I'm truly amazed by this story of the man in Afghanistan. It appears to be a 'very meet the new boss same as the old boss' situation. I realize that they might be set in their ways and full religous freedom isn't going to happen in a few short years, but this still seems outlandish.

Hey everyone, I'm offically on the list! yea for moi! aren't you happy for me? I know I'm happy. and not just because of the anti-depression medication. I'm proper happy.

Do you want to be instantly smart, funny, successful, and goodlooking? Then sign up now for a free trial of this weird crap we're selling that will grow your hair back. Let's face it guys, if you don't have a full head of thick wavy hair you are not a true man, but in fact a gelded dawrf thing that women will look upon and shriek with terror and disgust. You want to get laid don't you? Yes, of course you do. You are are a true man and thus are guided by your base urges.
So you know what you must do! You must call the number at the bottom of the screen! You must pay the $4.95 shipping and handling and then after the two-three weeks shipping time you will go out and in preparation buy a twelve pack of condoms. Extra large condoms! Yes! The side effects!!
Joy to the world!

Maybe if I post something else it'll change the site. It seems nothing else is working.

Dot Hack Suck

Least I got a debt card out of it

Okay, I buckled. I got the stupid card. I mean it was just sitting there on the hard drive. The game of the year in hundreds, thousands of magazines and it was just sitting there on our hard drive.

Six gigs of pure gaming perfection just waiting for me, calling to be used, shouting at the top of it's cyber lungs (which isn't very loud with our speakers actually, but it's the thought that counts I guess) to be played. How could I resist? It would be wrong of me to deny it wouldn't it? The geek police would come in and arrest me. I would be forced to give back all my membership cards, the free pictures of Angeilna Jolie, and my precious Babylon five tapes.

I couldn't let that happen. You must understand that. So I got the frellin' card. Does that make me a hypocrit? Maybe. A guy who spelt that word wrong probably? Most definately. But I got the card and started playing the game. The first 30 days were free. And it's a good thing because at the end of the that thirty days I discovered something astounding.

....This game kinda sucks.

Don't get me wrong the graphics were mind blowing, the....ummm....well the graphics were really good. The gameplay could have used a bit of fine tuning. A good example of this was how they overcame the battle problem. In all your normal RPG's put out by Square they have a seperate screen for battling monsters. You know how it is, you're walking along and the screen flashes, you get the weird chung-chung noise, and you move into the screen with just you and the monster. However, you can't do that in online games. My guess is that would take up too much memory and processing power to remember every single person's battle and remove them from the space other people could see them while fighting the monster. So what they did was that when you first attack a monster the screen doesn't change at all but you might as well be in a different world. Allow me to explain....

You're walking through the forest. You see a bunny. You want to kill the bunny. You click on the bunny and you get the little box with your options. You click attack and even if you're a good five steps away from the bunny you'll swing your sword and hit the bunny. Everyone else in the cyber world can see you and the bunny killing each other, hell they can even cure you as you fight and cheer you on. The thing is though is that when you start to lose if you click disenage and run away the bunny keeps hitting you. You can screens apart but to the overlord computer you're still right together in your own separate world. So you die. A lot.

This gets old pretty quick. That and the fact that the fights at first look like they should be of the action RPG variety (Your Kingdom Hearts, Dot Hack Signs, and Dark Clouds. When you walk up to the guy and hit him it means you hit him. When your sword misses the guy it means you missed.) When I first started playing I would move around during battles thinking it mattered. Then after my sword phased through the orc a few times with no damage I realized I could just stand there like a moron and it wouldn't change anything. Once you start a battle you can just walk away from the computer too. It has auto attack so you can go for a bathroom break and still fight to the death. It's kinda stupid. Where's the adreniline rush of moving around and evading attacks? Just hitting F2 and watching your guy do spells and attacks is no fun. I want to be in the game more! Not just the guy hitting buttons at the keyboard.

Then there was the story. I'm sure if I had bothered to look hard enough I would have found it, but from what I could tell it was lacking. There weren't any sort of cool recurring characters that eventually would join me on my quest. (like the black Ninja dude from FFVI or the simple joy of watching the Turks talk like in FFVII) They took all the fun out of RPG. It was just lone me wandering the countryside being killed by those god damn wabbits. Let me tell ya people by the end of a month you really wanted to just destory those suckers. We're talking driving to Square headquarters and smashing the servers that control wabbits levels of hatred. Bloody things....

The whole reason I play these games is to enjoy the witty banter of fictional characters while adventuring through an equally fictional world. I want multiple plots and subplots going on all at once then having them all come together at the end for some grand finale. Remember Final Fanasty VI? Each character pretty much had their own plot and arc going. Some even had two! The theif had his quest for redemption for being unable to save his girl from the empire back before you met him. He had some guru keep her in suspended animation to give him time to find the miracle cure to save her. Then he finally finds the esper to do it, and she comes back and tells him to stop focusing on the past and live.

The half esper half human girl who starts off with amnesia has to discover what love is as it related to her personal identity. The Doma guy who lost his family had to come to terms with his loss (In fact there's an entire dunegon where you go into his head and fight off his inner demons!) and he had to comically overcome his fear and misunderstanding of machines. The black ninja guy's plot you had to really look for. If you took him for lots of naps he had dreams that were like repressed memories of how he became this unfeeling ninja guy and at the end after the main boss is beaten and everyone's running out of the dunegon he yells out that he's going to start over and he runs off. There were ten characters like that! Each with their own unique personality and arc. It's the best game ever made by human hands! You can play it over and over and each time you see something new that enriches the characters and game a bit more. It wasn't about graphics or job skills you had or anything like that. It was about making you care about what happens in the game by drawing you in.

Final Fantasy online didn't have any of that. Everyone was clumped together and doing their own thing. Whenever I played I kept waiting for something to happen. A ninja man to be at a bar, or the guy with the airship hanging out in the inn. Something that would engage me in the game. It never happened though. I've played lot's of games by myself over the years, but Final Fantasy online was the only one where I felt alone.
-Mr.222 Feb 5, 2005

Geekdom should be Free!

The things I do for Fun

Ever played Final Fantasy online? No? Neither have I. I've got it all installed on the computer. Been there for about a week now. Cost me $28.95. I even endured going to Wal-Mart to get it. But I haven't played it. And why haven't I played it? Why haven't I, Mr.222, the greatest of the internet geeks, played the best game ever made? The coolest thing ever created for my kind?

I don't have a credit card.

Remember the good old days guys? When all you needed to be a super geek was a ten sided die in your back pocket? When if you knew the weakness of any given zombie based enemy you were the cool kid on the street? And it was free! Free! You didn't have to debate if you wanted a credit card just to be yourself or if you wanted to shed enough of your hard earned self respect to go to...Wal-Mart.

Although there was this cool guy in line wearing an army jacket. Cool guy, hated Wal-Mart about as much as I did. He said he hated the lines, but I explained how I can't stand the smell and he agreed after thinking for a quick second. Saw him a few days later at Shaws', explained my current problem, and we had a good chuckle over it, but enough about him. We need to focus.

Granted I should have read the box more carefully, granted I should have figured they wouldn't let me play online for free, but look past that for a moment won't you? I'm being charged a monthly fee to be me. It's like waking up one morning and someone making you give them a dollar or they shoot you in the head. I want to wake up free of charge, without having to worry that I left my wallet on the kitchen table and will I have enough time to roll out of the way when the bullets start flying? Will this be the day when my luck runs out and I get caught in a hailstorm of gun fire simply because I didn't want to pay the daily waking charge?
Just call me crazy, but that's not the kind of world I want to live in. I want to live in a world where I wake up every morning without the grinning gunman pointing his piece at me. Is that so wrong?

I don't think so. But that's what it's coming to, it starts with 'give us your credit card number so you can play the super fun game with your other dork friends' and ends with an explosive high speed car chase through downtown North Conway.
Maybe I'm getting off topic...

The thing is is that I shouldn't have to pay a monthly fee to play the greatest game ever created. I can perfectly understand Square's desire to turn a profit and I'm sure operating costs of all those servers can get up there, but that's why the devil in his annoying infinite mischief invented pop up ads. They're the gift you wish you didn't get, but serve the higher purpose of making services free. Instead of paying a monthly fee with money you pay a daily fee of mental energy putting up with the constant bombardment. And with the proper pop-up blocking technology it can be totally free, but the brilliant part is that the people paying Square to advertise still pay the money to Square. Everybody wins! Except the people who are paying Square, but they're expendable what counts is the mission.

I know what you're thinking, why don't I just suck it up and get a debit card? Why don't I join the rest of modern society and run into debt like a good little suburbanite? 'Think of it Mr.222', you're saying, 'think of all the pretty things you can buy with your new card. You can play all the online games you can stomach, you can buy all those Witchblade comics at Charlies you've always wanted, you can finally accessorize your room the way it should be accessorized. B5 posters bought on e-Bay, so many collector action figures that they blot out the sun, just give in...'

I'm not that kind of dork. I'm a low budget dork. I believe that you don't need fancy action figures to be the coolest nerd on the block. Being a nerd shouldn't be about how many fancy comics staring half naked woman with breasts bigger than your head you own. Being a nerd shouldn't be about how much you spend on online games no matter how cool. Being a nerd is about self respect. It's about looking in the mirror and knowing you watched the re-run of sci fi's Dune while everyone else was at the senior prom. It's about watching anime because you like the opening song even though it's in japanese. It's about using your brain to be better than everyone else, not your brawn.

At some point, probably during the late eighties early ninties, the dork/nerd/geek lifestyle got hijacked by corperate America. How big a dork you were depended on how many comic books you collected or the amount of action figures you owned in their original packaging. If you wanted to be a cool dork you had to go out and buy things. You had to get a credit card.
Well not me! I'm getting no such credit card! I'm going to sit in my basement watching my old B5 tapes (the ones I didn't buy on DVD!) and keep fighting the good fight. I refuse to be a party to their evil anymore. If I want to go on epic multiplayer quests, I'm make up imaginary friends and we'll go fight equally imaginary monsters in the woods. The way my dork forefathers taught me! I'll get out the old wizard cape I still keep in the closet and I will stop the FinRac from taking over the back field! Just you watch me.

Course the real shame of all this is that I'm now out $28.95. I mean I could have spent that on a new wizard cape. The one I've got is really starting to fall apart. I saw this real nice one at Wizardshop.com. They accept personal checks too. Damn convient if you ask me.
-Mr.222 Jan 11, 2005

by the way in case you're wondering, any zombie type creature is weak against Cure or any other sort of life based spell. Anyone knows that...