www.Tobold.com
Tobold@GMail.com
A blog with my thoughts regarding games I am playing and other stuff in life. Please read my Terms of Service
RSS Feed
Saturday, October 07, 2006
South Park - Make love, not Warcraft
I watched the latest Southpark episode 1008 "Make love, not Warcraft" on Google video. Not providing a link, because there are already several dead links to different uploads of that particular video on both Google and YouTube. This is copyrighted material, and the admins are required to take the videos down when they find them. But of course the video being "hot news" this week, it got uploaded lots of times, so I was able to catch one version before it got deleted.
The Southpark episode is remarkable in that half of it plays in the game of World of Warcraft, and you see the familiar WoW graphics and animations, with the voices of the Southpark characters. Blizzard cooperated heavily, which explains why for example the bad guy could summon scorpions into the Arathi Highlands, an effect which would be impossible to reproduce if it was just a typical Machinima movie, filming sequences from the standard game.
The story of "Make love, not Warcraft" is of a fat and pimply bad guy who plays so much, he becomes "super-high level", stronger than the GMs. Then he starts player killing newbies, preventing everybody from doing quests, and Blizzard can't do anything to stop him. Quote: "How can you kill that which has no life?" The solution is for the Southpark quartett to become super-high level themselves. Of course that leads to them having no life anymore either, and becoming fat and pimply. But with the help of Blizzard executives bringing them a USB stick with a powerful sword on it the kids finally kill the bad guy, and Cartman (as dwarf) smashes in the head of the bad guy lying on the ground, splattering blood and brain. Another thing you can't see in the real WoW game, I was a bit surprised that Blizzard allowed that.
In any case it was brilliant product placement from Blizzard, a lot of nice things are said in the episode about the game, even Stan's father gets hooked. And Blizzard is depicted as a company that just wanted to make a game for people to quest and have fun, and got surprised by people with no life playing it all day long. Which might initially have been true, but instead of producing more content for the "we just want to quest and have fun" crowd, Blizzard added more incentives to the no-life crowd, and actually encouraged the phenomenon. It is ironical that the bad guy is a player killer, because due to the current bad design of the PvP reward system, only the people with no life get to the highest rank there. To Blizzard's credit they are going to change that. I don't know how many people watch South Park, and how many of them weren't aware of World of Warcraft yet, but this is the sort of brilliant advertising money can't buy.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:54 AM Permanent Link
Comments:
<< Home
Newer› ‹Older
Those disenchanted level 60's can perhaps try out the game that Butterz was a master of - I believe it was called "Hello Kiddie Island Adventure". Could be worth a go.
I laughed quite a bit. There was even some pwned action.
I laughed quite a bit. There was even some pwned action.
supposedly the guy in the green shirt was Furor and the guy doing most of the speaking (at the head of the table) looked like Rob Pardo to me. If true, that's really close. Wierdly so (how did Trey&Matt know without meeting them?) The show was funny, pretty funny in places. But ultimately it was a product placement like you said.
The Google video is still out there although the original link I had is no longer available.
The Google video is still out there although the original link I had is no longer available.
Very funny commercial from Blizzard. Easy to download from newsgroups. At least if you live in Holland, like me :-)
# posted by 
: 7/10/06 20:40
: 7/10/06 20:40
try bittorrent
mininova dot org has the regular 175mb scene release version
top quality and not that crappy youtube/google stuff
;)
mininova dot org has the regular 175mb scene release version
top quality and not that crappy youtube/google stuff
;)
# posted by : 7/10/06 22:18
: 7/10/06 22:18
Great episode! I thought it was great how the player killer was a fat balding guy with no life and a wristband from carple tunnel in his wrists. lol. I wanted to watch the whole episode, but ended up catching bits and pieces due to my guild going on a run to scholo. lol. It will be funny if the "sword of a thousand truths" is actually in the burning crusade expansion.
It was fun. I was thinking that the sword represented Ashbringer? Very product placement-like, but hey, gotta give credit where it's due, it was a great episode of SP.
# posted by : 8/10/06 00:13
: 8/10/06 00:13
What a superb episode - and I normally despise South Park. It is almost enough to make me want to play World of Warcraft again. One theme really got to me - they way a bunch of people who are losers in real life can be legendary heroes in an mmorpg.
# posted by : 8/10/06 01:01
: 8/10/06 01:01
I can't actually find anything saying if you enjoyed the show or not.
I thought it was very funny :)
I thought it was very funny :)
# posted by : 8/10/06 03:16
: 8/10/06 03:16
I enjoyed the show. But it also told me an unpleasant truth. Sane Mike says "a bunch of people who are losers in real life can be legendary heroes in an mmorpg". Look at that from a different angle and you get "to be a legendary hero in an MMORPG, you need to be a loser in real life", and it gets a lot less pleasant. The kids only beat the bad guy after they turned into losers with no life like him. And if you compare that with the time needed to beat Naxxramas or become High Warlord, that isn't so far from the truth.
Quote of the Day:
"Do you want to stay outside throwing a ball around all day or get on your computer and do something that really matters?"
Cartman
Oh and the graphic for the Sword of a Thousand Truths is the rare 1h drop off Kel'thuzad called The Hungering Cold.
"Do you want to stay outside throwing a ball around all day or get on your computer and do something that really matters?"
Cartman
Oh and the graphic for the Sword of a Thousand Truths is the rare 1h drop off Kel'thuzad called The Hungering Cold.
It was actually, "Hello Kitty Island Adventure".
Yes, you read that right-- there is a real honest to gosh MMORPG based around Hello Kitty.
Fear.
Yes, you read that right-- there is a real honest to gosh MMORPG based around Hello Kitty.
Fear.
# posted by : 10/10/06 10:03
: 10/10/06 10:03
Only that the real Hello Kitty MMORPG is called Hello Kitty Online World, and not Hello Kitty Island Adventure.
Oh and the graphic for the Sword of a Thousand Truths is the rare 1h drop off Kel'thuzad called The Hungering Cold.
If you know that kind of information about World of Warcraft, it might be time to take a break. :)
Post a Comment
Oh and the graphic for the Sword of a Thousand Truths is the rare 1h drop off Kel'thuzad called The Hungering Cold.
If you know that kind of information about World of Warcraft, it might be time to take a break. :)
<< Home
