warcarft { Spoiler alert: This post contains WoW related themes and situations

Viewer discretion is advised.

But seriously. I've been a bit absent in WoW lately. Since the upheaval and general shittiness that happened over a week ago I stepped down at Guild Master after the title was dropped on me when the previous GM left. I stayed Master long enough to help staunch the bleeding (with the help of wonderful officers who stayed). I then handed the reigns over to another with more energy, charisma, and most importantly time online. See its December and that means busy social life, busy work life and travel and I've not been on much. With the late unpleasantness I developed a serious case of the blahs and mehs and decided a little distance was needed. So I've not been on WoW much. I've been reading, writing and rediscovering some old games.

I tried to install and play a space station sim called 'Startopia', but it was created in the days of Win98 and no amount of effort allowed me to get it to run on WinXP (even under varying combinations of 'run as' combatibilty options). I recently wiped my C: partition and did a fresh install. Its like having a new machine. I'm being cautious with what I install. My previous install lasted 3 years. Which is how old my CPU is and I've not had a blue screen ever on XP, save for a bad sound driver I installed when I tried to use the AC'97 onboard before buying my Audigy 2.

Anyways, I re-discovered a game that I had shelved for a while and its consumed me. Its 'Dawn of War: Dark Crusade'. Wow! I've been a fan of 'Dawn of War' since the franchise was released. Its a great game with a great engine that looks beautiful and the game play is intense. Its the standard I hold most RTS games to now. DoW has gone through many expansions. 'Dawn of War' which is set in the WH40k universe when it was first released, it let you play Space Marines, Chaos, Eldar, or Orks. The campaign was from the perspective of the Space Marine Chapter the Blood Ravens. It was engrossing. The game also let you play skirmishes and use custom maps as well as multi-player online. Its first expansion, 'DoW: Winter Assault' improved the game play and add a new faction, the Imperial Guard. The storyline let you track the campaign from any of the factions and it had a surprise ending involving another faction, but I won't provide a spoiler. The last expansion released was 'DoW: Dark Crusade' took it even a step further. Two new playable factions the Tau and the Necrons. It was set on the world of Kronos and the campaign was the (re)conquest of Kronos based upon which faction you played. The planet was divided into zones and you had an army and planetary resources used to conquer the various zones. Some zones gave planetary buffs, some gave you access to body guard units (personal commander units that you could start with). I've long been interested in the Tau (Tau and Imperial Guard being my favorite WH40k armies) and I've been playing the Tau campaign. I'm doing well, almost half the zones conquered and I've defeated the Ork, Necron and Chaos armies and pushed them off the planet (pockets of their faction still remain, but leaderless and they won't attack me now). I'm currently in the process of trying to dislodge and crush the Imperial Guard, a tough nut to crack with all their artillery and armor coupled with cheap to build infantry units. But my Sept is shooty and my Hammerhead tanks devastating. I lost my commander to Vindicare assassins, so I'm not sure what will happen. I'm still only a third of the way through conquering the IG capital map and going is slow as I'm constantly being shelled.

So anyways, this is why I haven't been in WoW much.