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Every story, article, column, piece, and so forth on World of Matticus ever published.

Professor Layton: My Anti-WoW

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I might have mentioned my affinity for puzzles. When I was younger, I’d frequently read Clue books as well as Encyclopedia Brown and try to solve them for fun. After a strong recommendation from a friend and seeing it crop up on various gaming sites that I go to, I decided to give Professor Layton and the Curious Village a try. The game is for the DS and it’s been around for a while in Japan. But it came out recently for the US players.

Here’s a quick trailer:

I’m hooked!

Anyway, the game has a TON of brain teasers and other problems to solve. There’s a lot of riddles. If you catch me in the BA chatroom, you can often hear my cries of agony and frustration and whoops of joy when I finally solve it after staring at the problem for an hour. The puzzles vary in difficulty.

9 out of 10 Matt’s would recommend this game for ANY gamer. The 1 Matt is too busy playing to give his recommendation.

Examples

Here’s a few straight out of the game:

1: Fifteen people are trapped aboard a ship that’s going to sink in exactly 20 minutes. Their only chance for survival is the five person life raft stowed on their vessel. To make matters worse, the waters around the ship are teeming with man-eating sharks, so swimming to safety is out of the question.

A round trip to the nearest island and back to the boat takes nine minutes on the raft. How many people will live to see dry land?

2: Five suspects are called into police headquarters for questioning and give the following statements.

A) One of the five of us is lying
B) Two of the five of us are lying
C) I know these guys and three of the five are lying
D) Out of the five, only four of us are lying
E) All five of us are liars!

The police want to release those that are telling the truth. How many people should they let go?

3: Imagine a digital clock. How many times will the clock display three or more of the same number in a row over the course of one day? Keep in mind, this digital clock is on a 12 hour scale that only shows hours and minutes.

Answers

(Highlight below)

1: 13 people. 5 go to the island, 1 brings the boat back. He takes on another 4 people to the island and comes back. That’s enough time to get an additional 4 more people. 5 + 4  + 4.

2: 1 person. Everyone is accusing a different number of people. It has to be one suspect assuming anyone is telling the truth. It would appear that suspect D gets to walk.

3: 34. 01:11, 02:22, 03:33, 04:44, 05:55, 11:11, 12:22, 10:00, 11:10, 11:12, 11:13, 11:14, 11:15, 11:16, 11:17, 11:18, 11:19. This is only for the first 12 hours. Multiply that amount by 2 (17 x 2 = 34).

Weekly Digest: 4 New Bosses Down, Healers Lie, and the BA Podcast

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What’s Happening in WoW

I mentioned earlier that we took down High Warlord Najentus and and Azgalor. Tonight we rocked BT further by one shotting Supremus and like 7 shotting Shade of Akama.

Band of the Abyssal Lord – Lang
Nether Shadow Tunic – Grid

Blind-Seers Icon – Sasette
Shadow-Walker’s Cord – Ronin

By the way, we’re still looking for a healer and an enhancement shaman (or a part time warlock). Three day raiding schedule! The only minimum gear requirement is Karazhan or badge loot. ZA stuff is a plus.

We took a lot of shots on Teron Gorefiend and we were able to consistently get him down to around 20 – 30% range on the first few hours. But we’ve been able to successfully identify "that guy" (will do a post on that later explaining what that means).

I really enjoyed this encounter because I get to do some DPS. All those days as a kid where I used to sit in an arcade and play some mortal kombat or play starcraft at home pays off in this fight. I stopped playing fighting games because of one reason: the shock rat. Yes, you know what I’m talking about. Anyway, all those games I played involving fast movement and quick reaction time helped a lot.

Why?

Because of the gimmick. You get hit with a debuff that kills you after 30 seconds. But when you die, you get to control a little ghost pet. Think of it as similar to the Chess event where you have to use your pet’s abilities to win. Theres these four mobs that spawn when you "die" and you have to use your ghost pet to kill them or stall them from getting to the raid.

I clocked about 3140 damage per second. 180 APM? You bet. 😉

Here’s a video to demonstrate the process:

What’s Happening with the Blog

I changed up my links section drastically. Now it’s going to point to a new service called Tumblr. What I plan to do is store any links, stories, videos, quotes, images, and etc that don’t merit a blog post on their own and are too large for twitter. Think of it more as an asides page where I put up anything I find interesting and want to share. And it may not always be WoW related.

Check out my tumblog!

I’m also currently considering the implementation of votes for my posts. It’s a widget suggested by notable blogger Game Dame. Readers would be able to rate the posts on my blog on a five star scale. You might have seen it implemented on several blogs. The only thing stopping me at the moment are reasons technical and time related.

By the way, the first Blog Azeroth podcast episode has been finished and should be undergoing post production within the week. The speakers this week included Galadria, Fumbleknock, and myself.

Latest Blog Posts

Here are the posts from this week:

20 Questions by Matticus

This week I had a chance to sit down with Siha of Banana Shoulders.

Past Hits

Past columns I have written that still hold true to this day.

High Warlord Naj’entus and Azgalor Taken Down

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Gloves of the Forgotten Vanquisher x 2
Don Rodrigo’s Poncho

First T6 gloves go to Deidrich (Rogue) and the next pair went to Sassette (Mage). The Poncho went to our only resto druid in the raid, kilmster! Yay! Azgalor was taken down within the first 30 minutes of the raid tonight without any wipes.

Ring of Captured Storms
Fists of Mukoa

Hankwilliams with the gloves and Ravenx with the bling ring. This boss marked the first time since March of last year that I decided to change my healing spec for a boss encounter. I switched it up from my Imp. DS build to a CoH build. I think the extra instant heals helped a lot. Each application of CoH hits for about 1000+. It was a messy take down, however. I figure about 10 people got floored throughout the entire fight.

Someone had the stupid spear and the only 2 players close by was an elemental shaman and a holy paladin. Both were asked to get the spear. But there’s no way the Paladin can do it if he’s on the main tank.

I might have to do a blog post in the future about situational awareness.

Oh and yes, we are recruiting another holy priest or some other kind of healer. Why did you ask?

No More WordPress for Me

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Well, at least I won’t be using it to write my posts and pages anymore. I’ve used a combination of ScribeFire and the WordPress dashboard to craft my posts. At the moment, I’m compiling my post via Windows Live Writer! I should have made the switch sooner. But man, this program rocks! It handles like any other Office program which is great because the feeling of familiarity is there (I’ve had to work with Word a lot throughout school).

Features

Free: I like free. Do you like free? I think I’m getting the bang for the buck here.

Scheduled Posting: Yes, you can do that on WordPress as well. But you’d have to be logged in to your WordPress account. With WLW, I don’t even have to have my browser open anymore.

Inserts: My current WordPress is setup in such a way where I could not use the WYSIWYG editor on WordPress itself or else it would break my blog. As a result, I’ve had to hand code everything in HTML. Now there’s a big time pain. I can insert links, pictures, tables, videos, and Wikipedia links with relative ease.

Adaptable: WLW works with many different blog services. Among the most notable includes WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, and so on. Oh, if you have more than one blog, it can handle multiple accounts simultaneously.

Spell check: I still have to proofread my post. But at least it’s quicker now and I don’t have to guess how to spell a word properly. A simple right click and a list of suggestions can fix that.

Previews: What this does is it allows you to download your style. Therefore when you preview it, you can see how it looks formatted as if it were on your own blog.

Plugins: You can expand and customize WLW with different features based on your tastes. Right now, I’m using Insert Video, Text Template, and Insert Wikipedia Link.

Mac Users

For my MacBook, I’m going to give ecto a spin. This one came highly recommended to me courtesy of Siha.

On a side note to feral tanks

When you’re about to tank Azgalor, please don’t shift to Cat form when he’s under 5 yards away from you.

Our Main Tank did just that yesterday and he exploded. I had iTunes open with the Benny Hill theme queued. Talk about timing.

Weekly Digest: Worst Change in 2.4, SSC Mistakes, and GQuitting Properly

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What’s Happening in WoW

Mallet now has Lord Sanguinar’s Claim and the Breeches of the Avatar. I now sit at ~2050 healing without any additional raid buffs.

What’s Happening with the Blog

It’s been fairly quiet recently due to midterms. So nothing much here either!

Latest Blog Posts

Here are the posts from this week:

20 Questions by Matticus

This week I had a chance to sit down with Galadria of the Holy Light.

In case you missed it, last week BBB was interrogated via 20 questions (his blog).

Past Hits

Past columns I have written that still hold true to this day.

Trends in the WoW Blogosphere

The biggest trend at the moment is a no brainer. Everyone’s out there buzzing about the changes to 2.4 and speculating about reactions and impacts to the game.

Blog Spotlight

A Dwarf Priest – There’s several excellent healing resources to be found if you see through it. The site looks a bit narrow for me, but it still works! What’s the blog about? I think the name speaks for itself =).

Matt Likes: Priest PvP Tips vs. Other Classes. If you’re a Priest whose planning on going toe to toe against other players, you will want to take a look at this. It may not help you kill them, but it can help you survive a few seconds longer.