Eternal Lands Beta

Eternal Lands is a free MMORPG that is now in Beta based in what seems to be the middle ages with magic and fighting. The graphics, while not premium content, will apparently not run well on computers over 5 years old, which is a shame due to the small footprint the game takes up on the harddrive. My computer constantly registered 59/60 FPS during my trial.

The character creation process is still a bit clunky. At the sign-in screen you have a button to create a new character, but it doesn't automatically pop up the character generation screen. You have to click the button on the bar at the bottom to rename and set up your character.

After creating my guy, I proceeded to follow the tutorial. It's a pretty decent tutorial and if you need any help along the way there are plenty of people to talk you through it. Just join the newbie channel in the upper left corner and type "@" and your question.

Along your travels you can harvest vegetables, sticks, and eventually ore and other items. The graphics are about the quality you can expect from Runescape but that's an acceptable sacrifice for the payoff in game size. While World of Warcraft folders can take up to 10-12Gb of space for the high quality graphics, the download for this game is about 20Mb, plus the separate download for sound.

Movement in the game is a bit tedious. I couldn't find a run option and targeting the rabbits and beavers is laborious in the extreme. Not only do they move as fast as you do but they move almost constantly and unless you are with in range to attack it, you still have to worry about terrain obstructing your view (and thus your attack).

Healing can take a while as well unless you can afford a good healing potion, but for the first 15 attack levels (while you are learning to fight) you can use the tutorial dude to heal your character instead of eating to increase your regen and sitting down and waiting for 10 minutes.

Items while easy to obtain are nearly impossible to sell at the early areas unless you happen to have rabbit furs which you need for the fighting quest, or vegetables from the garden.

All-in-all, I found it a generally fun free game to start playing and would recommend giving it a try if you're looking for a free alternative to World of Warcraft.

Google Chrome OS?

In an article on the NY Times, Google announced last night it's plans to replace Windows in the smaller netbook laptops. For an OS that is bound within a web browser, I guess it depends on how it is able to interface with the hardware on how it will affect gaming on those computers. Microsoft has already lost a lot of OS share to Linux, especially on the server side and gaming has been gradually taking off on the Linux side as well with increasing gaming support utilizing WINE, now on version 1.1.25, which includes many virual memory and game fixes, including a sound fix for WoW.