Judas Unchained by Peter E. Hamilton (quick review)

Judas Unchained is the second book in a highly detailed and immertsive story started in Pandora’s Star. Hamilton has completed the story in a magnificent manner, and these two books are wonderful.

Any fan of sci-fi should read these two 1200+ page books.

In short: Brilliant, the best of his work.

The essential style is matched to the first novel, which I reviewed earlier, and if you know any sci-fi books, you’ll know that characterisation, plausible technology, and a holistic story with grainy details are key requirements; and this book delivers.

How to get keyed (TBC Instance Attunement)

Blizzard has published a good site which outlines the paths to get various keys, and the overall path to progress to Mt Hyjal.

TBC Instance Attunement

Have a look, IMHO it looks better than the text based one that was written ages ago by a fan, but then again you could print the fan’s version.

Minor Wishlist for Warcraft

Most sites and blogs there days have lists of changes, so here is my take.

For the most part this is all about the cosmetic or peripheral side of the game, and thats because I’m not a fan of PvP, which seems to be the focus for development until recently.

1 – Turn off displaying Shoulder items just like Helms and Cloaks.Some of the shoulders just look plain sad, and I’d rather not see them. This could be taken to an extreme, and disable any item, but thats a bit to far.

In a perfect world the items would have a transparent or selectable colour, which matches the base colour you select, or the base colour of the Tabard you are wearing.

This way your Fire Mage can have red highlights, the Pallys can all be pink-ish, and Undead characters can maintain their EMO black-look.

2 – Give characters a Guild-bank which is visible to all members, but only an officer can hand out gear. This does not need a DKP-ish tracker, and could easily be part of a wider guild-friendly update.

Pretty low priority, but a big change that would help the community feel of the game.

3 – Make the multi-mail sending part of the default game. Please, its just such a core need that it sucks to have to add this via a mod.

4 – Create Scrolls, and other single use disposable items. These could be added into enchanting, or added as a new profession like Scribe.

5 – Create Bows, Arrows, Staves, etc = Woodworking Profession. Hunters and Rogues would be interested, as would all staff wielders.

6 – Move some Cloaks into Tailoring, and keep some in Leatherworking. Or just add new ones in Tailoring as it does not make sense.

Warcraft Armory – needs more resources

Blizzard has added a new sub-site that allows searching for players, guilds, weapons, etc… All from one location – called the Armory.

Great idea and in combination with that auction-house site from a few month back, it would be almost like we can research while not logged-in.

But the need to fix the service – its too slow! Check it out, but be patient, its either fully overloaded already, or has a crappy amount of cpu and bandwidth to support it.

On a sarcastic note: maybe this will allow the Gold-farmers to target their demographic in a much more efficient manner?

As an example here is Aurac my Warlock.