Please please PLEASE let this be legit!
Ico was one of the most moving games I’ve ever played.
EA Sports Active — this ain’t no Wii Fit!
I just got out of the shower. Over-share? Well, there’s a point to it. I’m a morning shower guy. I can’t leave the house without my morning shower. So why did I just get out of the shower at 9:30 at night?
Because EA Sports Active came out today, and I figured I’d start right in. You remember your first day with Wii Fit? You headed some soccer balls, hula’d some hoops, did a little downhill skiing. No biggie. So I fired up EA Sports Active and figured I’d jump into some relaxing introduction to the program.
Nuh-uh.
Now in all fairness, I’m about as out of shape as a person can get while still being able to get out of a chair on his own locomotion. I spend my days sitting in front of a computer, and my evenings…sitting in front of a computer. And I’ve got the body to show it.
But still, I told Active I wanted a “lite” workout. That ended up being about 20 minutes of running in place, squats, side lunges, held-squats camouflaged to look like an inline skating mini-game, and some upper body stuff that honestly was pretty easy. It was the leg/thigh stuff that kicked my ass.
By the end of it I was a sweaty ball of jello, barely able to stay on my feet. It took a good 15 minutes before I could manage that shower.
So was it fun? No, frankly it wasn’t, but I feel better for having done it. The boxing exercise was fun (pretty similar to the one in Wii Fit, honestly), and the inline skating thing might’ve been fun had my legs not been screaming in agony by that point.
Was it convenient? Well, nothing works like it does in the ads. Active comes with a belt that you strap to your thigh, and for exercises like running, you stick the Nunchuk into it. That belt was a pain in the ass for me. I was wearing sweats when I started, and no matter how tightly I cinched the belt, after a while it’d slide down and finally off. I finally ditched the sweats and just worked out in boxers and a t-shirt, and then it did a better job of staying put. Guess it’s time to invest in some gym shorts; the guinea pigs were shocked.
Once you get the belt in place, you jam the Nunchuk into it. The fit is really tight and I worry about damage to the analog stick on the Nunchuk. And you only use the belt and ‘chuk for some exercises; for others you have to hold it, so you’re constantly jamming it into this pocket and pulling it back out.
You also get a ‘resistance band’ which you use for doing curls and stuff. You hold one end in each hand, and stand on the middle of the thing. Seems really easy, until you’re trying to grab the end of the band and the Wii Remote in one hand, and the other end of the band and the Nunchuk in the other, and trying not to get the cord between the Remote and the Nunchuk tangled in the band. I mean it ain’t rocket science but I did find myself wishing I had a third arm a few times.
I’m sure all of this will become less of an issue once I’ve used all this gear a few times.
The software itself is decent. For every exercise you can first watch a video to see how it’s done (demonstrated by a real person, not an avatar) and then during the exercise, your avatar takes up most of the screen, while a trainer leads you in an inset window. Encouragement is fairly constant but the trainer will bitch you out if you start messing up.
It all worked pretty well, except for the running towards the end of the workout. Suddenly it stopped registering consistently. My guess is that the belt/nunchuk had become twisted or something… I was about to pass out from fatigue so it isn’t all that clear to me what was going on 🙂 but I was jogging in place at what I thought was a consistently plodding pace, and my onscreen avatar keep slowing way down, then speeding up, then slowing again. Apparently the game watches the distance between the Nunchuk and the Remote to determine your pacing, so you do need to pump your arms as you run…maybe I was screwing that up? Running was working a lot better early in the session though, so it was something wonky, not bad software.
After the torture workout was over, my trainer gave me a glimpse at what we’d be doing tomorrow, and then I had to answer a couple of surveys about eating habits and exercise outside of the game. I found myself feeling guilty at not having eat enough veggies, or drinking enough water, and for only getting 3 hours of sleep last night. I found it interesting that I was already giving my digital trainer a ‘personality’ and wanting to please her. But I am a geek with something of a robot fetish, so there ya go… ok, over-sharing again.
For my trouble, I got a trophy for completing my first workout, and another for burning at least 100 calories . 🙂
So that was day 1 of EA Sports Active. It offers a much more real workout than Wii Fit ever did, for me. The pre-set 30 Day Challenge doesn’t let you just do the easiest things over and over, and downtime between exercises is basically the amount of time it takes you to change gear…none of that 2 minutes of mini-game, 2 minutes of loading screen that Wii Fit offers.
By the way, the game will work with the Balance Board, but ours is still out for repair, so I couldn’t test that.
At this point it’s pretty clear that I have the tools. If I stick with Active, I’ll wind up in better shape than I’m in now. I can tell you that just by how my legs and thighs are feeling after that 1st workout.
Sacred 2 Initial Thoughts (Xbox 360)
A few people saw that I’ve been playing Sacred 2 on the Xbox 360 and have asked me how it is. Rather than try to answer 140 characters at a time, I figured I’d offer very early thoughts here.
Honestly, I don’t know how it is yet. I’ve only put in about 4 hours, and have only gotten to level 9 with 1 character class (the goofily over-sexed Seraphim, of course). I *think* I’m going to like it once I figure everything out; the game really throws you into the lake and expects you to learn to swim on your own. The manual isn’t much help and even though I have Tutorials set to “On” I haven’t really seen anything I’d call a tutorial.
The game is really about growing a character. You have attributes (ie, Strength, Dexterity and so on) and you have Skills (Sword Mastery, Shield Lore) and then you have Combat Arts. Combat Arts are your “active” abilities. You power them up by slotting Runes into them. For every Rune you slot into a Combat Art, the art gets stronger but the cool down time increases (substantially). Both attributes and skills (which you get points for when you level up) can be used to reduce cool downs.
So you have this balancing act of making abilities as powerful as possible without making the cooldown times so long that they become less useful, but you also don’t want to spend all your skill and attribute points on reducing cooldown times, since that cuts you off from all the other benefits of skills.
And if you slot enough runes into one “School” of Combat Art, then you can enhance a combat art in another way. Each art has two ‘upgrade’ paths and it seems like you can only choose one of the two.
And the runes that you slot into Combat Arts can also be slotted into weapons, giving them a bonus.
And that’s just a quick overview of character development. I still don’t really get it all and I’m guessing I’m growing a gimped first character.
Gameplay wise, you map both combat arts and weapons to the face buttons of the 360 controller. So that gives you 4 weapons/combat arts. Then you can map another 8 to the Face Buttons + Left Trigger and Face Buttons + Right Trigger.
For some reason, I’m finding it really hard to keep track of 12 combat arts/weapons, in spite of the fact that I can be very comfortable playing an MMO with 4 banks of 10 hotkeys full of skills, consumables and the like. I think it’s because you can’t see all 12 at once? Since they aren’t always there, you don’t memorize them like you do skills in an MMO.
Potions get mapped to the D-pad, although Up on the D-Pad is always mapped to your Deity special ability (which I haven’t really looked into yet).
Basic gameplay here is very Diablo-like. If you don’t love top-down hack & slash RPGs, don’t even bother with Sacred 2. It isn’t good enough to convert anyone, and it is a pretty pure example of the genre.
A few gripes… the combat doesn’t have a lot of “umph” and you tend to have to play with the camera pulled way out (so you can see enemies before they see you) which means the onscreen foes become pretty tiny. This doesn’t impact gameplay — you can see their health bar clearly — but it kind of distances you from the action. The game also feels a little rough at times. Sorting through inventory is more cumbersome than it should be (you can’t see the stats of both equipped gear and gear in your backpack at the same time) and I’ve had Details screens refuse to pop up, and Quests get ‘stuck’ until I quit and restarted.
But on the other hand, there’s nothing really like this on the 360. The world seems huge and the environments are pretty lush. Your character persists between games, so you can play through again and again at higher difficulty levels with the same character, leveling up and maxing out gear. There’s a Chest in towns that you can store equipment, and all you characters have access to that chest. So if you’re playing a Seraphim and a really sweet piece of Shadow Warrior gear drops, you can stash it in the chest and roll a Shadow Warrior just to put the gear to good use. If you’re a hack & slash fan, you’ll get why these features are important.
I started playing at Silver Difficulty (2 of 4) and so far the game feels really easy, and that’s my biggest beef so far, but I’m led to understand it gets a lot harder later on.
I’m still on the fence with this one. I haven’t yet played enough to give it a thumbs up *or* down.
A hypothetical question for fiction lovers
My post rebutting Neil Gaiman spawned a lot of comments and a lot of good debate. It’s always eye opening when issues you feel are self-evident wind up being very much open to different interpretations with other people.
So I’ve devised a little test to peer into your minds to see how you tick. 🙂
Let’s imagine a hypothetical situation.
Assume a writer self-publishes (just to take the publisher out of the equation and make the example cleaner). He writes Book 1 of a new fantasy series. You pay your $25 for it, and you find that he’s a good writer, his characters feel really alive, his world is interesting and he poses a lot of intriguing questions. The end of the book is a classic cliffhanger with no resolutions…
Two years pass, and the next book he publishes is Book 1 of a different new fantasy series. You pay your $25 and find that once again, his writing is technically very good, his characters are well written, this new world is interesting and he poses a lot of intriguing questions. And again, a huge cliffhanger ending, no resolutions, no closure.
Two years go by, and he self-publishes a third book and it is Book 1 of a third new fantasy series. You know the drill — you pay your $25 and find the writing is good, characters are good, world is interesting, no closure, cliffhanger ending.
Another two years goes by and he self-publishes his 4th book, and it is book 1 of a fourth new fantasy series.
My question is: would you buy it?
And it is only fair that I be the first one to answer. And I absolutely would not buy it (in fact I probably would’ve stopped after book 2). An unfinished story gnaws at my soul — that’s just the way I’m wired. It’s like an itch that I just can’t scratch, and if an author indicates to me that he isn’t going to be finishing his stories, I won’t put myself through the self-inflicted torment I’d endure, no matter how great the author is. It just isn’t worth it to me.
There are more great books out there than I have life enough left to read, and more are being published every day. I literally don’t have time to read everything I’d like to read, so I’m always looking for reasons to filter out a particular author, and this is an easy filter for me.
If you’re in the same boat, you *probably* could at least see my point in my Gaiman post (even if you didn’t agree with it). If you think my answer is bizarre, then you probably thought my Gaiman post was off the wall. But maybe this’ll give you a glimpse into how I come to the conclusions that I did?
Anyway, I’d love comments on this. Am I just part of the lunatic fringe on this, or do most people like the closure of having cliffhanger endings followed up on?
Free Realms update
Free Realms seems to be signing up people left and right; they announced yesterday that they’d reached 1 million registered users (note: not subscribers). And they’ve added another 2 servers, bringing the total to 10. We logged in at 10 am ET this morning, and all servers were already at Medium capacity.
The Friends list is still borked, but it seems like the overall server crashing/unexpected downtime issues of last weekend are gone.
Speaking personally, Angela and I are still enjoying the heck out of it. In fact I found it a bit too enjoyable, and played so much last weekend that I aggravated my wrist (typical gamer/programmer RSI issues, nothing serious). Then Mon & Tue were very long work days full of head-down coding, which didn’t help the wrist situation any. So I’m restricting myself to short Free Realms play sessions a few times a day. And mostly doing combat missions, which aren’t as mouse-intensive.
It still feels like every time I log in I find something new. Today it was a whale breaching off the coast in Seaside, then later a crazy fireworks display from a musician named Bruce who was being held hostage by some ogres. When the last ogre was knocked out, a huge burst of rainbows and fireworks shot off from the rock that Bruce was using as an improvised stage.
We’re supporting the game, both via subscriptions (in my case, Angela has a Station Pass) and buying stuff at retail shops. I bought a couple of $10 Station Coin cards at Target one day, and a couple of Starter Packs for the physical CCG from Best Buy this week. Those were $10 too and are a decent deal. They get you a month’s subscription to the game ($5 value), a virtual dog (pets cost between $2.50 & $4.00 in-game) and some other in-game odds and ends, plus of course a deck of cards and a ‘playmat’. The down side is that there’s still no detailed instructions on how to play…just what’s printed on the playmat. Maybe all this stuff is obvious to veteran CCG players, but this is my first such game.
But I find it interesting that I’ve spent $25 this month on a “free” game and have zero regrets for having done so. The $5 for the subscription was a ‘must-have’ but the other $20 was just bubbling-over enthusiasm and wanting silly extras.
We’re gleefully anticipating the future of Free Realms. Apparently more jobs and more mini-games are in the works, as well as all those “coming soon” areas on the map. The funny thing is, we weren’t chomping at the bit waiting for the launch. I played a tiny bit of the beta and wasn’t impressed, and Angela had zero interest in the game (I’m not sure what convinced her to try it…I guess just that it was included in the Station Pass). And now we’re both completely enchanted by it.
If any devs happen upon this, here is my suggestion for the future of Free Realms. How about offering different ways of accomplishing crafting tasks? Granted I’m an old man and not the intended audience, but the smelting mini-game kills me with all its “frantically shake the mouse around” motions (ie, the bellows). I’d love a more cerebral alternative to doing those action-based mini-games. And I’m sure there are players who would like more of the whack-a-mole action-packed mini-games and that get tired of the ‘eliminate the gems’ stuff.
I’m visualizing an option when you start one of these tasks you are prompted — Minigame 1 or Minigame 2? — with 1 being action-packed and 2 being more cerebral. You could ask every time, or let the players indicate in their settings which style they prefer.
And one last request: soundtrack, please?
Or, just ignore me and keep doing what you’re doing, because what you’re doing is pretty damned awesome.
Rebutting Neil Gaiman’s Entitlement post
So today Neil Gaiman wrote a post called Entitlement issues… in which he answers a reader’s question about whether or not it is realistic for that reader to feel let down [an odd way to phrase things, but I’m just using that readers’ words] by the slow progress that George R R Martin is making on the next Song of Ice and Fire book. The reader asks what responsibility Martin has to finish the story.
Gaiman’s response: “George R. R. Martin is not your bitch.”
Teach that fan to respectfully ask a question, I guess. But anyway, Gaiman elaborates:
You’re complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you.
No such contract existed. You were paying your ten dollars for the book you were reading, and I assume that you enjoyed it because you want to know what happens next.
To which I say, bullshit.
Now, before I go any farther, I’m not hating on Martin. I’m addressing the issue in more theoretical terms here.
So anyway, yeah, Gaiman’s answer is bullshit. There is most definitely a social contract in place here. When I buy book 1 of a series, it is not a stand-alone story. I’m buying the first part of the story with the understanding that the rest of the story will be forthcoming. Without the rest of the story, the first book is just unfinished business. Essentially, when I buy book 1 I’m investing in the author, helping him pay the bills so he can continue to work on finishing the story. My $10 for Book 1 is a down payment on the $30 story I’m intending to buy (assuming it takes 3 volumes to tell the story).
If someone can genuinely convince me that this isn’t the case…that I can’t in good faith expect a half-told story I’ve paid money for to eventually be finished, then I’ll make sure never to buy part of a series until the entire series is completed. And maybe that’s the answer. Maybe these books shouldn’t be published until the whole tale is told. But publishers won’t do that. Why? Because they need us “investing” in the story in order to finance the rest of it being written.
Gaiman finishes his post by re-phrasing his first line like this: “George R. R. Martin is not working for you.”
Oh really? If Martin, or any author making his living from writing books, isn’t working for me, who is he working for? When he puts dinner down in front of his family, where did the money for that dinner ultimately come from? I don’t see many ads in the pages of the novels I’m reading. I don’t see any indication of a corporate sponsor. As far as I can see, the only source of revenue comes from the people buying the books. The customers. He is absolutely working for me. So is Mr. Gaiman, for that matter.
I write code for a living. Other people design buildings, or write soundtracks for movies, or create balanced and delicious menus for charity dinners, or build custom cabinets… many, many people use the creative sides of their minds in order to do their job. And pretty much all of them have commitments and deadlines and manage to make their deadlines, regardless of whether they’ve fallen into or out of love recently (see Gaiman’s post for that reference).
This idea that writing is some kind of holy behavior that can’t be tainted by being held to deadlines is, in my opinion, bullshit. And frankly, 99% of fiction authors can’t get away with missing deadlines, either.
And the idea the an author will sell you part 1 of a story and just decide “Naa, I’ve decided I’m not going to write the rest of that story. You can just make up your own ending.” and that we should be OK with that, is ludicrous. And the reality is, any author that regularly pulled such a stunt would soon find him or herself without a readership.
Again, I’m not hating on Martin. Because for people in all walks of life, shit sometimes happens. Contracts get broken, deadlines get missed in spite of our best intentions, we bite off more than we can chew and get into trouble [which seems to be where Martin is]. That’s part of being human and it happens to everyone. I feel for Martin. He must feel completely trapped at this point.
But I’ve also decided not to buy any more pieces of A Song of Fire & Ice until he finishes it, because I’m not sure he’ll be able and willing to finish it, at least not in my lifetime. My choosing not to purchase his most recent piece of the story isn’t malice on my part. That’s me investing wisely. I work hard for my money and I have to be choosy about where I spend it. My time is also valuable, and I prefer devoting it to complete stories, or stories that I’m confident will be completed.
So yes, there is a contract in place, and in spite of the best intentions on everyone’s part, sometimes the contract will be broken. When that happens, the people who had entered into the contract have every right to be disappointed, every right to feel let down. Telling a reader that he has no right to feel let down is astonishingly disrespectful, in my opinion.
Gaiman should keep in mind that we readers aren’t his bitch, either. Authors who work for us should be mindful of the fact that if you let us down enough times, we’re going to stop reading your work. And if we all stop reading your work, you’re going to have to find a new job.
Rough week
Sorry for the radio silence so far this week. I worked until about 10 pm on Monday, and 11 pm on Tuesday, and it hasn’t left much time for twittering, blogging (reading OR writing) or gaming.
The bright side is that my wrist is feeling better. I played so much Free Realms last weekend that my carpal tunnel/RSI/whatever the hell happens to my wrist, was starting to flare up. We’re loving that game.
Rumor mill is going great, isn’t it? I can’t believe we’re less than 3 weeks from E3. What’re we going to see? What’s this crazy new Xbox 360 camera all about? Will PSP Go! be announced? And what about this slimmer PS3 (along with, presumably, a price cut)?
I’ve actually scheduled days off for that week; I won’t be at E3 but I’ll be following the news in real time!
Ahh, screw it. Rant deleted. Ranting solves nothing.
A rough Free Realms weekend
Free Realms is having a tough weekend. Yesterday the website (and the game has to be launched from a website) was up and down (or just really really slow) all day, and this morning I’m seeing the same issue.
The geek in me wonders if it’s the game’s login servers or the web servers that are the hold up. If you can get in, the game runs fine (at least this was my experience yesterday…I managed to log in and was playing normally, while Angela couldn’t get the login pages to kick through to the game).
I’ve read a rumor that a stand-alone exe file is planned so we won’t have to launch from a browser. I hope that is the case. Might fix the problem with getting XFire to recognize the game under Vista, too.
On the positive side, when things stabilized last night, we found there were now 8 servers running. I believe there were 4 at launch, then they went to 6, and now 8. And all were a Medium capacity (which is typical of evenings). So it would seem the game is gaining traction. Anecdotally I’ll say it is becoming a lot harder to find ‘shinies’ now, due to more players running around. To me, that’s a good thing; I find myself really wanting the game to be a success so the devs can continue to add to it (the map has several “coming soon” areas on it).
I continue to putter around, doing a little of everything and not getting much in the way of levels, and not caring a whit. Which I continue to think is the ‘right’ way to play Free Realms, if an MMO can have a right way to play.
Angela was struggling with trying to do a 3-pip mission solo last night. I was on the other side of the world hunting for archeological items when she said “I might need help.” I finished my ‘dig’ (mini-game) and teleported to her. It’s been said before but I’ll say it again, getting to a friend in need is so easy in this game…it’s a really nice feature.
We had to try her mission a few times. Wait, let me back up for those who haven’t played. When you enter a combat mission instance, you’ll get a set number of Knockouts to use in order to successfully complete the mission. Most of the time you get 3 or 5. This means you can “die” 3 (or 5) times and Recover (jump up with full health and power), keep on fighting, and still “Win” the encounter. Enemies do not regain health, at all, so you can brute-force your way through some boss encounters by, say, getting him to 50% health before you get knocked out, then Recovering and taking off his other 50%.
Before you snort, I remind you once again the primary demographic targeted is younger kids. The game is designed around not being frustrating.
Anyway back to Angela’s mission. It turns out when a party goes into a mission, the number of Knockouts is for the whole party. So in this case we had 3 Knockouts between the two of us. So the first thing we learned was that if one person gets knocked out and the other is about to join him/her in a dirt nap, the first person should stay down and wait, so both characters can jump back with full health at the same time.
The first time we tried it, we went in as Brawlers since we both had the highest level in Brawling. I had 7 and she was I think 10. We just went into it spamming keys and things did not go too well. Then we tried it with me as a level 3 Ninja and her as a level 3 Warrior. That went even worse, though I think that was my fault. I couldn’t resist flinging shurikens at the oncoming waves of baddies (this mission sent several waves of 3 angry ogres at you) and so I got all the aggro, and I’m thinking ninjas don’t have the best armor… owie! Also, even though encounters scale, before level 5 you only have 1 special power, so fewer tools at your disposal.
At this point we decided maybe we needed a plan. 🙂 We decided to go back to the Brawlers since they have leg sweep, which is an AOE, and Throw Rock, which gives a brief stun at range. Then we headed to a nearby town and bought some health potions. While I was adding the health pots to my consumables bar I remembered I had won some “Root” balls in another encounter (consumables that you throw at baddies to root them) so I readied those.
When the first wave came in, I threw my rocks (the stun from these is really brief) and hit 2 of the 3 charging ogres. Angela waited a few seconds, then threw hers, extending the stun. Then I threw a root ball (that’s not the actual name of the item, btw) and halted 1 of them for a longer duration. In this way the ogres got to us 1..2…..3 and we took them down as they approached without too much trouble. The 2nd and 3rd waves weren’t quite as choreographed (no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy!) but we got through to the boss fight without a single Knockout. And he wound up being not too big of a challenge. Success!
Lots of verbiage to describe one encounter. But I just wanted to demonstrate that some of the 3-pip fights do take a bit more thought and planning than the straight-up button mashing that can get you through the 1 & 2 pip fights.
We’re still enjoying the heck out of the game. I’m certainly getting a lot of value out of the $5.00 I threw down for a month’s membership (and Angela is playing “free” since she has a Station Pass).
$5/month is my sweet spot (Free Realms)
I’ve grumped a bit (both here and on Tesh’s blog) about the monthly subscription model that many MMOs adhere to, and which seem more and more outdated every month. The model seems so limiting. I (and others) have talked about alternatives such as buying bundles of minutes, paying for access to certain content (the Wizard 101 model as I understand it) and so on.
And I griped about Free Realms really not being all that free. But I grudgingly ponied up $5 for a month’s subscription to Free Realms, and I’m finding that all my issues with a monthly model melt away as long as the price is low enough.
Fair or not, I work on the “movie value model” of entertainment. It costs me roughly $10 to see a roughly $2 hour movie, so anywhere that I can get entertainment for less than $5/hour feels ‘cheaper than going to a movie.’ It isn’t a perfect model and honestly I can’t afford to go to movies very often so it isn’t even an accurate model, but it is what I use.
In Free Realms, I paid my $5 and started playing, and probably spent more than an hour in that first paid play session, so the rest of the month is “free” according to my warped model. And I play the game a lot (for now) because I can jump in, do something meaningful, and jump out again, all in 5-10 minutes.
For instance yesterday, waiting for the water to boil for pasta, I logged in, Teleported to that town in the north with the mine (the name escapes me…getting old sucks), and ran in there and played the mining mini-game twice. Got some ore, some gems, some experience, and logged out in time for dinner.
Compare that to EQ2, where I paid $15 for a month about 3 weeks ago and so far have managed to fit in 1 play session of an hour or so. I don’t mean to single out EQ2, most MMOs really require a nice sized chunk of free time to play, and for me these days, those chunks are rare. Now I feel a nagging guilt that I *should* be playing EQ2 rather than Free Realms (or my other current time sink, Lawn of the Dead, aka Plants vs Zombies). I don’t like guilt, even when it is self-inflicted.
I wish to heck XFire would track Free Realms playtime on Vista, because I checked my /played time for this character that I started a week ago, and I’ve managed over 16 hours of Free Realms this week. I know for a lot of you, that’s a typical day. 🙂 But for me, that’s a huge amount of time for me to devote to a game in a week. Where did all that time come from? I guess the 5-10 minute sessions here and there do add up.
$5 for 16 hours (and counting) of entertainment? I can’t complain about that. I do need to shut off the auto-renew, though, in case I lose interest before my month is up (so far not looking very likely).
Now the RMT phase of Free Realms is a different story… but I’m pretty happy to have paid $5 for a month of having access to all the Jobs and all the Quests.
BTW, I finally unlocked Ninja…what a blast! And I had a glowy sword I’d made via Blacksmithing, so I started out uber. 🙂 I’m at work or I’d post a screenie.
And yeah, for now at least, I’m a bona fide Free Realms fanboy.
Seven Free Realms details you may have missed
When you first start playing Free Realms, everything seems pretty straightforward. But after you’ve been playing a while you’ll start to notice little nuances that you might wish you’d picked up on earlier. Angela and I have been comparing notes and here’s a list of seven things you might not (yet) have noticed in Free Realms. Consider it a little nudge up the learning curve, in the event that you’re just getting started and have missed any of these.
1) Join a Friend: Let’s assume you managed to get your friends onto your Friends list. On the Free Realms launch page, bottom left, is a panel listing your friends. To join someone online, launch the game by mousing over their name and clicking on Join Friend. This will cause you to not only log into the same server they’re playing on, but to appear in-world at their location (though if they’re running when you log in they will have moved a bit). It’s faster then figuring what server they’re on, logging in, then teleporting to them.
2) Map Zoom: The “M” key brings up a world map, but it can be pretty information dense near ‘hub’ areas. Did you know you could mouse over the big “town” icons (e.g, Sanctuary) and then click on it to zoom into a map of just that area? You can get a lot more detail that way.
3) Status Pause: So you’re playing a mini-game and the phone rings. Ack! What to do? In the top left of your screen is a big STATUS button. Clicking that brings up the ‘goal’ screen and pauses the game. (We haven’t tested this is all the mini-games but it definitely works in the gem-removal game, and I’m assuming it’s there in others, too.)
4) Dressing Room: Got some gear and want to know what it’ll look like when you equip it? From the Job inventory screen, hover over the magnifying glass (bottom right of each icon in icon view, and the far right column in list view) and your avatar will don that gear. This works for stuff that you normally couldn’t equip (i.e., if you’re not high enough level to use it yet). You can preview a selected item in the Station Cash Marketplace by clicking the magnifying glass icon on the right above the “Buy” button. There is no preview functionality in the ‘generic’ inventory mode, though, nor is there at merchants, which seems like a major oversight.
5) Changing Jobs at the Start of an Encounter: When you click on an encounter, before you enter it, you can quickly change Jobs from the icon at the very top of the screen. Can be helpful if you’re in a lower level Job and the encounter looks too tough. Just switch to a Job you’re better at, and have at ’em!
6) Class-Specific Collections: There are tons of collections in Free Realms. Did you notice that some of them are Job-specific? Here’s the thing about those. Unless you’re in the appropriate Job, you won’t see Job-Specific Shinies. It *seems* like Shinies are placed logically… so you’ll find Cook Shinies in and around harvesting fields, and so forth.
7) Buying a Pet: So you’ve bought some Station Cash and you’re ready to take on the responsibility of buying a pet. But different Pet Stores have different selections of pets. How can you be sure you’re giving the right pet his or her Forever Home? Skip the Pet Stores completely! Open the Marketplace and click on the “Pets” icon from the navbar, and voila, a list of all available pets (as well as all available pet clothing). Now you can be sure you haven’t missed the perfect pet!
Maybe all these are obvious to some folks, but to us they all eluded us for our first couple of play sessions. Hopefully someone will find the list of help. Please feel free to add more tips in the comments!