Anyway . . .

<Roseo|Work> The controller looks like someone left a pile of jellybeans in the sun too long

O the dragons are gonna fly tonight

They're circling low and inside tonight 

It's another round in the losing fight 

Out along the great divide tonight

Anyway
They fixed Anarchy Online, sort of. I wrote the preamble to a review some time ago for Gamehacker and never got around to writing the actual review since the preamble mysteriously vanished in the same way that this page mysteriously vanished.

Since I no longer wanted to write the review, I sort of forgot to keep playing the game. It was no fun. Especially it starts out no fun, with new players imprisoned in a non-massive, usually non-multiplayer area I came to refer to as the Newbie Hutch.

Along came my friend Dariakus, purchasing the game on the strength of my lack of enthusiasm for it, and soon it seems like everyone around me is playing the thing. So that's what happened to me. The same bug that gobbled up Rod Humble two years ago finally got around to me. Of course there are major differences between EverQuest and Anarchy Online. The first and - sue me - most important is - finally - the graphics. It's become a little irritating to read comparisons between ugly graphical MUDs and beautifully written text MUDs. Especially offensive to me is the assertion that the imagery communicated by that text is not graphic or vivid, cannot be measured against the content of a graphical mud, and is either superior or inferior because of its form rather than its content.

To my mind, Anarchy Online proves this isn't true. Finally we have a graphical MUD that is more vivid and prettier than its text counterparts, not because it is graphical but because of the stylishness of its design and the professional quality of its execution. A curious thing happens: Players share common points of reference, experience immersion in and respect for the world around them, and the conversations and actions between them become a text MUD of sorts within the graphical context - actual roleplaying, and by this I mean not making stuff up but interacting honestly with what is around them as though those things were real. As a result, mundane details and made-up storeis are replaced with convincing discussion of the world and debate over its events and politics.

It's like Subspace, with cities instead of web pages.

Segue to the all important issue of Cosmic Rift, the last of its kind.

It was with some enthusiasm I learned today that the new zone, whose name has now escaped me, had gone up at some point in the recent past. It sounded somewhat promising based on the description. Sounded as though some interesting things would happen in that zone. So I tried it out.

Shortly after entering the zone I experienced a crushing fatigue such as I can't compare to any recent gaming experience. I remember some years ago I was made to sit at a table full of graduate students in music theory. Watching and then playing in this zone was something like that. I can't criticize the game because I didn't give it even the beginnings of a chance. Other people seemed to enjoy it. I was first struck by the complete lack of terrain (read: "wall in space") in the zone. Apparently the Cosmic Rift team is shooting for gritty realism or something. I'll try and force myself to play it later. Right now things look pretty bleak to me.

Two pithy additional comments about Anarchy Online. It pretty much works right finally, though it literally requires 256 megs of RAM to run properly. (Fortunately, the stuff is dirt cheap right now.) And 95% of the screenshots I've seen from it are terrible, including all the ones on the box. They make a gorgeous game look like another EverQuest or Asheron's Call, and it's not one.

Another months with one update. Let's see if I can double that in this next month.

My thanks to anyone who still checks here.