EverQuest Online Adventures For Playstation 2

So, finally, like I've been promising, submitted for your reading pleasure, a review of Everquest Online Adventures, and the beta process. First of all, though, I have some administrative details to take care of. First, I made myself a spiffy new .gif header for my articles. I would like to thank Charlotte from http://rubberducky.nu/siesta who requests that she be given credit for the matrix font. (Actually, since this is a month late, I think a different "Special" Logo is being put up, but if you looked last month, you would have seen it, and if you look in may, you'll see it. For the "special" one, I was bored one day, and found this cool picture for a different gaming site. So I chopped off their logo, and put on the console-tations one. Then I got more bored, and pasted a picture of my head on it from when I was in the corps. It's my only good picture from the corps. Actually, given that I hate almost all photos with me in them, given that I actually like one says a lot, and I just lost my train of thought.) Second, you may notice the Game Cube icon on the header, and be thinking to yourself, "This clueless nimrod never does reviews for Game Cube!" Well, on a limited basis (I don't actually have regular access to a Game Cube), that's about to change. Next month I plan reviews for Phantasy Star Online, and Pikmin, both exclusively for Game Cube (yay!). Thirdly, I would like to point out that you will NOT notice an X-Box icon up there. There's a reason for that. I'm sure you'll figure it out. (If not lets just say that if I were the last gamer and earth, and X-Box was the last console platform, I wouldn't play on it.) (well . . . maybe Halo, but that's it!) Ok, so now for the story of Beta. Beta Episode I: The Phantom Network Adapter

Every now and then, I occasionally sign up for random beta tests via the internet. In particular, I was trying to get onto the Star Wars Galaxies beta (done by Sony Online Entertainment). After signing up for that, it asked if I wanted to sign up for the Evercrack beta (PS2 Network Adapter required). I didn't have an adapter, but signed up anyway, because I figured I wouldn't get it. Well, low and behold (thank you, Murphy!) I got the one beta I didn't really want that much. So off I go to get a Network Adapter. Note that the current time frame here is approximately the end of November/beginning of December, and while the adapters had been plentiful the month or two before, suddenly they were nowhere to be found in the stores. I checked ebay, and the little things were being scalped at generally $50-$60 (retail $39.99). One clueless sod was asking $100. So anyway, I get back to College Station (from Fort Worth) (Texas) (I guess that would make it the weekend before thanksgiving), and go to Hastings, and lucky me, they had TWO of them. (Not for long). Thus I became the proud owner of a PS2 Network Adapter. Beta Episode II: Attack of the School Firewall

So finally armed with a network adapter, I install it at school, and then proceed to admire it. Yep. Looks pretty snazzy. Uh-huh You betcha Pretty darn cool It'll be lots of fun Yep You might be asking yourself at this point why I didn't actually go play Everquest, rather than just sit there and admire it. Well, lets travel back into the dark ages of time, back to the early 90's. One bright and shinny day, Texas A&M University gets a phone call from some yankee school (somewhere in Ohio?) wanting to know why A&M was hacking them. Computer Information Services (CIS) does a voodoo ritual (actually, they got the poultry science department to sacrifice a chicken. It's the computing dark ages, remember?) and discovered that one of the faculty member computers was hacking the other school. While said faculty member was out of town. Further investigation showed that it seemed that a group of hackers had hacked that computer, and they were using it to hack other computers. So CIS decided to put up a firewall. This had an effect very similar to smoking a cigarette in sniper territory at night, or perhaps putting sugar-water on yourself to keep the mosquitoes away. Needless to say every hacker and their dog assaulted the firewall with everything they had. Throughout the relentless assault, A&M's firewall became more sophisticated, and it became evident that most of the hackers were amateurs and were just using programs and instructions given to them by the good (read: good = Neo and Trinity from the Matrix) hackers. Well, putting up the firewall kinda made the Good Hackers (no angelic good, you fool!) kinda . mad so they took stole the plans for the school firewall, and analyzed them for a weakness. They determined that by sending a signal straight down one of the T3s, they could initiate a chain reaction and blow up the firewall. (Not really. They succeeded for a while, but eventually the firewall got even stronger, and eventually they lost interest. But my version sounds cooler.) So anyway, thanks to dark age Neanderthal hackers, the school has an annoying firewall, and coupled with CIS's draconian totalitarian control techniques, means I had no way of negotiating it with the Playstation, unless it was a computer. Actually, come to think of it, I really didn't play because the game disk was at home. (teehee. Oops.) Beta Episode III: Rise of the Empire

Yeah, right. You just wish that I knew what the title is. I just wish that I knew what the title is. (The rest of this Episode skipped for obvious reasons.) Beta Episode IV: A New Connection

It is a time of gaming unrest. Our hero, has won his first victory, against the evil Murphy, and has secretly procured the Phantom Network Adapter. Pursued by sinister Thanksgiving Weekend Traffic, he races home in his 1991 Chevy Blazer, custodian of the Playstation that can help bring Everquest to the general public. Ok, so I get home, and realize that I have no TV. (I left mine at school, its too big and heavy to move around a lot) So being the nice person that I am, I go and steal my brother's TV, and drag it off to my room. I hook it all up, set up the network adapter, plug it in, and put in the disk. And I'm downloading updates (*twiddles thumbs*) As a side note, connecting to Sony's network through a router can be touchy. I think there were some side notes up about it on the website. Luckily for me, I had very little trouble initially getting connected. So after downloading some updates, about 4 MB worth, and typing in my registration key, and making my account and stuff, I finally get to character generation. I suppose this is a good time to explain my mission. I got to take part in Beta III. Beta I and II were mostly debugging runs. From what I've heard, on Beta I the game and server are really unstable. The server goes down a lot (multiple times a day), and they tend to wipe everyone's characters a lot, and you have to keep starting over. Beta II is more stable, and the server goes down less often. Beta III is mostly for checking game balance, and for load/stress testing the servers. So anyway, I finally get into the game, and I'm given a choice of 12 different races. And those races are, best as I can recall, human-eastern, human-western, elf, dark elf, dwarf, halfling, troll, erudite, barbarian, and gnome. Obviously, I didn't get to play all of these. I only played barbarian, and Sidra played a dark elf. I did run into most of the other races though. So I think about what I want to be, and while wizards are cool, they take too long to get powerful, so instead I became a Barbarian grunt, er... warrior. There were several classes to choose from for barbarian. As I recall, there were warrior, shaman, rogue, and a magician or enchanter, or something to that effect (Read: wizard). I went for warrior because I wanted to whack things hard. Barbarians are the strongest race, and warrior is the strongest of the barbarians. And also because it's a well-known fact that in fighting games, females are the most dangerous, I became a Barbarian Warrior Female, named MasConejos. (Actually I went female just because I'm a pervy lech). I looked pretty scary too. I was bald except for two tendrils of hair that fell over my face, and I had scary face paint. SO finally now, I have an account, a character, and I spawn into the barbarian hometown, which is in the very north of the world-island, which looks kinda like Greenland, actually. Including the ice and snow, for my region. I got REALLY sick of ice and snow after a few days. Beta Episode V: Zack Strikes Back (Illegal kidney shot)

So I spawn in my hometown, in a bar nonetheless. (All good beginnings take place in a bar.) It starts me talking to the bartender guy, who is the leader of my order (Barbarian/Warrior). He explains things a bit, and sets me up with a mission to go find a tailor by them name of (I forget), because if I want to be a butt-kicking fighter, I need some more armor than my fur-bikini halter-top and a kilt. So I step outside, and become instantly lost. The town seems really big and confusing at first, and there are lots of people all over the place, who all seem to know exactly what they are doing. (In actuality, the town is practically one long street with building on one side, staggered different distances from the main concourse.) But after wondering around randomly for a bit, I find the tailor lady, and she gives me some cheap leather armor. I go back to the bartender guy (Marrik? Marak?), and he says that I've completed my quest, and I get some XP, and go up a level. I talk to him again, and he gives me another quest to go talk to a particular shaman guy, and the coachman, and to do whatever they say. So after wandering around for a longer time, (see picture of town) I decided to cross the river, and there I found the coachman, and at the end of the tunnel, I found the shaman guy who bound me to the spot. Whenever you die, you respawn, you respawn at the last place where you were bound. So after finding those two, I went back to the bar, got another mission complete, XP, and level. The next quest I received was for the bartender to make me a good Club of Severe Maiming, but I had to get the magical ingredients, which included a couple of rat tails, etc. So I went outside the immediate town wall, where the baby monsters are, and as I hadn't figured out to equip anything, I went running around punching rats in the kidneys until the died of internal hemorrhaging. Thus equipped with my rat tails, I returned, got XP, a level, and a Club of Severe Maiming. My next quest, was to go and get a necklace from a goblin ice warden, outside the town. This seemed like a good idea, as I was getting bored of the city. So off I went to the tunnel mouth, which had become a staging area for people to meet, and look for people to party with, etc. My memory gets a little sketchy here on exactly how things went, so I'll just make up the stuff I'm not clear on. I went out, by myself at first, and went about killing blackbirds, bats, rats, small spiders, and other generally helpless and defenseless creatures smaller than me. The game mechanics here are actually fairly good. For example, in Diablo II, every time you go up a level, you just get a few extra stat points, and a level 40 barb can take out my level 70 sorceress. In Everquest, you have modifiers depending on if you are fighting above or below your class. For example, assume you are a level 10 character. If you are attacking a level 11-12 character, you only do like 75% damage. If you are fighting level 13+, your hit rate and damage go to something like 20%. If you are fighting a level 9 or below, you do maybe 100-125% damage, and they are at a penalty to hit you (of course you get less experience for killing things below your level). The net result is that it's pointless to kill things far above or below your level, because either its impossible, or you get no experience. Killing things your level and below yields good amounts of experience, and teaming up to kill things a few levels above you yields really good experience. (And if you somehow manage to kill something significantly higher than your level, you get excellent experience, but we only did this successfully once, and died about 3 times trying to duplicate it) How does one know what level something is? Well, there are color codes. When you target anything, be it a player character, a non-player character, or a monster, it will have a color-coded aura around it. Things your level are white. Things two or so levels above you are yellow. More three levels above you are red. Two or so levels below you are dark blue, three to four or five are light blue, and more than five below you are green. Of course, as you go up in levels, the levels that the colors that things "con" to you represents also go up in level. So anyway, after that brief digression, we go back to my character. I went out, killed things smaller than me, went up a level perhaps, and finally found a warden. I challenged the warden, and we went into honorable combat. I fought valiantly, and even though the warden conned red, I nearly had him cornered and dead. Or so I thought. It turns out he was faking, and when my back was turned, he snatched my Club of Severe Maiming, and thrust it right through the back of my pretty little head. And thus I respawned back at the tunnel, with the worst hangover I had ever had in my short, electronic life. All notions of fair and honorable combat left my head at this point. Beta Episode VI: Revenge of Los MasConejos Diablos

Return of the Jedi was originally entitled Revenge of the Jedi, did you know that? Lucas decided, though, that "revenge" was not a very Jedi quality, so he changed it to "return." I believe that if you look around hard enough though, that you can still find movie posters for "Revenge of the Jedi." Luckily for me though, I'm not a Jedi Being infuriated with the warden's dirty trick, I trained for hours on end (about 2-3 actually, but that's not important) until I reached level 7 or so. Still feeling a residual headache though, I recruited a band of a lackey, a goon, and a thug to accompany me. We went back and challenged the warden. He fought hard, almost our match, but then a fortuitous kidney shot from the thug caused the warden to drop his weapon. I stepped in for the finishing move attack, and looked into the warden's eyes, and my conscious convinced me that it wasn't a fair end for the warden. I considered this briefly, and then gestured for the warden to pick up his weapon. My conscious was so proud of me for turning the other cheek which made it a Kodak moment, for when the warden turned and bent to pick up his axe, I shoved my Club of Severe Maiming right up his pretty little @$$. Beta Episode VII: Dénouement

So anyway, like Hamlet, this review has gone on entirely too long. And now, like Shakespeare, I'm going to quickly wrap everything up so I can go watch spirited away again (saw it at the movies last night, it was AWESOME. You must go see. Now. Or no more review for you. Ever. Right. So anyway, After that, I generally went exploring the nearby regions (the whole world is basically divided into big squares, 2000 by 2000 feet, and in the beta version at least, you could bring up a debugging tool on the screen that would tell you the name of the region you were in (i.e. Halas for the barbarian hometown), a region number (squares were basically numbered across and down, so just the number could tell you in what direction you needed to head to get to another specific region (i.e. 2 squares over, and 1 down) and also gives you co-ordinates for the region, to five significant figures (i.e. 234.56 or -998.71)), and leveling up. I did make a few friends, and later we formed our own guild, Los Lobos Locos. The game supports user created guilds, that can have any number of members, and you can give them 5 or so different ranks from New Recruit to Grand Master of the Guild. It cost like 5000 gold to start a guild. Eventually I grew tired of seeing nothing but ice and snow, and so I or we, as the case may be, went out exploring even further. I eventually had covered about 1/3 of the continent, most of the western coast and near interior. This is also where the coachmen come in handy. When you first come to a coachman, you sign the ledger. From there, a coachman will instantly transport you to any of the adjacent towns with coachman, but only if you have signed their ledger too. So initially you have to explore on foot, which from Halas to get anywhere takes about an hour of real-time running across the world. Luckily there is an auto-run feature, that will keep you running in a straight line without having to hold the joystick forward. You can still make minor course corrections with the stick without interrupting it, or type messages to each other, etc. This game is very odd in that you spend, literally, nearly 50% of the time just running from point A to point B, yet for some reason, the game is still kinda addicting. So anyway, I started branching out, and signing ledger books, but I did it in a hopscotch fashion, and it was the last 2 of about 6 that I got that actually let me warp effectively from point to point. After several days of exploring though, I could warp from Halas, the northern most point in the game, to very nearly the bottom of the world in about 5 minutes (due to loading times for each stagecoach jump). I personally think this is rather impressive at my low level (between 10-15 throughout), because after you get a ways outside each town, all the creatures are between levels 20-30, and all have KOS, which means that they will kill you on sight. This is really sucky, because the fields and slopes are littered with lots of big mean creatures that all want to kill you. I died probably 30 times in trying to expand and branch out. At one point I had made it to the Human kingdom of Qeynos, and I died like 15 times trying to get out to go back home to Halas. It was very frustrating, because you respawn right back in town again, 30 minutes running time away from where you died. Exploring is definitely a thing easier done by high-level people. (There was a group of people that the developer team granted a high level character to (level 30); I wasn't one of them. Right. Lost train of thought again, talking about Tribes and Halo. As a last note about exploring, at one point me and my guild buddies (who incientily thought I was female. I didn't correct them, because I was role-playing. Or I'm a pervy lech. You decide)) and we found this cool cave. We decided to czech it out, and went down the tunnel, and discovered a sleeping small dragon. We all very quickly crept quietly away and then ran like the dickens. It was cool, but dying there would have sucked, because it took use 30 or 40 minutes to get that far. Right running out of steam now, and I still haven't reached the end. It is time for my pre-conclusion final statement then. I haven't yet really mentioned much about the beta testing aspect of this yet. This was Beta III, so the main issues were any bugs they hadn't caught yet, and balance. There wasn't much I saw in the relm of glitches. I read some of the stuff on the forums, and there were some other things that other pople found though. The closest I found was on top of perhaps the biggest hill in the game. It went WAY up there From the top, if you looked out across the hozion, there would be a big black blob across the center of the screen. Don't know why, or if anything ever became of it, but I reported it. Beta III is mostly aiming for balance issues and stress testing the server though. We did find several balance issues. On some of the latter barbarian quests, you had to kill these two special goblins. They would only spawn next to two particular igloos, and the spawn rate was something on the order of 1 every 12-24 hours. Needless to say, this created a huge bottleneck of people standing around waiting for hours for these things to spawn. I got lucky on one of them, I was running by, and a group were all fighting against this one beastie, fighting over the loot, I guess, and one of the special goblins spawned right next to me, and no one was paying attention. (and yes, there was generally a line for this too.) Anyway, since no one was paying attention, I killed the thing, and grabbed the special quest item I needed. One guy saw me just as I was finishing killing the goblin, but then it was too late, because once you kill something, the corpse belongs to you and your party, if you have one, and no one else can access it for several minutes. So I got one of the items I needed. I bet that other guy was rather upset. But anyway, there were several quests like this, where it was hard to do, and there were lots of people waiting or camped out. There were some quests, as I recall, for other races that had some bug and you couldn't complete it. Enough. Plot. It's an MMORPG. It has no plot, other than that which you create yourself. If you look at my story as a plot for my character, its not too shabby. Graphics. (These will all be short, needless to say.) The graphics are good, I think towards the higher end of what the Playstation is capable of. Visibility range is fairly decent, which is always an issue in these games, and magic effects, while not uber-flashy, are simple and elegant. Sound. Sound was under-used, at least in the beta. I don't remember there being any music. The only sounds really, are the sound effects, and even they are space. There are sounds for whacking things, sounds for spells, and monster growl just before they attack you. There are a few other miscellaneous sounds, and the sound of running, and water. You hear a lot of the running sound. Gameplay. Control is fairly simple, and a lot of it is customizable. You have instant, pre-formulated things to say that you can edit, and other things like that. The most regrettable things lacking, are that there is not an Auto-Attack command, like the Auto-Run, so that you can talk while you whack off, and that the typing interface, while about as good as it is going to get for a controller, is pretty poor. To type, you press down on the analogue stick, and a big letter/number pad comes up, kinda like a keyboard, but in alpha-numeric order. You use the controller to move around and select, letter by letter, what you want to say. This means that messages of anything more than a few words are a pain to write, and that also a whole plethora of abbreviations come about as a result. On the other hand, I'd be surprised if one couldn't attach a USB keyboard and use that to type. As for the rest of the game, as compared to Everquest for the PC, this one is more limited. You cant do Player vs. Player Combat, or much of anything else besides running amok and killing beasties to level up. There are no other trades to pursue, such as weapon making, or trading, or anything else. Just fighting. Despite that, and even despite that you spen 50% of the time just running, the game is still oddly addicting. Difficulty. Well, I'd say the difficulty is perfect, since it's a level based system, and there are always bigger harder things to fight than you. I'm told that in Everquest for PC, there are things like full-scale dragons (no pun intended), that require 20 high level people working together to kill. I don't think this game will have quite that scale of multiplayer cooperativeness, (max part size is four, and multiple parties cant share experience or loot) it will probably have small dragons that require 4 high level people to kill. Replay. 12 different races. 14 different classes. 100+ hours to reach max level for one character. You do the math. On the other hand, it would kinda all be the same after a while, so multiply that by 0.25. Its still a long time. If you get bored, you can always cancel or sell your account. Niftyness. This review is 8 pages long in Word. Surely you can find something you think is nifty in all of that. Overall. This game is very interesting and kinda addicting to play. In all honesty, if you have the money and time to burn, go get it, I think it will be worth the money. I'm personally waiting for Star Wars Galaxies to come out, at which point I will through the remainder of my money at it, and disappear into electronic oblivion, much to Sidra's dismay I'm sure. But if you have the money, time, and you are a PS2 fan, go for. Drop me a line, tell me all about it. Final Ratings: Plot N/A Graphics 9.0 Sound 6.0 Gameplay 8.7 Difficulty 8.8 Replay 8.3 Niftyness 8.5     Overall 8.21667

[Back to Collector Times]

[Prev.]

[Return to Reviews]

[Return to Gaming]

[Disclaimer]

[Next]

Copyright © 2003 Zack Roman MasConejos@yahoo.com