It’s been a while since we’ve posted anything related to table gaming, so I thought I’d drop these in here. I saw this in a forum where interesting and unusual items are displayed.  How awesome would it be to have a set of six siders like these at the gaming table?  Being Diamonds, I’m sure the cost of these would be astronomical….but who said fun didn’t come without a price?

The dice (total weight 32 carats) and solitaire (just under 4 carats) not only look fantastic but roll very well! The dice are an exclusive design by Coster of Amsterdam.
The black diamond, also known as Carbonado, is a natural polycrystalline diamond found in alluvial deposits in the Central African Republic and Brazil, they look black and are highly porous. A study by Stephen Haggerty and Jozsef Garai, both of Florida International University, analyzed the hydrogen in black diamond samples using infrared-detection instruments at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and found that the mineral formed in a supernova explosion.

Bragging rights for owning a set of these would be enough to seal the deal   Could you imagine having a full set…d4,d8,d10,d12,d20…..that would rock!

The World of Warcraft GMs are watching and listening to you on their servers to help maintain fair and quality play, but in a recent incident the GM’s role went above and beyond. As learned from Loot Ninja today, a teenager was chatting with a WoW GM online recently and the teen made suicidal comments in an effort to play on the GM’s sympathies hoping to get some loot.

A 17-year-old Fairfield Twp. teen pretended to be suicidal when he became frustrated with an online video game, Fairfield Twp. police reported.

The teen…typed that "he was suicidal and that the game is the only thing he has to live for," according to the report.

The company representative called 911.

The GM did the smart thing and called the cops in the off-chance the kid was truly suicidal, so of course the police and paramedics show up at the young man’s home.

The juvenile told police it was a joke "to try to get what he wanted for the game," according to the report. He was then handcuffed and placed in a patrol car.

Isn’t this just sad?

Let’s hope the young man has learned his lesson that you have to work and invest something of yourself to get ahead in the world, that part of growing up is trying and failing, learning from your errors and growing from it. But it really seems that this teen’s attempt at ‘pity loot’ is a classic symptom of the typical "Trophy Kids" (aka "Generation Y") that have been raised to think everyone is a winner and even losers deserve a trophy.

Well, the loser of this story has won himself a minor criminal record.

The news article originates from the Middletown Journal and has the full story.

A punter for the American Football Team Minnesota Vikings says that he loves playing World of Warcraft so much that he’s tossed around the idea of changing his name. His name (for today at least) is Chris Kluwe, his teammates know of his love of WoW and they’ve already given him an appropriate nickname but he is considering taking that name to the next level.

Here’s his discussion of the topic on his weekly radio program (original article from Star Tribune):

“I think more people like to hear me talk about playing video games than football,” said Kluwe, an expert at many video games. “I’ve played video games since I was 4 years old. I play them a lot more than I kick a football. I kick the ball about 45 minutes a day. I play video games about five or six hours a day. But that’s OK. I don’t watch TV.”

“Back when [Bengals receiver] Chad Johnson changed his name to Ocho Cinco, I told the guys at 93X that I was going to change my name to Chris ‘World of Warcraft,’ ” Kluwe said. “They said that’s too long. So they started calling me Chris ‘Warcraft.’ I could make a lot of money if I changed my name to that.”

He’s doing pretty well for himself. He recently renegotiated his contract for $8.3 million over the next 5 seasons.

According to his wikipedia page, he plays a troll rogue on the Kil’jaeden sever, keep an eye out for him. It’s unknown whether he plays a female or male char

[via Gaming Angels]

Here’s one of the best machinima videos I’ve ever seen: “The Craft of War: Blind“.

I don’t have much in the way of constructive criticism other than the transition in music early on didn’t seem appropriate, but the song used for a majority of the vid (Hide & Seek by Namie Amuro) added to the vibe the animator was trying to set.

The lighting was spot on, the use of WoW models was brilliant, the SFX are great, the plot had me hooked and I’m anxiously awaiting to see more on this assassin vs. Dragon theme.

The Craft of War: BLIND from percula on Vimeo.

Sensing that World of Warcraft is not the years long, multi-million user flash in the pan I expected it to be, this last weekend I partook in a holiday discount deal from the local GameStop. I picked up the World of Warcraft Battlechest for half off the MSRP (came to US$19 if you must know).

During my install of the product, the setup from the DVD was flawless.

However, I was expected to accept the mother of all End User License Agreements. For the love of all that’s holy, their legal department probably puts Microsoft attorneys to shame. This behemoth of a document consists of:

• 7 Pages
• 37 Paragraphs
• 275 Lines
• 3634 Words
• 19035 Characters

Who the hell is going to read that thing? Oh, I gave it the old college try and plowed through the first one and a half paragraphs then supplemented with scanning for keywords of interest in a handful of other paragraphs, but sheesh!

Later, while scanning through my hard drive to look at all the crap the installer left, I stumbled upon a newer version of the eula that is a year newer than the one i accepted. Blizzard managed to extend that large document by 2 pages, 3 paragraphs and 149 words. Needless to say, I’m not more educated on this one than the first.

OK, so far my positive WoW out of box experience went from positive to neutral, not bad, but let’s login to the server and see how it fares.

I find a desktop icon, nothing too fancy, big ‘W’, clean and crisp and to the point:

What followed that mouse clicky was the beginning of a 4 hour descent into hell that would not see me creating my first character until the following morning.

It appears that Blizzard doesn’t believe in rolling up their updates. The program detected there were updates to be installed before the game could begin. So it promptly downloaded and installed the first update. When that was done, i clicked Play and again it detected another update…same process followed. I had to install update after update after update for about 30-45 minutes before the sh*t really hit the fan. Some were pretty small, others ~256MB. It was turning into a real pain in the arse, what would have helped is to know how far I had to go through this user interface until we’re done. Maybe it could tell me “Andy, you are on update #6 of 10″.

After 30-45 minutes, the process wasn’t done, it was just getting started. Because then I learned it needed to download and install a 2GB update! WTF is this all about? It took 4 hours to download, this old man needed to get some shut eye so I hit the rack while the installer did its thing and unpacked/installed itself. So I was fast asleep while the unpacking and updating actually occurred; given it’s size and complexity it’s probably best I wasn’t watching it tear its innards apart and rebuild.

The next morning, I sit back down in front of the PC, click the ‘Play’ button and learn that *another* update had to be installed. Thankfully, I could tell that the date of the package was released just a few weeks before so I must be near the end. And sure enough it was over after that last turdlet was dropped on my system.

So after 4+ hours of downloads and installs/updates of WoW on a clean system, I could finally get it on and start the click fest with millions of other nerds.

And now, after having played Freylok the Druid Night Elf for about 12 hours over 3 days, I get it. I understand the appeal of the game and I’m looking forward to more, but it’s unfortunate a new user has to go through hours of hassle just to get logged in. Even Windows rolls up updates between service packs, why can’t a game as popular and ubiquitous as WoW do the same?

 Things I’ve learned from this weekend experience:

• Blizzard’s OOBE (out of box experience) sucks bad if you’re a new user like me. Be prepared to hand hold your PC through hours of updates if installing on a clean PC. I will file a bug to Blizzard this week.
• WoW is one kick-ass game. The graphics are great, the size of the worlds is just unbelievably large. I knew it was massive, but sheesh, this is big and detailed. Tip of the hat to the development team and the IT Pros that have to maintain the servers.
• Even a hard core anti-social introvert like myself doesn’t mind interacting with strangers in this new world. Unlike Sim City or Second Life, the attraction to interact with strangers in WoW is that you probably have a lot in common with the thousands of characters hacking and slashing around you as you both fight on to achieve your quests or save your sorry arse from the ‘black hats’.

Down with the Horde! Long live the Alliance!