WoW

WoW installed and fired right up with nary a hitch. First thing I did after creating a character was to play with the video options. It defaulted to fairly mid quality settings. I turned everthing up to max. Restarted the game for the texture detail to take effect. You start out the game in a small town so there were quite a few peeps running around plus lots of NPCs and buildings and such. The game was fairly chunky at these settings, although still playable and possibly quite passable out in the wilds away from town and other folks. I really didn't expect to be able to play at these settings but wanted to see what the PodBox would do. Pretty impressed, the PC chunked much worse on the same settings, as did the eMac. I turned things down a bit, where the games still looks good, clip range is far off and the game plays smoothly. I'll make note of what those settings are and post them. Still a chunk or two when the screen gets really busy, but very good overall in my opinion. Doh, forgot to mention all of the above is at the max rez of I believe 1660 x whateveritis, its even a widescreen mode. Game looks great.

Later when I've grown accustomed to the eye candy I'll prolly turn things down just a bit more for a super smooth play experience, particularly in PvP where you want minimal lag time.

Another thing of note. The game installed really fast, much much faster than the PC or eMac which literally took a couple of hours, couldn't have been much more than half an hour or so. Some of this of course could be optimization by Blizzard of their code as it nears production status, but still the overall impression is much smoother gameplay than my albeit somewhat aging PC and the general feeling that the machine just isn't working nearly as hard as the other machines I have played the game on. Definitely WoW on the iMac G5 is more than just playable and you can really enjoy the game at an above average level of detail. I had pretty high expectations for the PodBox and Wow and it doesn't look like its gonna let me down.

Woot!!!