A weekend with Unit

I've decided to spend a little more time with Unit. I may do more of this in the future as time permits and games are sufficiently interesting. Initially I wrote Unit off due to the cheesy graphics on the site. However, the English option gave me pause and I played it a bit more. I have now played the game about 20 hours or so. Not a lot for a first person shooter, but more than I'd put into some passing games that I put up here.

After 20 hours, I can say that Unit starts to grow on you. Well probably before that point. I often found myself thinking, "okay, this is the last round and then I'm turning it off." When I do finally turn it off, I realize I had thought that an hour before. This game is still in beta and I did experience some technical issues while I was playing.

As I mentioned before, the sound has some hissing/skipping/something weird going on. There isn't much you can do with the sound settings so I wasn't really able to play with them a whole lot. Also a few times a game has counted down to start and then instead of loading, it pops up a message saying "Please try again later". I immediately push join and it counts down again and joins the game which has already started. Also, I once played a round where we played for about 30 seconds it suddenly said "Game over, you win!" but there were no stats like we'd normally see and we were kicked back to the room. Everyone seemed very confused. Other than that there were no other clear cut technical issues.

There was an issue I found with a couple players. I don't think it was technical, I'm sure they were hacking. If you watch this video you can see towards the middle.


The guy takes a full clip to the face which bends him over backwards and he keeps running then shoots me through a wall from 40 feet off with a shot gun. He was doing that for a couple games. When I finally got host, I banned him. Screen name was "Ryuk" and belong to a clan who call themselves only "A". That was a couple days ago. Today I encountered him again with a clan buddy. They both seemed capable of taking far more damage than anyone else on the map. They still died, but slowly.

This map you see in this video is a Mercenary Free For All. These maps are fun for a few minutes, especially if you get a defensible position. However, they quickly turn into an episode of loony tunes. People can spawn almost anywhere and get a 3 second invulnerability when they do. You constantly have this situation where one person dies, someone spawns and kills his killer and someone else shows up and wastes him and then someone else spawns, and it goes on and on. A killing chain. It's difficult to get any momentum at all unless you can get a bunker or something. That map you saw there has one building that has a flight of stairs in it. If you can get up it, you can sometimes hold it for awhile and get a rhythm going before anyone gets you. Due to the nature of the game it can take awhile for someone who knows you're there to make it back to the place since people are constantly popping all over the place. Even if they get back over there they might figure you're not in there anymore and forget about it. I've been able to have runs of 5-10 kills which is far better than simply running around.

Team death match has been my favorite so far. One of the popular maps for this is called "Sweden". There are 2 opposing bases with 3 entrances/exits each. A central bridge, a couple sniper buildings, and lots of hiding spots to get the drop on people. Controlling the bridge usually means your team will win. From the bridge you can quickly move between all 3 entrances and exits (overlooking 2, direct access to 1) so a good team can cover everything and really pen in the other team. I played for a couple hours with a fellow calling himself 바보 (Korean for fool) followed by some other characters I forget. Very good and most maps were a duel between him and I for top spot. He won slightly more than me, but I had some very good games both on his team and against him where I started the game 6 or 7 and 0. In addition to your team winning the match the players individually compete for the most points during a game, and the game will inform you if you're currently leading. Annoying if two people are dueling like we were. "You've taken the lead! You've lost the lead! Assit! You've taken the lead!" it can get pretty rapid fire until someone pulls away.

Experience works interestingly in this game. You get XP based on the rank of the person you kill, assists (more than 60% damage to someone and then someone else kills them), head shots, and stacking kills. Each time you kill someone you get 5 seconds to kill another person to have it become a "multi-kill" twice I've hit 5 and once I hit 6. The progression is something like: multi, triple, monster, ultra, crazy then at 6 it just said "6 kills!!" Kind of a let down. It says that you get a big XP boost if you get 5 kills in a row like that.

I also got to make a new character and find out more about buying things. Characters and guns are permanent. Not rentals. Armor is a rental. Characters let you assign 7 points to various stats. To make an assault guy, a sniper, etc. I'll attach a screenshot below. Guns get repaired, and armor has to be bought every 30 days. It is nice to see guns as permanent. If you don't play for awhile you'll lose your armor and have to but it again, but at least your guns will be there. Some armor choices can be made between adding stuff to give more defense or more speed. Grenades aren't rentals but they can't be repaired. I assume when they run out you need to buy a new one, but it's okay, they're pretty cheap compared to everything else.

After playing this some more, I think I'll continue playing it. I didn't think it would stand-up to AVA, but it has proven more interesting than I initially though. So just because there is some girl holding a gun in an entirely inappropriate way on the website, don't pass the game over. You might be pleasantly surprised. I still don't know what "Justice for all" means. There doesn't seem to be any clear-cut sides in the game and they're referred to as mercenaries. The English in game is great. I didn't notice any weird sentences, so I think they've paid to have this professionally translated. At the time of writing this I'm ranked 158^th globally. So this really isn't that hard of a game to get into.

Getting foriegners together

One of the major components of online gaming is player interaction. For foreigners gaming in Korea this can be a double-edged sword. If you're not fluent in Korean, you might not notice someone acting like a troll in the chat. On the other hand, if you're part of a team in a tactical game it can be hard to coordinate with your teammates. This gives us relative peace at the price of ease of use.

I don't know how many foreigners out there are playing games regularly in Korea. I hope a few people have started to try it out. I was thinking that we should find a way to get the foreigners together who are playing if they want to have a game with people they can chat with. There are many games out there though that might benefit from some interaction. This might be useful for those who are here quite long term as well like f-pats and other guys that are pushing many years.

In addition to the shooters and other games I've covered most sites have some form of go-stop, poker, chess, janggi, and other other casual games on them as well. Perhaps at some point I'll do a round-up of the games on various sites to see if there are any major differences between them and if so, which one is better.

I'm not sure how to best set something up. Whether we should have a facebook group, a clan website on one of the services or what exactly. If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to make them. Are you happy gaming alone or would you like to play a game with some other foreigners?

Cannon Kings - in Beta

I actually got the name of this wrong in my last post. The name of this is not Cannon Kids, it is Cannon Kings. Though "Kids" seems like it would fit it more. I know you're all dying to play this game, but unfortunately it is still in testing. There wasn't the normal "B" letter assigned to it to say it is in beta, but apparently they had the 4th closed beta test in January. Four is a lot for a game these days so I expect that it will come out any time now. I'll be sure to update when it does as it is the only other game that looks accessible on Joara.

Battlezone Plus

As I suspected Battlezone Plus is a fun casual shooter. The game is 3/4 isometric view and runs at a fixed 1024x768. I dug through the options and config files and couldn't find a way to change that. The game is easy enough to get installed if you've installed anything at all by this point. Click the Game Start on the website and go through the activeX installs and the launcher. Next next your way until it is finalized. Once it is done, hit the Game Start again and wait a moment. For some reason the anti-cheat seems to take a little extra time to fire up on this one. It is a small download though at only 190MB.

When the game fires up you'll be given a choice of creating a character or bailing. Create your character. It is fairly easy. You pick one of several stereotypical classes and customize a few things like their face and clothing color. Pick a name and you're good to go. It will offer you the tutorial, I'd say skip it. It wasn't that helpful and overly slow. Basic knowledge is this: click to shoot, move with WASD you can crawl by pressing E, if you have a special item like a health kit hold Q to make it happen, and when you are reloading there is a quick time event to let you load faster. You'll see it a couple times in the video. I hit it a couple times and miss it once or twice. You can double tap a direction to dash that way. To join a channel you have to first select one, I'd choose regular, and then choose the individual channel before you can join. Once you're in you can get on with blasting hippie gangsters, skinheads and your fellow man.

There are two play styles in the game. Deathmatch and Mission. Mission involves killing a boss and his cronies, the aforementioned hippie gangsters being one variety, several times. If you kill the cronies enough times they stop spawning and you can deal with the boss all by themselves. When you defeat them you get some XP, gold and a random item. I've mostly gotten bolts and arcade coins. No idea what the bolts do yet. The deathmatch pits you against one or more enemies, and seems to be just a team deathmatch. For as simple as the game is, it is a pretty fun and an intense deathmatch.

Interesting things of note in the missions is that enemies will drop random power-ups and traps. Things like mousetraps or mushrooms can mess you up. Other items can heal you. You can also sometimes get a grenade refill as a drop. Enemies can stun you so you're confused. Your direction keys will get messed up. They'll even randomize one or two more times so if you think you've figured it out, it won't last long. As you go up levels you can increase the level of the missions you do. You can also change the various levels difficulty level, but I found no difference between an easy Rank F mission and a normal Rank F mission.

All in all, it is fun, cute and you can get into it pretty fast. There are a host of upgrades, but I didn't actually see any cash items yet. The training area let's you upgrade your character. Speed, strength, other things like that. Even at 1024x768 the graphics are fine. The controls work well, I had the odd accidental dash, but I got used to it pretty fast. If you want a casual shooting game to play when you're not up to something more serious, this might be your game.

Joara

I seem to be having far more luck finding small portals these days. Here is another one that allows foreign sign-up. It is called Joara. It has a couple games of a note. Battlezone is a casual 2D fighting game. Might be the kind of thing a shooter fan needs when they don't have a lot of time or don't want something too serious. They also have another shooter called Cannon Kings which seems to involve young children running around with ordinance strapped to their back and launching it at each other. You can go ahead and get signed up here, there is no direct link to registration off their game portal page. Joara is actually a much larger portal of which gaming is only a small part.

Normally we'd be inclined to sign-up using the 외국인 button, but I was not successful with that. It gave me an error. I suspect because my name is 19 characters. This one is just an SQL error. If someone has a name under 14 letters and wants to give it a go, please report back. So, what we can do is choose the blue option, 일반, on the left and use the normal Korean adult sign-up. Once there, choose the I-PIN option and it will pass your registration details on appropriately. No surprises here. Address, e-mail, phone number, etc. This will kick you back to the main page when you are done. You can look for 게임 in the upper left to get you back to the game portal. I'll be talking about their game Battlezone in the next post.

Unit

As I said in the last post, Unit is a first person shooter at Gamebus. This will be an easy post because Unit has an option to set everything to fully English. Text and voices. The English is good and there are in game guides and tutorials. So instead I'll talk a little bit about the game itself. I should mention the game is launched from the start menu, not the game page itself unlike many other games.

The game is a standard shooter. Nothing fancy here. Gain levels, buy equipment, get shot at. The graphics are serviceable, the ping low, and the sounds mediocre. I was getting some kind of crackling on the audio in game. It's a beta product and while momentarily distracting, I ignored it pretty fast. There are no advanced features like zooming in on your crosshairs or that kind of stuff. Zooming is limited to sniper rifles. You can add bots to games if you choose. They're dumb as a stick. I got killed because I thought an area was safe. You see there was a bot standing there not doing much so I assumed there was no bad guys. I turned the corner and was wasted. Apparently the bot didn't feel the need to shoot the enemy 3 feet in front of him. Lot's of standard upgrades. Guns, armor, grenades, knives, etc. You also upgrade your "character" by buying them in the store. It all works on points which you get from each match. At my level I could only use the trainee, later I can get a bunch of others, but I'm not really sure if it is just aesthetic or if there is function.

What's the attraction for this game? Well, the site allows foreign sign up via ARC or I-PIN and the game can be completely switched to English. Frame rate is great, I regularly got 100 FPS on max settings on my Geforce 7950GTX. The game is not head-shot crazy. Head-shots seem to require you actually aim at the head and even then it isn't completely guaranteed. Would I really choose it over other options? No. I'd still rather go to AVA or something over this, but if you must have a game in English try it out. You might want to sign-up, try it out and post on their free board just to encourage them to do more games full in English. Any company willing to do this should be encouraged even if the product is middle of the road.

Gamebus

Gamebus is another site we can add to the foreigner friendly crowd. Head on over to the site and choose the familiar sign-up option under the login box. We have a choice between using our regular ARC or using our I-PIN. I've decided to use the I-PIN. After you punch in your info you'll get a message of no consequence then you can agree to the terms. Leave them selected as is and hit the gray 확인 button in the lower right. You'll find the name and ID number already filled in. A couple notes here. During the address pop-up you'll have to input your whole address. Search for the postal code as usual, but before dismissing it, you can enter the rest of your address in the box below. Then click okay. Other forms has you do it after you close the pop-up. Not this one. Also do not make your password too long. You'll break it. It is asking for 4-8 letters. I entered a long password to see if it would choke. Instead it wrecked my account. I was getting an SQL login page error. I confirmed this by whipping up another account with my Korean friend's ID and putting in an appropriate length password. Works fine. I can't recover the old account because their password recovery can't seem to authenticate my ID, the name field isn't long enough to take my English name.

This is another small portal, but it does have a first person shooter on it called UNIT - Justice for All. Not sure what that means, but there is a scantily clad woman holding a sniper rifle like it's a purse or a perhaps a smoothie as part of the main graphic for the game. Not high hopes, but you never know. The game is currently in open beta.

HappyOz

Just came across this small portal. HappyOz is another game's portal that doesn't have foreigner sign-up. Not many games, but it does have an upcoming shooter/MMORPG. It may be in the same vein as Huxley from the looks of it. Deathmatch + quests. It is going for the more fun light theme than Huxley has. The game is called Wild Planet. So if you're interested in questing and shooting it might be worth checking out. It seems to have vehicle combat from the videos I've found. Not sure what the time frame is for this, but sometimes these closed betas can really drag on.

GUNDOG

GUNDOG is an upcoming first person shooter from Innoceed. I haven't really heard of either before, but it looks like a fun cartoony shooter. It also looks like some of the text will be in English which will be a help for those who don't speak/read Korean. I haven't come across a gameplay video yet, but the official site does have a few screenshots on it. Here are a couple. I'll keep an eye on this to see when it comes. It is scheduled for 2010.

Company of Heroes - Part 2

As promised here are a few translated screens and explanations of the new gameplay. New gameplay is limited purely to the skirmishes and multiplayer aspect of the game. The campaign remains untouched. It is even subtitled, not dubbed. Text is changed obviously, but you'll hear all the old familiar voices if you've played this before. Mission briefings are completely in English, but they're fairly straightforward anyway. I'm not really going to provide any in game screenshots or video, because the web is full of screenshots of the game. Currently it seems that this is the base game with no expansions. So there British and the second German faction are absent. If you have never played Company of Heroes in English I recommend giving a play guide a quick once over so that you become familiar with the icons for special abilities, or just experiment.

The first thing I'll talk about is the skill window. As you increase your level you unlock skill slots and gain skill points. At a low level all your skills seem available to you, but you can only pick a couple. This leads to some interesting multiplayer matches where experience doesn't make a huge difference. Each skill will unlock at a skill level. So in game you don't spend the XP, it is just an ever increasing bar. In the campaign this works as before with a normal skill tree you spend points on. After you choose a skill you can then assign points to it to make it better. Increase damage, reduce timers, etc. Don't worry if you make a mistake you can spend supply points to dump the skill and get everything back. If you have an empty slot you can click the square and choose the slide out window on the left to put a skill in it. They're all the same as you'd remember from Company of Heroes before.

The base screen let's you assign special abilities and hero units to be used for the matches. Hero units are installed n the buildings they'd be made in and general abilities, like a reduced cost on a unit, are installed in the general bonuses pane on the left. This is wide open while you unlock hero unit slots at various levels. There are a number of "uses" assigned to each bonus, but this seems to reduce by 10 each match regardless of how many times it is actually used. I used an Anti-tank one twice in a match and it went from 22 to 12. I don't know why it is at 22. It was given to me like that, but I can't imagine how it would end up there. You will received these bonuses and hero units as random loot after missions and matches. If your uses drops too low you can use supply points to add more. 50 uses costs around 500-800 points depending on the item so far. Keep in mind that only equates to like 5 games. So you might not want to just assign everything or you'll empty them all out. To purchase more uses for an item, right click it and choose the middle option "사용 횟수 추가". It will give you a menu to buy more uses in increments of 50. Hero units don't have uses. They have levels. They gain XP, which seems to be static. There isn't much else here. You can figure out the bonuses from the icons, or translate a key word or two to figure out what they do. Mostly they associate to increased range, firepower, speed, armor, or reduced cost. For example the Croc tank bonus I have equipped is a 10% range boost. Hero units don't seem to get normal special abilities. Those hero soldiers I have don't get grenades, stickybombs or upgraded rifles. Engineers don't get the option of adding flame throwers. I think the idea is that these permanently upgraded units will come equipped with these bonuses and others as you level them.

If you head into the general match area you'll be given a screen where you can add friends to your party. I haven't tried that yet so not exactly sure what that means. Below that is a blue button which lets you see available matches. Right now there usually aren't many, so I generally start my own room. Sometimes it fills up quick or I go ahead and invite someone. To invite someone switch your chat to the main room and scroll through and find appropriate opponents, left click their names and choose the invite word. I invite a few and someone usually accepts pretty quick. After that hit the game start on the right above the player list. The menu is annotated, I never touch the lower two options. You can also click people's names in the scrolling chat to interact with them. You'll often see people requesting invites, but you can't see their side so inviting them from there is kind of pointless. Try to pick someone at your level or lower. Higher levels will have more heroes and skills unlocked. You might be fine, or maybe not.

These are your main screens that will get you playing. A note on supply: You get it after campaign missions and skirmishes. So if you're low, go do a few campaign missions or play an AI match. Yes, this multiplayer game still has the AI matches. In a room click the opposing player's empty box and you'll get a menu to set options. You can choose various AIs with easy being at the top and going down to the hardest. So if you want you can do comp stomps or whatever tickles your fancy. The AI does seem to be upgraded. I tried an easy match and the computer was cutting wire which is not what I remember the CoH AI doing on the English version, I won and got 278 supply. If you're going to stomp an easy AI, take off your abilities and save the "use" on them.

All in all, this is a perfectly playable low ping version of company of heroes which is close to the original but different enough to be interesting. This is definitely a permanent addition to my collection. The Koreans haven't had a long time to get good at it yet, I'm sure a few played the English version, but I think not that many which means the games aren't all blowouts. I had a nice match tonight with a guy who managed to get a Panzer and a couple light tanks out against me, and then artillery my forward base. It looked like he had me but I managed to almost take the Panzer out before he obliterated the base. My Shermans rolled up behind him and wiped them all out. He bailed after that as he had nothing left.

Company of Heroes - Part 1

Most people who have been in North America in the last few years or kept up on PC gaming at all have heard about Company of Heroes. Most people have played it, but if you're playing it over here and want to play online, you're probably having ping issues, as well as time zone issues. Windyzone has decided to bring it to us. If you go to Company of Heroes from the main Windyzone page you'll be given an event page about the beta test. Click the dog tag in the lower right to continue.

Once here you can do the familiar, "game start" dance to install the Windyzone launcher, and the game itself. It'll first download a 30 MB loader, then it'll download the actual game. The download is around 3.6GB. It'll install and you'll be all set. There are no surprises here when compared with any of the previous installs we've done. What will surprise us is when we get in the game. While very familiar, the game has been changed in some ways. Click Game start button to fire up the launcher and the green 게임시작 button to get going. Doing so will check for patches. Then launch the game.

The first thing that pops up is a question in Korean. I think it has something to do with your first time playing strategy games. I answered yes on one account, no on the other, both times it runs the tutorial. The first thing you'll do is choose your side. In this version of company of heroes you actually make characters you build up. The choice is obvious from the flags and you choose one of three specialties. These mirror the specialties you'd have found in the original company of heroes. They're different for each side. Choose one and click the next button on the lower right. It'll be highlighted for you. Now you can customize your guy and give him a name. This will also be highlighted. You'll then be presented with a choice of playing the campaign or multiplayer. Multiplayer is not a level playing field. Get your feet wet with a campaign and start to build your guy up. You can switch any time you want. Regardless of the side you choose, you will start with the allied campaign. It matches the same campaign. Playing it will give you levels though. So try it out. There doesn't seem to be anyway to disable the tutorial. It'll run you through some stuff. Like enabling abilities, adding bonuses, things like that. Just grin and bear it and you'll get some free bonuses plus it'll run you through some stuff with a finer hand than I. It's not hard to follow even without knowing Korean.

Back on the main screen you'll see a variety of options and games you can play as well as your standard chat. The middle seems to be nothing more than hints. While we've played this game for a few years now, it's new here. That doesn't mean they're push overs though. You can play regular games, ladder games, campaign, and tutorial missions. You can customize your character (abilities) and set bonuses in your base. You will get randomly invited to games. If one pops up hit the green "예/네" to join in. If you don't, it'll disappear after a few seconds. This will get you started. In the next post I'll talk about some of the new features and how they effect multiplayer matches. The campaign completely mirrors the English. Voice-overs are subbed, not dubbed.

Gametree

Gametree is another small portal. It doesn't allow foreign sign-up. I've sent them an e-mail and they've said that they hope to add it in the future. They didn't provide a time frame but we can hope more sites get around to it. So if you've borrowed a friends ID or have them making accounts for you, you might want to add this to the list. They have a few RPGs, a couple sports games, Pang-Ya a golf game, and Blackshot a FPS. Obviously I'll be focusing on Blackshot. I might talk about Pang-Ya as well. I actually tried a Korean golf game on my PSP last year and it was completely playable. So if this one is as well perhaps I'll do a write up on that.

Blackshot is interesting because it seems to have been picked up by a German company. The game is hosted, presumably in English, at Twowar.com. I haven't tried it there yet, but I expect the ping isn't as good as it is here. After digging around further it has been picked up in several countries. It was released last year so it is fairly new.

Landmass update

I mentioned before that Landmass was dead in the water and updates had been long ago. Well MBC has become aware of that fact. In January they acknowledged that on the site, but little has changed. They've posted several news items that I can't read. Very little beyond the front page of this site works. It either times out or dumps an SQL error. I still can't verify my account with the Landmass specific user agreement. The subjects of several of the news items tells me that they are aware that there are server and login issues. I cannot actually read them because they time out. Someday this particular game might work again. I might try poking them with an e-mail to see if they can tell me anything useful. Using an old test account I can apparently get it to work enough that I can download and log in to empty servers. Not much of a solution though.

Windyzone registration

Windyzone is the first site we'll sign-up for that requires our I-PIN. It is a mostly mundane portal, however they have somehow snagged Company of Heroes. Yes the fantastic RTS from Relic. It also isn't just the multi-player component. You can play the campaign through as well. So we'll head over and click on the familiar 회원가입 button located under the login panel on the right.

They've conveniently labeled the I-PIN option for us in English. Go ahead and click that. When you do the name fields will be removed and the buttons below will become a single big blue button. Push it. This will initiate your I-PIN login.

Here is how this works. First enter your I-PIN ID. Don't bother with the password now. Hit the big blue button to the right of it and the pop-up will reload and probably center itself. You'll also notice that the service provider will change to 공공, or another company if you don't have your I-PIN from them. At this point you can go ahead and enter your password and click the login button. I've already signed-up for this particular site. I rushed through before checking a bunch of sites in my I-PIN research, but what follows is the standard registration page like the ones we saw with Pmang or any other site. Enter all your info, confirm your user ID, etc. When you're done, hit the big 확인 button and you should be good to go. This site doesn't suffer from the long name problem as far as I know and at 19 characters my English name was taken just fine.

Beyond Company of Heroes, what can Windyzone offer us? As can be expected, there are some RPG games, flash games and a few casual and action games. Really not much. Most are overly cute like you'd find at several other portals. Company of Heroes is a really odd fit for this site. I would have expected it to end up somewhere like Pmang, Hangame or Hanbiton.

Netmarble Sign-up

I mentioned before that Netmarble now allows foreign sign-up. Well they do, but it is a little buggy. Right now if your English name is more than 14 characters it will fail. Mine is 19, so I can't really write more on it now. I have heard from some other foreigners who can sign-up, and one reported that there is an additional verification step. You'll need a Korean credit card, bank certificate, or cell phone in your name that matches your ARC to finish the sign-up procedure. They have said that they are aware of the problem and intend to address it. What the time frame is for that, I have no idea. Hopefully soon.

I-PIN

What is the I-PIN? The I-Pin is a kind of alternative to using your ARC on every website. This is extremely useful for foreigners as many Korean websites don't feature specific sign-up pages for foreigners. The process is fairly simple first you'll make an I-PIN using your ARC but then on subsequent websites you can use the I-PIN to sign-up. It is the same sign-up page that the regular Koreans use. There are actually several companies that provide I-PINs. As a foreigner there is one we should use.

To make your I-PIN head over to 공공I-PIN. They're a foreigner friendly I-PIN company. The other companies require additional verification, a cell phone, bank certificate, etc. The English sign-up for this requires nothing beyond your ARC. The page is entirely in English. So I don't need to walk you through this. To get you started though look towards the bottom for "Getting public I-PIN". Enter your info and within a short time you'll have yourself an I-PIN. There is some enjoyable konglish on the page, but it is still pretty straightforward.

Now, when you want to go sign-up for a site that doesn't have a foreigner sign-up page, look for the I-PIN option. Here is where your mileage will vary. On some sites this works perfectly fine, like Windyzone, but other sites will kick back a name error. Nexon and Netmarble currently do this for me. However, I spoke to another foreigner who was able to sign-up successfully for Netmarble. I've got e-mails going to them to figure out what the problem is. I've sent an e-mail to Nexon asking them about it, but they haven't gotten back to me yet. I've also asked 공공I-PIN about letting foreigners set a "Korean" name that could be passed to the site as verified so that it wouldn't break their forms. Also no answer on that one yet.

The I-PIN has a lot of use just beyond games. It will also help you sign-up for other sites. I just used it to sign-up for the E-mart website. They do have a foreign sign-up but the I-PIN worked just as snazzy. If you have issues on individual pages you might try finding their customer service center and attempting to contact them. Some of them respond quite well to English e-mails. Look for their 고객센터. Usually upper right. Once there you might dig around for an option that looks like "1:1". This is what they use to refer to e-mail help. Most sites let you access this logged out but something, like Nexon, don't. Don't ask me how you're supposed to get help if you can't register. Netmarble will not respond to English e-mails.

While this is useful for convenience on some sites, it is a necessity on other sites. Windyzone is one of those sites and so is Netmarble. If you try to sign-up for Netmarble, let me know if it works or not. Also let me know how many letters your English name is.

Sting - now with more arcade

I did a bit on this game a little over a year ago. Due to the insane headshot box I didn't really play it again. Since I was doing updates I decided to check on old games and found that this game has been rebranded. It is now called "Sting Arcade". This also means that the site has disappeared as well. I'm not sure what this "arcade" thing will entail, but if it opens up again and I catch it, I'll be sure to post on it. The message on the site indicates they are doing new tests, and the main YNK menu bar says the game is in beta.

Coming Goodness

It has been awhile since I updated but mostly because there hasn't been too much new stuff coming out. Well that has finally started to change and I'll be talking about a bunch of new games in the near future. I've also got a couple other games portals, Gamemania and Windyzone, to mention. Also of note is that Hanbiton and Netmarble now allow foreigner sign-up, while Nexon seems to have removed the option. I'm also going to be talking about the I-pin as well. Something we need for Windyzone and some other websites.

Currently out we have:
Battlefiend Online
Quake Wars
Huxley
Company of Heroes (an RTS!)

Coming up soon (hopefully) we have:
Hessian
Dizzel
Metro Conflict
Battle Star Online
Kingdom Under Fire 2
Metal Black
Steel Dogs (just finish these two already!)
Berkanix
Pyschic Online
Warcry

Speaking of Warcry here is a sound test video they just released.