Ragna....I mean Water Margin

I sat down with a new Malaysian game called "Water Margin". It's an interesting martial arts based game set in a 16-bit color pallate. It looks and feels quite a bit like Ragnarok Online, except really, really dumbed down. That's not a bad thing though as some people don't like how complicated/involved RO gets.

When starting out, you choose a profession as well as an element. Your physical attacks are based on your element I believe, and your elemental defense is based on your element choice as well. There's a decent class selection, but not as much as one would hope. Most of the classes are quite similar to each other, or have very little differences. The only real unique ones were the toaist priest (magic user) and some class that's a healer and attacks with a pen (the name quite honestly eludes me as I write this).

The newbie experience is pretty good though, as the starting city has nothing but the guides who teach you how to play the game and send you on simple quests. From there, you'll get tossed into the main city, and there's where most of the game goes from. Most people were pretty helpful when you take the time to ask them questions as well. It's a large city, and always full of people, so take your time to learn it, or you'll be confused later.

The leveling is pretty basic and revolves around either pressing 1-3 hotkeys or just clicking your mouse; very boring if you ask me. The ideas behind the game aren't new either, and it almost feels like they WERE trying to rip off Ragnarok Online if you ask me. If you are REALLY a fan of 16 bit artwork, or like RO, give it it a shot. It's free!. Otherwise, stay away for now, until the game does something to make itself stand out.

Sorry for the lack of posts...

Life's been hectic for me as of late, and the flow of free games has slowed to a trickle, so please bear with me as I review a sort of free game (explanation coming).

I spent a lot of time reading up on a game called "Graal Online". When it first came out back in 1998, it was known as "Zelda Online". It changed pretty quickly however from a java game to a full blown application. It's got a small community, as well as several different servers to play on. Oh, and it's a one time fee of $29 for the software, with limitations.

There's 2 "premium" servers (for now) to play on. There's Graal Kingdoms, which is a medievil fantasy game with pvp that has various kingdoms in control of some islands. Then there's "Zone" which is a modern/futuristic game heavy on guns and pvp. These constitute the "gold" servers, which you get 6 months of free access to when you buy the software. For the other servers, there's 2 catagories; Classic and Playerworlds. Classic is run and maintained by the staff but it different from Graal Kingdoms, and playerworlds are versions of classic run by various players of Graal.

This is good because they were one of the first companies to embrace allowing servers to be run with OFFICIAL software for a game. Secondly, it provides more options for players who don't want to pay for gold access. To me, I found the classic and playerworlds servers to be a bit blah, but there's lots of people who like it better than Kingdoms.

For me however, I bought a year's access to gold (special package they offered) because of the good community as well the immense amount of roleplaying going on. Plus, it was pretty cheap anyways, only $10 more. Anyways though, Kingdoms is an MMO, but the world is fairly small, which is fine, because without any speed enhancing items, it'll take a LONG time to even walk the mainland, nevermind swim, or catch a boat to the various islands. It's 2d, with 3d environments (similar to ragnarok), with crisp clean sprites.

When you create your character, your options are limited. Only 5 classes, but even those don't matter much as everyone can eventually learn every skill and spell if they have the time and in game resources. Then you choose male or female, and then you're given a pre-set look to start with. Your looks (hair, clothes, face, body) can all be changed later though at shops for minor amounts of money. Hell, there's several people who are running around as foxes!

The gameplay is pretty solid, as there's 6 areas of growth for your character. There's Physique, Mental, Wisdom, Agility, Personality, and Magic. Most are self-explanitory, but personality is for skills like shopping, which deal with getting a better deal at shops and other such things. the leveling curve is quite steep, and you get less experience each time you kill something, so it's best to hunt in areas with varying creatures.

I'd say about 99% of items re created or harvested by players. Sure some stuff can be bought in shops, but most stuff can be made cheaper, or hell, ONLY made by one of the tradeskills, or alchemy. You can also "prepare" a weapon, which opens up slots on it for enchantments based on your physique level. Also available are various blessings for your weapons as well, which can be done by anyone devoted to a god, who has a high enough wisdom level. Various gods allow higher levels of blessing than others, and from I've seen, only 2 of the gods (the ones with the highest blessings) are used FOR blessing, one for PvP, one for PvE. So basically the others don't matter that much, except for roleplaying, or certain situations.

What is so great about the game though, is that 90%+ of the players are diehard roleplayers, and you can ALWAYS get in on it. After only two days, I got myself into a kingdom, and am already helping breathe new life into the world. I was shocked when the prince of my kingdom took my roleplaying, and expounded on it, bringing in about 7 people, and even fleshing out my own story more! Talk about stroking my ego! I feel like my head can't even fit into my computer room anymore :P

Anyways, I think Graal is a game EVERYONE who loves roleplaying should try. The price is right (and they even accept paypal!), and the community is better than you'll find on most MMOs. Pick it up and look around for Trindras Sanreum, and start up a conversation.

Trindras

Turf Battle

Turf Battle is a pretty new game (that I'm fairly sure is a Korean translation) that's in early beta testing. The concept of this MMO is that players form tribes (think clans/guilds) to battle over areas of land for various benefits. Interesting concept, but not a completely new idea. I figured it was worth a try anyways.

Once the game opens up, and you enter the character creation mode, you'll see the options are kind of limited. Two races, humans and elves (they have a different name for them that I can't recall exactly at this moment). Humans have the choice to be a blade warrior (swords), fist warrior, or a red wizard. Elves get to choose between archer and blue wizard. This is a bit deceptive though, as later on, red wizards can become yellow priests which have speed enhancement buffs, and blue wizards can become a white priest for healing, or black sorcerer for debuffs.

Anyways, the customization for your character is fairly standard. Several hair types, several colors, and several faces. Your body is determined from your class. At some point, you'll be able to choose your starting city as well, but for now, the option's disabled.

Once you jump into the game, you start off in a city. The first thing you notice is the graphics. They're not bad, but nothing to write home about either. To be honest, when I first entered the game, the thought that crossed my mind was, "wow! A commercial MMO using Realmcrafter!" Not that it's an insult, but it's just how the graphics are.

The music though is pretty good, and the sounds definately fit the game. That's a good thing, since one of the starter quests is SO hard and you have to sit in town for a long time to do it. The various sound effects that come from using magic or attack skills is also nicely done.

The controls for the game are a little touchy. You can point and click, or you can use the wasd method, or even the arrow keys if you so desire. Point and click is more accurate, but is a lot harder to use when you're trying to jump. Wasd is easier to move, but it's not quite accurate enough for some of the jumps they expect you to do later on. Same for the arrow keys. Also, they really should have a full layout on the website or on the in-game help, as trying to click to grab most of the items on the ground is a headache and a half (shift will loot, I was told after about 6 hours of playing).

Now to the actual gameplay. I think the max level is somewhere around 200. They don't really say on the website. However, you will find yourself leveling pretty quickly, even without the newbie quests. Each attack (magic or physical) that's successful gets your experienced based on the level difference between you and what you're attacking. Also, each skill levels up as you use it as well, raising in both strength and mana cost (if there's one attached to that skill/spell).

After a few hours of playing, I found myself level 14, and that's when it's started to slow a little bit. Mainly because 99% of the potions in the game require at least level 20 to use, so once I was out, I needed to stop and rest a lot. Thankfully, you do regenerate hp and mana pretty quickly, so there's never too much downtime.

There's also crafting in this game. Unfortunately though, every raw material comes from kills, and not from harvesting skills, but that can be forgiven. You take the raw materials to various NPCs inside the cities, and they can refine them into workable materials, which can then be used to make various items. The good thing is that you can make pretty much any item you can buy in shops and then some, not to mention they have bonuses to their defense or damage. The bad thing is that the material costs get pretty hefty pretty quickly. Also, when you make rings, bracelets, and necklaces, they are rather plain, and need other items (gems) to give them effects.

The game as a whole however, is pretty good. It's very early beta, and the amount of players is still pretty small, but in time, if they fix the glaring bugs and exploits, it should be one of the better games for a while. Did I mention it will be free to play as well?

Try, try, try again

I dug deep into my bag of free MMOs to dig out Conquer Online. It's a Chinese based MMORPG that's heavy on the action, but extremely light on the roleplaying. It's a low-rez, almost isometric game, with an outdated color palate. However, the game recently (a month or 2 ago) went from version 1.0 to 2.0. What changes did it bring?

To be honest, nothing that I can tell, other than an easier to read GUI. Perhaps more of the changes are geared towards the end game, as I've failed to reach that part yet. So far, I've brought 3 different characters to level 30+; an archer, a taoist, and a warrior. Playing them again for the first time in about 6 months really didn't feel any different than it used to be though.

The classes are varied, but there's a lot of overlapping. Warriors and Trojans for example share most of the same special moves. Warriors are trained to use a shield however, and Trojans use 2 weapons. Taoists at level 40 can become water taoists or fire. Water focusing on curing and transportation, fire on destruction. It's REALLY hard to reach that point without being powerleveled though, and if you get powerleveled, your magic is too weak to solo afterwards.

Archers however don't share much in common with anyone. By my estimates, at least 1 in 3 (most likely greater) characters are archers, for 1 main reason. A skill called "Scatter". Basically when you use the skill, it allows you to fire an arrow, with a slight damage and experience penalty, at EVERY ENEMY within a certain area in front of you. And let me tell you that it's about 140 degrees or higher. Massive leveling in REALLY fast times happens, provided you reach level 23 for the skill, then keep supplied in arrows and top notch gear.

All in all, for a free game, it's pretty good. You can even go mine for ores, swap the ores for timber, and use ore and timber to build yourself a house. You also find gems to put into your equipment from mining. Also, if you want better gear, you can pay them a set price for some "dragonballs" to use to upgrade your equipment. Worth it if you intend on being a "1337" PKer, as the game has a HORRIBLE PK system (even when your PK is set to off, you can be attacked).

All in all, I say give the game a shot. However, if you DON'T like PK, don't even bother, as that's what the end game consists of (after you've reached the max level, reincarnated, and reached the max level again).

A old favorite of mine...

Well, hackmygame's L2 servers are back up, but no one I know has been on their prize server. So, I started on the PvP server. It was fun at first, and hell, someone dragged some of the raid bosses into the cities for people to group up and kill for experience! However, two days ago, an event started for most PKs in 2 weeks or so. What that means is NO ONE is safe ANYWHERE. Yea, that's a whole lot of fun for semi-new players :/

So instead of sitting around and getting killed over and over again, I went ahead and downloaded a game I haven't played in a year. Rubies of Evenide. If ever there were a class you wanted to play in an MMO, they most certainly have it! I didn't even bother to count how many classes they had. Suffice to say it's clearly over 50. Some of the differences between classes are very subtle, others are profound. Needless to say, there's something for everyone.

The combat is fantastic as well. It's a refreshing change of pace from all these real-time MMOs. Everything is broken down into "turns" but it's a real-time turn similar to the Final Fantasy series of games. To break it down so it's easier for people who haven't experienced it, each action (moving, attacking with a weapon, or casting a spell) takes a certain amount of time to do. Movement has only one phase, whereas other actions have a preperation phase before the actual action is done. While this is all going on, the NPC(s) are doing the same thing. It makes for some strategy, which is welcome in an MMO, imo.

The crafting is fairly detailed with there being 4 types of crafting (weaponsmithing, armorsmithing, tailoring, fletching) and 6 types of each materials (cloth, leather, metal, wood). Leathers can be gotten from the hunting skill, which checks every time you kill an animal. Higher the hunting skill, the better the chance of getting hides or fangs. Mining will net you metal, but you can only mine in certain places, as well as get certain ores in certain places, so it keeps you hunting. Cloth and wood are both storebought (for the lower quality versions), or dropped off of (generally) humanoid NPCs. There's also Herbalism, but right now it's not used for much, until enchanting comes in.

All in all, it's a fantastic game. Free to play, but donations will get you special items, as well as access to a special island which sells I believe all 6 tiers of materials for each type, at a pretty cheap price. Nice perk, and it's pretty reasonably priced too. Also, donating will allow you to bypass the cap they have on free players per server (which is set at 110, and can take forever to get on otherwise). I highly recommend everyone download it and give it a shot. If you like it, drop them a couple of bucks too.

Trindras

Trying new MMOs isn't always wise...

I played a little game about 6 months ago in closed beta called "Fly For Fun" or Flyff. For the first 3 weeks, 90%+ of the game was all in korean, making it impossible to understand anything. So, rather than continue testing for them, I stopped.

Well, two days ago, I tried it out again, as it's been "released" now, even though it's free. let me just say, the game has it's moments, but really, really isn't that good. For starters, there's a serious lag problem that they can't solve. Hell, they don't even know what's causing it, all they know is it's a degenerative problem, and reboots every 12 hours ease the lag slightly.

Also, the experience system is ridiculous. You have two experience bars. One is xp, one is "pxp". I'm not exactly sure what it stands for, but I know what it does. Basically, the pxp bar sits at 100% by default. Now, whenever you use a skill while killing something, that bar starts to drop. The more skills you use, the more it drops. The lower it goes, the less, experience you get. Why you may ask? Because the skills/spells themselves are absorbing some of that experience to get to higher levels. Higher levels of your spells and skills mean more damage, and access to better versions later on in character levels.

While this is all well and good for melee classes, it puts a REAL crimp on healers and mages. So much so that well, mages are ridiculously hard to level, EVEN nearing the end game. That's not how it's supposed to be. Mages are supposed to struggle early on, but then get really strong and have an easier time than say a warrior. Not here. Oh, lets not even discuss healers.

On second thought, lets. See at level 15, you can choose to become an "assist" which is basically, a cleric, or a priest. Then at level 60, you get to choose to specialize into a billposter (which is like a monk), or a ringmaster which is basically a full on healing/buffing priest. Normally, there'd not be an issue, but billposters are SO broken. They hit hard, take TONS of damage, AND can heal themselves. How fair is that?

All in all, it's an average game, that fails to do many things right. The concepts are interesting (like free-form flying), but it fails to turn it's potential into a game that I could recommend.


I tried out this psudo-MMO called "Neo Baseball". It's technically browser-based, but it opens into full screen and everything. Basically it puts you into the seat of a coach/general manager of a baseball team. You choose everything about it, from the players, right down to the kinds of training each player gets (to enhance their abilities). Solid game, and really fun. If they can fix the damn problem I'm having that once I log off one account, I can't log it back in, then I'll wholehearted recommend it. BTW, it's only compatible with IE (yuck).


Anyways though, I'd like some feedback on WoW. I've played it tons on private servers, but I haven't played the official servers since the "Final Stress Test". Is it worth paying for? Several friends of mine, including my best friend are playing it, but I wonder if I should even bother, mainly because it's so full of damn farmers and such. Anyways, leave me some comments please, on your opinions.

I appreciate those of you who are clicking my ads. So far I've earned a few bucks. I don't start getting payouts till I reach $50 though, so please keep on clicking :) Who knows, maybe they'll actually put a decent ad up there, and you may actually see something you wanna check out ;)

Trindras

An interesting, often ignored game

Well, hackmygame's lineage2 servers were down for the majority of the day, and I really didn't feel in the mood for World of Warcraft, Anarchy Online, or Maplestory. What was left? Well, nothing on my computer, that's for sure. So I took some time and dug through my file of games that I've wanted to try, but haven't for whatever reason.

In there, I found Project Entropia. I didn't play it when I first heard about it, mainly because I didn't have WinXP, or enough ram to run it. Well, both of those have changed, so I figured I'd give it a go. Solid graphics (though not impressive enough for the hefty ram requirements), good music, and a fairly helpful tutorial guide to help you get started.

So, after the download, I dove right in. The first difference I noticed was that you're allowed 1 character per account. Period. There's no deletion, and no second or third accounts. Already I was being put off by the game. No big deal though, I can deal with 1 character. Next, you actually go to create your character. The amount of detail they give you is VERY impressive. Few MMOs come anywhere near the amount of options they give you. Next up was being tossed into the game. No "newbie" area or anything, they just drop you off at a major colony on one of the many planets.

Now here's where it gets interesting. See, the game is technically free to play. The game's economy is based on "Project Entropia Dollars" or credits, however you feel like calling them. 10 PEDs equal $1US. While this sounds like a great way to earn some extra money...let me warn you. You start with 0 PEDs, NO weapons/armor, and well, only 2 ways to earn money. One is called "Sweating" where you run around the wilderness gathering the sweat off of the wildlife to be used for "mind essence" which I'm still not sure what it's used for. Something to do with their version of magic "Mindforce".

Anyways, the other way to go and get oil from the oil fields. Well, that sounds like a better option, right? Well, the oil fields are about a 30-45 minute run across the starting continent. Oh, and the wildlife tends to not like you, and attack you frequently. Thankfully, there's no penalty for death, other than being sent back to the closest revive terminal.

Basically though, you're stuck getting sweat for a while to earn some credits to get some armor and a weapon, or if you REALLY feel like it, some mining equipment. I still haven't reached that part after 10 hours of playing.

There's no levels. It's ENTIRELY skill based. Use a skill (either passive or active) and there's a chance you'll earn experience in it. Earn enough, raise a level in that skill. The skills are VERY diverse and can easily keep you occupied for a long time. You can get a mentor as well, who can point out stuff, and help you along as well. This ties in with the skills as you're considered a disciple for....a LONG TIME. Only certain skills count towards not being a disciple anymore, and like 7 of them require 1800+.

Ok, pick your jaw up off your desk. It's a little extreme, but keep in mind, they made this game for the long haul. At any time you can cash out some in game credits for real life cash. Back when the game first opened, there were troubles trying to get cash sometimes, but that's changed. With in game investments of $25,000US and over $100,000US, they seem to be pretty set. Also, people are constantly putting money in now to start the game, as it REALLY helps out. All in all, I highly recommend giving it a chance if you like Sci-fi, and are willing to sink 50+ hours into the game before you can do a lot. If you can do that, you'll enjoy their VERY robust crafting system. And who knows; you could find yourself liking the game so much that you want to buy a spacestation for $100k US too (as an investment of course).

Trindras

[On an off note, I just wanted to thank all the visitors to my website. Thanks to adsense, I can get a feeling for how many people are visiting each day. All the money I raise from here goes directly to funding my gaming, and that's what keeps me writing :) And as always, feel free to leave comments. I do read them, and will respond to them if they contain questions.]