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I thought it would never come to this...

So there I was. The place: Best Buy. The mistake: waltzing into the PC gaming section for no reason. The purchase: The World Of Warcraft Battle Chest on sale for $30.

Now let's take a moment to soak this in. In my lifetime, I have played 1 MMO (Ok. 3 if you count Phantasy Star Online and Phantasy Star Universe, but those are hardly traditional MMO's), and that was Final Fantasy XI on the 360, and I hated it with a burning firery passion. I hated installing, I hated patching, I hated how un-user friendly and how un-n00b friendly the game is, and I hated how f**king boring that game was. After playing that, I pretty much swore off the genre for good. Not because I thought the genre was a bad idea or I was against paying $15 per month or anything like that. I just figured it wasn't for me.

Which is why I found the idea of me playing World Of Warcraft so perplexing. I just saw the box, picked it up and walked to the cash register, not knowing the ramafacations of what I had done. The thought of what the game truly was didn't even cross my mind. It was more of a "hmm...I heard that's good, and it's on sale. I'll take it!" kind of moment. Then on the way back to my car, the right side of my brain started to show up to work and said "What the f**k did you just do? You bought THAT? For real?". I thought about turning around right then and there and taking it back, but by that point I was sitting in my Hyundai and just said "f**k it".

Let me take another left turn here. My mother is awesome. She bought me Grand Theft Auto III when I was 13 without batting an eye. Not because she's uneducated on the subject, but because she thought enough of her son that she knew that I wouldn't beat up hookers and steal cars after playing the game, and bought it for me because I thought it looked like fun. As long as I had good grades, stayed out of trouble, and took care of my buisness, she really didn't care what the f**k I played, and god bless her for it, because it formed the man you all know and love. So after saying this, when she saw me walk into the door with a copy of World Of Warcraft, she freaked. spewing out facts like "I've heard stories about that game. People lose their social lives playing that." I told her to calm down a little bit, and she did. She's a little uneasy about me playing it, and she has already warned me that "If it get's too out of hand, I WILL step in!"

One more thing: I am not a PC gamer. At all. In the last 5 years, I have played 2 PC games, and those would be the first season of Sam & Max and Peggle. For the most part, I find PC gaming to be expensive, cumbersome, and overly complicated. It's also worth mentioning that I don't exactly have a gaming PC. My computer is a 20 month old Dell Inspiron E1505 with a Intel core single processor, 30GB hard drive, and 256 MB of RAM. I use it for 3 things: Surfing the web, writing papers, and doing a podcast (and it doesn't excell at any). Hell Sam & Max chugged on this thing! So I got a nice dose of reality when I found out that I couldn't install WOW because I didn't have enough RAM.

Let's take a right turn here. I'm also not really a wiz kid with computers either. I've never put one together, nor do I know how they work. They work, that's great, and that's all I really need to know. So When I called Best Buy and they told me that it would cost an extra $30 to install a $35 RAM chip, I decided to do some research. Big props to Nabo and Mike O'Hara for telling me that installing RAM is as easy as plugging a cord into a wall. You guys saved me $30. The fact that those Geek Squad ****ers wanted to charge that much for something that involves taking off 2 screws and popping a chip into a socket and took all of 45 seconds is beyond stupid, and if you let them do it, then you are a true moron. Seriously John, your company is run by the Devil, and the Devil must be making BANK on stupids.

And so, after all that, it was time for the install, and boy was that fun. First you install the first game (40 minutes), then set up an account (15 minutes), then install the expansion (30 minutes). It was at this point I was ready and rearing to go fight some stuff, but after 4 hours of doing all this crap it was time to go to work. So after I got home, I'm thinking it's time to get this party started, but then I found out that I have to get a gig's worth of patches. First you download them, then you install them. During this time, I:
1. Made a hoagie (tasty)
2. talked it up with the good people at VGEVO.COM
3. Watched a couple episodes of Dexter (This show is AMAZING)
4. Made a visit to the restroom
5. reminded myself why I hate PC gaming
So I left for Best Buy at around Noon on sunday. It is now 1:30 at night, and I can finally log into WoW. Needless to say I'm in no state of mind to create a character and get going, so playing the game had to wait until Monday.

As someone who is primarialy into console gaming, opening that box and finding 2 instruction manuals (one of which is over 200 pages long), and a couple of 200 page strategy guides on top of that, needless to say that those sweet sweet memories of having no idea what to do in Final Fantasy XI were all coming back to me. Wandering around aimlessly with nothing to do, not knowing how to do quests, everything. The first part of an MMO is always the hardest: The character creator. This is a big decision. I decided that since I'm always a big manly man with a giant Claymore, I'll be a human mage, because shooting fireballs is awesome.

And here is where I start enjoying myself. The game does a very good job of holding your hand at the start, giving you helpful tips, and showing you in the right direction. I checked out the basic command tutorial, and learned how to shoot fireballs, and then preceeded to slaughter dozens of wolves until I became level 3. Then I went to do my first quest, which involved killing 10 wolves. Then I killed 8 wolves for meat, then I killed 10 little Gremlin looking mother ****ers, then I killed 8 bandits. I was starting to wonder if every mission was "Kill 10 ___". Thankfully it soon turned into more then that, and I'm now traversing the land of the Elwynn Forest.

I'm up to level 8, and I've barely scratched the surface. I've soloed every mission so far, and I'm gonna start looking for some people to play with real soon. I've learned a few new spells such as "shooting fireball, but now it's more powerful!" I also wanna read more of the lore and back story as I've heard it's well written. Needless to say they've got me hook line and sinker, and I can't wait to play more.

I guess Mr. T was the straw that broke the Camel's back...