Mai Me Arai

While I’d dabbled in online games in the past in the form of competitve experiences such as Quake 3, which I will eternally suck at, Ragnarok Online was my first true online game. I played the Thai version and luckily there wasn’t that much reading to be done in the game as Oui was my very reluctant translator.

The entire game is about grinding from the get-go and looking back I wonder how in the hell I ever found it entertaining. It might have been the cartoon graphics that are done in the 2.5D style but it was the first game that both Oui and I played online, though we only had the one account.

Like many games of that generation it has PvP features that you can’t opt out of. The way PvP worked in this game is that if you flag you can attack anyone whether they are flagged or not. It’s a player experience that griefers love but the majority of other people hate and you never see it these days except in older games that are still hanging on thanks to a few dedicated players.

We only played it for about two months because we tired of the grinding and constantly being killed by other players quickly, but it was our first taste of what was to come.

Let’s be clear on something, I love my PS3. Adore it even. Saying so doesn’t automatically mean that I hate the Xbox360 or those who love it though.

There is one thing I hate about my PS3 though: the Playstation Network (PSN). Don’t get me wrong, I love the content and I love how easy it is to buy stuff on there – that is if they would make it easy for me to buy anything on there.

First a bit of background.

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A few days ago I stepped away from playing Plants vs Zombies (which is incredibly fun) to call my mum (who we’ve found out has cancer). I’ve since discovered that not closing Plants vs Zombies was a mistake because I received a phone call later that day from Oui to tell me “I’ve finished that game”. He’d been nagging me to play it all the time because he liked to watch, something that should have been an indicator to me, but it seems something about it has triggered his intense interest.

It’s so hard to predict what he will like sometimes, but like any addicition of his he is losing sleep over it via the ‘just one more level’ method. He thankfully decided to create his own profile after finishing the game on mine and has already finished the main game and is now plowing through everything else, of which there is an abundance. It’s rare to see a game as small and cheap as this (it was $10 on steam) that has so much game packed into it.