Libra's Gaming World

Exploring the Spore Galaxy

2008-11-29T21:09:00.001-08:00

Well, this game was a major surprise! It was the most anticipated game of the year and beleive me, I understand why!

You start the game by creating a small cellular organizm. You pick it's diet, carnivor or herbivore, and off you go in the Tidepool of this newly livable planet. There are tons of other cells out there so the competition is fierce. You have to eat to accumulate DNA points and add body parts to your little organizm. As you advance in the game, your creature becomes more and more complex and eventually you evolves legs. It goes on like this with tons of explorations, interaction with other creatures and little missions to gather more DNA points. From the cell stage, you go the the Creature stage, then the Tribal stage, Civilization stage and then the Space stage. You get to create buildings, vehicules, space ships... And share your greations with the entire Spore community.

The game is very will created. Your creatures can sing, dance, strike a pose, roar...The only thing I find a bit negative is that it doesn't take long and to evolve from one stage to another, not giving you much time to explore the possibilities of that stage.

The graphis are wonderfull, the possibilities of creatures to create are limitless...it really is an amazing game, with hours and hours of unique game play!

After playing for a week, I have to give this game a big 5. The makers of The Sims and SimCity have impressed me again! A wave of applause to EA Games.

Discovering the Perfect World!

2008-10-27T14:13:00.000-07:00

Still in the theme of free MMORPGs, I decided to go out and try one of the most popular out there and that I hadn't tried yet: Perfect World International.

So far, the experience is wonderful:

Great graphics that can compete with WOW in quality
Great story
Very nice interface (a little like Flyff)

The goal is to protect the Perfect world from the Wraiths. They were the original inhabitant of the world and were supposed to have been destroyed, but now they are back. The current inhabitants; Winged Elves, Untamed and Humans, now have to unite to defeat the Wraiths and save the Perfect World.

So far I really love this game. I still have to play more to get a better liking, but at only level 5, I already see the features as being very well designed:

You can totally customize your caracter's face and hair, like in WoW
Winged Elves can fly even at Level 1
The mini map give you coordinates of where you are, where NPCs are and any other object you wish to find.

One thing I have noticed so far though is that the help information for quests is very incomplete (www.1perfectworld.com does not have all the Level 1-19 quests listed) and it can be hard to find quest items, or even the moster you need to kill, without asking people around....if they answer...

Apart from that, the quests themselves are a lot of fun.

I recommend this game to anyone who loves MMORPGs. It's almost Perfect!

My mark for Perfect World International is a big 4/5 (for now....)

The Online Gaming Experience...Free

2008-10-19T11:36:00.000-07:00

I thought it would be good to give a little review of some of the most popular MMORPGs you can play for free.

These are two I would recommend:

Fly for Fun
and
Rappelz

Both are distributed by Gpatato and are absolutely free to download AND play.

First lets talk about Fly for Fun (Flyff) as it is still my favorite.

The graphics are very pleasent, colorful and maybe a bit childish but none the less amusing. It is an Anime style game, made in Korea.

The ultimate goal of the game is to reach the highest level, 120 and gain experience and rare items, including flying board and brooms...

Flying is the major characteristic of the game. Once your caracter hits level 20, you are capable of using either a broom or a board and fly to your destination.

There are 4 classes you can choose from: Mage, Mercenary, Assist or Acrobat.

Each class has a different set of special abilities. That makes an nice element of change should you get bored of your Level 22 Mage and wish to try something different.

The only downfall is that quests can get a bit boring and repettitive. After you killed 100 Lawolfs, you kinda want to move on to something else and sometimes the drop rate of quest items can be pretty low. Dispite this fact, the game is farelly addictive and Gpatato made it pretty interesting with new PvP arenas, one PvP channel (in the other chanels, dualing is possible but you can't kill your oponent), mining and a wide variaty of special events. Since it is absolutely free, Gpatato gets its financing by selling special game items (like a bunny costume during the Easter event) for a small fee to interested players.

I give a big 4 stars to Flyff

Now when it comes to Rappelz, the same commun feature apply (PvP arenas, a PvP channel, mining or gathering of some valuable items) You can also by special game items from Gpatato and they conduct pretty nice spacial events. Rappelz however is a much more advanced and sofisticated game than Flyff and the graphics are much superior. The World of Rappelz is also much bigger.

The main feature is that you can, and most likely should, tame a wild beast to become your pet and help you during quests. Here again the goal is to get to level 120 and you can choose from 3 Races; Deva, Gaia and Asura. Within those races, you can choose different classes at different levels.

Leveling up is farelly easy in the biggining but once again, quests can become repettitive and boring. One big plus for this game is the veriaty of quests you can work on at the same time.

According to me, the biggest flaw is the interface. You can't move arround and do everything using the mouse...Flyff was better for that as you could have your Spells on keyboard shortcut and walk around using the mouse... you can't do that in Rappelz...it's very big on the keyboard.

But once you get used to it, it's pretty nice to play and also gets very addictive.

My vote for Rappelz is 3.5 Stars

Of course, there are tons of free MMORPGs out there that you can try. Here are a few others I have stumbled uppon:

NosTale

And many more... You can find a decent list of what is out there on MMOHUB .