Posts with tag grand theft auto

Don't kids grow up so fast these days? Especially when you feed them one of Papa Hummel's Old Fashioned Pet Biscuits. Shikozu of <Fallen Ghosts> on Altar of Storms snapped this photo of her blood elf orphan right before Child Protective Services took her in for questioning.

Now onto the contest. As you may have heard, the latest entry in a popular series of video games came out this week, and there was much rejoicing. Except from me. Because while I love these games, I am terrible at them, and end up giving up after about five missions and seeing how many times I can drive cars over pedestrians or attack shopkeepers with katanas before the cops catch me. If only there was a way to have the mayhem of GTA with the simplicity of WoW ...

... which leads into a new screenshot idea: Grand Theft Azeroth! Glitchstravaganza was such a success, I decided to try another user-submission gambit. But this time, I'd like to see you doing evil things in the fashion of the GTA series. Jacking mounts. "Mugging" guildmates. Slaughtering innocent critters. Crashing zeppelins. Running your orphan through hot lava. Whatever your evil heart desires.

Send your Grand Theft Azeroth screenshots, with a one-paragraph-or-less explanation, to aroundazeroth@gmail.com by noon ET on Wednesday, May 7. The five best entries will go up for a vote on Thursday, with the winner to be announced the following Monday. The winner will be held up for universal acclaim and will receive a spot of honor in the AA gallery. Remember to include your name, guild and server if you want them included. We prefer full screenshots without the UI. And please, no more sunsets ... unless they're over a bloody corpse! Muahahaha!

It's a fact that the majority of what we do in World of Warcraft is kill things. Nearly all the supplementary activities we engage in, from shopping to crafting, are all basically to help us improve the effectiveness of our violent capabilities. Many players have noted that if WoW were at all real, then nearly every one of our characters would be considered a genocidal maniac for all the people and creatures we have killed, and yet we view ourselves as heroes.

The idea is, of course, that most of the lives we take are really evil anyway, so we're actually doing the real good guys a favor. We kill tons of demons, ghosts, zombies, dragonkin, giants, and rabid beasts -- even most of the humanoids we kill are bandits or wicked cultists of one sort or another. This way we do lots of killing, but still feel as though we are heroes.

There are some situations in the game, however, that turn things around for us, in which our character is not the hero. While there are some higher-level instances such as the Black Morass, or the new Caverns of Time: Stratholme, in which one could argue either way whether what we're doing is good or evil, most of situations in which you are clearly the bad guy, as far as I am aware, have to do with the undead, and to a lesser extent the blood elves as well. Of course, you can argue that in general, undead are just misunderstood, and the blood elves are just tragically misled, but as in the case of quests in Hillsbrad that ask you to go slaughter human farmers, or help develop a new plague, there's really no denying that your character is doing something "morally wrong."