I gotta hand it to Blizzard. They, for the most part, really know how to take care of their customers. I purchased the old Warcraft III and Diablo II games years ago. At this point the original CDs are just about unusable, for example I figured out I could still play Diablo II, but only if I could start a new game within 6 seconds of the main menu appearing. Now blizzard has set-up a system to allow those of us who have bought their older games to enter our old CD keys and download a non-CD version of the same games. They were definitely under no obligation to do this, but they did it anyways. It just goes to show you that Blizz really does care about their customers, even the older ones who may not have bought anything from them for a while.

I only have one gripe and it’s not even Blizz’s fault. In one of the recent updates to Leopard, Apple removed the 256 color mode (which these older games rely on) for their computers with NVidia cards. So for now I cannot play them, but rumor has it that the upcoming 10.5.5 update is supposed to restore that function and allow these games to be played again.

  So about a week and change ago I decided to completely reinstall my computer. Of course between work and everything else it has taken me a while to get everything reinstalled back to the way it was. One of the only things I hadn’t gotten at this point was installing World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade. After installing all 8 discs(4 for the original World of Warcraft and 4 for Burning Crusade) and wasting an hour and a half while it installed then I found out it was going to be another 2+ hours and just under a gig of downloading. I can only imagine that it will also take a while to run the full patch as well, so chalk up another 30 minutes to an hour for that. 

Blizz I can respect that you want to fix bugs, tweak the environment and add content. But I gotta draw the line at having to download a gig’s worth of fixes if for some reason I have to reinstall. For instance the 3 times that have had patches go bad and been told the only way to fix the error is to delete my installation and reinstall from scratch. Or if for some reason I need to reinstall one of my computers that has WoW installed on it. 

Back before the internet was the internet a lot of geeks, including myself, would spend hours dialed(yes through a modem, a 14.4kbps modem actually) into text based bulletin board systems. On these BBSes there would be a few games that were very popular, one of the most popular games was The Legend of the Red Dragon or LORD. To sum it all up Legend of the Green Dragon is actually based off of Legend of the Red Dragon, unfortunately the original author & copyright owner has not converted this game to the web or released the copyrighted source code. Thankfully smarter and more creative people than me went to the trouble of recreating the game for all of us to enjoy when we are bored.

So without further ado I present Paleck’s LOTGD