Colder Still

Last week I played Rohan Online: Blood Feud, and last night I slogged through a bit of Requiem: Bloodymare. These are not good games. I have a soft spot for eastern fare, although most of it is frankly trash, but these two games are really pretty awful.

Rohan has a bit of charm to the character designs and music, and the sound effects aren't too bad. Since I consider sound effects second only to variety in importance when judging the quality of a game, I can almost recommend it. For a while. It's fun for a day or two, until you reach the inevitable point at which you find yourself whacking at the same monster over and over again for that .1% of a level. In Rohan this happens at about level 15.

Requiem is a different story altogether. Apart from not being a HORROR MMORPG, but merely a very bloody fantasy MMORPG, its major crime is making the /shout command a premium feature in its F2P scheme. Pay the optional $8 or $15 and not only do you get more xp, smaller death penalties, and other things whose default settings should be something developers arrive at in the interests of making their game challenging and thrilling; for that small amount of money you have access to a feature that comes free in every other Korean game ever made, a feature which has always benefitted others more than the person using it.

Imagine my embarrassment learning of this clever plan only days after declaring Rohan the most backwards game I had ever played.

In my depression I went back to RF Online for a moment. We'll talk about that later. I actually love RF Online and wish I hadn't hit a brick wall at level 34. But it's time to hop on my return flight and play some shitty American games again.

Thit's week's shitty American MMOs are Starport: Galactic Empires" and the ever-maligned Dark and Light. I say shitty primarily to shield myself from criticism. The truth of it is that thus far I've found D&L to be a charming and stable game which happens to control and draw about as smoothly as Runescape did five years ago.

Son of a bitch, now I'm playing Runescape.

Right now, I am playing Runescape.

Fuck you, Internet. Fuck you.