I was trying to hold off posting until I'd actually gotten to play the other game, but I downloaded two games from GPotato.com, a MMO company (the people responsible for FlyFF). The games I downloaded are Corum Online, and Space Cowboy Online. Let me talk about each in this post.

Again, on my quest to find a decent hang-out MMORPG, I decided to visit the makers of FlyFF. I enjoyed FlyFF to an extent, except that the Filipino community, to which I'm limited since we're IP Banned from FlyFF International, is really bad. So upon visiting the GPotato website, I saw that they're also the makers of a game called Corum, of which I'd heard before.

Corum is a new game in its early stages. It doesn't use the same engine as FlyFF, to my surprise. It has nice unique graphics, which aren't quite realistic, but aren't necessarily cutesy either. Let me list what I don't like about Corum first, because there's only a few.

1. ) Fixed Resolution and Graphical Options
You can't edit it, as far as I know. The game doesn't run too poorly even on my crappy machine, but in towns when there are a lot of people sitting around, it gets a little choppy, and I can feel my CPU grinding. An option to run it at a lower resolution or with less detail would've been nice.

2.) NOT NEWBIE FRIENDLY
This game isn't the most unfriendly game there is, but it kinda leaves new players, especially those with little or no experience with MMORPGs with little room to learn about the world. There isn't an intuitive tutorial, or guide NPC, or even a help menu. They do, however give you quests all throughout the game, which should help you figure out what monsters to fight and where. But they don't tell you where to find the next quest after the first few, so I found myself running around the two starter cities looking for quests at one point.

3.) Ugly Melee Attack Control/Monster Selection System
This is its major downfall for me. I started out with a Ranger, which is a melee character (oldschool Ranger definition; like a thief/assassin). When you point to a monster, you see its name and its HP bar at the top of your screen. When you click it, you move to where it was when you clicked. This is a bad thing, because the monsters are moving around like 95% of the time. So to chase a monster down, you kinda have to keep clicking on it, or guess where it's going and beat it to that spot. Then when you're within melee range, if you click it, that's when you start attacking. Sometimes, probably because of lag, the client won't recognize that you're in range. So the monster is attacking you, but you're doing nothing, as if you're out of range. This has caused my death on more than one occasion. This problem is notably reduced when you're using the Arcus (an archer; the only ranged character in the game), or a mage character that can spam spells (via right-click). All in all, it can get frustrating having to chase your enemy down.


With that aside, let's talk about what's cool about this game.

1.) Game Design is Nice
When you start the game, you're in a world map. You can see the beginner village and a few dungeons, including player-occupied dungeons in your screen. This seems like an offline kind of thing, because you won't ever see anybody else on the world map. This gives it a feeling of being an offline RPG, which is cool to me.

2.) Music is Nice
Yeah the music also adds to the feeling of an oldschool RPG. They're always subtle and non-intrusive, but certainly noticeable enough to make you feel nostalgic in a way (at least it did that for me).

3.) Item System
The item system is pretty interesting. From the way I see things right now, weapons are important, but they're set in a way that you can be using the same weapon for 30 or 40 levels and it would still be pretty strong. This causes you to invest in a great weapon, like upgrading it and adding stats and stuff. I'm using the weapon you get in one of the low level quests, and from what I've read on the forums, this'll be the strongest weapon I get until the level 35 (?) quest, unless somebody's really spent a lot of time making a better weapon (like +10 with many many added stats on a generic wepaon). Quests will get you some pretty awesome gear (usually in sets with set bonuses) even at high levels.

4.) PVP
PVP seems like the highlight of this game, which I like. I haven't tried PVP yet, but I'd like to. From reading stories on the forums, PVP is very rich in this game, because of the uniqueness of the strengths and weaknesses of each class, and even the variety of which you can build each class.

I'll play Corum a little more. I don't have much time to do so, but I'm hoping I can get my character to a decent level (60-70 sounds fine). I'd also like to try their PVP sometime soon.


Now, on to Space Cowboy. As I told my sister: if you like 70's style mecha anime/manga, or if you like flight sims (both first or third person) or shooting stuff down, or if you want to be a geek of something this is probably the game for you. I haven't played this game yet, but judging from screenshots and forum posts, it sounds like an awesome game. There's so much information, like what weapons to put on your ship or "Gear", what engine, etc. There are even formations and strategies. The game client available on the website right now is about 900+ MB, but after that you have to download another 800 MB or so of patches, which replace most of what you've downloaded from the original installer (gah...). They really need to update the installer. I've been downloading and patching for about 30+ hours now (and I still have about 600 MB to go I think). My DSL isn't the fastest, but still, no patching should EVER take this long. Just think if I were on dial-up! D: D: D:


B-boy news: I learned a lot of things. Members of Battle Crew (J-Masta and a B-boy called Jessie [or however you spell it; sorry dude]) were at Urban Hope last Monday, and taught us some fundamentals of some power moves (in my case, I learned a little about how to make my swipes better, and how to do turtle floats). I also got some tips on my styles to make them more dope. Props to those guys. I think I levelled up like 15 levels in that one night. I'm still feeling the muscle pain from that time.