[Brighter and glowy screenshots are ones with filtering turned on (max); darker and more jagged ones without.]

Game installed fine, ran fine, music and sound effects all zero by default but I immediately had the option to change everything on the character selection screen. So far so good! Until… character creation.

From left to right: Titan, Knight, Healer, Mage, Rogue, Sorcerer

What you see in the screenshot is almost all of what you get — your class is dependent on your sex. Muscly / melee = men; magical / agile = women; oh no too many females, let’s make the Sorcerer male. *rolls eyes* But Vickie, potential castle sieges! You must play on!

Mysterious fourth customisable characteristic?

There seems to be a reserved fourth customisable characteristic, though. Different sex for different class eventually, possibly?

And so I put class aside and picked whoever looked the most appealing to me. Much like Lineage II, customisation of appearance is very limited.

I created a Mage (who reminds me of Dark Elves from Lineage II)

Heh, I’m a little predictable.

After a short personal dungeon (instanced), I made it to the main town Randol and was soon killing foxes and wolves. I think the monster animation needs a bit of rework since the distance they travel doesn’t match their strides (Is there a technical term for this?). But I keep reminding myself that this is a free game.

And there are castle sieges.

The maps (W or alt+W) are quite helpful and you can ask pretty much any NPC for direction to another NPC. NPCs with quests (Q) and quest rewards (A) are clearly marked, both on the maps and on the NPCs themselves. Teleporting to most main towns are free as well.

The game has something else I’ve really loved from Lineage II that’s also missing in Guild Wars — running all over the place and climbing hills. My character may need glasses / binoculars, though (visual distance was set to the highest).

Overlooking Randol... half of it

I met up with the online friend in the game soon. She informed me that the highest level was 145 (at the time of writing). That’s right, one hundred and frigging forty five levels. She also told me about the Guardian system (Status [T or alt+T] > Action, Social > Action > Guardian system), in which the apprentice gains a shiny weapon while the guardian gains reputation points on the condition that the former reaches level 20 in 10 days.

Revisiting the same place, now with filtering effect and new armour and weapon

We decided that it’s win for both of us if she power-levelled me, so I chose her as my guardian and soon dinged 20, got a shiny weapon, leeched enough money from the level 100+ mobs she fought to get some level-appropriate but equally revealing armour… and we’re off on our own merry ways.

Monsters (and players?) leave blood on the floor when they die in a personal dungeon, by the way. I can’t tell whether it’s awesome or unnecessary.

Blood on floor

Later, I met a princess in a personal dungeon, who, of course, needs to be saved because princesses’ sole existence is to be saved.

(My eyes might fall out if I keep rolling them like this.)

I'll save you. I'll save you NAO.

But…

Nao Princess is not looking at my face

What the quest didn’t tell you is that not only does Nao Princess not have any fighting power, she also doesn’t have any HP regeneration, ability to self-heal, dodge enemies or respond to YOU’RE STANDING IN MY FUCKING WAY either.

Without any planning and still noobish at the game thanks to being power-levelled, the rescue mission resulted in much fail.

You have failed quest [Rescue the Princess]

Anyway.

Similar to Lineage II (again), you learn skills by spending the SP you gained from killing stuff. And still similar to Lineage II, there’s never enough SP to use if you fight the natural way. In this game, though, you lose both XP and SP when you die. Therefore, in order to get enough SP, we might just have to do this:

1. Kill stuff with high SP-to-XP ratio to gain XP and SP.
2. Use SP to learn skills, preferably down to 0.
3. Suicide; lose normal amount of XP but 0 SP because you have none.
4. Repeat from step 1.

Tada! SP farming.

Coloured dragons

More things to note:

1. The screen holds for 2 seconds when you take a screenshot. Not cool.
2. There are mounts: horses (quite realistic if they’re not funky-coloured) and dragons.
3. Magic skills take a while to start casting and sometimes I can’t tell whether I hit or missed.
4. There also seems to be some sort of safe zones (near entrances of towns and outside dungeon rooms?) where your attacks fail and monsters stop chasing / won’t attack you. The zone isn’t clearly marked so it can be quite annoying for ranged players, especially spell casters.
5. Aside from the personal dungeons, everything else reminds me of Lineage II.
6. This game really reminds me of Lineage II.

And this game seriously very much reminds me of Lineage II. The UI, the music, the skills, the social actions, monster level difference equals different monster name colour (exactly the same as Lineage II’s), the grind… But I haven’t played enough of these games to tell whether this system is Lineage II-inspired or just a typical (Korean) grind game thing.

I guess I’d recommend this game to hardcore gamers who wanted to try something like Lineage II but can’t find a good private server, don’t want to pay to play, or don’t quite have the hardware for it. This game is absolutely not for casual gamers.

Me? I don’t see myself getting addicted to it, but I might play on since I have a thing for grinding.

And that, my friend, is Last Chaos and the last mid-semester break of my degree.

If you’re like the rest of us, particularly those of us who run around with a Chinese character name but are absolutely and obviously not a bot or gold farmer, it’s not uncommon to encounter personal attacks from racists, even in the supposed safety of our own PVE district (Asia – Traditional Chinese).

3 months ago, I had these two Warriors in the Traditional Chinese district of Leviathan Pits, that came doing the taunt, point, shoo and laugh emotes as soon as I mapped in. Bear in mind that players have the complete freedom and choice to travel between any districts of the same area — their intentions were clear.

The exchange they probably expected:

Racist #1 taunts you.
元氣娜奧美 (my Warrior’s name): excuse me
Racist #1 taunts you.
Racist #1 taunts you.
Racist #2: sorry i dont speak freaky deeky
Racist #1: HAHAHA
Racist #1: pwnd
元氣娜奧美: 阿 怎麼辦 我不太會說英文耶…

What happened in reality:

What can I say? I’m a fast typist. You’d think that my “excuse me” would tip them off, too. Way to unintentionally pwn your own friend-in-crime.

As if failing like that wasn’t embarrassing enough, though, one of them then said:

Which is horrible Spanish, according to a friend’s friend who speaks Spanish. Why am I not surprised that it translates so well into English in an online translator?

But that’s not all! When I asked them if they’re aware that they’re in the Traditional Chinese district, they added a bold declaration that would make Freud proud!

(Adrian Victoria is my friend who’s actually also American.)

And then I reported them. Sadly, a few days off Guild Wars during the weekdays likely had little effect on them.

Oh look, it’s not just English-speaking players who would “accidentally” land in the Traditional Chinese district and “accidentally” type out loud, either.

And they’re only the milder racists in PVE.

You have no idea what it’s like to PVP if you have a Chinese name.

And that’s only part of the default story. I know.

Over in Strangetown, the Beaker couple allegedly performs strange experiments on a Sim handily named Nervous Subject. Pollination Technician 9, the Smith family father, is an extraterrestrial alien with green skin who has fathered more children than he cared to remember. Pascal Curious, a man, is in his third trimester with an alien baby. Olive Specter has an alarming number of dead ex-husbands and tombstones in her backyard, and an even more alarming memory of having sex with the Grim Reaper.

Oh yeah, the Grim Reaper. I know.

There’s also the easily accessible Criminal career; many, many ways to deliberately kill a Sim should we so feel like it; PlantSims, ghosts, vampires, robots, werewolves, witches, zombies… most of which exist by default whether we like or believe in them or not.

And that’s what makes this game extra fun. I know.

Now let me conveniently overlook the fact that Sims are either asexual or heterosexual by default; but they’d better not call gay marriage “marriage” and make it as fulfilling as straight marriages in The Sims 3, because oh no, that would be so wrong and unnatural, you know!

(Note: Entry originally written in March 2009, 3 months before The Sims 3 was released, when someone replied in the official forum saying that teh gheyz that is us should be satisfied with our getting “joined” / civil union option that rewards less aspiration points than male-female marriages in The Sims 2. I’m sure most of us applaud EA for at least giving us that possibility; but it’s simply not good enough!

The Sims 3 has now been out for 3 months. It acknowledges all marriages as “marriages”, and AI-controlled Sims would become partners with another AI-controlled Sim of the same sex if the players let them experience it.

Unrelated, but I’m disappointed that they took out the tickling interaction between adults, though.)

A few years later, however, on our trips to various lands with tall folks who think we’re tiny, tiny folks who think we’re smelly, and smelly folks who are usually our enemies, Aidan and Zho got closer.

And closer.

And even closer.

And then? When we finally saved the world from the Great Destroyer, Aidan and Zho decided to break up stand in separate groups outside their aggro bubbles, as if they never knew each other.

When asked, Aidan said:

Me? Aidan! What have I ever done for you? No, no, no. What have I ever done with you? I’ve never even had you in a party by choice! What about Zho, Aidan? What about Zho?!

That day, the rare romantic fangirl in me died.

The closest Aidan/Zho fan effort I’ve found so far is this YouTube video: Guild Wars – from Ascalon. This unofficial GW wiki discussion thread also cracked me up. But fellow Guild Wars players, do we not know how to write porn fanfiction?

ArenaNet, there’d better be Aidan/Zho offspring or descendants in Guild Wars 2, or I’ll… cry!

In other news, I should be studying for tomorrow’s exam.

I also fail at memes.

Rest in peace, 智源.

ArenaNet, we have asked politely like civilised entities; we have whined relentlessly still rather like civilised entities… Now if you absolutely cannot reset a death count, please AT LEAST FIX THE STUPID BUG BEFORE ANOTHER SURVIVOR UNFAIRLY DIES CAPSLOCK KTHX

Now I can’t tell you what her exact purpose in the game is (there are tons of theories out there if you felt like breaking your brain); but this is what I believe Cybil is not: male protagonist’s love/sex interest, cleavage, blonde bombshell, damsel in distress. She is just a female police officer who happened to be blonde, beautiful and very well-proportioned, like the rest of the young women in the whole of the game universe.

I was quite thrilled when I first read about Konami’s “reimagining” of the original Silent Hill game. Okay, so remakes have never been all that exciting; but this is Silent Hill. Silent Hill is Silent Hill, is Silent Hill, is Silent Hill. Or so I was chanting half in disbelief when I was looking at the screenshots of the now wearing glasses and looking 100 times more distraught Harry Mason (the protagonist).

It really wasn’t until I saw this one screenshot with Cybil… Let’s put the two Cybils side by side. On the left is the Cybil from the 1999 PlayStation days; on the right, Cybil in the upcoming Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.

She may still not be a damsel in distress; but poor, poor Cybil, who did you piss off at BPD, SHPD and/or Konami to deserve this?

I can actually already see why they named the reimagining “Shattered Memories” now.

Here is a sample of the Guild Wars (Guild Wars Prophecies) opening theme song: DirectSong > Guild Wars > 01 – Opening Theme.

Here is the movie’s official site: Traditional Chinese version, Simplified Chinese version or English version.

This is my expression after I heard the song on the movie’s official site:

Anyway, on to the game! (Very image heavy, as with other gaming blog entries!)

When you first run the game, you would notice… that the music is very loud. Like, very loud. There’s no immediate way (not even shortcuts) to turn the music volume down or off other than adjusting the whole system volume. Also, the default size of the windowed mode is 1024×768, i.e. very cluttered screen. There’s no way to change it in-game but you could go into the files (\release\user.xml & \release\geConfig) to edit it if it annoyed you enough as it did me.

After I got the initial annoyances out of the way, I went ahead and created my family. Instead of giving each character a completely different name like in other games, GE goes by the family system where all the characters share the same family name… which is fine per se, but by the time I came up with a decent Baroque-y family name that wasn’t already taken, I’ve already heard the theme song enough to know how to play it on my violin. True story.

Unlike many other games, the male characters aren’t painful to look at; I even made my scout a male. Classes in the image (from left to right): Fighter, Wizard, Scout, Musketeer, Elementalist.

The wizard and scout blinked. Bleh.

Unfortunately, you only get to change the outfit of the characters later on in the game, not their appearance otherwise, i.e. all players of the same class and sex will have the same face.

Oh, but I did mention that the game is free, right? Apparently you are given some good 21 years to play it. Who knows if I would even live that long?

You always get disconnected if you stayed in the Barracks (character selection screen) for too long, though — at least that was what happened to me for a few times. Here I thought I was hacked already before I even got to play the first character that I only just created.

This game employs something called the Multi-Character Control (MCC) system, which, as the name implies, allows you to control multiple characters you created (up to 3) at the same time. Soloing (in the playing-alone sense) is actually possible!

Below is likely the most important bar (alt+I) with hotkeys a newbie would want to be familiar with, as it allows you to switch between controlling each character individually and controlling the team as a whole and more. I missed it at first and the characters I weren’t actively controlling were just standing there getting hit. I’m glad I eventually discovered it!

Poses (alt+X; some of which are included in the very beginning, some you earn through quests, and some you buy) make for some crazy idling and screenie fun, especially for people with vivid imagination, e.g. me!

But it’d be nice if the characters would breathe when they’re posing.

The trees are gorgeous too, except they turn transparent when you go near them, which I suppose is bad for screenies but good for combat.

Aside from what I already mentioned above, there are also a couple of other things I didn’t like about the game:

1. There’s no way to change where the unmoveable zone map (alt+Z) appears (in the middle of your screen by default) other than hacking into the files.

2. Other windows (inventory, quest, etc.) don’t stay where you move them. They always go back to their default positions when you zone to another map.

3. Chatting in-game is really annoying. You have to hit alt+C every time to expand the chat window. Enter key also works. Strange how it didn’t for me in the beginning.

4. We can’t move our characters with the keyboard (which is so because 24 keys are reserved for executing different skills of the 3 characters).

5. Melee characters can’t attack flying / levitating creatures.

6. Scouts can’t won’t automatically heal if they’re equipped with a weapon; and can’t do any damage whatsoever if they’re unequipped.

And what’s with female elementalists in MMORPGs not keeping their boobs in their dresses, anyway?

Not to mention giant vegetables and unmanned uninhabited stores?

MMORPG worlds are strange.

So, in conclusion, I hated the game at first because it takes a bit of getting used to the multiple character system; but ended up liking it because it’s free and… grinding is fun. Nooooooo.

Disclaimer: Some animals were harmed in the making of this introductory / review blog entry thingy. But hey, that crocodile attacked me first!

The two of them are from some crazy time zone from the past so it’s actually already really late / early for them. Here, Mon (Acro) fell asleep. For the fifteenth time. And so totally going to be pushed down the slope by Sora and me in 3, 2, 1! ELE PUSH SPIKE!

We seriously need a ladies’ district in GW. Here’s proof:

(Yes, you can be a wall, Sora.)

A male Paragon wouldn’t stop bothering our Mon. I tried to stop him…

But he stripped…

… down to his underpants…

So we had to zone. We demand a ladies’ district! And a secret lesbian handshake! And a song! (Mon’s requests, but we second and third!)

And then Mon and Sora became guildies. Yay for them!

Cross-posted to the LG forums.