Rift: Beta 5 Impressions

A Death Rift over Newbie Land

These are my impressions of levels 1-20 of Rift. The level cap for Beta 5 was 30, so I didn't manage to see everything and some of my critiques may become irrelevant as one gets into higher levels.

Rift hadn't really managed to make it onto my radar until pretty recently. New fantasy MMO's seem about a dime a dozen and most go down in flames pretty quickly, often, seemingly, for similar reasons. Some friends made it into Beta 4 and said, "Hey, check this one out!". Two minutes on Google the day before Beta 5 was to begin scored me a beta key and I jumped in the next day.

Comparisons to WoW in fantasy MMO reviews are inevitable, particularly in the case of Rift. When your interface pops up for the first time you will be excused for noticing that it is virtually a direct lift of the WoW interface. This makes it instantly accessible for anyone who's ever played WoW but it highlights a common theme through much of what we see in Rift. If it's not an area where they're innovating then it's copying. For better or for worse, Everquest and then World of Warcraft have set the fantasy MMO standard in stone and Rift isn't a game that does too much to break free of it. We have the usual character archetypes, leveling, gear dependent performance, scores of 'kill 10 rats' quests, instanced PvP areas and floating exclamation points. Much of what you find here will be tediously familiar.

So, it sucks, right? Same old, same old? Well, no.

Because it does pick a couple of areas to innovate in and where Rift has chosen to innovate it does it really, really well.

The first thing that jumps out, the low hanging fruit, as it were, is the graphics. Rift is the best looking MMO since Vanguard. Rift takes a realism approach to its look and will cheerfully toss in as much eyecandy as your system can manage. Where it falls down a bit in this area is environmental detail. The world is stunning but is often rather bland and uninspired. There isn't a lot of point to exploration as there isn't much of interest to find. Anything of note in the zones will have quests that aim you right at it. Running down the beach to see what's around that rocky outcropping is generally pointless. There will either be nothing of interest or there will be a quest objective that is clearly marked out on your map. There are no random sea caves to find or forgotten shipwrecks, no out of the way sinister hermit shacks. One of the things that has always impressed me with WoW is the attention to detail, even in "irrelevant" areas. Run into a dwarf's house and get a quest from him, sure. Run down the stairs behind him and you'll find a fully detailed bedroom for him, complete with characteristic quirks; maybe a knife stuck in the table, boots by the fireplace, a boarhead on the wall, a book on the nightstand by the bed. It looks like somewhere where someone might actually live. Rift lacks this and as a consequence the beautiful environments also have a feel of lifeless sterility.

My Reaver/Champion/Riftblade

PvE leveling content is mostly uninspired with the occasional standout. There are two factions to Rift and each faction has its own line of zones and quests. Within the factions, however, there is almost zero difference in the questlines. Every race in a faction has the exact same start and quest progression with some very slight differences based on class. This makes progression extremely linear. You get to a quest hub, take all of the quests, all of which will aim you to one area. Run there, do the quests, run back, turn 'em in and get the next batch which send you to an area next to the first one. Rinse and repeat. Once you've polished off the quest hub you get a feeder quest where you run a little further down the main road and do it all again. Most of these quests are 'Kill X number of X' quests or 'click X number of object' quests. There are some standout quest lines, however, that seem to crop up more and more the further you go. Students at a University that have you helping with hazing rituals, for instance, or a knight by the roadside that has you undergo a series of tests to prove your worth. Since every play is doing every quest and every quest that has a gear reward offers an item for every class there is a lot of sameness among archetypes to the degree that when you see another character of the same class you can tell exactly where they are in the questlines by what they are wearing. If they're on the same stage as you then they will be wearing exactly what you are wearing. The armor pieces look great but, at least at low levels, seem to cycle through only about four or five different models.

Sound is pretty bland as well. There is little oomph to weapon sounds and combat generally sounds like people banging forks together. A lot of improvement could be made here.

So I did say that Rift has some great innovation and then proceeded to lay out a bunch of critique. So what does Rift do really well? Two things: Character classes and the Rifts that are the game's namesake.

Yes, Rift uses the usual four character archetypes: warrior, cleric, rogue and mage. Within each of those archetypes, however, there are multiple (seven at the moment, eight planned) variations. And you get to pick any three of them to combine into your own class, meaning there are 56 possible variants for each class as well as additional variants than focus on just one or two of the options. Eventually you are able to acquire all the variations for your archetype and switch between whatever trios of souls you choose. This gives an enormous amount of variety and flexibility to create a class that exactly fits your playstyle and that can be changed depending on what you're going to be facing. The Reaver variant of the Warrior, for example, excels at facing many "trash" mobs at once. Then you come to a powerful single target and switch over to your Paladin build as they are much better at handling single tough targets. This adds an element of interest to PvP as you'll know that you have a warrior in your sights, as he looks exactly the same as every other warrior, but beyond that you have no idea what he's going to be able to throw at you. Likewise, he doesn't know the specifics of what your mage is about to send his way.

I do not know why there is a big sexy hologram in the camp but I can't really complain too much.

So we've saved the biggest thing for last. The game's namesake. The Rifts. As you'd expect, Rifts are dimensional tears that allow another plane to spill through. These form in the game world, producing a vast swirling cloud in the sky and changing the environment below to match the appropriate plane as creatures begin spilling out. If you're in the area, you can run over and add yourself to a public group and work together with whomever else has shown up to defeat the critters and shut the Rift down. Generally this is a highly entertaining bedlam of barely controlled chaos. Mages who weren't careful enough with an AoE frantically running through clumps of warriors, hoping that they'll grab the three monsters chasing them, archers standing back and firing arrows into the melee, clerics frantically trying to keep up with the multiple fights raging around them. Rifts will also spawn invasions; groups of elite mobs that then venture forth to wander the zone and attack settlements. This gives Rift a dynamic life that makes it completely unique among MMOs. I'll give an example to show how this all plays out.

I was doing some PvE questing with my warrior on the last day of Beta. I saw that a Fire Rift had opened, but it was a ways away so I didn't worry about it too much. Then another opened, and another. Major invasion. All three Rifts were a ways off, however, so I chose to finish up my quests and leave the Rifts for other players to handle. I headed back to my quest hub only to discover that it was the focus of the invasion. Every player at the small cluster of tents, as well as all of my quest NPCs, was engaged in fighting off a crowd of fire demons. I joined in and we stood and defended our patch of turf as wave after wave of invaders attacked. their focus was a guardian stone that each camp contains. Should the invaders manage to destroy it then they can replace it with one of their own that will then spawn creatures right there within the camp.

We fought against them for at least half an hour. Two of the Rifts were successfully closed by other groups of players allowing the attack to wane slightly but then a Death Rift opened nearby and sent a Death invasion our way. Fire creatures and Death creatures are not friends. Suddenly it was a three way battle. The Fire Demons vs. the Undead vs. the players and NPCs. This added element allowed us the upper hand for long enough that we were able to end the attack at the camp and charge out en masse to tackle the nearest Rift. By now we had accumulated at least forty players into the battle and we were able to steamroll the last Fire Rift and then move on to tackle the Death Rift and finally end the invasion. It was possibly the best hour or two of gameplay I've had in an MMO.

And that is where Rift shines. The dynamic Rift and Invasion system. Vortexes of chaos that come ripping into your gameworld. Roving warbands that can dominate areas of the zone if left unchecked. It makes the game feel more alive and more fresh than anything else out there and does so well enough to more than make up for the staleness it may have in other areas.

DC Universe Online Beta Impressions

Overview

DC Universe Online, launching on PC and PS3, offers itself as the opportunity to be a superhero or supervillain in the DC world, fighting alongside and against the likes of Batman, Superman, Lex Luthor, The Joker, et al. Does it deliver?

To make it clear from the beginning, this is not an MMORPG but, rather, an MMOAG; Massively Multiplayer Online Action Game. Many of the standard MMORPG conventions are here-leveling, gaining new abilities as you level, quests and loot drops. The combat, which naturally makes up the vast majority of your game time, is a completely different animal however. The easiest comparison would be to console action games, such as God of War or Prototype. Click the mouse or controller button and you melee attack (I'll be using mouse terms from here on out as that's what I use but the game is completely playable on either a PS or XBox controller). Right click and you make a ranged attack. Various series of left clicks and right clicks activate different combos, all taking place at full action game speed as enemies (and you) get flung about, knocked down and get sent tumbling by explosions. The MMORPG 'whack-a-mole' bar does make an appearance as the means to fire off your various superpowers. It's limited to six powers on the bar, however, and once your character has gained more than six powers you'll need to pick and choose to set up your bar how you want it. Each character has a second 'stance', changing from the standard DPS stance into a tank stance, controller stance or healer stance, depending on their base power set. These stances each offer their own power bar that can be set up differently than the character's standard DPS bar. Most of these powers can be used repeatedly, as long as you have the energy to do so. Some of the more powerful ones, however, do have cool down timers, or require expenditure of "supercharge" energy which can only be gained, slowly, through non-superpowered attacks.

The game is primarily set in the two main DC cities, Metropolis and Gotham. Both cities are bound to make DC fans happy. Metropolis is bright, sunny and futuristic with gleaming skyscrapers and chirping birds. Gotham, on the other hand, is dark and brooding, misty and gothic. Many of the locations one would expect to find make an appearance. Centennial park with its giant memorial from the death of Superman (no worries, he got better), Arkham Asylum, Lexcorp Tower, S.T.A.R. Labs, Waynetech, etc. Gotham even features Crime Alley, a fresh bouquet of red roses lying under a flickering streetlight behind a theater. Heroes can retreat from the city to The Watchtower, the Justice League's massive space-station. Villains have the Hall of Doom in its underwater hiding place. The game world is bursting with obscure references for DC fans to pick up on, from the obvious major and minor characters standing around to the more obscure such as "Nora's Frozen Treats' in Gotham.

In addition to the cities the Alert missions (small group "dungeons" and high level raids) are set in other DC hotspots such as Smallville, Area 51, Oolong Island and even the Moon. The size of the DC Universe allows plenty of opportunity for locales, the initial game having barely scratched the surface of potential locations.

The level cap is 30 and is reachable in about 30 hours of play. The design concept is that the 1-30 play represents your character's "heroic journey" from a schlub with brand new powers to a full fledged hero/villain. Once you hit 30 you're part of the big leagues. Leveling is a pretty speedy process, designed to allow casual players the chance to get to the end game with relative ease.

The graphics are sleek and pretty, as one might expect. Animations are fluid and the draw-distance is generally pretty impressive. There is an impressive array of voice talent portraying the major characters, with Mark Hamill once more stepping in for the Joker, Gina Torres as Wonder Woman, Wil Wheaton as Robin, James Marsters as Lex Luthor, etc.

Character Creation

Crimson Queen and Nightwing take down Bane

Character Creation is possibly the area where DC is going to take the most hits, as it will naturally be compared to its competitors, City of Heroes/Villains and Champions Online. Character Creation is far, far more limited in DC. There are three hard set body types to choose from, a palette of only three colors that can be applied to your entire costume and a much more restricted selection of costume pieces. New costume pieces are gained as loot during game play and can be added to expand your options and change your character's look over time. In addition to the monthly subscription fee, DC will also feature microtransactions and it's a sure bet that a lot of these will be more costume pieces.

The design reason behind this has several aspects (apart from microtransaction dollar signs). One is the previously mentioned 'heroic journey'. An example cited was Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins, starting his crimefighting career in a tactical vest and ski mask. Then he progressed from that to the Batsuit. If you look at the many, many variations of Batman's look over his history it plays right in to the concept of your character starting with a 'simple' version of how they will come to look by the time they've hit their full stride.

The other aspect is that in CoH/V and CO, once you've designed your character, that's pretty much it. Sure you can futz around with your costume later but you're still working with what you had at initial creation. In a game such as WoW, however, you have next to zero options at creation and part of the fun of character advancement is gaining new, cooler looking gear until, by top level, you look like a spiky armor plated death machine. DC's system aims for this same appeal, allowing you to make your character's look better and better as you progress in power.

Whether you find those design ideas compatible with what you want from a superhero game is entirely up to you. Even with the loot gained, a level 30 character has far fewer options for their look than DC's competitors have at initial creation. Will you be able to make a cool and unique looking character with DC's character creator? Yes. Will your character look cooler when they hit 30 with the new gear you've obtained? Yes. Will your character look exactly how you want them too? Probably not. Can you live with that? Up to you.

As an example of a character's look evolving over time, here's Crimson Queen at level 30

Interface

The User Interface is another place that DCUO receives some criticism, at least from the PC crowd. Much of this is from dealing with the limited options presented by launching on the PS3. Even when scaled all the way down, interface screens take up pretty much all screen real estate when open and shut down other aspects of the interface. Want to tell your group the stats on that rare piece of loot you just got? Well, you open up the inventory and your chat box disappears. No click-drag for you! Discussing what mission to do next? Open your journal and again, your chat box is now gone, forcing you to constantly flip back and forth to have any meaningful communication. This is alleviated somewhat by the built in voice chat but if you're not using that, for whatever reason, it gets pretty tedious. Additionally, UI elements can not be moved around, the mini-map can't be zoomed in or out and my expectation is that Interface mods are unlikely to be allowed.

Addendum: See last paragraph of conclusion.

Content

And here comes hit number three. Content is king. The content that DCUO has is quite good. Mission arcs are generally comprised of four or five open-world missions, culminating in an instance that will have you teaming up with one of the major characters to go toe to toe with another major character. These instances are where the game shines. Rather than an instance Boss simply having umpteen million hit points requiring you to stand there and bash on him for half an hour while popping heals as necessary, all of the instance bosses are done "raid style", causing you to have to deal with scripted events and survive various stages of the fight. In a villain fight against Supergirl, for instance, I had to distract her from using consoles to free metahuman experiment subjects by setting their stasis tubes on fire. Once she hurried to their rescue with her frost breath I proceeded to jump in and destroy the console to prevent her from freeing them. If I failed to do this in time and allowed her to free metahumans then I had them to contend with as I continued trying to thwart her efforts.

The catch is that while the content is engaging and fun there isn't nearly enough of it. There's plenty to get you from 1-30 but once you've hit 30 with a character then you've seen the majority of the leveling content the game has to offer. There's even a fair amount of direct crossover, the same instances and missions being recycled for both sides. As a hero you do a series of quests against venom addicted thugs at Batman's behest, culminating in teaming up with Nightwing to take down Bane. As a villain, you'll get to do the exact same quests for The Joker, teaming up against Bane with Killer Croc at the end. Sure, the reasons are slightly different and, as a hero you might be defending the police against the street trash whereas a villain will be defending the street trash against the police but the mission play is fundamentally identical. Here, the speed with which you can reach 30 becomes a detriment as starting a new character will have you doing the same stuff pretty quickly after you did it the first time.

Once you hit level 30 the game changes and not necessarily for the better. Apart from the Alerts, 1-30 is entirely soloable. In fact, the game doesn't scale instances for a group so if you do team up then you will absolutely blow through the content. Once you get to 30, the solo content utterly and completely ends. End-gameplay currently consists of aimlessly cruising the cities, looking for collectibles while waiting for your instance queue to pop. There is certainly a decent variety of Alerts and Raids to do at level 30 but DC offers no innovation here. You do the missions to gain tokens which you save up to buy a piece of gear that will make you slightly better at doing the same missions over and over to collect more tokens for yet another piece of gear. It's the same formula we've seen in pretty much every other MMO, so, if it works for you, great. If not, however, it simply becomes a giant hamster wheel once you've done all of the end game content 2 or 3 times. SOE promises monthly updates and larger quarterly updates as well as the inevitable paid expansions. Will these content updates primarily be microtransaction gear or will there be a continual stream of new content added both for leveling and end-game? We'll see.

Addendum: See last paragraph of conclusion.

PvP

I haven't much to say here, as I've done very little of it. At the current stage of Beta, no one ever seems to sign up for the PvP arenas on the PvE server and the PvP server offers no reward for fighting other players other than the fun of doing so. At the moment PvP is faction based but entirely open other than that. My PvP server experience got old fairly quickly as there were a few level 30s lurking near the newbie mission areas, apparently for the sole purpose of preventing them from completing any of the missions. I did get to experience the fun of blasting one of them with a stun effect about 75 stories in the air and watching him fall into the distance but the novelty of respawning over and over paled rapidly and back to the PvE server I went.

In Conclusion...

Is the game fun? Yes, very much so. Combat is fast and furious, the missions are fun, the instances are interesting and the travel powers make moving around the city plenty entertaining. However, the console constraints are going to inevitably annoy the PC players, the content ultimately gets repetitive and if you're not interested in grouping at level 30 your only other option is to start another character to play through the same stuff all over again. It's fun interacting with and fighting against the DC characters as opposed to the CoH/V, CO generic hero/villain you've never heard of before. As it is, the game is definitely worth your initial purchase and the month of playtime that comes with it. What SOE has to offer with monthly updates is going to be the deciding factor in whether it's actually worth subscribing for a second or third month.

This is all, of course, impressions of the Beta and certainly some of the  issues I've mentioned may be addressed before launch. There was a dev post today in the beta forums announcing that end-game solo content is on the way. Initially it's going to, sadly, take the form of repeating lower level content but the implication was that there would be fresh stuff added after launch. Additionally, there's a large patch coming today and, while the patch notes are not yet posted, it was mentioned that it contains a lot of UI improvements.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, or, how to design an island colony that will someday be a treasure ruin.

Architect: Boy, wait 'til you see these designs I have for you! You're going to love all of the secret puzzle doors!

Client: Secret puzzle doors?

Architect: Yes! Like check this one out! You have to turn these statues to face the right way in order to open the door to the room leading to the monastery crypt. Isn't that cool?

Client: Why would you do that?

Architect: Why?

Client: Well, yes. On your blueprint here there are stairs down to there from the main sanctuary. Why would you use this puzzle door entrance?

Architect: ...

Architect: ...or how about this! A secret treasure library above the chapel!

Client: Ok, and how do we get into this one?

Architect: Two giant gold keys high up on the wall. You have to climb up to them and hang from them to open the door.

Client: That would make it not much of a secret, wouldn't it?

Architect: Eh?

Client: Well apart from them being giant keys, having monks climbing around the walls and hanging from keys whenever you wanted to visit the library is going to be a bit noticeable I would think.

Architect: Oh, that's ok. We're just calling it a library. There won't actually be anything up there other than windows to look out at the treasure building which will be next door. You'll be able to tell because it will have a giant secret treasure symbol on the roof.

Client: And that's where we put the treasure?

Architect: Naw, we'll hide the actual treasure in a scret room under the church altar.

Client: And how will we open that? Secret staute levers? Twisting symbols? A mosaic puzzle?

Architect: Naw, just shove the altar out of the way. We were overbudget.

Client: Remind me again why I hired you?

Architect: I am very cheap. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go add in three foot high walls everywhere.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, or, how to be an evil bad-guy villain.

Evil Bad-Guy Villain:
 Men! Our goal here is to stop a single man. This is why I have brought over a thousand of you, as well as an array of motorcycles, trucks and jeeps, an AA gun and an additional tanker full of fuel barrels. Now, spread out over the entire island in groups of 2-5! Take a couple of fuel barrels with you just in case. I want them spread everywhere in case any of the vehicles need emergency refueling. You guys over there, there's only one or two roads on the island so take all of the vehicles and park them at one end of it.

Let's see, what have I missed. Oh, yes, the river! You two! Take the left over fuel barrels and float them all down the river. Just in case our one patrol boat runs out of fuel somewhere.

Ok, everyone, suit up! We have a couple of crates of shirts and hats here so that you'll all look the same. This will make the one guy we're trying to stop easy to spot.

Due to the absurd number of you, we need to find this massive treasure just so I have a hope in hell of making payroll next week. The treasure might just cover it, provided enough of you get killed out here.

Super Bad-Guy Villain: Remind me again why I hired this guy?

Flunky Bad-Guy Villain: He was cheap.

Super Bad-Guy Villain: Cheap?!? He brought a cruise ship full of morons, a tanker full of vehicles and fuel barrels and enough weaponry to overthrow Liberia. What the hell was the expensive option?

Final Fantasy Playthrough Part II

Episode II
In which Captain Gaypants joins the cult volleyball team

Our adventure today starts with The-Girl-Formerly-Known-As-Nipples-Who-Is-Apparently-Underage-So-We-Should-Call-Her-Something-Else explaining the sphere system of character advancement to me. This explanation comes in the form of one of those tutorials where you watch the game do part of it, read the explanation and then hit the button and watch the game do something else and give more explanation. And the tutorial is over 60 steps long. I counted.

Note to game designers: If you create a game system that requires a 60+ step tutorial, scrap it and try again. I can explain how to play chess in less than 60 steps.

The end result of this is that Gaypants gains a new skill called 'Cheer'. Disappointingly (and rather surprisingly), no pom-poms manifest when he does this.

Inappropriately-Dressed-High-School-Student and I jump off of the spaceboat and swim down to an underwater ruin. She thinks it might still have "some power". Apparently, we want this power. Gaypants manages to reactivate the place by banging on a control panel over and over. Fortunately this is done in a cutscene as this technique of reactivating the power of a millenia-old ruin simply would not have occurred to me. It also wakes ups a squid which we have to fight. Sometimes the squid swims away from us giving us the opportunity to do a flanking maneuver. The combat apparently plans to grow gradually more complex over time.

Back to the boat and I'm-Not-Naked-This-Really-Is-A-Flesh-Colored-Skin-Tight-Outfit decided to give Gaypants some food (presumably some of the squid) so that he'll stop whining about it. He eats it by frantically grabbing handfuls of it and shoving them into his face with lots of grunting noises and almost chokes to death in the process. On such a person the fate of the universe rests.

The laser bolt shooting tidal wave shows up again only now it seems to prefer manifesting as a giant, non laser shooting globe of water. It performs its evil purpose just as well, however, which seems to be destroying everything in a chapter so that Gaypants will wake up in a new chapter without anyone having to write anything resembling a segue. Aquaglobius-ex-machina.

This time Gaypants wakes up in the water near a tropical beach on which some surfer dudes are playing volleyball. This excites him enormously, as he is the greatest volleyball player in the universe. They accidentally knock the ball out to him whereupon he jumps 50 feet straight up in the air and kicks the ball off into the jungle somewhere. The surfer dudes are quite impressed and immediately recruit him for their volleyball team. Seems they are about to compete for a championship despite having not won a single game in the 15 years of the team's existence. Considering that most of the team looks to be about 18 years old I can at least surmise why the first decade or so was a rough go. The fact that this record seems to qualify them for the championship tells me that there's only one other team in existence.

Gaypants also learns that this is the future and that his city was asploded by the water ball 1000 years ago. The head of the surfer dude volleyball team, hereafter referred to as Dude, takes Gaypants up to his village and then basically abandons him. Seems the designers felt that the player should actually have to do something for a minute or two. The gameplay intrusion consists of walking around a 6 hut town and talking to everyone. If they have a conversation you know they are not important. If they have a cutscene then they are. Dude's in-game name, incidentally, is 'Wakka'. I can only hope that there is an upcoming scene where he and Gaypants are separated, leaving Gaypants to wander around calling his name over and over. Three times quickly should do it, I'd imagine. Dude has a hairstyle reminiscent of Cameron Diaz in that Ben Stiller movie that I can't remember the name of. Presumably he achieves this hairstyle in precisely the same way which may explain his instant liking for Captain Gaypants.

There is also a temple where the priest gives Gaypants a vague bunch of gobbledygook about founders and summoners and guardians and adepts. He also tells him that the inner chamber of the temple is forbidden to everyone but summoners and guardians, of which Gaypants is neither. He's worried, though, because the summoner in there is late coming back and it's dangerous in there.

Gaypants reaction to this, naturally, is to charge into the forbidden temple chamber of the island cult. He spends a few minutes sticking marbles into walls to get them to open (I believe this was intended to be some sort of puzzle?) and then finds the summoner who turns out to be a hot chick, presumably of age and with nipples though she is a bit more demurely dressed.

Gaypants proceeds to awkwardly attempt to flirt with her in every subsequent conversation. Fortunately she seems absurdly insecure with rock bottom self esteem so he may actually have a chance. She hasn't asked him about his pants, though, so an unpleasant doom could still befall his courtship.

Rather than winding his intestines on a stick and roasting him in a banana leaf lined coal pit as a sacrificial feast to the island gods to appease their anger for his violation of their holiest of holies, the island cult chooses to let the transgression pass because Dude says s'all cool.

I've been unable to force myself back to this, so this is likely the end of my Final Fantasy X experience

Part 1 here

Final Fantasy X Playthrough Part I

I referenced this is my last post so I figured I might as well stick it in here, as non-timely as it may be...

I've always been an RPG fan, be it old school pen and paper gaming to massive Bioware epics. When talking to other RPG fans the topic of the Final Fantasy series occasionally comes up whereupon I am forced to confess to having never played a single entry in the series. This is generally met with shock and amazement. How could I have missed this fabled cornerstone of the genre?

But then the stars realigned. Our neighbor bought himself a new PS3 and sent over his PS2 and a stack of games for us to babysit until he gets around to getting it to his assorted relatives in South America. And there, atop the stack, Final Fantasy X. A quick glance at the IGN review announced that X was, perhaps, the greatest of the series. At last I would get to experience what all of the fuss was about.

And so begins...

The Adventures of Captain Gaypants

Session 1

The game starts with a slow pan across what appears to possibly be a new incarnation of The Village People. One of them gets ups, pats a girl on the shoulder and then wanders up a hill to gaze dramatically over a foreboding landscape. The effect is somewhat ruined by the fact that the character is wearing possibly the stupidest possible version of pants that I've ever come across. They are shorts. One leg is Lara Croft length, the other leg is knee length and appears to be hemmed with a fringe of lace. They do seem to go well with the lemon yellow top, however. That plus the glittery diamond earring and the Meg Ryan hairdo make me uncertain as to the character's gender as it otherwise seems vaguely male. The character starts an internal monologue in a male voice so, apparently, that's the sex that their id has chosen to identify with. I also start to come to the disconcerting realization that this is to be my representative in the game world.

Apparently this is the near future, however, as we then drop back to an earlier time. What is apparently a sci-fi disco of some sort, based on the cheesy synth music and an assorted crowd in odd clothing. Someone steps into the foreground and everyone screams and runs away. An attack? An action packed intro to the combat system? The game drops out of the cut scene and I run forward, ready to defend the screaming people. Ah, I see. There's no attack, they were apparently screaming in joy at seeing me. It seems I am sort sort of celebrity. Lead singer of a boy band, perhaps. That would at least slightly explain the pants.

But no, some of them are carrying volleyballs that they want me to sign. So, apparently I'm a volleyball player of the sort that has screaming fans. I have a few awkward conversations with them and then try to leave with no luck. I must, instead, have awkward and completely non-interactive conversations with the rest of them before we can move into another cut scene. Some of them want me to sign their volleyballs at which point I take the opportunity to name myself Gaypants. This is the maximum name length allowed. In my heart, however, I am Captain Gaypants.

The cut scene ends and I move towards the stadium, anticipating that I will now get to fulfill my role as a mega sports star...which I do, in another cut-scene. Seems that I am not a volleyball player. The game appears to be some sort of zero gravity rugby played while wearing David Bowie costumes. At this point I'm wondering why the game is called "Final Fantasy" rather than "Final SciFi".

We cut to a man who looks like Elvis in a Liberace costume. He waves his arms around and a giant tsunami appears on the horizon, bearing down on the city! As if that's not enough, the tsunami shoots laserbolts! Destruction! Chaos! The villain is introduced! Oh, wait. Now I'm talking to Elvis. Apparently we're friends, somehow. Big Starcraft looking insects are dropping around us. I'm not sure what they have to do with the laser shooting tsunami. I flail at them in precisely the way a six year old girl would if you threw a spider at her. This makes Elvis see fit to hand me a sword the size of a small canoe. I flail ineffectually with it also until it glows and suddenly I am able to use it. Damned useful feature in a sword. The cut-scene finally ends and we drop into turn-based combat with the bugs accompanied by the sort of battle music that might be inspiring to someone who wears the sort of pants that I do..

"Great," I think. "I love turn based combat! The careful maneuvering, hordeing of precious action points, careful flanking maneuvers..." Or, combat could consist of pressing the X button two times.

More bugs attack and Elvis comes up with the strategy of breaking a techno thingamajiggy so that it falls down and destroys the bugs. As well as what appears to be a major freeway interchange. Somewhere in here we fight a really big bug and I get the option of 'overpower' attacks. These consist of mega attacks which I apparently must play a minigame in order to use. Elvis's minigame consists of hitting a long series of buttons in under three minutes. Captain Gaypants is simpler-he just has to hit a sweetspot on a moving bar like in a golf game. He has two minutes to accomplish this Herculean feat.

Rather than making me actually do something that might resemble playing the game, the escape from the destruction of the freeway is another cut-scene. This is a pattern that repeats itself often. Cut-scene, gameplay consisting of walking five feet in the direction of the arrow on the minimap, next cut-scene.

Somehow we get from the exploding freeway to me floating in the air above the city. I swim through the air for a few feet and land on a platform in order to activate a cut-scene dream sequence. I wake up from this to find myself washed up on a rock in some fantasy looking ruins. Aha, I think. The Fantasy part seems to be kicking in. I swim through the ruins, get out of the water, find a chest and then another cut-scene which knocks me back into the water. Fight some fish...X,X...X,X...X,X. Then a giant fish with tasteful light bulbs attacks! X,X...X,X...cut-scene. The giant fish chases me and I escape into the ruins. Not a lot of suspense to this sequence as it's done in a cut-scene. Killing off Captain Gaypants in a cut-scene would be a pretty cheesy thing to do.

I find myself in the ruins of a big round room. I find some dead flowers which, the game informs me, are too rotten to burn. Good to know. I find the remains of a fire pit and whine about how cold I am, causing my precognitive lament about the non burnable flowers to make more sense. Perhaps if I were wearing longer pants...

I inform myself that I need flint and tinder. Conveniently, these are located mere feet away. The search for them constitutes the most gameplay I've yet encountered. I get the fire lit and start whining about being hungry. Rather than looking for a sandwich we drop to a cut-scene where a bunch of people burst into the room. I am not sure who they are but they have a vaguely space pirate feel to them. They gabble at me in space pirate language. One of them is female. She is, as best as I can tell, stark ass naked save for a couple of belts-one around her waist and one worn vertically to hide her lady bits. Except her boobs which thrust out, gloriously free...AAAAH, WHERE THE HELL ARE YOUR NIPPLES?

Either she is actually wearing a full body skin colored leotard or space pirate women are nipple free. Perhaps she keeps them in the goggles she has atop her head. I am tempted to call her Nipless, for the slur pun, or Nippless, for the simplicity and elegance of a single 's' changing the the entire meaning of the word. Neither of these, however, quite have the ring of simply calling her 'Nipples'. A word with a true and magnificent ring to it. Try it now. Yell out "YO! NIPPLES!". See how great that sounds? Especially if you're at work? Come to think of it, it really is an underused nickname. Try adopting it for your significant other or for a coworker. Let me know how it goes.

Nipples helps Gaypants fight off some creature thingy while the other space pirates stand around and watch. Then they take me to their spaceship which actually turns out to be a boat that just looks like a spaceship. I am apparently to function as some sort of cabinboy. I look at a crane and get yelled at. Then I find a book that explains to me that in space pirate language Y=A. This is the extent of my cabinboy duties.

I am informed that there's some watchamacallit in the water beneath the boat and that Nipples and I are going to swim down to it and watch some cut-scenes together. We fight a couple of fish on the way. X,X...X,X...

At this point our power mercifully went out, bringing us to the end of Session 1

Part 2 here

Final Fantasy XIV Open Beta Impressions

Messed around with open beta for this today so here's impressions from a non-Final Fantasy guy.

I'll clarify that with a quick summary of my JRPG background. The first one I ever tried to play was a PC port of one of the Metal Gear Solid games; don't recall which one. My fuzzy memory of it was that 90% of the gameplay consisted of hitting the space bar over and over to advance through interminably long dialogue cutscenes. Recently, having never played a Final Fantasy game and having a friend's old PS2 camped at the house I gave Final Fantasy X a whirl to try and see what all of the fuss was about. I lasted about four hours and rank it as one of my worst ever game experiences. Gameplay again seemed to consist mainly of walking from cutscene to cutscene amongst one of the most irritating collections of characters ever assembled into one license.

My only other knowledge of square enix is that theirs is one of the names attached to Deus Ex 2, another train wreck of a game.

Suffice to say, I came into Final Fantasy XIV with pretty low expectations. These were not raised in the slightest by the game patcher which is done torrent style and which, accompanied by the sort of music you'd hear in a crystal and candle shop, announced that it was going to take around 27 hours to download the updates. A few minutes on google and I found a direct download for the 4.4 gigs of patches and saved myself about 25 hours.

Character creation was ok. The character art was good if of questionable design. We have the generic humans, the elves whose males dress in lowrider pants the better to display their rippling abs and manscaping skills, the FF version of a hobbit which seemed the bastard offspring of the Pillsbury Doughboy and a muppet and which I immediately wanted to stick knives into, a catgirl for the furry crowd and a big burly guy who I expect gets flocks of male elves fluttering around him wherever he goes. There are limited options for each customizable aspect but there are decent number of customizable aspects. Since they're all choices between presets it's pretty easy to make a decent looking character, provided you're not playing a male elf or a muppet. Sadly, turning music off in options does not kill the music that plays during character creation.

Really?

Once in game I had to hand it to 'em. The graphics are gorgeous. The main quest lines, it seems, are chock full of cutscenes as I might have expected from previous jrpg experiences. However, be it the novelty of character centric cutscenes in an MMO or the quality of writing and animation, I quite enjoyed all of the cutscenes in this one. Mostly. The long load times at the beginning and end of each cut scene were a bit of a turn-off. There are three different starting areas, each with its own questline. I've done one of these questlines and dabbled in the other two. The eyebrow raiser is one that features, I shit you not, a flying musical kitten band that chases a big tree monster away. Points for originality, I guess. More points if they'd let me ragekill them and hadn't given them some absurd cutesy name. Moogies? Moogles? Something like that.

Ummm...

The way the quests are conducted, however, is a throwback to ol' school EQ. Wanna get a quest from an NPC? Good luck. There are no indicators whatsoever of which NPCs might have quests to offer as opposed to flavor dialogue. During quests you'll get objectives along the lines of 'go talk to pullers at the fisherman's guild'. You arrive at the fisherman's guild to find fifteen NPCs lazing about and you get to run around and talk to all of them until you find the one that updates the quest and starts the next cutscene. An additional big part of the starter quests is running around the starter city. I was in some piratey city that consisted mostly of three hundred yard long bridges and ramps that you continually had to run along to get anywhere. Nice scenery couldn't prevent this from getting old pretty fast.

Creating another character in the same city and, consequently, skipping through the cutscenes that you've seen already reveals that, at the low levels at least, the majority of your playtime simply consists of running from one place to another to find the next cutscene.

Character animation is both good and bad. Good in that it's smooth and lifelike. Bad in that most characters seem to be possessed by twelve year old Japanese girls. Once you've done the wave emote once you will quietly vow to yourself to never, ever make your character do anything of that sort ever again. This is one of the cultural oddities of Japan that I've always found the strangest-how everything seems targeted towards young girls. Here we have the squeaky voices, the animations, the flying kittens, the muppets, the androgynous males with fabulous hair. In any case, if that's an important part of the Asian RPG experience for you then you will be able to find it here though, so far at least, it hasn't been as overbearing as it was in Final Fantasy X.

The UI is absolutely, hideously awful. Really, really bad. Chat is limited to 80 character messages. Most info like inventory, character, etc. is buried 2 or 3 layers deep in a menu system that is slow and must be interacted with with a software driven mickey mouse hand cursor that just kind of vaguely drifts along in the direction that you're trying to move it. Your inventory is split across multiple tabs in multiple menus. Want to clickdrag something to equip it? Tough shit. That's not how muppets roll.

I finished the starting questline with my character and am now in a position where I have no real idea what to do. There might be another quest for my level, somewhere, or there might be a hundred. I'm faced with the prospect of running around randomly talking to likely looking NPCs in order to find out if there is anything or not. Or I could do the "guildleve" quests. "Guildleve" is apparently a Japanese word that means "generic". These are the cutscene free go kill 6 rat type quests and I have the sinking feeling that these comprise the bulk of the play experience. These are all handed out from behind a counter rather than from individual NPCs in the gameworld.  I did a couple of these, both of which sent me to an area just outside the city where I then had to click on a rock, select it from the menu, select to do a guildleve from the rockmenu, select which guildleve to do and then select my difficulty level. The game then did a complete 180 from its prior lack of quest direction. For the guildleves, it highlights the nearest appropriate mob on the map, surrounds it with a big glowy circle on the map as well as a directional arrow and then places sparkles over it on the landscape.  Chat in this area was useless (more so than its normal uselessness) due to a goldspammer sitting next to the rock running a spam macro. He was still there when I logged back in 8 hours later which is probably an indicator of something.

So...

PROS: Great graphics and sound effects, well done animation, well done cutscenes and interesting storylines for the main story quests.

MEDIOCRES: Clunky combat, obnoxious running distances to get around the cities, unlabeled merchants, generic rinse and repeat grind quests.

BAD: Horrific UI, miniscule loot, elevator fantasy music, software mouse, quest direction either nonexistent or over the top, very little content unless you like grinding (supposedly only true for beta), locked keys, periodic supernatural possession of game designers by spirits of pack of Japanese schoolgirls.