Project Lore

In an effort to cover World of Warcraft's extended Extended Universe I drank not one, not two but four Game Fuels recently, two of each flavor.  Now I know the Horde is going to freak out about this with claims that Project Lore hates hordies, but your drink taste exactly how I would imagine Cherry citrus-flavored death to taste.  The stuff is absolutely awful.  It should be pulled off the market as fast as Zicam and its creators forced to drink it, and only it, until they beg for mercy.   Screw waterboarding, just force terrorists to drink this concoction of chemicals and "flavor!" As with most things, the Alliance is better.  Well, that is simply relative to the Horde mockery of a refreshing beverage.  This pop is only mildly less appalling than its co-branded cousin, offering gamers a Wild Berry-flavored potion of high fructose corn syrup, caffeine and almost the same collection of chemicals that are difficult (Ethylenediaminetetraacetic Acid), and scary (Glycerol Ester of Wood Rosin), to pronounce.  I've yet to meet someone who drank the disgusting tonics out of something other than curiosity, but the shocking thing is that they have both been around the block before. As unattractive as I find Horde Red, the carbonated catastrophe is a re-branding of Mountain Dew's Halo 3 GameFuel which debuted in 2007.  Not to be outdone by unoriginality, the Alliance Blue is also a re-branding, this time of Mountain Dew's election tie-in flavor, Mountain Dew Revolution. Something good did come of the cross branding though, IRL dailies.  Again, I am not a marketing mastermind, but forcing us to view the same junk, much of which has nothing to do with the sodas, day in and day out seems like an odd marketing strategy.  Even money says it has to do with the act of repetition forcing the human brain to remember things more accurately (see Navi). In all seriousness the good aspect is another vanity pet!  After this morning's failed attempts at the Scorched Stone, my GM and I took out our frustrations on each other's Battle-Bots.  Once fueled up (you have to reboot WoW after requesting your fuel) these guys duke it out for a bit and then one explodes in a great show of leakage.  Glad Blizzard gave the animators some time to play with these machines, but it makes me want a mini Diablo vs. mini Tyrael battle even more. I'd say that between the chance for IRL rewards, even if the token collection system is absolutely stupid, and the in-game combat pet, the co-branding has been a success.  But Blizzard, next time make the other company create interesting IRL dailies.  It really shouldn't be that difficult, some guerrilla marketing, puzzles we have to solve, trivia, need I go on? There are a ton of things more entertaining than "watching" videos over, and over again. Here I thought reading numerous Knaak novels was the worst thing that could come from the Extended Universe!  I kid, I kid, the story arcs are entertaining and leave absolutely no aftertaste (of death). I am sure many of you out there actually enjoy these deviants of ahh, but are you proud enough to admit it?  Me?  I will stick with my Pepsi/Mountain Dew Throwback, as I cannot stand the aftertaste left on my palate by High Fructose Corn Syrup.  The Throwback stuff is awesome, as far as soda goes anyway.  Anyone else get a kick out of the Battle-Bots? Edit: Yes the Horde Drink is the Halo 3 GameFuel, not Code Red. Thank you readers!

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Ever since Mountain Dew's Game Fuel promotion started back in May (the drink itself is just now starting to show up on store shelves), people have been wondering when exactly they'd be able to get their hands on the associated Battle-Bot vanity pets. Well, good news everyone! They're finally here! Here my puny pugilist is trying to convince me that Game Fuel is part of a balanced diet.If you've already signed up for the promotion, then you're halfway there. Simply go to the website, log in, and click the button in the lower-right hand corner. Be warned: you will need to have a Battle.net-linked Warcraft account in order to receive the pet (it's a good thing to do anyway, for added security and the option to digitally download all your favorite Blizzard games once you've authenticated them through the site -- not to mention beta opt-ins!). Once you've gone through all that, simply log out of your WoW account in-game and then log back in. The key to your new mechanical bruiser should be in your mailbox. I have to say that these little guys (invented by famed Gnomish toymaker and proprietor of Wonderworks in Dalaran Jepetto Joybuzz) are actually really cool. Click on them, and they babble in some obscure techno-language (no doubt subliminal messages telling you to buy more Mountain Dew). You can also fuel them up with either a red or blue mixture, and when your Battle Bot encounters another one with the opposite color, they'll get into a fist-fight. Sadly, it seems that the only way to obtain the fuel right now is to visit the Mountain Dew page every day and click through the same image as before. Hopefully, there will be some sort of in-game method for claiming the juice once the promotion period is over. On that note, I have actually found individual bottles of Game Fuel at the local Wally World, but only the Horde-themed red (perhaps this town ain't so bad after all!). The bottle says "Citrus Cherry," two flavors that I generally like, but ends up tasting something like carbonated bubble gum. Not entirely unpleasant, but it probably won't appeal to everyone's palette. Never tried the Halo 3 stuff, so I'm not sure if it's any different, though the Alliance version is some sort of berry (and I use that term very loosely).

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Image via MMO-Champion.

PepsiCo, creators of Mountain Dew, are working with Blizzard for a new promotion! They are producing two new limited time flavors of Mountain Dew called "Game Fuel". It comes in two varieties: Citrus Cherry which has a Horde theme on the label and Wild Fruit which has an Alliance theme. The Alliance version has 1 more mg of caffeine. There are some cool prizes in the promotion. Most notably are what assumed to be in-game pets: battle bots. The bots have at least two abilities: fill with "Blue Battle Fuel" and "Red Battle Fuel". Its unknown what this does besides change their appearance. In order to get these prizes, you need to earn tokens. You can exchange your tokens for an entry to a prize drawing. Its unclear how the battle bots will be acquired; I don't think its likely that it will be through the drawing. There is a greyed-out button that says "Redeem Tokens" that will give you the option of exchanging tokens for a battle bot or entries to the prize drawings once its implemented. Here are all the different ways you can start earning tokens today. Note that you can only "carry" 2,000 tokens before you must exchange them for something, and you can't do that yet. Its very realistic that you might hit this cap before its implemented.

• Sign in: 100 tokens when you register for the first time and sign in and 25 tokens for each day you log in after registering.
• Refer-a-friend: 50 tokens per referral (shameless plug of my referral link). You can send out 5 emails per day through the site. Though your friends will probably hate you for doing this, since if they care enough to register, they probably already know about the contest. You can also make a "faction flag", which makes an embeddable link you can put on your website or forum from which you can get 50 tokens with a maximum of 250 tokens a day. You also get 25 tokens for making the flag the first time.
• Clicking on product facts: 25 tokens per day you look at the product facts. What is the point of wanting people to do this every day?
• Videos: 125 tokens per day. There are 5 videos, each worth 25 tokens per day. You don't have to watch them, just click them. These are all the intros to WoW and its expansions and some trailers for WoW. Most player have seen these, why does Pepsi want us to watch these again... every day?
• Read lore: 25 tokens per document. You can only read each timeline document once.
• Clicking on ads that take you to the Mountain Dew page from other sites: 25 tokens per ad per day, max of 175 per day. Why does Pepsi want to burn their Adsense money?
• Clicking on the WoW promotion ad on the Mountain Dew Home Page: 25 tokens per day. Again, stupid.
• Clicking on "hidden urls": 25 tokens per URL per day. I have no idea what this means.
• Social Media: 25 tokens per site per day. On Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter, you just click on the link that takes you to the Mountain Dew site.
• DEWSletter: 25 tokens per newsletter, which comes out once per month.

Here is the list of prizes and how many are being given out:

• All-inclusive Blizzcon Trip: Four total, one per week for the first four weeks of the content.
• Alienware Notebook, one per day (worth $2,000)
• Razer Mako Desktop Speaker System: one per day (worth $400)
• Razer Carcharias Audio Headset: seven per day (worth $89.00)
• Razer Lycosa Gaming Keyboard: seven per day (worth $70)
• Razer DeathAdder Gaming Mouse: seven per day (worth $59)
• Mountain Dew Game Fuel Hoodie: twenty four per day (worth $40)
• Mountain Dew Game Fuel Messenger Bags: twenty four per day (worth $40)
• Mountain Dew Game Fuel WoW T-shirt: twenty five per day (worth $18)

The drawings go through August, and its only available in the US. You have to pick which prizes you want to put your tokens towards, so start thinking about it now. Everyone will probably pool into the most expensive ones, so you might want to enter into the cheaper ones as well. What are you going to try to get, and what do you think of the promotion?

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