I was introduced to EverQuest some time back and was realy amazed and enjoyed the enormous multiplayer aspect of it. I found it a truly absorbing experience ‘becoming’ my characters and enteracting with the environment and other players. It’s really odd when you find yourself thinking about it as if it were real. I found myself keeping track of characters I liked and others I didn't, or even hated. I would make mental notes to work on practicing certain skills like jewelry making and have to remind myself to go shopping and try to remember which stores sold the food I liked at a good price. If you’ve never played it, you might think I sound weird, but if you have you know it’s not me, it’s the game. My friends and I even took to calling it ‘EverCrack’ due to its addictive nature. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I played several days straight a couple of times.

So, to hear there was a new game like EverQuest only with better graphics and set in the future was exciting indeed! I was told it was called Anarchy Online and so I did a little research on the Internet. I found some stories of bugs during beta but good reviews and exciting forcasts for the most part. I downloaded some of the screenshots and the demo mov files and decided this indeed was going to be cool! I couldn’t wait. I was out of town when it released, but bought it only a few weeks after.

Once I got it home I started the install. Make sure you have plenty of resources available. The requirements on the box are Windows 95/98/ME/2000, Pentium II 300 with 64MB RAM, 2x CD-ROM drive, Direct3D compatible video card, DirectX compatible sound device, 700MB free hard drive space and a 28.8 K Internet connection. There is NO WAY this game is playable on a machine with those specs AT ALL! I mean it WILL NOT RUN. The box recommendation is a little better at a Pentium III 450 with 128MB RAM, Direct3D compatible video card with 32MB RAM, 8x CD-ROM drive, 1GB free hard drive space and a 56K Internet connection but IMHO that’s way below the playability mark as well. My machine is no super box, but well over those specs – Celeron running at 456 with 384MB RAM, GeForce2 with 64MB RAM, a 44x CD-ROM drive, the game installed on it’s own hard drive, over 300MB available in virtual memory space and a cable modem connection that I’ve never had choke on me. Even those specs, which are well above ‘suggested’, the game required a arduous two-hour instalation process, took up 830MB of disk space, slideshows often when I turn around and had on several occasions run out of virtual memory. Let me make that last point again: ran out of 384MB (3x the reccomended) RAM and over 300MB virtual memory space! I forget...how many M’s in ‘memory leak’?

So, I was finaly exploring the new world and I must admit it is pretty. The sky especialy! And the landscapes are much more varied and realistic that other games with rolling hillsides and huge futuristic skyscrapers. There was much more variety to the look of your character with your body shape slightly adjustable, lots more faces to choose from and all kinds of clothing available to be bought or looted inside the game. The characters look a lot more realistic that anything else I’ve seen and the variety caused me to do quite a few double takes as people went running by. Okay, that sums up what I liked about it.

What I didn’t like was a lot, starting with the documentation. Now, I’m not one to read the book cover to cover before giving it a go, but I like to have something to refer back to when I get stuck. Not much here for that tho. Not only is it sparse, but it is all run together so it’s hard to even find the section you are looking for. In fact one time I was trying to look up how to perform some function and I found places where they mentioned the function but they all refered to a section that I swear doesn’t exist! There is only the vaguest of descriptions of the stats and requirments of everything in the game making it really hard to know what choices to make. Still don’t know why some things wouldn’t work and I have a pretty high IQ, goddammit!

Yeah, the graphics were great, but even with my PC’s specs well above the recommended level I still had probles. I got slideshows all the time when zoning or turning in open spaces, or really any ol’ time it seems. It actualy got me killed once because I couldn’t get myself pointed toward the door. My head pokes through low ceilings all the time. I've fallen through numerous mountains and buildings. I've been attacked and damaged by NPC's that aren't even in the room. Also, the servers were down all the time. Got kicked off several times and then never could get back on. The interface was cludgy and wouldn’t act right at times. Some stackable items wouldn’t stack. The held-key/click combinations I found far from intuitive. And the list goes on, but all these issues I could’ve lived with.

What really pisses me off and why I would never play this game again is that the most important part of a game like this was unreliable. In a game like this, the most vital part of the interface is the vitality meters. Combat is the only way to progress in this game. Succeed in combat in this environment you have to be able to reliably monitor your, your oponent’s and sometimes your teammates’ and their opponent’s vitality. You need to know who is dieing faster, what weapon is inflicting more damage, when to apply first aid and when to flea. Several times while playing this game I had opponents whose health had dropped to zero yet kept fighting for several rounds. Once I noticed an opponent’s health started below full, slowly droped and then suddenly went to full for no reason. But infinitly more annoying is the times I finished a battle with half my health left, only to have it mysteriously disapear and DIE! If this was some sort of melee game where you just jump up and start shooting again that would be one thing, but this is a stategy game the point being to accrue experience points in order to level up. In this game, when you die you are docced a ton of your hard-earned experience points. I don’t have patience for a strategy game that on occasion not only fails to reward succesful strategy, but actualy penelizes you. The first time this happened I was shocked and annoyed. The second time I stopped playing.

I just hope I can find what I did with the box so I can return it.