Anyway. I've still been playing Dungeon Fighter Online, and it's been a blast. I've been commended ... or ridiculed? ... I dunno. Either way, I do my normal thing while playing MMORPG's ... and that's LEVEL, and fast. Granted, the holiday exp bonus' has helped out quite a bit, but still. I've also made a fair bit of money, although it's a fair bit harder to do here, as you're limited on the amount of areas you can go through in a day.
I also read a great deal of different web comics, game review sites, and other... miscellaneous sites. One in particular I go to regularly is "The Escapist Magazine". It's the home of Zero Punctuation. If you're a gamer, and have never heard of this man ... you need to be slapped, and HARD. Anyway, on this site, they also have many other things that are interesting reads from time to time. Just the other day however, one person had done a compilation of different posts on the theme of learning from mistakes or something like that. One of the posts was "The best games you never played". In this list were some that I wasn't too thrilled to read about, nor interested in downloading, even though they were free. One however, piqued my interest.
See, I've always loved games that were full 3d movement environments. Games like Decent. Yea, good old Decent. ::cough:: Anyway, back on subject. Apparently back in 1999, there was a section of Micro$oft that was used to develop ground-breaking technologies. Things that could be modified and put out full-scale via the main company. This section had it's own name, but never put anything out under it's name, seeing as it was just a sub-section of the big-wig. The crew there thought up a nice 3D space shooter, but of an MMO variety. Well, not so much MASSIVE as we know it today, but perhaps just a regular Multiplayer-Online. When it initially launched however, the only way to play it was to of course, purchase it. Then on top of that you had to pay for the monthly service charge to be a part of the "Zone", Micro$oft's gaming hub thing of the time. Unfortunately it flopped, and M$ pulled the plug on it. Shortly thereafter M$ made the Zone free rather than Pay to Use.
This game I'm talking about, has been alive and kicking with a good group behind it apparently for the last 10 years or so. The game is called Allegiance. You can download it there, and sign up as well. Be fore-warned: This game has a HUGE learning curve. The training missions are buggy (at least to me all but one was completely buggy and couldn't be finished). The one mission that does work, is the last one, it's also the only training mission that will account for any custom controls you may have set up before playing. This means that for the other training missions, you are forced with the default keyboard/mouse setup to do stuff. Oh, and that last training mission? Yea, it was created by the community.
The game is pretty unique. You pilot different space craft around a network of areas, wherein upon the initial spawning in the map area, you don't know where all the wormholes (alephs) are, and you have to actually go and find them. You have a commander that will research different techs, and build stuff to take over portions of the map so that you can get more tech and everything like an RTS. The difference is that your little people that are doing the fighting? Yea, they're all real players. Granted the miners, and constructors and stuff are NPC's they have a pretty good AI, for what they're there for at least :). The movement through the environment can be best summed up by me as: You're piloting a hovercraft that has 360 degree movement capabilities. You're flying along in one direction, going 100 KM/h, you make a hard bank to the left and up 90 degrees ... you're momentum still has you going in that initial direction, so, you'll slowly make an arch around until you're finally heading true to the direction your ship is aiming. It's not one of those, turn and instantly have 100G's but you're going in that direction now. It's actually quite nice as far as I'm concerned. It behaves how I think it would really work in space.
I've not attempted to command yet, nor will I attempt to any time soon. I want to learn how to pilot things, and figure out where stuff is for easier detection and map revealing for the commander. Also learn all the lingo.... heck, when you install the game, it puts two icons for you on the desktop, one for the game login itself, and another that links to the wiki.
One bad thing I've not liked yet, is the fact that on the wiki it suggests you connect to the TeamSpeak server that's dedicated for the game (as it doesn't have built in voice-chat functions). Why is that a bad thing? You'd think it was a smart move? Well, sure, it would, if there were more than two channels. No. Wait. Make that ONE channel. See, that second channel? Yea, that one where everyone's chatting in? You're not allowed in there unless you have the password to it. Where's the password? No clue, and the people within the game that are in the TeamSpeak server don't answer. Oh well.
Oh, one last thing. Minecraft has gone into beta now, so, the price is supposed to have jumped up as well (I've not gone to look, as I've already got it so I don't need to pay again). There have been some interesting bugs that have come across, but he's ironing them out supposedly. My classic server is doing as good as before, although at times I get inundated with massive amounts of griefers... most notably when my server ends up in the top 10 for some reason on the main minecraft site. Glad I'm running a custom server software wherein I can undo the griefer's ... oh wait... it's got bugs in the custom software, wherein sometimes, even after immediately kicking someone, or them logging off, it can't find them in the database to undo their stupidity. ::sigh:: Oh well.
