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There’s been an explosion on the planet Ragoland you’re one of the scout crew sent down from space to investigate it.Teams of up to 4, made up of fully-customisable characters including race,profession and appearance, must go and find out what caused it in a seriesof RPG missions which generally involve beaming down to the aforementionedplanet and beating/shooting the bejesus out of scary monsters and supercreeps.
It’s possible to play Phantasy Star Online both off- and online,the latter option being for the ‘Billy No Mates’ crowd or those who want tosay hello to our friends across the continents and team up with themin order to defeat the baddies and complete the missions. At the moment, though,I’m trying to get hold of a US Dreamkey CD so I can route my online activitiesvia Freeserve Unlimited. The standard UK Dreamkey discs do not allow you tochange the necessary dial-up settings so I’d have to hand over mucho moneyto BT profit until then.
Language barriers are not a problem as the universal translator system willprovide hundreds of preset phrases and sentences in English, Japanese, Spanish,French or German. You can also type in individual words and phrases too viaeither a Speak-and-Spell-style A-Z onscreen keyboard or the officialDreamcast keyboard. At home, alone, computer-generated assistants are availablefor those who don’t want to rack up the phone bill.
Without a doubt the graphics are gorgeous and easily the best thing aboutthis release. Colourful and fluid, the best test of such a title is theease at which they are rendered when changing location from inside a buildingto outside, or vice versa. I saw some clipping as you move along, but it’snot a major problem.
An ambient soundtrack flows along in the background nicely while whizzy SFXaid the opening and closing of speech and object windows. It’s fair enoughin its execution but nothing mindbendingly different.
Playing on your own can get rather boring, but going online and meeting upwith other real people is far more entertaining. Moving around yourthird-person characters is fairly intuitive, with the left-back button tocentralise your view. The only hard bit is getting everyone together if you’remeeting new people for the first time, but for those more organised you canarrange to meet at a certain time set in Internet ‘beat time’.
Watch-makers Swatch invented this form of time which divides the dayinto 1000 “beats” which, IIRC, starts at midnight GMT so presuming you canwork out what the ‘beat time’ is, you’ll all meet up together.
Overall, even though it took around half-an-hour after logging on for myfirst experience to find someone to play with, I did enjoy the game and onlyexperienced lag when someone else joined. I just hope I didn’t offend anyoneby picking up items or money when some were left for me. I’d have typed moreto confirm what I’d done but without the keyboard it’s a pain to have aconversation.
Although you don’t have to play PSO online, you DO have tobecause it’s not half as much fun if you don’t. It’s also a much better gameto play online than something like Quake 3 because here you actuallyget time to stop and think, whereas the original Unreal, for example,had an offline mode with bots that aped the online world perfectly – becauseI also got killed every five seconds there.
I’ll look forward to the time when we have more complex games available forplaying online and UNMETERED! Even a bash of Virtua Fighter would bea great laugh online.
A word of warning though, if you plan to buy this game do not rent it firstin order to try it out. I’ve never gone against ‘try before you buy’ before,but once the registration settings are complete your Dreamcast will notaccept another Phantasy Star Online game disc so don’t be caught out.
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Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.