Crusaders and pirates and dwarves! Oh my!

So many things happened in WoW this week that I don’t know what to talk about first, LOL.

Weeping for a Fallen Crusader

I never liked Crusader-type characters. You know, the Tirion Fordring type who believes in the goodness of all and the Light and whatever else the goody-two-shoes like. They just seem so…unbelievable to me. Like it was just a front, or they were brainwashed to be like that, or whatever.

Crusader Bridenbrad, a member of the Argent Crusade who chose to isolate himself from everyone upon learning that he was infected by the Plague, was…different somehow. He seemed more sincere, more noble, and more worth my trust and affection. Call me a shallow softie, but his quest chain had me in tears toward the end. I’m not the only one who shed tears for Bridenbrad though. RIP, noble Crusader.

Chain Heroics and learning the ropes of Survival

Earlier last week, I did some chain Heroics with my guildmates (that’s a few of them up there dressed up as dwarves and dancing with my Hunter). We were at it for a really long time, and it was around 7am my time when we were done. I forgot which dungeons we ran, but I do remember that we did Gun’drak and Trial of Champions. One of our guildmates, a more experienced Survival Hunter, helped me out by giving me tips on shot rotations and about my pet…and he even Enchanted my equipment, gave me some gems, and gave me half the gold I needed to learn Artisan Flying. Yes, my guildmates are generous like that, haha.

Pirate’s Day and Brewfest

Not much to do on Pirate’s Day, but it was fun to run around in a pirate costume for a while. I accidentally removed Captain Demeza’s buff though, so I didn’t get to run around in costume for very long.

I don’t drink in real life (I seriously don’t drink anything with alcohol in it…well, fine, I taste some of them, but I don’t down entire glasses), but Brewfest is an awful lot of fun. The music’s kind of catchy too, and the goblins’ chatter is kind of funny (“I can’t feel my legs!” “I can’t see!”). My only problems with Brewfest are random disconnections and horrible lag when I go to Orgrimmar’s Brewfest grounds.

That aside, I think the game somehow made it up to me by letting me win the roll when the Great Brewfest Kodo dropped while my guildmates and I were trying to complete the “Save Brewfest!” quest and the Direbrewfest achievement.

I really need to get me some more mounts.

We’ll continue farming Coren Direbrew throughout the remainder of Brewfest, so hopefully even more members of our guild will be riding on Brewfest mounts soon.

Dead or Alive Extra Figure: Kasumi Special feat. Yamashita Shunya (Sega Prize)

I just bought myself a Dead or Alive Extra Figure: Kasumi Special feat. Yamashita Shunya figure by Sega. This was originally a UFO catcher/claw machine prize, but I bought it in a local toy shop last weekend.

While this figure features Kasumi in one of her alternate costumes, another version of the figure, featuring Kasumi in her signature blue and white costume, was also produced. You can view the figure’s official product page here.

I’m not a fan of Dead or Alive at all; I actually hate the games, but I still think the girls are pretty. This figure is really nice for a “prize” figure, so I just went ahead and bought it.

Most of the other prize figures I’ve seen usually have poorly-made faces, but as you can see above, this figure’s face is quite pretty. Her having a nice face was part of the reason why I wanted to buy her in the first place.

More pictures (and comments) below!

Recent World of Warcraft shenanigans

Lots of amusing stuff happened when I played World of Warcraft over the past weeks. I think I should have posted separate entries for this, but I kept on forgetting to.

Dinging level 80 and pwning a guildmate in chat

My boyfriend and I were in the process of earning the last few XP points we needed to get to level 80 few weeks back. Just when one of our guildmates whispered me to ask “When are you guys going to get to 80?”, I leveled up.

A case of mistaken identity

I just logged in as my main character, Arinae, when I received a whisper from one of our newer guild members. I never spoke to him before, so I was confused as to why he actually whispered me. Turns out he mistook me for another guildmate’s alt, whose name was “Aernai”.

Going on my first raid

I went on my first ever raid last night with some of my guildmates. We were one man short of a 10-man raid party, but they figured we could still handle it. I died a few times thanks to my lack of experience and failure to understand some of the instructions my guildmates gave me over Ventrilo, but it was pretty fun. We started at around 1:00am and kept at it until around 3:30am though, so I had one heck of a headache afterward. I got lots of equipment upgrades though, so I’m not complaining!

We didn’t get to finish going through Naxx since a lot of us had to go AFK a few times and some of us had more important things to attend to (like sleep and having to leave for work), so we’re going to finish it tonight.

Roles filled, offered, and scrapped in A Game of Thrones pilot, and GRRM still has problems with Meereenese knots

George R. R. Martin posted a lot in one go on his LiveJournal this morning (or evening, depending where you live), including some news about the HBO A Game of Thrones pilot and A Dance with Dragons.

HBO Pilot: D&D have cast one more role and have an offer out to a wonderful actor on another. Sorry, no clues, I’m clued out for the present. One of the roles that was yet to be filled has been written out of the pilot. No huge thing, he wasn’t in that part of the book in any case… though we did have a world-class thespian lined up to play the part. Character and actor will both be back if we go to series.

Drat, no clues? Great, now we have to wait a while for official announcements. Pfft.

And I wonder which role was taken out of the pilot…based on what I know about the pilot’s script and the book, it could be Grand Maester Pycelle. According to the script, he’s supposed to be talking to Cersei in the scene where Jon Arryn lies on his deathbed, but that was never shown in the book.

A DANCE WITH DRAGONS: I took a good hard swack at the Meereenese knot. The sword bounced off and cut my nose off. Bugger.

GRRM has been stuck with “the Meereenese knot” for a long while now, so I guess it’s safe to say that he’s suffering from a writer’s block. And based on the way he described it, this one seems more painful than writer’s blocks usually are. Ouch.

Why Talim should not be wielding tonfa and wearing belly dancer clothes

No matter how much I love Bandai-Namco and their Soul series of games, seeing Talim fight always makes me feel really disappointed in them. Now, I don’t know how well-researched the other Soulcalibur characters are, or if their fighting styles are really styles rooted in the cultures of the countries they’re from. But Talim’s just…wow.

Don’t get me wrong, I like her well enough (though not enough to actually use her in the game), and I do think she’s cute. It’s just that it really annoys me that her fighting style and her costumes are so very un-Filipino.

Well, okay, some of her costumes may look a teensy bit like some of the costumes of the pre-Hispanic cultural minorities in the country, but come on. In Soulcalibur IV and Broken Destiny she looks more like something that would pop out of a magic lamp or a belly dancer from a faux-Arabian bar than a proper tribal Filipina.

That aside, I am still glad that they didn’t make her wear a  baro’t saya or any other Spanish-influenced costumes. While the baro’t saya is the alleged “national costume” for Filipinas, it’s still distinctly Spanish.

Talim’s fighting style is like a bastardized version of our local martial arts (Arnis, Kali, or Eskrima). …oh wait, I take that back. I barely see any trace of them in her moves, and even the move names are hilarious. Sure, Double Abaniko is an actual term in Arnis, but Spinning Hiwa and Tuhod Slicer? That’s just sad.

What’s even sadder is that another fighting game, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, actually showed characters using Filipino martial arts properly (Quan Chi using Eskrima, Sonya Blade using Kali). Goes to show that it isn’t so hard to go out and research Filipino martial arts thoroughly.

Let’s move on to Talim’s weapons. Her weapons are tonfa, for fuck’s sake. Tonfa were popular in Japan and may have originated in China, or in another Southeast Asian nation (Indonesia), but not in the Philippines. If they wanted to do it right, they would have given her dual arnis sticks. Or, if they insisted on having blades on her weapons, they should’ve given her dual bolo/itak or kris.

And I’m not the only Filipino who feels annoyed with Talim’s fighting style. Check this Filipino Martial Arts Forum post, wherein the poster refers to Talim as “that annoying Soulcalibur character”.

Come to think of it, Talim is no longer specified as Filipina in the games; the Philippines was only specifically mentioned when she debuted in Soulcalibur II. Maybe Bandai-Namco realized their mistake in labeling her Filipino, and thus opted to just say that she’s from somewhere in “Southeast Asia” in the games that came out after SCII. Too little, too late. They never should have tried to put in a Filipino character into the game in the first place if they had no intention of doing the proper research. Filipino characters rarely appear in video games, and it’s just disheartening to see that one of the most prominent ones is badly researched.