Flour Power

I've always been a big fan of Monopoly. It was probably the board game I played the most as a kid, before the video games arrived in force. A couple of years ago I even tried a computer version of it, but it was just boring playing versus the computer (I don't think the multiplayer capabilities were very good). It was like the board version, minus the pleasure of holding all that fake money and laughing on my friends' face when I won.

So you can imagine my excitement when, earlier today, I found out that Hasbro would release a version of the game using Google Maps as the playing board and therefore create a worldwide Monopoly game - Monopoly City Streets. WOW!

The details were very sketchy, but Hasbro has since posted on the official blog some information on how the game was created, to answer some of the speculation around it:

So, did Google build it? From the reports you would think so but the application was built by Hasbro's UK digital agency Tribal DDB.

Have Google helped us? Of course, they've been great and have really gotten behind the project with all the support we needed.

Who else has helped us? The project was made possible by using the street data from OpenStreetMap, combined with Google Maps, API tastic!

They have also released a FAQ, to satisfy the more impatient while the game doesn't start.

Other sites report some more details:

Players start the free game with three million Monopoly dollars and can buy Downing Street for $231,000, while Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, where the White House stands, costs $2 million.

Rent is paid automatically each day, from $50,000 for a house to $100 million for a skyscraper.

The game will start on the 9th of September 2009 and will go on until the 31st of January 2010.

This sounds like a brilliant idea, and I can't wait to rush in and buy the streets from the Portuguese boardgame version.

Remember that awesome Guitar Hero World Tour advert with Heidi Klum in her underwear rocking away Risky Business-style? Shame on you if you don't, but here it is again, because it's something one can never grow tired of watching:

Now one of the first commercials for the new Guitar Hero 5 is out, and it stars a whole line-up of Playboy Playmates alongside Hugh Hefner himself. The result is, once again, pretty nice:

This is what I call good advertising!

Still prefer the one with Heidi Klum, though. Which one is your favourite?

Over at BlizzCon 2009, a trailer for the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion - Cataclysm - has been revealed, confirming many of the rumours. The most impressive part is the revamping of the existing areas, giving them a totally diferent look and feel. There will also be 2 new races (Goblins for the Horde and Worgen for the Alliance), an increase in the level cap from 80 to 85, the possibility to use flying mounts all over Azeroth, and, of course, lots of new quests.

As for the release date, and to keep with Blizzard tradition, nothing has been disclosed yet.

I'm in the middle of a relapse. After more than 2 years away from the claws of World of Warcraft, I'm slipping into it again... I needed one game to test the new laptop's graphics card and WoW was the only one I had around, so I had no choice. Yes, I could have gotten any other game and avoid the most addicting game on Earth (to me) but I'm just lazy. True, I don't have nearly enough time to properly enjoy all it has to offer. Yes, I am aware that I can buy 3 pints of Guinness with the monthly subscription fee. Stop making questions!

Let's forget about all the implications of going back to playing the game and focus on the post subject - the install process of WoW is something massive!

It starts with the installation of the game itself. That's 5 CDs worth of stuff, which means changing the CD 4 times, and being there when the install program asks you to. That's all fine, although it takes ages to complete each CD. The problems started when I got this error message about the setup process not being able to read some file on CD3, possibly due to scratches or dust on the CD. And what happens next? The whole installation fails! No chance to retry, no chance to clean the CD and continue from where the installation was forced to stop. So I had to do a brute-force uninstall, aka deleting the game folder, and restart the whole thing. Then when it asked for CD3, I carefully cleaned it before continuing, and spent the remaining installation time praying that nothing else would go wrong. It didn't, and so I proceeded to install the first expansion - The Burning Crusade.

This ran smoothly with no errors, although it again took ages to install the contents of only 3 CDs. They must have some crazy encryption and/or compressing on those files for it to take so long. I don't know. Anyway, so far there were 8 CDs worth of game data, which amounts to something like 5.6GB.

It was time for the second and last expansion - Wrath of the Lich King - and I didn't have a physical copy of it. It is available for download from Blizzard, though, and I proceeded to do it. And that's when I saw the size of it - 5GB! 5 fricking Gigabytes! That's almost as much as the game plus the first expansion combined. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the fact that a lot of new stuff comes out in an expansion, and that besides that Blizzard issues patches and corrects issues constantly, and those add up to a lot of stuff that gets included in the expansion release. But it just seems too much... Couldn't they have stripped some stuff out, like videos and that crap, from the downloadable version? Anyway, there was nothing I could do besides waiting for a few hours for it to install. At least the download speed was pretty decent.

4 hours later the expansion was installed and I thought I would be playing soon. The game was only released last November, so there shouldn't be too many updates to install, right?

Wrong! After some downloads to update the updater program (cool, uh?), I got presented with a 600+MB download for some patch. OK, on second thought maybe 600MB is not that much for 9 months of updates, although with the slower download rate this would require 2 more hours to complete the download. All I had to do was wait and it would be all done. Right?

Wrong! After this update was installed, another one started. Around 60MB this time. And then another one - 41MB. Followed by yet another one - 56MB. And just when I was starting to get desperate, a 880MB monster showed up! That takes the total to about 1.5GB of patches and updates since November. Doesn't it sound a bit mad? I can't help thinking that there must be some fundamental flaw in the game design that prevents it from having more modular updates. And even if that isn't the case, why not pack the whole thing into a big download in order not to keep the users on their toes to start playing, only to present another download window when they think they'll start playing soon?

In total, the installation about 10 hours from start to finish, not including the dirty CD incident. 10 hours! A bit too much, no? And to think I'll have to do it all over again when I install the final version of Windows 7... I wonder if it's possible to just copy the files over? Or if an upgrade from the RC is safe...

Anyway, WoW is now running fine, apparently. Well, at least the game main screen loads OK, because I didn't have time to actually play it. By the time all the updates were installed, it was time to go to sleep. I don't even know if I will be able to test it today, because Blizzard might have released some big ass patch overnight...

So if I don't show up for a while again, you'll know that I've been imprisoned by the World...

...

... of Warcraft.

UPDATE: Oh wait! Apparently there's more. 447MB! Jeez...