PC: Big online games

By PETER ELEY

In the space of two short decades, computer games have moved from PacMan to sophisticated network fantasy role-playing, where people who will never meet physically form alliances and act out alternative lives in cyberspace. Is it good, is it healthy? Who knows — but it's a lot of fun.

The killer game is Ultima Online, and thousands of people worldwide log on daily to do battle with dragons and other fantastic creatures. There's even a trade in characters, with good players selling their cyber life to wannabes who haven't got either the skill or the patience to grind through the levels themselves.

Asheron's Call is Microsoft's pitch for this rapidly growing business, and it's up there with Ultima and the other online fantasy biggie, EverQuest.

Graphically, it falls between the two: better than Ultima but not as good-looking as Everquest.

But although the graphics are blocky — the game runs on a Pentium 166 and only 32mb of ram — they're good enough to create that all-important feeling of being there. The game is set on the isle of Dereth, where your character does battle with the forces of darkness.

It's a non-linear, unstructured world where anything can happen. Sometimes things are so hard to accomplish that you will be forced to team up with other players to complete tasks.

Dereth may only be an island, but it provides 500 sq m of gameplay, and an impressive range of environments, ranging from mountain glaciers to subterranean dungeons.

The monsters you encounter are imaginative although let down by the blocky graphics (more complex ones could slow down the game). But hard-core players will forgive that. The real aim of the game is to create a cyber alter ego, and accumulate experience points. The game has no end — it evolves, and being killed, as you almost certainly will be many times, involves only the loss of some cash rather than all-important points. One thing to remember is that these big online games invariably attract a small monthly charge, although Asheron's Call comes with one free month.

E-mail: peter_eley@herald.co.nz