With all the talk about how MMORPGs drain people's time and take them away from their families, it's a bit heartwarming to find out that those annoying (in a cavity-causing-this-is-too-sweet-to-be-real-this-is-annoying manner) father and son sports duos can exists in World of Warcraft.

The father and some duo is Siscotoquork (dad) and Dragonflie (son) of the Maelstrom guild on the Emerald Dream server. What's amusing about them is that the son got the dad into gaming with FF7. Given the age of FF7, the dad's been a gamer for quite some time now.

Gaming for them has turned into an activity that helps keep them connected as a family. The dad explains that they used to play a lot of tourney basketball back then but as he aged and basketball became a little too much for him to play on a regular basis, gaming helped them gain common ground. Dragonflie had this to say about gaming and family:

It is a good activity if all the family is in it, because those that are not feel left out. Especially if the other members are not gamers. WoW just takes to much time to play it without the other family members being involved.

When it comes to balancing gaming time and family time, the son says that WoW's a little more demanding than games he's played before. The dad says for him, time management is a less hard since his family is all grown now. All he has to do is work WoW around his wife's activities.

When it come to the fact that the guild leader is the son, the dad had this to say:

It actually is great to have my son as guild leader. I do not have to put up with the headaches, however, being his father gives me an automatic respect factor with the other guild members. Even though I do not get any respect from him.

Of course he probably said that in jest. Why does the Southpark WoW episode come to mind?

Everybody's out to be famous, and from publicity events, photo opportunities, Jackass stunts to airplane hijackings, that instinctive itch for attention just has to be scratched. For the WoW dudes who just don't have the time to pull off anything as time-consuming making a WoW music video, we've got something that could get your character in print - preferably not on a wanted poster.

The WoW main site's announced a screenshot contest for the WoW trading card game, and winners will be eligible to have their screenshot posted on a future card for the said game. Mechanics are as follows:

1. The contest begins November 27, 2006 at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time, and ends on December 24, 2006 at 11:59 p.m.
2. You must be of legal age (13) to enter the contest.
3. Access the submission form enclosed at the source link. In the event you can't submit your application electronically, Submit a hard copy of your screenshot along with a copy of your name, age, and residence to the address: World of Warcraft TCG Screenshot Competition, c/o Blizzard Entertainment, P.O. Box 18979,Irvine, CA 92623

As for prices:

• One Grand Prize winner gets their screenshot used as a basis for a later WoW Trading Card game card, and will receive an Onyxia raid deck, a starter set and 10 booster packs.
• Five 1st place winners get an Onyxia raid deck, a starter set and 10 booster packs.
• Ten 2nd place winners get a a starter deck and 5 booster packs.

Judging will take place on December 18, 2006, and winners will be emailed within 14 days after the judging. Instructions for claiming prizes will be provided for in the notification. For the full details on this event, we suggest you visit the source link. Good luck.

It's kinda unfair that Blizzard's World of Warcraft is so ***d**n popular, that WidowPC will actually piece together for you a specially-crafted WoW-online gaming PC so you can enjoy in full glory the phenomenon that is WoW. Sigh, some of us here wonder if they plan on extending this kind of special treatment to other games that we like, like EVE Online, or Command and Conquer 3, or Microsoft Flight Simulator.

This WoW rig comes equipped with AMD's Athlon 64 FX OR Dual Core (your pick) on an A8N-E motherboard. Toss in nVidia's GeForce 7600, 11 bays for 5.25" hard drives, up to 4GB of DDR RAM, the Killer NIC ethernet card, and high-def sound that blind people can play to (oky, not in WoW, but WidowPC has an article about the blind playing shooters...).

And you get to pick between two lovely PC casings (the picture we've included), the TU-155 and RX-9, both of which look nothing like an Orc, but who's complaining? With that kind of power under the hood, grinding through Azeroth should be no problem. If you can pony up upwards of US$ 1,495 for the basic package, that is.

But tell you what, WidowPC. Throw in the option to upgrade to one of those sweet G80 mothers, and that's a deal that we'd take (even if you throw in the price differential for the G80). With that kind of power, we can then use the PC for more than World of Warcraft - like Crysis, FSX, C&C3, The Sims...

Things are not quite looking good for Blizzard Entertainment's giant MMO, World of Warcraft. First, expansion The Burning Crusade was delayed for a couple of weeks with the developer saying it needed some more time. The players gave in, thinking it's for the best. Then weeks after weeks, the updates being done to the game became public and sad to say, the fans are not liking it.

To be quite frank, thinks like these leave a bitter taste in the mouth. Sometimes it makes a player so disappointed, that he just want to call it quits. If you ask us, it makes us go back to the time when WoW was just released and the gates of Azeroth just opened. It makes us remember what it is exactly about the game that we love in the first place.

When you think about it, WoW holds three qualities that help endear an MMO to a player. The virtually unlimited dungeons and raid runs were designed for achievers, while the PvP enthusiasts have a world and battlegrounds set aside for them. Then you have the casual players that were pulled in and eventually became hard-cores themselves. Interlocking quests, smooth level transitions, goal-driven gameplay. Everything a player desires is there.

If you really think about it, WoW in its own way deviates  from the norms of MMORPGs. Certain games require you to join groups and clans. Not require in a sense that you won't be able to play but require meaning "let's see how far you can go alone." WoW allows a player a moment of solitude, the freedom to be left alone whenever he wishes it.

Yes, those are all the things we love about World of Warcraft. Blizzard boasts of its 7.5 million active fan base. While it is true, we hope they begin listening to its people before their number dwindles down.

It's been another week, and you what that means, boys and girls - time for another round of WoW mods. We've got three new interesting mods from over at the World of Warcraft, with two mods perfect for the money-conscious WoW gamer, and one Druids might wanna take a gander at.

AuditorFu v1.2.2
Author: Alari
This mod allows characters to keep track of their recent monetary transactions, with the FuBar interfacing allowing for easy access to the detailed categories recorded in this mod - like a credit card tracker. FuBar recommends using it with FuBar installed for best results, and further adds this is an improvement on Accountant/AccountantFu. You'll have to remove the FuBar_AccountantFu folder to swap this one in.

The full article awaits after the jump!

Lets start with the bad news. Things don't look so good for game publisher Activision as their stock might get delisted from the NASDAQ exchange after the company failed to file its quarterly earnings statement.

Activision alerted shareholders to the news and has pledged to make the earnings report as soon as erm, uh, "practicable." Activision says that the reason for the delay is because of their need to complete a review of the their stock-option grant practices.

The company intends to request a hearing before the NASDAQ Listing Qualifications Panel in order to appeal for a continuance of their listing.

Okay, so with that done, let's move to the bit that's all nice and rosy.

WoW publisher, Vivendi Games, boasts a spike in earnings reaching up to 110 Million Dollars compared to 38 Million Dollars. That's a increase of around 186.7 percent. Aside from the obvious Warcraft money cow, Vivendi also credits start-up investments for the Sierra Online and Vivendi Games Mobile divisions, and the strong sales of Scarface: The World is Yours, as reasons for the profit increase.

When asked about the revenues for World of Warcraft, rumoured to have reached $1 billion for this year, Gamespot reports that  Vivendi opted for general terms. The describe the financial results of its games division as "very healthy and dynamic," and the overall economic performance as "great."

Machinama managed to get an interview with the animation staff responsible for the South Park World of Warcraft episode. They managed to talk to Producer Frank Agnone, Tech Supervisor JJ Franzen, and Director of Animation Eric Stough. Since the interview is pretty lengthy, we'll just give you guys the bottom line quote for each topic covered. Things should still flow, so don't worry, you won't miss out on anything.

On what inspired them to do a WoW episode using actual WoW footage.

The idea of doing a World of Warcraft show came from Trey pacing around our office. When he's stuck on a show or is thinking through an idea he paces around the cubicles. One day about a year ago he was walking around and noticed about half the staff playing World of Warcraft. Junichi, his friend from college who animates for us is an expert at it. Trey then bounced around the idea of the four boys getting destroyed by some guy in California.

What about the storyline?

In between animating shots for South Park, Jun is always playing Warcraft. For years it was Diablo. We would all tease him about having no life.

Regarding the custom animations (after all, your avatar could never be that expressive on its own)

Eventually, it was decided that we would push forward in both directions (using models and using in-game footage), starting to model our own characters as well as contacting Blizzard and seeing how interested they would be in participating. We met with several people from Blizzard on Thursday, the 7th of Sept. and it became obvious that they were extremely eager to make this happen, and seemed willing to do whatever they could to make sure it did. Luckily, they also use Maya to do their in-game character animation, which meant we would be able to just grab their files and go...

On their relationship with Blizzard.

Just to give you an example of how easy our relationship with Blizzard was, Trey had written new pages just a couple of days before air that had Stan's dad, Randy came across this Uber sword that was the answer to killing our villain. Later that day the Blizzard crew was in working with us so we approached them about swords and of course they had exactly what Trey wanted. Ask and we shall receive.

Cool stuff, and just in case you guys are wondering, 75% percent of the people in the South Park offices are addicted to WoW. No wonder that episode felt so true. Blizzard of course deserves props for being helpful with this one.

If you guys want more details feel free to click on our read link below.

Any Linux user today knows that he really might end up having problems doing things. The problem lies in actually using the applications we're used to having, especially if you switched from something like Windows to the cute little penguin. We're pretty sure the number of downloads will give a fair idea of Linux users in the QJ community, so we might as well get on with telling you what's up.

Normally, World of Warcraft and other MMOs and PC games are meant to run on the two main OS types: Windows and Macs. A little bit of tweaking from the Linux community, however, allows for Windows versions of the games to run on Linux by adding a translation layer (and possibly some additional open source stuff) to launch said programs. Of these different additions to the world of Linux, the most notable is the translation layer (or program loader for PSP people out there) known as Wine.

The open source community of Linux officially came out with v0.9.2.5 recently with a pretty nifty update for gaming. WoW players who've gotten used to playing by using an OpenGL patch won't need to anymore. As they mentioned, you can run it straight out of the box!

Here's the list of other changes in version 0.9.2.5. Enjoy the download, and isn't it an interesting time to be a Linux gamer?

• Many more fixes for installer support.
• Many MSHTML improvements.
• Support for NTLMv2.
• RPC over TCP improvements.
• Lots of bug fixes.

Download: [Wine v0.9.2.5]

It's that time of the day again, where we, here from deep halls of QJ, dug deep inside our long been unlit dungeons to equip you, raiders of Azeroth, with every bit of advantage in your quest to be the supreme World of Warcraft'er. Regardless if you're a pet-loving Hunter, a traveling Druid, a staff wielding Mage, or any of the characters in the World of Warcraft that you play, you're bound to find use with the cast of WoW mods we dish out from time to time, like the ones we have in this post.

For today, we have three featured mods specifically crafted to enhance both your skills and gaming satisfaction (one can't live without the other). Here they are:

DeathAlert v.05: In all battles, there's always confusion (which we today somehow coined into "friendly fire"). Usually our guildmates tend to get lost in figuring out which target you were tanking before you die. This mod might making things a bit easier by announcing to your raid or party what mob and icon (if available) you were tanking before you got p'wnd.

Features:
-Simple and sweet on/off switch.
-Customizable raid message using patterns.
-Will let the raid know what mob name you were tanking, and raid icon if available.
-It will only announce to the raid or party if you were in defensive stance when you died.

Download: [DeathAlert v.05]

The other two featured mods await after the jump!

Browsing through YouTube, we found this video which happened to be an entry to the Summer Movie Contest and even landed in third place in the Music/Dance category. Yes, the contest is so over and we bet you've already seen some of contest entries, but this one caught our eye and amused us. Well, go ahead and click play so you won't be left out in the cold.

Who would have thought that someone could generalize the characteristics of a lot of World of Warcraft classes and then pack it in one single video? But Ian Beckman thought of it and made the video. Now there are some people who didn't really like the video and expressed their disgust of it, and of course there are those who find it really true ("Hunter, you will want every single weapon in the entire freaking game...") and amusing. But then again, we all have different take on things.