Where were you at midnight on Monday night? If your answer is anything other than “standing outside the local Gamestop in freezing-cold weather waiting to pick up a copy of the World of Warcraft expansion,” you’re a better person than I. Behold:
The lucky few at the front of the line. You can’t see him very clearly, but the guy in the bottom left is, indeed, dressed like a Warcraft character:
From my vantage point, way toward the back of the line. Who knew that this mid-sized midwestern town was home to so many WoW fanatics?
Victory at last! My copy of The Burning Crusade in hand, I drive home to fire it up and create a hot female blood elf character.
The experience of standing in line in the snow did not quite match up to Gamestop’s enthusiastic description of the event as a “release party.” I, at least, spent more time shivering in the cold and questioning my own sanity than I did actually partying. Nevertheless, I had a good time; it was fun interacting a bit with some fellow nerds in a social environment where conversation filler consists of questions like “So, is your druid spec’ed out as a feral druid, or as a healer?” rather than “So, mighty crazy weather we’ve been having lately!”
by 
I was in gamestop here a few weeks ago. a man entered the store. he was obviously not all there mentally. his growth was stunted and he looked like a hobo and smelled bad. the was obviously uneducated, poor, and crapped on by life. he goes up to talk to the dork behind the counter … they start talking about Halo. this guy loves Halo.
when the dork asks him if he wants to put some $ down on the next release of the game, the guy gets very excited. he didn’t know a new Halo game was about to be released. dork says, “yeah, it’ll probably come out in about a year or two, though that’s not certain at this point. but when it comes out, you’ll be guaranteed a copy at this store. you can even get the Master Chief special edition box for 50 more.”
“master who?” says the man.
“master chief” says the dork, pointing to a photo of the “hero”
upon seeing the image and recognizing it, the man lets out the longest, most satisfied (and hilarious sounding cat call of ) “MAAAAAAASSSSSSSSTEEEEEEEEER Chief!!!!!!!!!”
They pattered back and forth for a while more and I continued to grin about the “maaaaaster chief” comment… but it made me sick that the store-dork was going to try to bilk that poor guy out of 5 bucks cash for a game that probably won’t come out in that guy’s life time.
the other thing about the dork that pissed me off was that,
1. he had the worst handle on the English language I’ve heard in a long time.
he used so many 16+ letter words in some sort of pale attempt to sound smart – yet not once did he ever use a single one of those words in the correct way.
2. if the dork hadn’t been so young and stupid, he might have realized that the guy he was talking to would never have understood most of those mis-placed words even if they had been used properly.
i have a bag of game stop stories.
each outlet in my new town is especially craptacular.
Sorry to hear about the Gamestop experience. That’s really awful–I hope you complained to the manager.
(The employees at the Gamestop nearest me seem pretty friendly and knowledgeable, so I can’t complain. Sounds like you’re not so lucky.)
before we moved the gamestop employees were really great. i liked them a lot, but things are different here for some reason.