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While I’m well aware that the developers in charge of World of Warcraft over at Blizzard have too much time on their hands — as this list of pop culture references woven into the MMO prove — some people clearly have even more time on their hands.

One particular individual, animpinabox, took the time to research and match up the dancing emotes for each individual World of Warcraft character and race to the originals it took inspiration from. They say they grabbed all the clips used for the comparison from YouTube, which is quite a feat in itself. The attention to detail by Blizzard is just… ridiculously astounding. And just plain ridiculous too.

Via Kotaku

This past week marked the official launch of The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. It’s not easy going up against the juggernaut that is World of Warcraft but I think LOTRO makes quite the valiant effort on many levels, the least of which is by adopting a similar UI and quest/play style. Of course, it helps to have a strong mythos already developed and, so far, it’s been fitting quite well for me — even repeating them multiple times since the public stress test, I’m actually reading the quests and trying to follow the story. For now at least.

Michael over at MMOG Nation took a couple looks at LOTRO both at launch and a week later and provided his impressions from the point of view of the seasoned MMO gamer (or so I presume). I originally caught his Launch Day impressions last week and based on his “What I Love/Like/Hate about LOTRO” lists I ended up writing Michael purely because of this comment:

The Classes. Sorry dr00ds. I just have never gotten behind classes that screw up the four legs of the D&D table. If I can’t look at a class in a fantasy MMOG and know whether it’s a Tank, Nuke, Healer, or Skills-monkey, I probably won’t play it. My primary character in WoW was a Paladin, and look where that got me.

I’ve always felt that I could understand the MMOs whose classes more closely aligned with those in AD&D than those who didn’t. Or maybe I’m just a huge nerd. This was something that made Final Fantasy XI easy for me to pick up as my first MMO, because the starting job classes — and even some of the advanced classes — still fell neatly into the base classes I first grew to learn during my pen and paper days. I still have a hard time equating these to the LOTRO classes and World of Warcraft. Both seem a bit more of a stretch than I’d like at times, but there’s not much I can do about that — and, no, I’m not playing DDO. I think the familiarity of the locales and storyline as Michael mentions at the end of his follow-up post a week later help overcome a lot of that “I’m lost” feeling I initially got when playing WoW — although thankfully that’s no longer an issue.