PC Gaming Diary #1: It's a Game Within a Game!

My roommate walked by my desk last night and simply stated "You are multitasking like crazy, are you playing two games at the same time?!" Well, in fact I was.

I've spent most of my recent days playing World of Warcraft. I own a good amount of games, but the one that usually consumes the most of my time is WoW. I have been playing for going on 4 years now and I have yet to level a character to 80. There was one point in time prior to the Burning Crusade expansion that I did in fact reach the maximum level at the time (60), but since then I have been a bit behind the pack.

Yesterday I leveled my latest toon (a female, retribution speced, blood elf paladin on the Skullcrusher realm) to 59. WoW involves a lot of non action at times. When you fly from city to city you have no control over your transport and are sort of left in limbo. Usually I'll alt-tab out of the game and do some web browsing or some chatting, but in the past month Pop Caps games has released two add-ons for World of Warcraft; Bejeweled and Peggle. You can customize the add ons to automatically open up when you get on a flight path and automatically close when you are done. You can also customize it to automatically open and close in other occurrences such as death, but I just chose the FP option. Bejeweled plays as it would normally play, although as points increase you also gain levels in regards to your Bejeweled skills. Peggle offers extra WoW specialties such as leveling and earning talent points that can be used to your liking (very similar to TPs in WoW itself). I tend to spend most of my FP time (which can sometimes take up to 15 minutes depending on where you're traveling) playing Bejeweled, mostly because I find it more simplistic then Peggle. I haven't quite caught on to the Peggle buzz yet as I find the game to be mostly luck. Maybe I just haven't realized the strategy behind it yet. It's fun though and props to Pop Cap for the add ons. It adds an entirely different level to playing World of Warcraft as well as casual gaming.