animation software.

I honestly could have been more impressed with the animation. I can see where they started from the WoW models and tried to upgrade them with more polygons and motion capture. However, for a number of the spell animations and fighting moves I think the film would have been better served by actually using WoW's animations. In particular the animation for Death Grip was kinda jarring. It took me a couple of times seeing it to actually figure out that it was supposed to be Death Grip. Possibly my gripes with the animation are due to the Vimeo playback being abysmal; it was both slow and choppy. I frequently had to pause and wait for the stream to catch up, even when it appeared to have buffer available.

The story, however, was quite intriguing. I am very much looking forward to the second part. It shines an interesting spotlight on Sir Zeliek from Naxxramas. And its yet another take on the process of becoming a Death Knight, and the effect of the Lich King's mind control on those he enslaves.

I strongly recommend everyone watch DKLS. It's got a good story and some decent animation. It makes me want to play through the DK starter area again.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Legendary Pet Battler & WarcraftPets.com

Two things happened last night related to pet battles.

The first is that I have won 5000 pet battles. That number includes battles with wild pets, pvp pet battles, and tamer battles. Regardless of what it counts it's a ridiculously large number of pet battles won.


The other thing was that someone sent me a whisper during Darkfall's Siege raid. They had the good timing to send it during a bio break or I'd likely be much less amused. This was apparently someone who had seen my profile on WarcraftPets.com and wanted to know if I'd like to buy the Spectral Tiger Cub. I would love to buy that pet, however, the quite reasonable price they were charging was more gold than I currently have.