Monthly Archives: July 2004

Planetia

Planetia is a FREE ticks based space strategy game.

You own a planet and together with your galaxy and/or your alliance you try to dominate the universe. Develop your planet and attack/defend with your fleets to gain power.

Player can play together with friends in small private galaxies (10 planets) or in larger random galaxies (20 planets).
People can start with different race planets each having it’s own shiptypes to develop and build.

You mine asteroids for resources and try to attack and capture asteroids from others planets in the universe.

Fairly easy gamepley but quite a tough game to play due to the highly competative community.

Advisable is to get help in the start from an experienced player and/or to find an alliance in the game which you can join.

Planetia has a strong gaming community and has it’s own IRC server and extensive gaming forums. This game has been around for 8 rounds (jun 2004) now with thousands of people playing each round and has been the game of the month on mpogd.com in jan 2004

Priston Tale

The english version of Priston Tale can be downloaded at eng.pristontale.com. There are already many versions of Priston Tale and servers are set up and already P2P in many asian countries such as thailand, korea, and I think China. Keep in mind that Priston Tale has been in the beta stage in the USA for about 2 years, and I’ve heard it was going commercialized, but any which way, they already announced free Priston Tale until level 39 (that’s still a lot of gameplay).

Interface-The interface for Priston Tale I think is decent. They of course have visual display of your HP and mana. They have hotkeys assigned to check your character stats, inventory, and so forth. It is also real simple, click to move, hold your left mouse to keep moving, and left click on monster to attack, right click to use your assigned spell. The only things that really nagged me was that they only allowed 3 quick slots assigned to numbers 1,2,3, on your keyboard for use. Knight-Online I think offered 8 or 7, around there. Another thing about the interface that really nagged me was you cannot hotkey your skills, at least I haven’t been able to during my gameplay, you had to open your skill window, and right click on the skill to assign it to your right mouse button.
I give interface an 7/10, halfway decent, still needs some work.

Graphics-Now graphics in Priston Tale are good for an anime-style looking MMORPG. The textures are detailed (unless you turn down your graphic settings for better performance), and there are barely any jaggies. Spell designs are decent, hacking and slashing does show some nice particle effects. Character creation needs to be more diverse, you can only select the 3 facial features of your character, nothing else really besides his/her class/tribe also. Character models are not really a biggie, they are decent in the game, a little diversity here and there. One thing that I did love was the login screen, the 3D background was simply beautiful. I give graphics 9/10, good, of course, but not perfect, lacking some diversity in character models.

Sound-The Sound in Priston Tale is good. I loved the background music, it really added the element of feel to the game. I turned it off mainly for performance issues, but the gameplay was simply not the same without the background music. Spell sounds are very diverse. Attacking sounds get repetitive after a while, but there are also a very diverse array of monster sounds. There are also good interface sounds that every RPG should have. I give sounds 9/10.

Gameplay-Ahh, gameplay in Priston Tale is very addicting. I faced many issues connecting to the server, mainly because of system reasons. Beware 256 Ram computers and below! Gameplay in Priston Tale is very good, the party system is awesome, your party is shown as yellow dots on your map incase you lose them on your screen ;). Up to 6 party members, experience gets splits decently. Not INSANELY hard to level up, actually is pretty easy from levels 1-20. This game mainly lacks spells(can’t learn first one until level 10), there is a decent selection of armors and weapons in the game. Game did get boring to me after about a week, well that’s me, I just got bored of hacking and slashing, and real LACK of spells, I cast same 2 spells for 4 hours of gameplay.
I give gameplay 8/10, for some people it gets insanely addictive then they lose interest after a while.

Lag-Lag is pretty unbearable at times, especially if you have a mid-range computer. I have 256 RAM pc 2100, 2.4 ghz P4, and it lags pretty hecticly at crowded areas. I died 3 times in same night from hunting in the same area with about 3 parties. When monsters spawn (spawn ALOT) mixed with about 20 people, lag starts easing in, for me about 3 second lags every 5 seconds. I didn’t get Disconnections a lot, mainly because I have DSL. Loading times on my PC are unbearable (beware 256 RAM). There is moderate gameplay lag. I rate lag 6.5/10 (game is a little resource hoggy and moderate gameplay lag).

Community/support-Ahh the community, in-game people are very nice, I had a high level give me free steel armor and free kite shield the other day. But on the forum boards on the eng.pristontale.com site, people are very mean and idiotic. Support such as getting hacked and losing items, Administrators don’t do anything or close to nothing. I give community/support 5/10, ingame people are decent, except for some KSers, bad support, bad forums.

Overall-Overall, Priston Tale this year comes out to be in my Top 3 list (I’ll have to see how guild wars and WoW comes out). I give it a 8/10 overall. I recommended, if you’re bored then play it! (be warned download client is 528 MB)

The Five Pillars

This game has managed to keep my attention for quite some time now. It’s not a hard concept to grasp, but to actually play it well, is not all that easy.
The game is turn based: meaning you get one turn every 5, 7 or 10 minutes (depending on the server you’re playing). With these turns you can do things like build an army, research and use spells, attack or buy items from the market.
You can put as much or as little time in it as you like. As it takes about 24 hours to get maximum turns, you can play once a day if you’re active. But this is not a requirement.

The nice thing about this game is the community: although the player base is still not large enough, the players that are involved right now are more than happy to welcome and help any new players. This help can be found in the forums and on IRC and you can also join a guild and instead of fight alone, fight and learn with (new) friends.

However, it might be difficult to understand everything right away. First of all, you can read several start-up guides that are available. But sometimes they don’t have all the answers. My advise: don’t give up. Try things yourself, or ask around if you really need help. And if you die, just reincarnate and try again.

+ Community
+ Administrator (listens to player’s comments and tries to improve the game as much as possible)
+ Challenge

– Difficult to get started (ask help if necessary!!)
– Minor bugs that still appear every once in a while
– Small player base

It’s worth checking out.

http://fivepillars.jaggu.org/