h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

David,

Here's a little tip from me to you, Mr. 26199. Give Asheron's Call a try. It's one of those games that your wife/girlfriend/significant other/mother says, 'You love that damn game more than you love me' about.

It's put out by Microsoft, but don't let that dissuade you. It is addictive in the extreme.

If you do decide to play it, log on to the Morningthaw server. I'll meet you there, give you a few tips if you'd like.


Have fun,

The Traveller
A.K.A. Malchik of Morningthaw
ISO-9001 Certified

Sounds interesting... what sort of game is it? I tend to go for first-person shooters (hence the fast-paced and violent ) but, I'm certainly not against trying new things...

Currently, the game I'm playing more than any other is Counterstrike... it's a Mod, in fact, for Half-Life... and a very good one. Terrorist/counterterrorist, been playin' it against my brother .

26199

It's a fantasy-based 3-d scrolling adventure game. It's like if you took a big bowl and mixed in equal parts MUD, Quake, and SimEarth. The visuals are stunning, the combat is quick and challenging, and the role-playing options are unbelievable.

Imagine playing Quake, and when you are finished with a dungeon, hitting the surface, going into a town, selling some of the loot you just got, buying a book to write down a nice story about your travels for that day, sitting at a bar to get some gossip about another dungeon that's bigger and badder than the one you were just in, then going up to the top of a hill to watch a fantastically rendered real-time sunset.

I'll be lucky if my wife doesn't divorce me, 'coz I spend all my free time either playing this game, or talking about it. It's that addictive.

It's like Quake for grown-ups.




The Traveller
ISO-9001 Certified

Oh, and I forgot to mention:

If you want it to be a first-person game, you can do that.

You can also have it be a third-person game.

Or a seventh-person-twice-removed game.

You can adjust the camera angle any way you want, so you can have the 'camera' right behind your head, angled slightly to the right, following behind your shoes, looking right into your face, or looking at you from straight above.

Very cool game.

Oooh, sounds good .

What d'you actually have to do?

Hmmm, perhaps you ought to write a review of the thing... there's a PC games page somewhere in h2g2 where they're collecting reviews.

(It *is* a PC game, right?)

(Just checking )

26199

A review? Hmm. Maybe.

What do you have to do? That's a good question. One of the great things about the game is that it is constantly changing, so you can never actually 'beat' the game. New quests and story lines are introduced every month, usually complete with new dungeons to explore, and new nifty weapons to get.

So I guess the objective of the game is different for each person.
For one person, he might try to make his (or her) character the biggest and the baddest mo-fo in the land. And so they might keep killing things to gain 'experience', thereby making thier character stronger, and buying bigger and badder weapons, etc., etc...

For another person, they might want to see as much of the 'game world' as possible. So he might spend all his time in the game wandering from place to place, fighting anything that gets in his way.

For me, I like to go dungeon-diving with my real-world friends. So me and four others agree on a time and a place (in the game world) that we are going to meet, and we head on into the dungeon, carving a bloody swath wherever we go. Sometimes we live, sometimes we die, but we always have a great time. And the game has a chat feature built right in, so you can tell your friends stuff like, 'Look out, there's a big nasty golem right behind you'. Or, 'Well, you gonna stand there all day looting bodies, or are you gonna help me kill this thing?'

Man, see what you've done? I get talking about this game and I could go on for hours.

Anyway, the bottom line is, it's a cool game.

Basically it's an on-line RPG?

Sounds neat... I play something of the sort myself, except it's entirely text based... you can find it at http://www.cardea-rpg.com - it's completely free. Worth a try!

Hmmm, is the game actually available in the UK? On-line gaming tends to be significantly more complicated over here...

26199

Oh, I don't know if it's available in the UK. You could check out the website. Here is the URL:

http://www.microsoft.com/games/zone/asheronscall/

And yeah, it is basically an on-line RPG, except a lot of people play it just for the combat. And that's fine, if that's what you want it for.

But just as your character can have skills like crossbow and melee defense, you can also specialize in alchemy, or cooking.

Fascinating game.