Hello, half a year later!  I suppose I should resign myself at this point to such enormous lapses in blogging, but old habits do die hard.

I’m sure it’s not difficult to guess the reasons.  Going from multiple decades as a loner with social events once or twice a month, to coming home each evening to the love of my life, is still a bit of personal culture shock ensnaring all my attention.  Once we manage to achieve “old married couple” status in the next few weeks, I’m sure sitting down to stare into my navel and mindlessly transcribe what I see will once again become my piece de existence.  Right!

Really though, I can’t pin all that simply on a state of matrimony.  The synergy here is that Tammy and I also happen to share an interest…it is how we met, after all, and it’s what we continue to do together.  That is:  massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG).

Sure, relationships are by nature a bit of a timesink, but that is just incidental.  MMORPGs are designed to suck away players’ time, in as flashy a manner as possible, and they only get better at it as time goes on.  I tell myself that it’s as valid as any hobby, interest or pastime, and far superior to some of the more common ones (television, anyone?)…of course, the fact that I need to tell myself that at all undoubtedly says something about it, but hey, what else am I going to do?  Movies and music just don’t do much for me anymore, and those favorite authors who are still alive don’t turn out books with a huge degree of frequency…

So much for the introduction!  What I figured I would do this time around is feed my frenzy by surveying the MMOs that I have played, and make suggestions for how you might come join me in this mad recreation.  And while I started assembling this blog entry way back in December, big changes in the MMO industry over the intervening months have altered the complexion of those suggestions in many ways.  The most dramatic change is that you can now enjoy the hobby to a large extent without having to spend a single dime.

My multiplayer gaming days do pre-date the arrival of MMOs by a few years.  On the one hand, there were first-person shooters…fully 3D games which pushed the envelope of technology to drop the player into a map where they could fight with other players, starting with the venerable DOOM and reaching its shiniest with UNREAL TOURNAMENT.  It often required kludges galore to get such games working in DOS over a 56K modem, but the smoothest gaming could be had by bringing my friends here to play over the home network.

Then there were the simulations…ground warfare games like DELTA FORCE, spaceflight simulators like FREELANCER, and tactical stealth games like RAINBOW SIX all had their day.

Finally, there was the roleplaying game.  Its execution might have been a touch limited, its graphics only 2D, but DIABLO II took us through a vast fantasy world for a number of campaigns, mowing down ghosts and demons and picking up shiny armor and gems.  This addictive formula was the one that would be expanded upon and refined once the MMO came into its own.

I wasn’t there for the earliest days of the MMO genre.  It launched with the 2D isometric world of ULTIMA ONLINE in 1997, and went to a fully 3D universe with EVERQUEST in 1999.  At that point, there was little attraction in it for me beyond the theoretical; online time was still charged by the minute, demands on computer power were often intense, and the whole dwarf-and-elf milieu thing just didn’t do an awful lot for me.  No, what it took to suck me in was a far distant planet where humanity was struggling, both externally and internally, to find a foothold.

Anarchy Online

Even in the wild-n-woolly days of early MMOs, there was definite pull towards bog-standard fantasy tropes.  It was up to Norwegian company Funcom to look to the skies; designer Ragnar Tornquist, whose adventure game THE LONGEST JOURNEY was acclaimed as one of the most intense and moving computer narratives ever, cooked up the planet Rubi-Ka, where rebellious miners fought a monolithic corporation for political control, alien invaders overran cities, and superhuman abilities became common thanks to an atmosphere saturated with nanomachines.

I was not present in 2001 for the launch of ANARCHY ONLINE, which was legendary for the crashing servers that met a player population far more massive than planned on; my introduction did not take place until 2003, at which point the game was far more stable.  So I was dazzled at the prospect which met my eyes…stone villages and prefabricated outposts, massive towering cities in soul-crushing shades of black and gray, vast wild landscapes under alien skies, populated by mutated creatures gone awry.   With few examples before it to set the optimal standards for game systems, character development was a deep and intricate matter of hundreds of statistics, crafting weapons and armor could require dozens of items assembled in multiple stages, and getting the most out of your character took balancing numerous implants and skill buffs stacked atop each other to insane lengths.  The crazed quasi-cyberpunk of the game concept allowed for both whimsy and awe, and discovering quests could often be a matter of research and luck in equal measure.

I must admit that even now, I’m nostalgic for it all.  I’ve played a dozen MMOs since then, most of which have been more graphically polished or action-packed or easier to navigate…but this one being my first, all those hours that I sank into it have in turn sunk it into me.  I can still “see” the memories of a sunset over the glowing crystals and misted waterfalls of Broken Shores, “taste” the dust of the sandstorms in Perpetual Wastelands, “smell” the dank inside the Temple of Three Winds, “feel” the subsonic throb of a sky-spanning alien mothership passing overhead.  The only other games to get under my skin in the same way were THE ELDER SCROLLS III: MORROWIND and THE ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION, and ANARCHY ONLINE is fully deserving of sitting there with them as a deep and immensely satisfying roleplaying game.

The Plusses: ANARCHY ONLINE was one of the first premium MMOs to offer players a free-to-play mode, consisting of the entire original game set on Rubi-Ka.  While it was once state-of-the-art and put the PC through its paces, at this point the game can run on whatever computer you plan to throw it at.

The Minuses: The game saw some refinements over the years, especially with its second expansion, SHADOWLANDS, which added a new setting of interdimensional conflict between angels and demons, and a much more polished user interface.  Unfortunately, if you want what the SHADOWLANDS expansion offers, you’ll have to pay for it, with a base subscription of $15 a month (or $8/month with a year’s subscription).  In addition, at this point it’s unavoidable to notice that the game’s graphics are old; landscapes are low-polygon meshes, and characters are stick figures painted with textures.  As great as the gameplay is, it’s now hard on the eyes.  A new graphics engine (the one Funcom uses for AGE OF CONAN) has been promised for years, and if that ever arrives I expect to rejoin the game myself for another look.

Where to get it: http://www.anarchy-online.com

EVE Online

Science fiction was also the flavor of the year for MMOs in 2003, when a modestly anticipated title launched to a small cadre of fans:  STAR WARS GALAXIES.  Of course, whatever unexpected success that game might have met with, it was missing a few little elements that might have been unreasonably expected, like, say, space combat.

It was up to a somewhat smaller game by the name of EVE ONLINE to fill that gap, and they did it with abandon.  At this point EVE is one of the biggest MMOs out there, its universe shaped and controlled by its players and the corporations and alliances they’ve formed, and trailblazing with an in-game currency which is translatable to subscription play time (and thus, real-life money).  If you’ve always dreamed of piloting a starship through interstellar distances, mining asteroids and battling space pirates, EVE ONLINE is the game for you.

The Plusses: There’s not a permanent free-to-play mode (short of earning enough in the game to finance your playtime), but the 14-day free trial is easily obtained.  The outer space graphics were gorgeous enough to begin with, but have been refined over the years.  Without the need to render characters and vegetation and weather, the game can readily run on just about any PC.

The Minuses: OK, I can tweak STAR WARS GALAXIES for not having space combat originally…but EVE is the other side of the coin, as you pretty much exist in the game only as a spacecraft (the game recently added the ability to walk around in your quarters, and a tie-in title for space marine ground combat is in development, but neither will fix the impersonality of the basic gameplay).  The other drawback, which is what drove me from the game after a month or two, is that little leeway is given for the distances traversed in space…you spend a whole lot of time flying from one point to another, and there’s not a hell of a lot to do in the interim unless you have a good book on hand.  You’ll need to be a fan of pretty space vistas.

Where to get it: http://www.eveonline.com/

City of Heroes

If the first generation of MMOs was ULTIMA ONLINE, and the second was EVERQUEST, ANARCHY ONLINE and STAR WARS GALAXIES, then 2004 was the watershed year for the third generation of MMOs.  Trust me to take the path of most resistance, as I still followed a science-fictional road; despite the advent of WORLD OF WARCRAFT and EVERQUEST II, my pick of the litter was the comic book inspired CITY OF HEROES.

Graphically speaking, the leap beyond ANARCHY ONLINE was mind-blowing.  Character models were fully articulated, curved and muscled.  Custom character design became legendary almost immediately, with an insane number of costume options to work with; even until recently, it set a standard that’s been matched only by other superhero games.  Gameplay was made far easier by marking quest givers and locations on the map, and the setting of Paragon City, overrun by rebellious robots and malevolent mages and scurvy street gangs and anachronic armies, was varied and vast.

The game held my attention for a year or so, until I bumped up against the limits of its high-level content, and the grind of trying to get through those high levels.  Since then, I gather, these issues have been eased…but at the time, I started to realize there were other games to pay attention to.

The Plusses: It’s got the comic book tropes down pat, and character design is practically a complete game in itself (I’m still appalled that the only character I was able to visually translate directly from the Champions role-playing campaign I joined in college, was the above-pictured Paragon, my attempt to stretch the limits of eye-blasting bad taste).  Best of all, plans for the game to go free-to-play were announced just two weeks ago, for implementation later this year!

The Minuses: Sadly, this is another game which somewhat shows its age, primarily with the monotonous textures used for its cityscapes.  Character animation is also a bit stiffer and more simplistic than has become the norm, and the control scheme a bit clumsier.  But if it’s going to be free, I’m sure I’ll be back for another visit!

Where to get it: http://www.cityofheroes.com/

World of Warcraft

When you talk about MMOs nowadays, the elephant in the room is WORLD OF WARCRAFT.  Its subscriber base is several orders of magnitude larger than any other MMO (and 150 countries) at 12 million, it’s been promoted on TV by the likes of William Shatner and Mr. T, and hey, it got me married.  Yet believe it or not, there was a time when WOW was the snot-nosed new kid on the block, kicked and battered, scorned and mocked and openly ignored.

Okay, that’s a lie.  The game was pretty much a behemoth even before launch.  Its developer was Blizzard, a company famed for taking a game genre and polishing it up to diamond sheen with titles like DIABLO and WARCRAFT.  Great things were expected from WOW, and basically, it delivered.

Just, you know, not to me.  At least not right away.  I was still a bit leery of the whole high fantasy setting (never being intensely into Tolkien or D&D, etc.), and in contrast to the quasi-realism at which CITY OF HEROES was aimed, WOW’s cartoony characters just put me off.  But eventually, I made my way into the game, and found the “cartoony-ness” was more a high degree of stylization which the graphics engine pulled off nicely, while the character animations themselves were intricate and quite realistic, with a nice dollop of expressive physical and voice emotes thrown in.  The world itself was breathtakingly colorful and detailed, the control scheme was smooth and immediately intuitive, and the user interface was a gem.  The writing was sharp, clever and moving.  Basically, everything there was exactly as it needed to be!

So I played WOW for a year or more, through just about every character class, until I got as much out of it as I wanted to, then I stopped.  Then, I went back and played again.  And again, and again.  Then there were expansions, and I played through a few more again.  Basically, it was the game that I just kept going back to, and if I always eventually came to feel that I had done everything I wanted to do there and was just spinning my wheels, still I would go back to it again.

And that is where I thought six months ago I would wrap up on this game, with an uncompromising recommendation to go play it immediately.  Then, unfortunately, the third expansion, CATACLYSM, came out, and I played it.  After a week or two of that, I realized that…I didn’t want to play any more.

Call me fussy, but somehow, in trying to make the game more accessible to new players, Blizzard finally managed to trash much of what kept me coming back to it.  Zones that were once quiet and extensive are now, per the title, shattered, and quest hubs were created so that, instead of ranging through a zone from two or three locations, the player is strung along every couple hundred yards to each clump of gameplay.  What was a theme park game has suddenly become a noisy carnival midway, and the charm it had for me just isn’t there any more.

Which is not to say anyone else shouldn’t play it.  If you haven’t tried an MMO before, or never played WOW back in the day, then it’s certainly the best you will find.  But if you’ve enjoyed other games, or knew Azeroth when Darkshore was full of mystery, well…

The Plusses: Polished, colorful and clever, the pinnacle of the genre.  It now offers a free trial that will let you play through all the non-expansion content up to level 20…and let you keep playing, albeit at level 20, as long as you like.  To advance beyond there, you must subscribe.

The Minuses: Cluttered, chaotic and controlled, it’s ADD in an MMO; you may feel dragged by the nose from quest hub to quest hub.  Not the game that it was.

Where to get it: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/

Everquest II

During one of my between-WOW interludes, I decided to have a look at the third big game to show up in 2004, EVERQUEST II.  The fact that a free trial was available for it made the peek all that much easier.

I wasn’t long for that particular world, however.  The character models were far more elaborately sculpted than those of any other MMO, but what they lost in stylization, they gained in staring, plasticized creepiness.  The music was dominated by a syrupy, Tchaikovsky-like ballet tune whose sweetness drove me up a wall.  The writing was bland, the high fantasy races were generic, and the zones were small and claustrophobic.  Really, there was nothing to hold me there.

And I have no idea why, years later, I went back.  Yet something happened in the interim.  Where the likes of WOW or CITY OF HEROES boasted an expansion every three or four years, EVERQUEST II had an expansion every year.  And if the others simply added new zones or character classes, with an occasional nod at another game system or two, EQ2 threw in a full overhaul and a gold-plated kitchen sink each time the calendar turned.  So now the game has not only matured, but it has added extensive elements that other games only dream of or are struggling to catch up with:  dynamic zone events, full personal housing with hundreds of available furnishings to place, alternative advancement trees, crafting quest lines that can be achieved with scarcely any combat, flying mounts, collectible items to seek out…it just keeps growing!  Although the character models for the human races still fall into the uncanny valley territory, the non-human races (including frogs and rats and fae and lizards and cats) are a gas to see in action.  The new zones are huge (and the original cities whose small tutorial districts put me off initially are themselves being opened up), the music is varied, and the writing has turned sassy and often hilarious.  With more to do in the game than even WOW offers, this is now pretty much my title of choice, and the one I expect to keep going back to.

The Plusses: A ton of things to see and do, and growing every year.  Not ultra-realistic nor ultra-stylized, but somewhere in-between.  And you can play its variant EVERQUEST II EXTENDED for free, with a limited availability of character classes and races, all the way up to the level cap with no other restrictions.

The Minuses: Human characters and elfin variants still look like mannikins at near range.  The free-to-play version doesn’t offer the more interesting non-human races or quirky classes, unless you pay to unlock them.

Where to get it: http://www.everquest2.com/

Guild Wars

In the lull between the third and fourth generation of MMOs, another title turned up:  GUILD WARS.  Created by a team of developers who broke away from Blizzard after DIABLO but before WOW, it might literally fulfill the definition of an MMORPG, but in practical terms it only partly fits into the mold.  GUILD WARS has quests and combat, but rather than an open world in which all players are acting, it has hubs that act as open lobbies to zones occupied only by each team of players.   While dozens of spells and skills are available to each character class, you can only load up eight at one time for use.  Harvesting raw materials and crafting items, part of the basic building blocks of other games, won’t be found here; the most you can do is find dyes to change the color of your armor.

All of which would seem to leave one with half an MMO, but those become the game’s strengths as well.  Since the publisher only needs to operate servers for the game lobbies, the only cost to players is purchase of the game box, no monthly subscription required.  By limiting the number of skills you take into combat, gameplay becomes shaped by your own individual tactical planning for how you want to play your character.  And the crafting…well, actually it does pretty much suck, but one learns to do without that particular timesink.

Unfortunately, something else that sucks about the game is its writing, and the voice acting used to support it.  Clearly there was no Ragnar Tornquist among these game designers; the quest dialogue is simplistic, overblown and melodramatic, and the cinematics have vocals delivered by actors who one assumes were recruited among the developers’ cousins and school chums, as it all combines to shred the brain and make the ears bleed.  The best game engine in the world (and this one is pretty smooth) can’t do much to save that.

What does save it, to my shredded mind, are two things:  the graphics, and the music.  The game is simply gorgeous to look at, stylized in a painterly rather than cartoony fashion; the player character designs might look like supermodels, but then, supermodels do look pretty good.  And the music is by Jeremy Soule, the same composer whose heart-tugging, sweeping compositions kept me glued to MORROWIND and OBLIVION for hundreds of hours.  Through the power of his talent, even the cheesiest and most annoying aspects of the game narrative (such as the little girl who skips around after you while constantly chattering in the prelude to the original game) manage to build into a profound sentimentality.

And to be fair, the game’s writing has improved somewhat from expansion to expansion, and the quests have become somewhat more distinctive and creative in turn.  Each “expansion” is in fact a self-contained game set in a different continent of the world of Tyria.  The first game, GUILD WARS: PROPHECIES, is the standard quasi-medieval fantasy world, ranging from green forests to icy mountains to blasted deserts.  The second game, GUILD WARS: FACTIONS, is set in the somewhat more unique quasi-Chinese world of Cantha, its high point the sprawling metropolis of Kaineng City, a towering, tottering nightmare of ramshackle huts densely packed together to great heights.  And the third game, GUILD WARS: FACTIONS, takes one into an Arabian Nights world of djinn and dervishes, fighting a demon plotting to become a god.

Given the improvements to the game over time, I have high hopes for its upcoming offspring, GUILD WARS 2, which promises a full-fledged MMO design, and genuine professional voice actors to boot!

The Plusses: Beautiful graphics and breathtaking music.  Fun tactical system and combat.  Free to play, you just have to buy the game box.  Free trial available for download.

The Minuses: Godawful writing and performances.  Limited skill sets and no crafting.  World feels empty of other players outside of your own group of the moment.

Where to get it: http://www.guildwars.com/

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

In the annals of disastrous game launches, one game stands shoulder-to-shoulder with ANARCHY ONLINE, and that game is VANGUARD: SAGA OF HEROES.  I wasn’t there when ANARCHY ONLINE launched, but I was part of the crowd when VANGUARD opened its servers in 2007.  And sadly, where AO eventually managed to recover and even become a strong contender among MMO titles, the horde of players who swiftly bled off from the glitchy gameplay and crashing servers of VANGUARD simply never bothered coming back.

That is a pity, as eventually I did come back, and what I found was a game that, while terribly generic and empty on the surface, proved to be enormously creative and deep once one starts to dig into it.  Areas that initially seemed cookie-cutter fantasy, like the Wood Elf tree city or the dwarven fortress, turned out to have their own unique quirkiness.  And buried within the game’s lore are some hilarious gems.  After playing a few other races, I tried the cat people; a bit startled at first, then laughing uproariously, to find the steps of their transdimensional fortress occupied by petitioners for alliance from all the demonic races I’d been fighting, then learning that my race itself was in a symbiotic relationship with the shoggoths of H.P. Lovecraft!

Unfortunately, the game is basically on life support.  Following the negative example of many other MMOs, its tutorial has been consolidated into a single generic island, rather than the individual home cities of the races, so most players never get a clue about the elaborate and surprising backgrounds concocted for their characters.  Designed to accommodate thousands of players, its sprawling cities are but ghost towns, where you’re lucky to see one or two other people running around.  Quest and geography glitches that would call for immediate repair in any other major game have been left to rot by the tiny handful of three or four developers kept to maintain the game.

But it is still going, and its wild beauty is worth a look while you can.  I can at least drop in whenever I feel like it, as maintaining the monthly station access pass for Sony Online Entertainment lets me play all their online games…for me, both EVERQUEST II, and VANGUARD.

The Plusses: A creative world, with breathtaking landscapes and truly giant zones.  Looks familiar, but never at all what you might expect.  A unique diplomacy system based around a card game, and very deep tradeskill crafting with a reaction system.  14-day free trial available.

The Minuses: A big world, but also an empty one.  Barely maintained, with longtime glitches remaining.  Trial island doesn’t go into the game’s unique lore.

Where to get it: http://vanguard.station.sony.com/isleofdawn/

Lord of the Rings Online

As the fourth generation of MMOs dawned, VANGUARD took a generic concept, and made it something unique.  For the other big games of that time, they took unique concepts and…well, they didn’t turn them generic exactly, but I never felt they were everything they could be.

The first of those was perhaps the most lusted-after of intellectual properties, the creative work that inspired the first role-playing game ever published, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS…which, in turn, created the system on which nearly every computer role-playing game, massive or otherwise, has been modelled.  That, of course, was J.R.R. Tolkien’s LORD OF THE RINGS, which added a word to become LORD OF THE RINGS ONLINE.

As I said earlier, I’ve never been big on either Tolkien or D&D, so my enthusiasm about the game was a bit peripheral.  But it was a big property, perhaps the one title to have a good shot at unseating WOW from its throne just by name value alone, so it was inevitable that I would have a look!

LOTRO is, indeed, a good, solid game.  According to the Tolkien fan I played the game with, the author’s original, intricately mapped lore is basically followed to the tiniest detail.  Much of the scenery looks like it could have come straight out of the movies, and it cleverly directs the player into quests which supplement, rather than echo, the narrative of the original books.  Some aspects are unique to this title; rather than pitting good race against good race, or making players live as orcs in Mordor, the game permits player-versus-player combat by letting you occasionally jump into the bodies of monsters assigned to harass players in particular zones.

But ultimately, it somehow felt like the lore and narrative were restricting the scope of the game, rather than opening it up.  That seems counterintuitive, yet rather than feeling like I was really invested in what was going on, I felt like a bit player in a larger narrative.  It’s not like I need a massive ego-boost from a game (like the Elder Scrolls games concluding with the player achieving godhood), but somehow LOTRO just felt…lacking.

Which is not to say I won’t go back to try it again eventually, especially since it’s piled on a few expansions and is now free to play.

The Plusses: Nice graphics, solid adherence to Tolkien’s lore, and standard gameplay with a few innovations.  Now free-to-play with some limitations; all races and nearly all classes are open to players from the beginning, but advanced zones and dungeons, along with additional character slots and storage space, must be purchased.

The Minuses: Feels restricted by the lore it’s following.  Character models are a little stiff.  Elves are very nearly boring to play.

Where to get it: http://www.lotro.com/

Age of Conan

If high fantasy isn’t particularly my cup of tea, there is another genre that I was always partial to, and that was low fantasy.  Not heroes and elves bravely venturing out to rescue virginal princesses from ultimate evil, but brawny barbarians hacking their way through decadent sorcerors for the sake of the tavern wench.  Yes, the pulp world of Weird Tales, as headlined by Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith…all of whose imaginations figure in to the last of the fourth-generation MMOs, AGE OF CONAN.

Given the earthiness of the property, it was rather surprising to see this turn up as a mainstream MMO title, but I guess it’s just the sort of move one would expect from Funcom, the company that unleashed its imagination to loose ANARCHY ONLINE.  Being a European developer, they don’t shrink from the adult nature of the works either…the game makes no bones about its Mature rating, whether your character is sending decapitated heads flying or shielding half-naked harem denizens from harm.  As well, being from Norway, they’re true to their Scandinavian landscapes in presenting the European continent of fabled prehistory, with a nice touch added by all the accomplished voice actors who bring various genuine accents to the table.

And there is a lot of that voice acting, too.  One of the game’s greatest strengths is its tutorial, which spends the first twenty levels taking you through an adventure on the volcanic pirate island of Tortage, where a tyrant is making use of demon-possessed minions and cannibalistic savages to repress the populace.  All the conversations are fully voiced, with the writing talent of Ragnar Tornquist unmistakably visible.  The game aims for a realistic look, with lush jungle landscapes and stunningly crafted character models.  And while the outline of events remains the same each time, the tutorial changes depending on what character class you play, so warriors, rogues, priests and mages all have different parts to perform in the story.  Finally, the tutorial switches between a single-player mode leading you through the main quest, and a multiplayer mode where you can perform quests grouped with other players.

Now mind you, what is a strength here is also a weakness.  A couple of times through those long 20 levels, and you may not want to ever see Tortage again.  And once you leave Tortage for the mountains of Cimmeria, the meadows of Aquilonia or the deserts of Stygia, gone too is the intricate storyline, the voice acting and the dual playstyle modes, leaving you to a standard MMO type questing world.  Not that this is a bad thing, it’s just a bit of a letdown after the care given to the game’s introductory passages.

Like LOTRO, AGE OF CONAN too suffers a bit in feeling a little restricted by the lore it has to follow.  Fortunately, the original Conan stories aren’t quite so cemented in setting as the lands of the Silmarillion, and the game designers do feel free to mix in a bit from the other Weird Tales contributors, so the world is allowed to breathe a bit.  And the new expansion adds a huge new landscape with the Asiatic provinces of Khitai, thus relieving some of the grind the original game was evincing towards its level cap.

Tammy and I just restarted the game yesterday, after a couple of years away, to explore what has been added.  Hence my inspiration in finally producing this survey!

The Plusses: Truly lush graphics, outstanding dramatic writing and action-based gameplay.  Amazing evocative music.  Adult with no apologies about it.  And the game went free-to-play just last week, allowing players to experience the entire game with a limited selection of classes at no cost.

The Minuses: Again, slightly bound by its lore.  Elaborate graphics will require a powerhouse machine to see at full advantage.

Where to get it: http://www.ageofconan.com/

Vindictus

One trend you may have noticed here is that the free-to-play paradigm seems to be becoming the rule with MMOs.  It makes sense, as luring players in to try the product, then nickel-and-diming them for items like virtual horses and elaborate clothing that enhance their game if not their gameplay, is likely to hold people around much longer than obligating them to play with a pricey subscription fee.

It’s only very recently, however, that A-list games have started to appear which are built from the ground up with free-to-play in mind.  One of the first and most lavish has been VINDICTUS.  Built around the Source Engine of HALF-LIFE 2, its graphics are vividly realistic, and its gameplay offers up destructible landscapes which can turn a knocked-over pillar into as much of a weapon as your swung staff.

The game is limited in many ways that bring GUILD WARS to mind.  Multiplayer meet-up locations are limited to cities that serve as quest hubs, and some corners are cut by presenting quest-giver locations as pre-rendered rooms with Japanese RPG style character portraits.  Gameplay features an extremely limited number of spells and attack moves…but the real meat of the game lies in that combat, in which actively swinging your weapon, lashing out with kicks and throwing enemies over your shoulder provides a vivid visceral feedback.

The Plusses: More lavish graphics, vivid action moves, and totally free to play.

The Minuses: Limited gameplay outside of combat areas.  Quests and maps are repetitive.

Where to get it: http://vindictus.nexon.net/

Rift

“You’re not in Azeroth anymore.”  That was the advertising line which introduced the gaming audience to RIFT, a new MMO from startup company Trion Worlds that stakes out its place in the fifth generation of MMOs.  Then the game came out, and player cynicism turned to player cheers.

As it turns out, the ad’s shot at WORLD OF WARCRAFT is fully merited.  What Blizzard did with the starting MMOs of its day, Trion has largely done with the WOW behemoth…polish up the formula still further, jack up the graphics to another level, add gameplay refinements of the sort that players have demanded and technology has come within reach of serving.  So now, we have a game with fully state-of-the-art graphics, responsive gameplay, the ability to switch character classes with the touch of a button (so that, for instance, an elementalist can become a necromancer), and with their world events–interdimensional rifts whose denizens must be banished back whence they came–the ability to play with other people without the actual necessity of forming teams or joining guilds.

Whether RIFT will truly take away any of the market weight from WOW remains to be seen.  Having brought two characters to the level cap, I don’t find its setting or writing all that evocative; it’s a polished game, but not a particularly memorable experience or world, despite some clever turns of plotting.  Still, if this points the way to where games are going, I look forward to seeing what the future brings!

The Plusses: Extra super lavish graphics, the ability to fill multiple roles with a single character, world events that encourage casual teamwork.  Gameplay polish to the nth degree.  Seven-day free trial.

The Minuses: The world is original, but not especially inspired.  Dialogue is weak.

Where to get it: http://www.riftgame.com/en/

The Also-Rans

Then we have the games that I have sampled, but not played for any extended length.  Some, like TABULA RASA and AUTO ASSAULT, not only held my attention so briefly that I could scarcely tell you how they played, but crashed so badly that they were cancelled.  Others, like SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI and SILKROAD ONLINE, had such weak production values that it hurt to look at them.  But still, I have touched on a few that are worthy of mention…

WARHAMMER ONLINE:  Another fourth-generation game heralded as a WOW-killer, WARHAMMER ONLINE did not crash and burn quite so badly as VANGUARD, but it went into slow decline immediately upon release in a vanishing act that hasn’t yet ended.  Intended to cater to the player-versus-player crowd, it proved to be less than responsive in that mode of gameplay, and had little to offer beyond that.  Hopes are higher for the science-fictional WARHAMMER 40K MMO now in development.

DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS ONLINE:  Yet another fourth-generation MMO that didn’t meet with expectations, DDO was the first A-list MMO to surrender its subscription model for a free-to-play status.  That proved resoundingly successful, leading the way for so many other games to follow its example.  Gameplay is based in a central city surrounded by instanced dungeons, akin to GUILD WARS and VINDICTUS; in feel, the game is much like others of its generation, although the graphics sit lower on the scale in terms of polish.  I tried it for a few evenings, but it didn’t catch my interest as strongly as other games in its class.

HERO ONLINE:  An early entry in the free-to-play sweepstakes (2006), this Korean game’s graphics are flatly lit and low in polygons, the English is broken and its quests are grindy.  The attraction for me is that it draws its inspiration from classical Chinese literature, and as such presents the milieu with all the enthusiasm of a Shaw Brothers movie.  More games should let you wield a paper fan as a weapon!

ZU ONLINE:  HERO ONLINE might have used Chinese literature as its inspiration, but ZU ONLINE bought the literary rights!  Unfortunately ZU delves fully into fantasy, with transcendental heroes battling among the clouds using elaborate cel-shaded graphics.  Pretty to look at, but obscurely plotted and another grind to play.

FIESTA ONLINE:  This one charmed me briefly, with its colorful anime-like characters and bright, bubbly world.  But then once again, the grind sank in.  Still, worth a look for kids.

FREE REALMS:  Aimed at the same young audience as FIESTA ONLINE, but with much more polished graphics and gameplay thanks to its source, the same Sony Online Entertainment that controls EVERQUEST and VANGUARD.  Even has some popularity among parents.  I found it a little twee for my tastes, but if it’s free you want…

AION:  This game came on the tail-end of the fourth-generation wave, and like so many others, never quite became more than a flash-in-the-pan.  I tried the free trial a few weeks ago, and found it diverting enough to hold my attention for a day or two.  But mainly, it just left me hungry for other games.

CHAMPIONS ONLINE:  Another premium game that’s gone free-to-play with stunning success.  I’ve given it a couple of evenings, but it doesn’t offer the same super-heroic sense that CITY OF HEROES gave me.  If I go back to it again, it will be on a whim.  Fingers crossed that its sister game from Cryptic Entertainment, STAR TREK ONLINE, will also go free-to-play soon, so I can give it a shot too!

There are other free-to-play games out there…many, many others.  But if there are any gems in the rough, my ear to  the ground hasn’t dug them up.  (Ouch for mixed metaphors!)

Coming Soon

RIFT has opened the way, and other fifth-generation games are on the horizon.  Among those I’m looking forward to?

THE SECRET WORLD:  From the twisted minds of Ragnar Tornquist and Funcom, another MMO of a different color (the colour out of space?) is promised.  Set in the contemporary world, with conspiracies and cults and things that go bump in the night…my expectations are high!

GUILD WARS 2:  Tyria as a genuine MMO?  With world events and dynamic quests and interacting spell effects?  Sign me up!

EVERQUEST NEXT:  So I never played EVERQUEST, but EVERQUEST 2 has taken a solid spot as one of my favorite MMOs.  Will another generation of EQ prove even better?

STAR WARS: THE OLD REPUBLIC:  I must confess that I’ve not been a particular fan of George Lucas’ vision since the Ewoks came dancing onscreen, and the KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC roleplaying game with its long stretches of gibberish alien dialogue left me cold.  But sci-fi MMOs are few and far between, and a stab at STAR WARS GALAXIES left me wincing at its age.  Will general gamer enthusiasm draw me into this one?

Yes, incredible though it may seem, there actually was some significance to that little photo which comprised the preceding post.

For those who haven’t been keeping track, I spent a good chunk of time in my one-bedroom apartment near the shore of Lake Michigan…15 years to be precise, ever since returning from my sabbatical in Borneo. Over that time, the space in which I lived proved an ideal demonstration of the second law of thermodynamics: that in a closed system, the natural course of events takes the system to a more disordered (higher entropy) state.

Which is to say, I didn’t clean the place very often, and the furniture was in a condition commensurate with the span of life which it covered…from the bookshelves salvaged from my childhood bedroom, to the cheap department store sofa I bought upon moving to Chicago.

So I figured that after getting married, the next big step in my life would be to move to a new apartment…a prospect with which I daresay Tammy was entirely in agreement. But entropy didn’t concur, and so the months passed.

Until, that is, I decided it was time to buy a new sofa! The one that I’d lived with for nearly a quarter of a century having become very nearly unsittable, its cushions flattened and fraying, its fiberboard frame splintering. Faced with this disaster of discomfort, my mind cast back to the golden years of growing up, recalling the solid succor of the furnishings in my parents’ home. Working from warmly glowing memories, I found this in my very neighborhood:

So one cool Saturday afternoon on the cusp of autumn, Tammy and I ventured into the store in Evanston to pick out our sofa, placing the order that set the craftsman into motion for the months-long process of carving it from solid oak. Which would seem to be all we needed to do…until, that is, I took a tape measure to the narrow entryway of our apartment, and discovered the new couch which was to be delivered in eight to twelve weeks would never make it into the living room!

Thus, the process of moving was soon underway. At least it helped that, as per the laws of entropy, I hadn’t been provided with a lease for the past four years or so.

Almost immediately, I encountered the accomplishments of legendary Chicago architect Benjamin Marshall. Nearly a century ago, he created the landmark which can still be seen when approaching the Magnificent Mile via Lakeshore Drive: the Drake Hotel!

Oh, but that wasn’t the new residence which Tammy and I signed for immediately upon viewing. No, our new home was to be another Benjamin Marshall milestone:

The key word to be taken from this vintage postcard is probably “Transient”, as rumor would have it that the building in more recent decades could best be described as a wretched hive of scum and villainy. But its purchase by a new realtor a few years ago led to a minor refurbishment and a major turnover of residents, so now it would seem to be about as legitimate as any apartment block in the Rogers Park neighborhood (the realtor’s recent bankruptcy proceedings notwithstanding).

The two aspects of the apartment which immediately caught our eye were the giant lozenge-shaped living room, and the full marble-and-glass shower stall in the bathroom. The curvature of the corner apartment leaves it with some odd angles and protrusions, and certain aspects like approximately 2 square feet of kitchen counter space and lack of any bathroom shelving would require some supplementing…but we were undaunted!

A scant two weeks passed from lease-signing to moving in. After which, we determined certain other peccadillos that required some patience. For one thing, my internet service provider’s provided service does not reach this far north, so I was forced to change to AT&T. Imagine the horror of three weeks without the intertubes, until the new connections were finally set up! My Covad email will be good for awhile yet (since it’s cheaper to just let the contract run out, rather than cancel it), so if you haven’t gotten my new email address, drop me a line.

And for the other thing, one particularly vintage aspect of this building is the wiring. Irregular brownouts throughout the day provide a cricket’s chorus of clicking and beeping from all the voltage stabilizers and backup batteries attached to the computer equipment and entertainment center. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that there won’t be a sudden rash of burnt-out motherboards and blown monitors!

The couch finally arrived two weeks ago, and it’s Home Sweet Home at last.

Shower stall luxury

Back again!  So, given the general trend of experiences related here, and my absence from the blog for more than a year, I can fully understand if you assume that I currently look like this:

The reality is quite different.  If you listen closely, perhaps you’ll still hear the echo of wedding bells, as Tammy and I tied the knot on January 22nd!

Subsequently, please excuse the lapse, as the whole dating thing, followed by the whole married life thing, has managed to entirely occupy my leisure time for all these months.  I suspect it will continue to do so, but I’ll try to lock my brain onto the site for the occasional update!

How have we occupied ourselves within that meta?  Most notably, with a belated April honeymoon in Lake Tahoe…

Not late enough, unfortunately, to make the slopes inviting on anything short of snowshoes; but the temperature was nicely moderate over our week there (with the occasional dramatic dusting of snow), and we managed to adopt two favorite slot machines side-by-side in the casino (Poppit for her, Monster Luck for me).  Despite moderately big wins on both the first and last day, the losses more than made up for those!  There were moments of hilarity, as when one of the barkers on the resort’s street gave us tickets to a sunset dinner cruise on the lake in return for our commitment to attend a timeshare sales pitch…then awkwardly took the tickets back when he found out what my annual salary is; and moments of sublime beauty, such as the discovery of a giant tub of banana chips in the supermarket for a mere $4!

In Chicago, we’ve also taken in a fair number of shows, like Blue Man Group, Lookingglass Theater’s “Arabian Nights”, two Theatre Oobleck performances, the weekly gig by jazz artist Patricia Barber at Al Capone’s old haunt the Green Mill, a Tori Amos concert, and a stage adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s “Neverwhere”.

Still, given how we met, it should be no surprise that a whole lot of our time together is spent in virtual worlds.  If anyone’s followed up on my past postings and gone seeking us in World of Warcraft, sorry that you haven’t seen us, as we put the game aside a year ago in anticipation of the expansion due this winter, Cataclysm.  Instead, after a few fortnights toddling about Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age in Age of Conan, we spent some months more exploring the gigantic, expansive, and virtually unknown fantasy realm created for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes…

And from there? Well, subscribing to the Station Pass at Sony Online Entertainment gives us free access also to half a dozen other MMO games, and so I pulled Tammy into one that I had sampled before (but found rather twee), Everquest 2. In contrast to my earlier visit, we’ve discovered that the game rewards a bit of dedication, and we’re enjoying it so much now that we are each running no fewer than eight characters more or less in tandem, switching off to another pair every 10 levels or so! The size of the world, the wealth of quests and lore, and the epic selection of character races (19) and classes (24) all promise to keep us busy exploring the game for quite some time yet.

Visitors have also passed through the Windy City over the past year, generally when the weather was less miserably scorching than it is right now (mutter, mutter). In fact Jon, my first roommate from MSU who was also my host back when I was traversing Singapore, Malaysia and Borneo, has been through here twice on round-the-world jaunts with his children, Jeremy and Naomi. They took me to see the Museum of Science and Industry for the first time since my senior year in high school! (Although what I once recall as some pretty intriguing exhibits back then have since been replaced by walk-through advertising for the petroleum and pharmaceutical industries…)

And last fall, Paul was in town for the theatrical premiere of his directorial debut, HOMEWRECKER. Yes, you’ve seen his name for years as an editor on many of Sam Raimi’s features (listen for his uncredited voice announcing the musical act at the “Oscorp Day Unity Festival” in SPIDER-MAN), as well as many Cinemax late-night favorites like MALIBU BIKINI WEEKEND and DANGER ZONE IV: MAD GIRLS, BAD GIRLS. But now his name is there above the film title, with an apostrophe “s”! Never one to turn down a free admission, I joined him at the festival to catch the film, and had a great time. It’s a spoof of those “houseguest behaving badly” movies that would have starred Drew Barrymore back in the ’90s, only in this case the cast that’s cooing and cuddling and cracking jokes at each other are entirely one gender.

The movie picked up its DVD distribution since then, so look for it at Amazon or Netflix!

So…yeah…here I am again. Look for more updates shortly!

OK, it’s finally become evident what’s driving this blog, and that’s the entertainment value of watching my various body parts fail. But if all that has only amounted to minor discomforts and inconveniences up until now, the headliner for the past three months has been rather more overwhelming.

Sunday morning in late March. Long before dawn. Chicago’s final sleet storm of the year is playing out in spectacular fashion, solid sheets of ice-dappled rain pouring from the sky. I’m off to another day at the office. At a street corner two blocks away, drainage is only a distant memory…the slushy water stands six inches deep, extending nearly halfway out to the center of the road.

So, annoyed but not particularly surprised, I scarcely break my pace as I gracefully leap across it. Only, in the course of leaping, the left leg which is pushing me across the miniature pond bends a little further backwards than it should, and suddenly I find myself with one limb nearly immobilized in searing agony.

I could outline the following months in considerable detail, a la Douglas Adams’ How I Scaled the North Face of the Megapurna With a Perfectly Healthy Finger But Everything Else Sprained, Broken, or Bitten Off by a Pack of Mad Yaks…but you know, I’ll spare ya. Which I might not have done a month or two ago, as my kneecap refused to find its way back to the proper position and I was becoming resigned to spending the remainder of my days with 4/5 of my conscious mind obscured in a haze of pain. But this month, I’ve had the arthroscopic surgery to fix the torn cartilage and now I’m doing the physical therapy, and the limb is feeling better all the time. I’m still not sure it’s ever going to be exactly right again. But at least now it’s only a minor discomfort and inconvenience.

Tammy’s visited twice in the interim, and I wish circumstances had been better for actually showing her about the city! But we managed a few notable diversions, like walking the length of Lincoln Park, buying a cake from the House of Fine Chocolates, and checking out the various beatnik-style coffee shops around my neighborhood. She’ll be visiting again next week, and I have some more ambitious activity in mind, like taking in a few shows and music performances (no details until I’ve surprised her!).

One thing driven home to me on these occasions, though, is that the Chicago which is here now isn’t the one that I fell for nearly three decades ago.  I know that I mildly bemoaned this fact in one of my first blog postings, but that was only about restaurants.  I did, after all, have other haunts around the city.  So many independent bookstores that had their quirky stocks…Kroch’s and Bretano’s in the Loop, with sections on psychology, mythology and anthropology that could always offer up an obscure tome; Tower Records with its alternative magazines and vast laserdisc (later DVD) selections, always good for browsing; the Aspidistra Bookshop with its tottering piles of used books; the comic book shop down by Loyola with its dusty racks of old movie fanzines; the unabashed full-spectrum spirituality in Transitions Bookplace; the Old World elegance of the shelves in Brent’s Books on the Magnificent Mile…ah, they’re all gone now.  Even Borders used to be able to cough up the occasional intriguing small press title in their four-story local flagship store…but with over a third of that space now given over to overpriced CDs and videos, the book stock is squeezed down to the mass market bestsellers.

I miss the days when I could go shopping for computer games after work in CompUSA, or the latest collectible card games in Comics Paradise.  Or even walk through the pet section of Woolworth’s on State Street, or leave Marshall Field’s with a box of Frango Mints in one of the store’s distinctive forest green paper bags.

Sad to think that probably what killed them all was Amazon.com…and I’m still happily complicit in that slaughter.

Of course, it wasn’t all shopping, but still nothing seems the same.  Grant Park with its ragged bandshell and tall prairie grasses has been squeezed out by the shiny chrome monstrosities that inhabit the new Millennium Park.  The monthly festivals of national cinemas at the Film Center of the Art Institute of Chicago seemed to have become a thing of the past with its move to a new space and a new name (the Gene Siskel Film Center).  And so many neighborhoods that I used to wander through with regularity have lost those anchors, retail or otherwise, that I once visited them for.

It doesn’t seem like so many years…a scant two decades…but how things have changed.

Ah, well.  Life goes on, at least virtually!  Tammy and I recently achieved a little milestone for ourselves, in the online World of Warcraft.  After months of play, we’ve managed to bring our characters up to the game’s current cap of level 80 for the first time.  So hats off to Worldwinder the shaman and Sabyn the priest!

It’s slacked off a little bit in the last month or two, but I did make my slog through a few TV shows on my Zune during the daily commute.  First season of THE TWILIGHT ZONE was quite entertaining, although I couldn’t help but notice how many story twists later showed up in Rod Serling’s script for PLANET OF THE APES (astronauts crash-land in a merciless “alien” desert which ultimately turns out to be in Nevada; astronaut is rescued by aliens but finds himself esconced in a zoo display; space expedition lands on an asteroid holding a mysterious waxworks exhibit of human society).  Second season of THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. unfortunately finds the series already beginning its precipitous plunge from season one…while the stories are still dynamic, the producers have engaged Lalo Schifrin to take Jerry Goldsmith’s bright jazzy theme and turn it into, well, Schifrin’s “Mission Impossible” theme, and the performances by leads Robert Vaughan and David McCallum have already lost the crackle they displayed during the show’s first year.

Probably the video acquisition which has me most excited at the moment is a Blu-Ray release of season one of (wait for it) STAR TREK.  Now, that admission may be sufficient to raise an enormous yawn, but I have to make a weird little confession…this may just be the very first time I have ever seen this series.  That’s weird because, well, I was a crazy Trekkie between the ages of 11 and 14 or so, madly devouring the novelizations and “making of” books and any magazine articles I could get my hands on.  The only thing that I couldn’t seem to gain access to was the actual TV episodes themselves, which Toledo television never got around to broadcasting on a regular basis.  It’s hard to believe at this point, too, but STAR TREK was pretty much all there was at the time in terms of media sci-fi…the only post-Flash Gordon series with a regular cast that dove wholeheartedly into a future milieu and hard SF themes, places that television just wouldn’t go until STAR WARS hit the screen.  Of course, even before STAR WARS my attention had started wandering elsewhere, so I only hung around the periphery of Trek and its fan culture by the time the movies came along.

Now that I’m watching the series for what we may term the first time?  Oh, I’m enjoying it enormously!  The stories may be rather pulp-heavy (particularly evident since a lot of my reading these days is vintage sci-fi pulp), but the cast and production really do carry it off very well.  It also helps that the show has been remastered in high definition, going back to and cleaning up the original negatives, spicing things up with reworked special effects fully in the spirit of the series, and even re-recording the music from the original sheets.  I have to say, no television show from 40 years ago has ANY right to look and sound this good.

Looking and sounding good is also the biggest achievement of the new STAR TREK movie, my first visit to the cinema in ages.  What drew me to it was a glimpse in the trailer of the Enterprise under construction, a mass of chaotically slashing lines and clouds of energy that looked like nothing so much as one of those abstract paintings which used to illustrate sci-fi paperback covers back in the Sixties.  But what I appreciate most, probably, is the performances by the actors; they manage to capture the essence of the original stars in a way that’s most evident to me since I’m just watching the original show now!  There are some thematic elements I dislike…the Tiny Toon versions of the characters who can operate a starship because they just happen to be such magically talented teenagers; and Kirk’s deliberate execution of the villain at the end of the piece, conducted under circumstances that make it a pure exercise in self-gratification, which is about as diametrically opposed to the philosophies of the original creators of the STAR TREK universe as you can get.  Still, I was impressed enough with the cast that I wouldn’t mind seeing if a sequel comes along.

The hour is late, so I must wrap this up…but at least I’ve gotten it going.  Again.  My apologies that I haven’t been answering emails under the circumstances, but I should be getting back to you all very, very soon!