I’ve been looking around at holidays today; one destination that keeps popping up is Spain. I spent a good hour or two skimming through the net looking at cities and destinations. I’ve finally narrowed it down to two possible locations: Barcelona or Leon.
Barcelona looks pretty damn fantastic, its’ got culture, museums, art galleries, an old district – reams and reams of fantastic architecture, especially those designed by Antoni Gaudi, the Spanish master of Art Nouvea. It also happens to be smack bang on the Mediterranean coast which gives it a hot climate, so lots of sun and sea if you’re that way inclined. Barcelona has a vibrant music and nightlife scene complete with bars, clubs and importantly dancing. It also boasts a huge range of accommodation and places to eat. One word of warning thou keep your belongings close as Barcelona is well known for its pickpockets.
Barcelona Palace
The other destination is Leon, once a Roman settlement and now a thriving and bustling municipality in Northern Spain, just south of the Cantabrian Mountains. The climate in Leon is a little cooler and more temperate due to its proximity to the north and the mountains. The city is full of ancient monuments and buildings dating back to the medieval Reconquista period, it also a large number of restaurants, hotels and galleries as you would expect from any modern Spanish cosmopolitan city.
Leon Cathedral
I think the best plan of attack would be to pick up car hire in Spain and travel to a few of the surrounding areas, once I’ve chosen my destination. I really want to experience the real Spain, rather than get stuck into the whole Costa del Sol scene. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, but it’s nice to experience it as if you actually lived there, rather than just a fly-by visit.
Every year around this kind of time I start to get itchy feet. I don’t know whether it’s due to the miserable January/February weather, or some sort of SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), complete and utter boredom or the inevitable and incipient arrival of my birthday – to be honest it doesn’t really matter what the cause is, because deep down I know that I’d love to get out and see the real world again.
For some time now I’ve been considering heading back out on a road-trip. I haven’t been out on the open road for some years now, last time we decided to go for Monte Carlo or bust – inspired of course by one of the greatest films of all time…
Our ride wasn’t quite as exciting or as ingenious as Major Digby Dawlish’s, it didn’t have any frills or mod-cons, nope it was just a tatty battered used van that we’d managed to pick up at a reasonable rate from the local van hire company. We spent a few weeks patching it up and making it liveable and then we set off.
Neither of us had really spent a great deal of time in France, so we decided to try and take in as much of the country as possible. We started in Normandy, trundled our way through Paris and continued down south, stopping in Geneva and traversing the Alps until we reached our desired destination: Monte Carlo and the Mediterranean.
We spent a week or so living the high-life and then we turned the van around and sped off west through the French Riviera. I’d always wanted to visit Carcassonne so we drove down and spent a few nights surrounded by some of the most astounding and intact medieval architecture in western Europe. After buffing up on our history we went north to Biarritz, surfed our brains out and watched the sunset every night – twas the perfect finish to a great holiday.
Arguably the most eagerly awaited MMO for years will be landing at the end of this year, and if you thought that Age of Conan or Warhammer was going to be the fabled WoW killer then you were off by a long way, but in a galaxy far far away, in the Bioware studios, TOR is being born and its coming will blow away anything Cataclysm has to offer. I mean why on earth would you want to be Gnome, or a Goblin, or even a Worgen (WTF! Seriously Blizzard, was that the best you could come up with?), when you can be a motherf*cking badass Sith Warrior Emperor styleee! Seriously you better be able to be a Mon Calamari Jedi/Sith, or I’m tracking down George Lucas and shoving a double ended lightsaber where the sun doesn’t shine.
As I mentioned the game is being developed by Bioware, probably the greatest RPG developer in the world, so expect a huge story driven MMO. The game itself is set 300 years after the events of Bioware’s phenomenally successful Knights of the Old Republic series; hopefully some sort of conclusion to Darth Revan’s story will be included. TOR is going to be your more traditional 3rd person MMO, but it will have some significant tweaks installed. Bioware have already announced that it will be heavy on story, with a lot more instanced 1player/grouped scenarios which will help unravel the plot.
Bioware have also stated that TOR will be the first fully voiced MMO, their intention is to make your participation within the story that bit more immersive; I tend to find Bioware games a little disjointed when it comes to this aspect, when you speak to NPC’s they’re always very grand and dramatic, but when you click that ‘prepare to die’ option and the fight begins, you tend to lose that sense of roleplay without a voiceover.
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*Revision*
In a recent statement BioWare announced that an up and coming MMO title they are working on will be delayed to the start of 2011, although they did not mention it by title, most people in the industry have taken this to mean ToR. With Cataclysm due towards the end of the year it makes sense to delay a few months, allow the initial hype of WoW 3rd expansion to die down a little and then hit the market with a fresh finished product. To make any sort of traction in the MMO industry your product needs to be ready, there’s just not enough attention span and patience for a work in progress – so companies get your damn releases right, or don’t bother.
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