Blizzcon 2008

Blizzcon baby!!!! Yeaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!! Where sweaty shut-ins, pasty dorks and hot ladies in corsets and wings all gather for my amusement... I mean, all gather to be enticed by any little morsel of info blizzard will give them on any of their new games.

Well, I had taken some pictures and had them developed, but my scanner decided to screw up one time too many and now I have a broken heap of plastic where once there was an intact heap of plastic that pretended to be a printer / scanner.

However, the pictures weren't great, my digital camera eats battery like Jabba the hut eats bite-size snickers, so I opted for the disposable camera. It unfortunately isn't really good at taking pictures inside the cavernous seizure inducing light flickering hall that is the anaheim convention center. So let me just summarize what I took pictures of: Hot chicks in costume, weird people in costume and blizzard merchandise. Yeah... whatever, you suck too.

Anyway, there was definitely plenty to do at Blizzcon, 3 seperate stations for Diablo 3, WoW: WotLK and Starcraft 2. As I said earlier I didn't get to play Diablo, what with my procrostination and the enormous line. However, Lich King looks awesome and Starcraft 2 looks awesome. As part of my Blizzard swag bag, I got a code for the Starcraft 2 beta, so more on that in the future.

Speaking of Starcraft 2, Blizzard announced that although all 3 races will be accessible in multiplayer, each of the single player campaigns will be released in expansions. I think this is bullshit. I can understand an expansion if you are going to add a lot of features to the pre-existing format, ala Burning Crusade, Frozen Throne and what not, but making the fan base pay 3 times for the storyline is a clear money grab probably initiated by the soulless fucktards at Activision / Vivendi. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Kirby isn't pleased t(•.•t) he says executives at Activision can kindly find themselves a fire to stand in and thusly die from.

However, gameplay is pretty awesome, the zerglings seemed a little over powered and the marines a little under powered and I didn't get to see too much of the more higher end units, being that I only got to play in 20 minute intervals.

Okay, moving on, all throughout the con there were tournaments for WoW arena, Warcaft 3 and Starcraft. I only managed to catch a glimpse of the WoW arena and it was entirely too confusing to be exciting and the final match was merely to see who could play the Druid, Warlock and Warrior set-up better. I.E. I didn't give a fuck.

To round it all out at the end of each night, the crowd of around 6000 people were entertained on the mainstage by Master of Ceremonies Jay Mohr and Headlining comedian Patton Oswald. The first night had the exciting and often hilarious dance and costume contest. The costume contest was simultaneously awkward, impressive and hilarious. The dance contest 3rd place runner up who stripped down and did the ogre dance, proved that less is more. While the constume contest winner with the giant moving mechanical turtle that took her 3 months to build proved that more is more.

I have to say Jay Mohr did a great job as MC, he was hilarious all night and realized that unlike last year he couldn't just phone it in. He even managed to get us through the unbearable and hopefully last Joke contest. I got one. How many Blizzard fans does it take to tell a good joke? They can't.

Also a huge unexpected highlight was on the very last night: Video Games Live. A live orchestra of music hosted by Tommy Tallarico from many of the games from the Blizzard franchise, which included an amazing piano solo by the video game pianist, Martin Leung, the underground hit "Lament of the Highborne" sung by the beautiful, Vangie Gunn, the world famous Illian pipe player performing the introduction to the Wrath of the Lich King, Eric Rigler, and the awesome David Arkenstone band performing all of the tavern music in World of Warcraft. It was really a great high note to end Blizzcon on.

All in all it was a great experience. It really felt like the people at Blizzard throw Blizzcon every year as thanks to all their fans... oh and so they can pretend they are rock stars, even though their lyrics consist of horrible puns. So from this fan, thank you blizzcon!