cjdaweasel.com

The Curse of the MMOs

Phantasy Star Online

Phantasy Star Online is the game that dares to ask the question “How many times can you port a game before you can officially start announcing that you’re just doing it for the money?” If there has been one game beat to death in the MMO arena, it’s poor little PSO. The game was originally developed sometime in the late 1800s and has been ported to every system under the sun excluding the original Nintendo. To top it all off, its not really that good of a game. In fact, dare I say it? It kind of sucks.

IA IA O

The first thing that most people will notice about PSO is that the enemies are just a bit dumber than over-ripe cantaloupes. Well, that isn’t completely true, because I’ve known cantaloupes that did things like “dodge fire”, and “move out of the way of each other”. Most of the baddies in PSO will run at you Gauntlet style in the hopes that they will reach you before they die. This would be a pretty effective strategy if all the players were fish and lacked the ability to move a joystick. Usually, the strategy for beating most enemies is running right past them and sitting on the other side of the room as they slowly amble toward you. From there, you can shoot at them until they reach you yet again and run past them again. Rinse, Repeat.

Sure it sounds easy, and it wouldn’t be so difficult if the targeting system didn’t hate you. Most of the time the camera will swing in the opposite direction of what you are attacking. This will assist you in getting a nice close-up of a tree while you practice swearing. Most of your deaths in this game will be followed by “Why the fuck am I looking at a wall?!?!”. They couldn’t have made this camera system more unfriendly if they programmed it to sleep with your girlfriend, slap you in the balls, and tell you how much you suck every fifteen seconds.

After you inevitably get the crap pounded out of you by a bunch of creatures that resemble some fourth grader’s attempt to make a gerbil/chicken hybrid, you’ll get what’s known as a photon blast. Let’s not pretend here, photon blast (PSO) = limit break (FF7). They function exactly the same. You get beat on a bunch, and you release a mega powerful blast that usually summons a bunch of Peeps or a worm. Yes a worm. Be afraid. These are all presented via a wonderfully Technicolor acid-inspired in-game movie which seems to end before your summoned characters do anything worthwhile. The worm will spin, the Peeps will bump heads, and all of this will leave you feeling empty, and wondering how many starving children in Ecctiobonia could eat for your monthly fee.

Literacy is Over Rated

But who needs to feed starving children when you can ask people half way around the world how the weather is? No kidding, thanks to PSO’s multilingual chat system, you can make people who don’t even speak your language hate you just as much as people that do! Using a menu of preset phrases, you can ask people in foreign countries as though they spoke your own language. Unfortunately, most of the phrases that I use on a daily basis weren’t in the list. Apparently, “How much for sucky-sucky?” didn’t make the cut. I’m hoping they’ll rectify this oversight in a future patch.

And that’s not all. If you can’t find your ideas in the pre-defined list of phrases, just send your emotions via various series of smilies. Sure it’ll take up screen space, but everyone can read simlie-ese. Here’s an example of how you can use the PSO system when dealing with others of foreign nationalities:

I like my tea with cream and sugar.

George Bush is our president.

+ =
How much for sucky-sucky?

Why is this Happening?

Of course, all of this is second to the great story of PSO. The PSO epic is based on a true story originally printed in the fine print on the back of a waterbed pamphlet. In only a few hours, this game reveals a chronicle that took the pamphlet over 2 sentences to describe. Printed here for your convenience is the original memoir:

“Some people go to a planet and they die. So we send more people to investigate. Do not use waterbed as a floatation device.”

AC: 10% This game surprisingly had the lowest number of assholes than any of the other MMOs I’ve played to date. This is mostly due to being constantly pelted with happy faces every time anyone said anything like “ Eat shit and die! ” or “I’m a lonely pillow-biter getting mad at someone over a fucking game ”

LLA: 100% You don’t even need to know English, or Japanese, or any language at all for this game. All you need to know is pictures. means ‘good’, means ‘bad’, and #()%#2222222222 means ‘I fell asleep on my keyboard’.

LSR: “Stamp Collector” If you’re playing PSO, you have to admit that you have no life. If this is the most fun way that you can think of to spend your time, then you’re probably better off collecting stamps, or toenail clippings.

My Character: I played a Force character (a spell caster). Which means (with the help of the camera and targeting system) I spent most of my time lying on the ground.

Conclusion
PSO is a vast (kinda small), wonderful (slightly entertaining) world with all the charm (mild interest) that an MMO (made by hyper-intelligent ballpoint pens) could be. All of this coupled with stunning visuals (for an N64), great music (resembling a Casio keyboard stuck on DEMO), and a wonderful community (I hate you all and hope you die). It truely is an MMO not to be missed (so aim carefully).

The Curse of MMOs

The Matrix Online
 
 
 

The Matrix Online is a game that was obviously designed by a group of developers that hate people and want to hurt you personally. MXO punishes the player  for playing the game and Monolith Productions makes sure you feel the burn. After spending several more hours than I probably should have playing this game I’ve determined that for the most part, they’ve succeeded.

Wanted: Editor

The biggest glaring problem with MXO is that for some reason the dialogue was written by the janitor while he was drunk. Sure it saves money, but the typos in the game are horrendous. Sometimes I don’t know what the hell is going on. I’ll just pick out the words that look like places or people, go there and kill them and hope that’s what was I was required to do. I didn’t get paid to write this, but I can bring myself to put a period in the right place every now and then. Sometimes, when I’m feeling really generous I’ll correctly capitalize a letter. The developers can do complex mathematical computations, code entire worlds, but don’t know where to put a comma in a sentence?

It’s A Boring World After All

When I get the occasional mission that makes sense it’ll just be the same crap I’ve done for the last far-and-few-between coherent missions repackaged. All of them follow the same form: Find something, talk to something, kill something. And once in a while in a mission you’ll be given the pleasure of using one of Metro World’s great elevators. Whoever decided that it should take fifteen thousand mouse clicks to open a fucking elevator should be drug out and shot. No, change that: Drug out, insulted, slapped, beaten, THEN shot.

I wish the problems with the environment ended there. If FFXI’s dominant color was gray then The Matrix Online’s dominant color is turd brown. Everything is brown. Everything. This wouldn’t be so bad (I like brown) if the environments were actually interesting. It seems that every four blocks in any given area its the same brown buildings in a different order. I usually don’t like to get into arguments about textures, bump-mapping or any of that tech crap, but it bears mentioning that the brownish textures in MXO suck. Doom 2 had better textures for walls. Oh how I wish that were sarcasm.

When you bore of looking at the brownish world, take a look at the brownish clothing that you can buy. For being a major selling point of the game, the clothing line would make even “Let’s do the same damn thing over and over” Levis hang their head in shame. The local Salvation Army has more clothing types than this game. Not that it really matters as everyone is either dressed like a Pimp, Ho, or a Goth. There’s only so many places that you go with those styles.

Stand Still!

When you actually get around to fighting someone, you’ll find that the game tries hard to imitate the fighting in the movies. I mean “tries” in the same way that a four year old “tries” to help you paint your living room and ends up painting most of the carpet or your mentally challenged cousin “tries” to help you with your math homework. Initially you’ll go through a period where you’ll try to find a pattern or develop a strategy around the battle system. This will be brief, as you’ll soon catch on that it all breaks down to just guessing or in my case, guessing poorly.

Whatever you do, don’t pick up a gun for you character, they’re worthless. Apparently there is a disarmament deal going on between the humans and the machines where the machines won’t enslave the humans if the humans replace all their high powered weaponry with BB guns. Really. In The Matrix Online, a kick is deadly and a bullet is just aggravating. No, I don’t understand it either.

MXO: The Slideshow

All of this is rather pointless though, considering that most people will never get the damn thing to run in the first place. I won’t go through the particulars with you, but four hours into the game I still hadn’t played it yet. There were several problems getting the game to install, the biggest of them being the system requirements. You almost have to have a Cray supercomputer to get this game to run poorly. You have to do twice as good as that to get the game to run decently. The game box should read “Recommended System Requirements: Deep Blue”.

AC: 20% To be quite honest I really didn’t see that many people online. It must have just been the time of day or the server I chose. It also may have been because I spent most of my time running into walls as my Alienware struggled to keep my frame rate above 3.

LLA: 80% The few people that I did run into didn’t seem to either speak English at all, or thought that they could imitate English by giving me a random string of letters. “LLO!!1 wtF RU saiz??/? kiLLR?!?!1″ In my country that translates to “I love to suck dick. Please put one in my mouth so I’ll shut the fuck up.”

LSR: “Farscape Fan” You’d have to be one exceptional masochist/loser to play this game for more than a couple of days. The game is grinding (not in a good way), and tedious. The story stinks, and their mother dresses them funny.

My Character: I played a Brittney Spears prostitute clone. So basically I played as Britney Spear’s sister.

Conclusion

All in all Matrix Online is a bad game. The more you play it the more you get the feeling that the developers are truly out to make you suffer. The real pain will come when you realize that you paid for it. That probably hurts the worst. Truth be told if I were a red piller and I had to deal with this shit, I’d jack out, go to Zion and give cave dancing lessons.

The Curse of the MMOs

World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft is an MMO designed for just one thing: Taking your money, and lowering your IQ. Okay, that’s two things. See? I’m getting stupider by the minute. No matter what you’re doing in WOW you’re going to be constantly pelted with requests to do things that you don’t want to do. If FFXI was about complete jerks with 15 dollars a month of disposable income and an internet connection, then WOW is about a secret government project to make everyone who plays it as mature as the plot to a Power Rangers episode. And it’s working.

My Story Begins

I started off playing as a female Night Elf. Anyone who has played the game already knows where this is going, so feel free to skip on to the next section. Everyone else, read on.

I spent most of my time denying requests to remove my clothes and dance. Which, if you have any life outside of videogames you will realize that this is not only a waste of time, but kind of sick. One person even went so far as to follow me all the way across one of the continents demanding that I remove my clothes, and even offered me a few silver if I did. I finally gave in and that’s the story of how I bought my first set of Druidic robes. THE END.

I wish. I figured that the higher I rose in level the more this kind of thing would taper off so I did my quests, built up an ignore list of perverts, and continued on with my pretend life. It seems though, that I just traded one type of harassment for another. One day, I shit you not, someone requested that I have sex with their character. Naturally I turned them down because I have a girlfriend and that is kind of like cheating even though there’s no real sex involved and its not me doing it anyway. Of course this is all just rationalization for the fact that having sex in a game is probably the saddest thing I can think of this side of Beanie Baby collecting. I can only determine that WOW breeds polygon molesters. They’re freaking everywhere.

Stay Away From Me

The worst thing about partying with anyone on WOW is that you have to put up with people who try to make their characters do things that they’re not supposed to do. I’m all for customizing characters, but a Rogue (think Thief) is NOT a healer. I don’t care how many Goblin Jumper Cables (an item that revives a fallen character) you have, or how high your First Aid skill is, you are not “TeH HeelR!!1!” You are “TeH imbecile!” If WOW were a benefits package then Druids, Paladins, and Priests would be Full Coverage, and a Rogue with Cables and First Aid would be an HMO. A bad HMO. There is at least one of these people in every Town, and usually two in any decent guild.

If you’re not in a guild, prepare to be harassed until you join one. Once you’re in a Guild, prepare to be harassed by duel requests. Actually, just prepare to be harassed. Everyone seemed to want to fight my Healing Druid. Why the hell would you want to fight me? What am I going to do? Heal you to death? That would be like a Tank Battalion challenging a MASH unit to some war games.

How To Take A Game Too Seriously

WOW also has different types of servers, such as PVP (Player vs. Player), Normal (ummm… Normal), and RP (Roll Playing). My favorite is RP. These people take the game far too seriously, but since its an RP server they don’t feel so bad about it.

More often than not, in an RP server, you are greeted by someone in the following fashion “I am Cabados of Stormwind, warrior of our King”. No. You are Greg of Ohio, maker of Slushies. I respect the fact that your life sucks and you want to be someone else, but please don’t go around telling other people that someone “insulted your honor”. You’re sitting in front of your computer on a Friday night playing a videogame, and you’re not having sex. Anything that anyone says to you, you probably deserve. I can’t really blame you though. It’s far more interesting to be ‘Cabados, the warrior of Stormwind” than “Greg, Manager of 711″.

But to all the Gregs out there, listen to me. When we’re having our imaginary characters fight a pretend dragon in a fantasy world, it is NOT the time to RP. I highly doubt that in Feudal times, if they were fighting a Dragon they would have used a phrase like “Tis a fine fireball hurtling towards you me lady. Would you care to step out of the way?”. More than likely they would have said something along the lines of “Get out of the way! FUCKING FIREBAAAAALLL!!”.

Where are people getting some of these accents and language from? In any given sentence from any Greg, there’s usually a bit of Olde English, a few modern English words, Scottish word or two, or some French mixed in. You don’t sound like a Medieval warrior, you sound like some backwoods British retard. Take an Olde English literature class, then try to play along. As it stands, there’s not a single European from any century that would have a fucking clue what you’re saying.

AC: 30% If they’re not pestering you to take off your clothes, then they’re harassing you to duel them. If they’re not doing either of those, then they’re either trying to get you to join their guild, or get you to quit your guild and join theirs. There are of course, some that are just plain assholes.

LLA: 70%-80% No one in WOW could type a complete sentence if they were reading out of the manual and they received electrical shocks to their groin every time they hit a wrong key. I think that this is partly due to the fact that almost everyone who plays WOW is 13.

LSR: “Horny Uncle Jim” The only reason to play WOW for longer than a month is if you like hanging around little kids. There’s only three types of people that like to hang out with children: Other children, serial killers, and child molesters. If you’re over 16 and you haven’t killed anyone, then my advice to you would be to stay the hell away.

My Character: I played a female Night Elf primarily, among many others. My favorite race were the Jamaican Trolls. Being a Troll is about as close as most people will ever come to being cool.

Conclusion

By the time you’ve played WOW enough to get your character to a level that isn’t laughable, you’ve effectively dropped two years off your maturity. To compensate you’ll try to talk like your from the 1300s, but you’ll just end up sounding like you learned European English from reading the copyright information in fantasy novels. I want to leave you with this thought: If you are not part of a class that is designed to fill a certain role in a party, please don’t try, and whatever you do, don’t talk like you’re from Feudal Times. You’ll just make yourself look like a fool, and even the Gregs will laugh at you.

The Curse of MMOs

Final Fantasy XI

I would like to start off by stating that if you are considering purchasing FFXI (Final Fantasy 11) I would advise that you take your keyboard, and beat yourself senseless with it. Not only will it be less painful, and far less time consuming, you’ll have an excuse to spend $50 on something that you will actually have fun using. Frequently your activities in FFXI will degrade to spending hours making numbers pop out of creatures until you level. For the uninitiated, leveling is where you gain abilities and increase stats. The higher the level, the better the character. Do not confuse level with maturity, they usually have little to do with each other.

Trying Very Hard to Get This Party Started

In order to do ANYTHING in FFXI you have to be in a party. Which means that you’ll get a group that will consist of a warrior type character who doesn’t know the meaning of the word “wait”, a twelve year old male playing a female character, a thief who will steal all of the good equipment (aka a “ninja looter”), a 65 year-old who plays like they’ve never seen a keyboard in their life, a total dick (required), and you. If you notice the dick missing from your party, that means that you’re probably it.

Also it is required that at least one person be on dial-up in any given party. This allows the party to catch a rest every 30-45 minutes while they wait for the player to come back.

A Job That You Aren’t Paid For and The Love You Get

Grinding is where you run around and kill things for experience (which is required to level). The experience is similar to building a tower out of playing cards, except the typical response to the results of grinding are “You Loser” rather than “Cool Card Tower”. FFXI does everything but force you to Grind. Be Cool. Don’t do Grinding, kids.

When you aren’t wasting your time trying to get that last bit for your next level, you’re usually attempting to socialize. Whenever you ask any question, no matter what the subject, you will get at least one, sometimes up to 10, people who will decide that its their duty to keep new players away. Usually, roaming in packs of three, because they have a third of brain each, they’ll attack you for anything ranging from “What level do I have to be to get X job” to “Who here likes kittens?”. Typical responses also range from “DOOd youz stoopid!!11″ to “Uz TEh suk” and sometimes the ever poetic “shut up noob”. Most, if not all responses are far from winning any literary awards.

Playing Something More Fun, Like Solitaire

If you’re still playing after 15 minutes, then you are one of the following: A loser, a loser with nothing else better to do, someone reviewing the game, a masochist, an idiot or an idiot game reviewing masochist loser with nothing else better to do. I recommend that you buy a back up game such as one of the other Final Fantasy games that was actually good (Final Fantasy 10 would be a good choice). If you have a really good imagination you can pretend that you’re playing an online version of FFX. The only tip off would be that the players would be helpful and speak in complete sentences.

But really, FFXI has nothing to do with the other games in the series, does it? It seems to me that if you’re going to make a sequel, the game should be SOMETHING like its predecessors.  Imagine that they came out with a Die Hard 4, but they made it a romantic comedy. Now pretend that they charged you $50 to watch it and the entire time you’re in the theatre, people all around you are telling you how much you suck. That’s a pretty good idea of how it feels to play FFXI.

Lastly, I’m obligated to mention the job system. Jobs are like classes. They define what kinds of abilities that your character will have, like swordsmanship, dancing, and the highly coveted super happy fun fun teriyaki eating ability. Some of the jobs you can become include: Monk, Paladin, and Ninja. That’s right, Ninja. I hate to break this to the developers, but Ninja isn’t a job. Pizza Delivery Boy is a job. Breast massager for Lacey Chabert is a job (no, that’s a dream come true, but I think that you get the point). Just think, if you work hard in ninja high-school, graduate from a good ninja college, and get a good ninja internship, you too can be considered fucking insane for thinking that Ninja is a job.

Scorecard:

AC: 60-110% FFXI is probably the most unfriendly community I’ve had the displeasure of playing in. I figure that most people that are assholes on the game are actually enough of an asshole to count for a few more people. So the ratio of actual assholes to perceived assholes is probably around 60%, while it feels damn near 110%.

LLA: 30% once you filter out the 20 or 30 people that type like they learned English from a shorted out Speak-N-Spell, you’re left with people who probably speak English pretty well, but can’t be bothered to type out all 4 letters in a word. If you’re (notice its not ‘ur’) to lazy to type out all the letters in a word, don’t bother. No matter what you say, you sound like a goddamn idiot.

LSR: “Public Masturbator” Grinding and Public Masturbating are very similar in that they both waste time, are frowned upon by most of society, and nobody really wants to watch you do it.

My Character: I played a monk, which is about as exciting as it sounds.

Conclusion
If you lie awake at night wishing that someone out there was making you arrange their toenail clippings in order of size while shouting obscenities at you, then this is the game for you. Otherwise, simulate the game by multiplying 2x2x2x2… for 2 hours a day 30 days consecutively and burn $50 in the fireplace (or flush it down the toilet). Trust me, given a choice, anyone would rather listen to a string of Pythagorean numbers than hear your FFXI story. No really, we don’t care. Shut Up Noob.

The Curse of MMOs

Introduction

I know what some of you are thinking: What is an MMORPG*? Well, aside from the sound a choking cow makes, it is a piece of software created by game companies to get you to pay 20 times the price of a game for the pleasure of playing it with 14 year olds all around the world. But of course their primary function is to waste much, much of your time.

In order to play MMOs, you have to meet certain requirements, usually outlined in the TOS (Terms of Service). Here are just a few of the many many rules that you’ll bypass when you hit the “I Accept” button in the 1834 game Ultima Online:
1) You must have the vocabulary/mental coherence of a 12-14 year old male.
2) Under no circumstances are you to help a new person learn how to play the game. You may only play the game after you are an expert.
3) The player must not know how to type or have a third grade understanding of the English language.
4) Your soul now belongs to [INSERT GAME COMPANY HERE]

For your mere 10-15 dollars a month you will get to play a pretend character in a made up world who has a more interesting life than you ever will. You’ll get to be a wizard, a warrior, a super hero, a Naked Dancing Guy, or some other badass that we all wish we could be. Also, you’ll get the euphoria of how cool it is to be said character, which will last until you realize that everyone else in the world is just as powerful, if not more powerful, than you.

In order to help you (and that’s what I’m here to do: help you), I’ve devised a rating system that will make sense out of what to expect from any MMO.

AC: Asshole Content. This is a ratio of cool people to assholes walking around in the game. Given as a percentage that I make up.
LLA: Lack of Literary Ability. This is a ratio of the number of people that couldn’t even type a coherent word if they were spelling their name.
LSR: Loser. This is how much of a loser you would have to be in order to level your character up to a point that they might be interesting enough to show your cat. These are ranked by type of loser from “Geek” to “Hardcore Loser” and all the way up to “Farscape Fan”

Also, I’ll mention what kind of character I played, but for the record I was usually Naked Dancing Guy.

*technically MMO or MMO-RPG stands for (Massively Multiplayer Online Roll Playing Game). The name MMORPG was decided by T-SOP-WUAFFE (The Society Of People Who Use Acronyms For Fucking Everything). Some of the societies other accomplishments include: IMHO, ESRB, and TTYL. To which I can only respond: FU.