30 second previews of games I've never seen

[Akasha]

Wow but did the MMORPG market blossom while I wasn't looking. There are more of them now than you can count with a whole sack of three-fingered hands, and we're just getting started. I've looked at practically none of them, and expect to be playing exactly none of them in the near future. The reasons for this are numbered in the legions, but the recurring theme is one of "holy crap, are they still trying to remake EverQuest?" Having blah-dee-blahhed all of that, here's a few thoughts on some MMORPGS I've played, and some thoughts on others that I've only seen a few screenshots of. Read along - it promises to be ribaldic.

Tabula what?
Tabula Rasa, for those who aren't Ancient Roman, means blank slate. The game would have been better named Oris Rasa, or in a language specifically non-dead; "Blank Stare". Good idea for a game whose official response to the question, "So what exactly is this?" begins with "Well its kind of difficult to explain..." and ends with a gigantic ::boggle:: emoticon. I've seen a few screenshots of Tabula Rasa - fifteen of them to be fake/precise about it, but the funny things about all of them is that I only really needed to see one. I've selected a random screenshot to serve as an example:

Ignoring with much strain and struggle the fact that her loins appear to be ablaze with the white hot fires of hades, it is obvious that what we are looking at is a female form. While that isn't a problem for me in, and certainly of, itself - this is what ALL of the Tabula Rasa screenshots consist of. While I'm not entirely positive, I'm somewhat certain that the land of...Tabula-Ville(?) has its male population. But the question is, where are they? With all the screenshots I've seen, I am left to assume that Tabula-Ville is somewhere on the island that Wonder Woman is from. They have men, but they must be keeping them well hidden from the rest of us. Or is it just that in a population of five thousand buxom Linda Carters, the men find themselves as invisible as the Amazonian Air Force? The fact that Tabula Rasa continues to find itself populated with people is proof, I must suppose, that progenics do in fact, take place there.

I burned myself really bad once in a gasoline-and-green-army-men accident when I was a child. The life-lesson I took with me that day, along with a few lingering twenty year old scars, is that hot things hurt - real bad. Looking again at the picture above, well... The punch-line is yours; my gift to you. Use it for good.

EverQuest Deux
(This will be a six second preview)
Its EverQuest with prettier graphics and higher minimum system requirements.

The Son of Lineage
actually titled Lineage II, its the game that Richard Garriott's company agreed to un-stupid in exchange for funds to develop Tabula Rasa. The riddle that needs solving is how they wound up with the development funds anyway. I say this because Lineage looks about as un-un-stupid as I've ever seen. Computer Gaming World's recent preview of it left me angry that we never definitively solved the mystery of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. It left me angry about this seemingly non-sequitious observation because it inspired absolutely zero thought and interest in me about the game itself. Whenever I'm at a complete loss for thought or interest in general, I tend to ponder the mysteries surrounding the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Don't ask me to explain - I'm not a therapist. Lineage II will be great if you already love Lineage itself and are not a complete moron. I say complete, because a minimum level of moron is already established for you. Lineage II will also be great if you like pretending to be a Japanese schoolgirl and KEKE is a lion's share of your vocabulary. That's what makes it the perfect internet game. Thousands of thirty-forty year old men are already playing it.

World of Warcraft
The previews and beta reports on this game promise great things. I have reservations not because I don't believe the previews and reports, but because I've seen nothing from Blizzard and Friends to make me believe that they'll have any idea how to control hacking and bug exploitation in their MMORPG. But what do I know? I've only played years worth of Diablo, Diablo2, and Starcraft. I mean, its not like ALL of blizzards online games are ripe with players using 3rd party tools to kill you anywhere in the map by pressing a button.

Oh wait - its IS like that.

Star Wars Galaxies: Now With Space
Whatever clever name they've given the first official expansion to Star Wars Galaxies, its still a game without focus or purpose. Unless becoming a Jedi is a purpose for you. In that case, hope its worth the several hundred dollars you spend to get there. I just played Knights of the Old Republic again. Ah, the simple pleasures of life - like lemonade in July, Baseball in August, and being a jedi without paying twenty bucks a month. What a time to be alive.

Post-Mortem
I'm sure I could go on and on and on because I've only scratched the surface, but I have an important project to get back to. I'm writing the Unofficial Player's Guide to Tabula Rasa. Chapter One is entitled "Well, uhm, you see, the thing is..." And I haven't finished the prologue yet.

Write up from : Arcadian Del Sol Dot Com
First found at : Gamebunny