Jeonsa

New upcoming games

2011-08-28T11:04:00.004+09:00

Well, as I started poking around there are in fact a few more upcoming games. Always upcoming. Who knows when we'll actually see them. The new buzzword this year is "Hyper FPS" I've seen a couple games referred to as that. I have no idea what it means, but I suspect it has to do with some kind of fast paced game-play.

Davinci Online is an upcoming Hyper FPS from Bridea. Not much on it yet, but it seems to be set around the time period of Davinci. This may be going the Warcry route. I did find this video:

Next up is IOB. Not sure what it stands for, but it's the next WW2 shooter. I know you haven't played one in awhile, but Karma was rather underwhelming in the scheme of things, so perhaps this will be better. It again has little out but a few screenshots, and a video.

We've actually got a FPS over at Nolto. Project Mercury. It's a stylized shooter and if you're reading this when I'm posting it, there is 1 more day of a beta test. Not sure if it's automatic, but I think I can access it. If so, I'll post some vids and screens. It has an interesting retro style, so it might prove entertaining.

Netmarble, have I mentioned they still haven't fixed their sign-up issues? Regardless they have a Hyper FPS coming called Ground Zero. They don't have any videos worth looking at on their page. Just a bunch of 5 second videos showing various attacks/abilities.

A couple more gone

2011-08-28T09:54:00.004+09:00

I was just thinking about doing my latest round of infrequent updates to catch up on what games have become available, but the answer seems to be not much, and we've lost some of the existing games.

Pointblank joins the ranks of the closed FPS. It's a shame, because the game still looked good, and when I last played it a couple months back, the community still seemed to be there. PlayNC seems to be moving to focus solely on MMORPGs and casual games.

Also, Another Day has closed as well. This is no surprise as the community was pretty dead when I was last there, but don't let that reflect on the quality of the game. It was a decent shooter.

Psychic Online, Metal Black, Dizzel, Metro and Gundog are still "Coming soon", so who knows when we'll see them.

Born to Fire seems to be the only new FPS game these days. The FPS scene in Korea is getting small. We've had 6 FPS shooters close recently, while only gaining 1. It's left some portals without a FPS that previously had some. I don't know if FPS in general are getting less popular, but it seems like MMORPGs are the big money makers as most portals, except Pmang, have many more MMORPGs than FPSs.

Cyphers

2011-06-11T16:01:00.012+09:00

Cyphers is a third person action game that I ran across quite randomly. I was looking for something else and this just happened to be on the front of Naver today. They seem to be in open beta right now. It looks to be running until June 12, and it's their third test, so I suspect this is gong to be going live soon. This is hosted on a standalone site and comes to us from Neople. They're also responsible for Dungeon Fighter which I've heard of and feel like it may be popular, I'll have to look into that one more. Sign-up for the site is pretty standard, but when you try to use the I-PIN option it states that they're still enabling that feature. Currently foreigners can't type their full name into the name field. The best I could do is 12 characters which leaves me far short. If you've got a really short name, it might work, but I can't test that. I used a Korean ID to create the account. I'll test the I-PIN sign-up when it's finished. Installation is also standard for a game of this type. Just click game start after you're logged in, install the active-x and follow along. Make sure to uncheck the boxes which offer to set the site as your homepage and all that fun stuff.

As to the game itself. It's a character based game. Meaning that there are a set number of characters and each has unique powers and abilities. You choose one at the start of each match, but there can be only one, if someone else chose it, I think it's random who gets to use it and who gets assigned a different one. When you start you'll be forced into a tutorial. Follow along, it's pretty obvious and you get some cash rewards for it. After each match you'll gain level XP, and character XP. You gain big XP for the one you used and a tiny amount for the rest of them. Once you get into the settings, set your resolution and set everything to the "고" level, that's the high level on this one. It seems to be named differently than the other games.

The game is a team-based game where the object is to destroy the other team's base. There are some twists to it. Each team has some soldiers that are sent automatically and fairly trivial to defeat, but left unchecked, they'll pile up and can cause some serious damage. As well each team has a massive guardian that protects the base. He'll destroy you easily if you don't go in as a team. The map is laid out with 3 paths going between the bases and some crossing lanes. Along the paths are also barriers that you have to bust through that have cannons and the like mounted on them. You can walk through your own, but you'll have to bust down the enemies to get past. Also this game has a unique twist in that the more you die the slower you respawn. It can get quite long, even by the third or fourth death you can go from a 15-20 second respawn to around 45 seconds.

Your character can attack with a regular attack, but also has several special attacks built in. Don't worry about remembering the keys for it because they're simple and part of an overlay. I'm not sure how to get rid of it, but you really don't notice it after awhile and it helps you keep track of your cooldowns. As you destroy enemies you'll gain gold. This isn't permanent gold so spend it. During the tutorial you will have had an opportunity to try the item system. Basically you just buy things from the menu below by pushing 1-8. These are clothing items that boost various things like attack and defence. It should be mostly obvious what each one does. You can hold down TAB to get a more detailed Korean view of everything. If you push CTRL it will change your menu to a potion menu. Use this to get health potions and other things. Health potions are #1. As you do this your level will increase. Not sure what effect that has on things beyond having better equipment. After you hit level 5 you get access to the dollar store to spend all that money you've been collecting from games. I haven't opened that yet, but I suspect it to be fairly standard. You'll be able to buy permanent bonuses and things I assume. I'll comment on that when I get it unlocked. Shortly I'll attach a gameplay video showing a bit. Ignore the stutter, if it shows up. I find recording in fraps to sometimes induce lag which isn't there otherwise.

The game is not bad. A good little action game, something different which is never a bad thing. I find that it's easy to stun-lock people. I'm not sure if I'm just playing against bad people or what, but my first few games I've done quite well. I'm sure that'll change when I leave the noob area or however it's done. There is no lobby system in this game. You just push F5 to quick join a game or hit F6 to create your own rooms.

Wolf-team update

2011-04-12T19:19:00.002+09:00

Wolf-team has found itself a new host. It's not longer on Hangame and can be found at Softnyx. A bonus to this move is that the site does not require any ID card to sign-up. You can sign-up with any information you want, and even make multiple accounts if you need to. The sign-up is straight forward. The only thing I found was that my ID was in use, but my password didn't work. Strange, as I've never had my ID taken on another Korean site before. I'm not sure if user data got transferred with the game, but if it did, it's not working properly. The site doesn't seem to use Active-X and this now runs from a downloaded client and also has global servers.

Recent withdrawals

2011-04-11T20:54:00.003+09:00

I was finally going to get around to my irregular spurty update as I'd noticed a few new things coming out lately and when I started poking around I've found that several games have also recently closed. Some were getting old, but a few were surprises. So before I get into a slew of updates about new games, I'm going to just make a note of which games have recently disappeared. In no particular order:

Metal rage - which was the giant robot fighting game recently closed it's doors after many years of operation. A shame to see it go, but it was getting old. It was however a bit of a unique game.

Sting - Sting seems to have finally disappeared. This is too bad, because while it was head-shot crazy there were some unique gameplay elements which I did like.

BattleStar - I never really got to write this one up, but this was a FPS vs RTS space marine style game. It looked unique and I had a very short time to play a beta, but I never got to really enjoy it. Netmarble has pulled the page. I have no idea why, the game was technically only out for a very short time. I can only surmise that they ran into some financial or technical difficulty.

Unit - I was disappointed to find out that this had disappeared. I liked Unit, but gamebus has totally redone their site and seemingly shut down many of their offerings. The site is mostly a generic corporate site now. I don't know if that means they're shopping Unit around to other sites, but as far as I can tell it's dead.

Company of Heroes - Korea was affected by the global shut down of the game. Sometimes Korea is immune to those kinds of things, but in this case they did not keep the game running here. A shame as it was nice to have another RTS option in country.

I'll keep my eyes open to see if any other games have recently shut down. I'm most disappointed about Unit and Battlestar, but really it's a shame to see any of these games go. I did get a chance to play Soldier of Fortune over the last few days and take some screenshots and a video so I'll see if I can get that written up. It's not open now, it was a short test, but I think it opens up finally for good at the end of this month if I read it correctly.

Another Day Install and Impressions

2010-11-21T19:10:00.007+09:00

Another Day is a first person shooter from Allstar. It's in open beta, which like all other open betas basically means it is out. I played this last year during a test and it didn't perform that well. Now, on my new machine with everything set to max it seems to play just fine. I didn't notice any framerate issues during gameplay. To get it installed, head over to the site and login. As an additional note you might see no rooms when you login. Click the "채널이동" in the middle of the screen. This will take you to the channel select screen. Choose "일반 채널" which puts you in the general channel. You might have defaulted to the beginner channel, which is usually empty. Though, don't expect a lot of players. While an interesting shooter, it hasn't gained that much traction yet. Allstar is not a major portal.

Install is pretty straight forward. Press game start a couple times and get your usual round of pop-ups asking for permission to install various controls, etc. Once you get the installer panel you see to the right, push the lower left button "전송시작". That will start the download. After the download is finished, the button will change text, push it again to start the actual install. Basically keep pressing "다음" through the whole install and accept terms when they appear. It's not a huge download or a long install, so it shouldn't take you a long time.

Once in the game you'll want to go to the options and up your screen resolution and up the various settings. This game defaults to very low settings, and once or twice during the game I noticed that it actually reset itself to low settings, I had to jump into the options in game and set them to high again. I'm not sure why it did that. The model in the shot on the left is on low settings. You can see the very muddy armor. The option menu is of course the one with the gear icon in the upper right. Once in there go to the "비디오" tab, which is the third one and make sure everything is set to "상" which means high. "하" is low and "중" is mid.

Guns are fairly standard in this game. You can carry multiple guns dependent on size. You'll see a "+X" number at the bottom, this translates to how much more you can carry, but different sized guns take up a different amount of space. A big gun might take 4 or 5. In the equipment screen you'll want to drag the guns you want to use down to the equipment bar for each class. What makes this game special are the suits. Your suits can come equipped with jump jets for your 2 battle classes, while the sniper can come equipped with a cloak. You can by better helmets, suits and packs that house your jump jets and cloaks. The helmets are interesting in that they have a function in game. If your helmet gets shot, you'll see broken glass and you might lose your radar if your helmet is blown completely off. I don't have a shot of that, but in the video below you can see me blowing the helmet off someone. He would have seen broken glass as it was hit. The jump jets can propel you quite far ahead or you can use them for short bursts to the side to avoid fire, a grenade, or an enemy with a hand-held ripper.

The maps are interesting and varied with a good mix of outdoors, inside, tunnels and even air ducts present on a lot of maps. There isn't really anything to interact with on the map, but some maps have doors present that you can open. It could add strategy but the matches are you usually too fast to really use those. You won't find a lot of places where a team could hole up and defend. So this is mostly a chaotic run and gun. There are lots of places for an ambush though, so it's pretty easy to get the drop on someone if you can find a safe place behind a barrel or some boxes. However, you want to change location after that because they do get a camera on you after they've died. They'll be expecting you next time. The radar shows enemies well so if an enemy spots you, you can be sure any nearby enemies know you're around. So picking ambush spots and moving around is a good way to add up the bodies.

This is a good looking shooter. It performs well and it has a couple of innovative features like the suit and the way the helmet can be blown off. It makes for a pretty fast paced and interesting game as people jump around the map firing at each other. You have to be able to spin fast and shoot as the guy you have lined up suddenly rockets past you and blows you away from behind. The only real problem is lack of players. There is always at least 1 game going on, but you don't have a lot of choices if there is some shark in there destroying everyone, or they all want to play bomb maps and you just want a straight out deathmatch. It's worth checking out, but if the body count picks up, it's a definite must-play

Allstar sign-up

2010-11-20T15:03:00.004+09:00

Allstar is a portal I meant to cover before, but I seem to have forgotten to write about it. I found some old sign-up photos stored away in my blog photo directory but they're out of date now. Allstar has changed their sign-up page a little since I took those screen captures. However, signing up for this site is pretty straight forward and easy. Head over to the site and have your i-Pin ID ready.

Start by clicking "회원가입" underneath the red login button. Ignore the impulse to use the foreigner sign-up form. If you do this, your account takes time to be verified. They expect you to fax or attach a scan of your passport for verification. Using the i-Pin you can pass on your details to the site through the normal registration process. So choose the left-most option. Then click the i-Pin tab on the next page and launch the i-Pin interface. Sign-in and it will pass on your details to the website. Fill out the rest of the form and away you go. The form has all the standard questions. I can't recall right now if the ID and nickname can be the same or not. Their captcha has changed. You don't write what you see, you might have to do a math question. So basically put in the value of what you would get. For example the current captcha on the foreigner registration page that I can see says "8+4+5" so I'd enter 17, not "8+4+5".

The reason I bring up this portal is of course a first person shooter by the name of "Another Day". I played this game last year during one of the beta tests, but it didn't run that well. I tried it briefly a few months ago again and it was much better. Now with the new machine I'm going to give it a proper go and write it up.

Psychic Online first impressions

2010-11-19T18:53:00.007+09:00

Well, I got to play through the second test day of this. It hasn't garnered that much attention. I think I only counted about 20 people online or so. A couple of them were "Gstar" accounts which is the big games expo going on in Busan right now. I debated going down, but since I'm still fighting some allergies I decided not to. What can I say about Psychic Online? Get yourself a hobby. Any hobby, doesn't really matter what it is, you'll just need something to do during the waiting time.

While getting into client and lobby is pretty quick, getting into a game isn't. We had a nearly full room and sat there forever. I have no idea why. Eventually half the people left the room and made a new one. So I joined that. We got all set to go and....hold on. I'll tell in you 3 minutes. I've never seen a level take so long to load. They're not that big. This particular one was almost tiny. Just an area around a gas station. I almost felt like I should have taken a before and after picture. The second and third times loading it didn't seem to help it along. Slightly faster, but still rather lethargic.

Once in the game it's much better. Frame rate was okay. Seemed to be locked around 60 on my rig, which tells me that the game itself is probably limiting. Your movement speed is so-so. I felt a bit like I was plodding around. The speed run didn't feel all that fast compared to say Warcry. I think the scout units were faster. They were always running up behind me and stabbing me to death. Hence why I'm looking behind myself in that picture. The main focus of this game is the "psychic" powers. I'm not entirely sold on them yet. They're interesting enough, but there isn't much focus on them. Previews always show these dueling psychic masters, but in game, you can't really do that. You fire off one ability and there is a serious cool-down before you can use another one. My medium soldier guy had 2 abilities. He could push stuff away and pull stuff toward him. Other than people anything I tried to push didn't really move that far. I was getting visions of a guy blowing stuff out Jedi style. Not happening in this game. The scout type people could turn invisible. The snipers could slow people down around them and the heavy guys.. well I'm not sure exactly what it was they did. Maybe over the weekend I'll try out the other classes. With all the waiting, I didn't actually get to play all that much. They have several training missions you can use to bump yourself up a few levels to use better weapons.

The beginner guns are pretty weak. You can unload a whole clip into someone and they probably won't die. So it's worth getting to level 4 as quickly as possible, say via the training missions so you can get that next gun. I think there is too much focus on the guns in this game, for a game called psychic online. I would expect a heavier focus on cool powers as you duke it out.

Overall I think this has potential. The loading issues need to be addressed. I really hope they'd consider tweaking the powers a bit to put a little more focus on them. It seems a bit unbalanced that the scout can turn invisible for the duration of a fight, but a medium guy gets a single repulse attack. That one repulse attack is not as powerful as being invisible.

Psychic Online Guerilla Test

2010-11-18T10:17:00.003+09:00

The Psychic Online "Guerrilla Test" begins today. It runs until the 24th but it's only open from 5-7pm each day. Kind of a short window. I think I'll be able to take advantage of a few minutes today before I must head out. Tomorrow I think I can probably put in a couple hours and try and get some screenshots and a video. They don't seem to be letting us download the client ahead of time so that is only going to cause delay.

Battery Open Beta

2010-11-16T18:10:00.007+09:00

Battery entered open beta on the 11th of this month. I got to playing it on Sunday night when I was taking a break from Warcry. It has a few different features which make it a bit unique, but also a bit of a challenge to play. I've only put a few hours into it so far, but I'll comment on what I've experienced so far.

The first thing you'll notice when jumping into this game is that there are health packs. Yes, you can actually make a nice run at getting tons of kills and make up for the occasional lapse with health packs. Enemies will randomly drop a few things. They almost always drop their weapon, which you can grab to replace yours if you run out of bullets. They sometimes drop health packs, and even rarer they'll drop power-ups that allow you to call in artillery or an attack chopper. These power-ups are powerful for a couple reasons. One, they do massive damage. The artillery can really pound a side, and the helicopter flies all over the map automatically attacking the other side. The helicopter can be shot down if someone grabs some rockets though. Two, the player who calls them in gets credit for the kills. A helicopter who gets on a run could easily add a dozen to your kill record. These can be called tons of times each round by both teams.

The guns seem fairly standard and deteriorates over time. So you'll need to repair them as you go. Repairs don't seem overly expensive. Some guns can't be repaired. On your inventory screen you'll see them as the guns that have some extra text on their boxes. You can "win" guns and other bonuses as part of a post round lottery. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but after each round, 2 spinners come up and various prizes and things can be won. I've received a gun, bonuses to XP, money, etc. I'm still investigating the full system of how everything works. I tried to change my default gun and I can't seem to use my grenade anymore in game. I'm sure there is a good reason for that.

Finally the other major change I noticed is that there is no set base in this game. Both teams will start at a fixed location but if your base is invaded by the other team who camps it, your spawn will change to another empty location on the map. The map I played several times seemed to have 4 major spawn points. I don't know what happens if the other team spreads out in those locations. I've never seen a side try it. This is interesting, but also a little chaotic. You're advancing on an enemy and suddenly they are popping up behind you. There are also fixed gun emplacements around the map. These work on a heat system. Heat goes up quickly then you've got to give it a break. Short infrequent bursts are the best way to use it. An incoming horde actually won't take a lot of damage from it as you'll quickly overheat and it takes awhile to cool down. You can also pick up a flamethrower as an extra on map weapon instead of a rocket launcher. This is a pretty quick kill weapon. There is also partially regenerating health. If you take massive damage but survive, your health will regenerate to 50%. Beyond that you'll need medkits to heal. Each one is good for 25%.

I think I'll stick with this for right now. Get a few more hours in and investigate the system a little more. Warcry is still on hold, as is Born to fire. I shot as mall gameplay video in which you can see the fixed emplacement and a bit of a go against bots. The bots aren't entirely pushovers in this, much like the bots in Sting.

Born to Fire - Open Beta

2010-11-15T09:40:00.003+09:00

As Stanly mentioned in another comment, Born to Fire was playable the past few days as a partially open beta. However, I think it's finished if I'm reading the notice correctly. When I hit play its announcing that the "real" open beta is coming December 2. So I wasn't able to play it, but they do have a bit of a funny intro video up on the site. It seems to suggest there will be a medic class in this game.

New machine

2010-11-14T23:32:00.003+09:00

I'd mentioned before that I got a new machine. The old Dell laptop did a good job for a long time, but eventually it got a little tired. This past summer it was hotter than usual and it really struggled with the heat. Even with a cooling pad. For a long while I couldn't even turn on a game without it overheating. When I really wanted to game I had to resort to an ice pack on the keyboard. I double bagged it..but still. It was time to replace it. So in early October I ordered up the parts and put it together.

The new machine I'll be using to check out all these great Korean games contains:

Samsung Syncmaster 2030 @ 1600x900
Intel i5 760 @2.8Ghz
Gigabyte Geforce GTX460 1GB
4 GB DDR3 1600Mhz Ripjaw RAM
2 x 1 TB Seagate HDs
DVD R/W
750W power supply
A handy little card reader
and a pair of Britz desktop speakers, but I mostly use headphones.

All of this is wrapped up in a nice 4 fan case. It has 2 big fans on the top of the case to suck out more hot air. Their part of a top unit that also has 2 extra USB ports. They plug into the back panel to give you better access. If I need to I can also mount an optional 2 fans on the side panel, but so far it is running nice and cool.

So far it's done a fantastic job and given me good framerates on every game I've played completely maxed out. I'm quite happy with it, and I'll probably use this for the next couple years or so barring any major catastrophes.

Warcry Impressions

2010-11-14T18:35:00.008+09:00

I've been able to put a few more hours into Warcry and sometime later tonight the "Final Ground Test" will finish. I've mostly played two classes, and gained a few levels. In the image you can see the costume I bought for my paladin which you can compare to the one in the last post. It has no real in game effect, but it does change the color of the effects on your skills. I also spent some time playing an alchemist. I didn't really do a lot with snipers or the rangers. I did play about 99% of my rounds for the "Empire" side.

The paladin is your typical soldier. He's got a middle of the road gun and a decent melee weapon. He gets two passive abilities. One is a shield, the other I never got around to exactly translating. He also has two active abilities. One is a heal, the other is an invulnerability. Each class has a "super" ability that can only be purchased at level 6 or higher. It has a 90 second cool-down which carries over if you die. I did okay with him but I got eaten alive by enemy shamans. They are the counter part to the alchemist. I'll talk about them more in detail in the next part. The paladin is a little slow, but if you can make it into a group enemies, activate your short invulnerability you can do some heavy damage before they take you out. Every character can "run", which is a forward double tap, but it uses up your action points which you might need for an ability. So you might run a little way, but if you run full tilt to the battle you're going to be shooting blanks. Overall I liked him, but sometimes you can't just run headlong into things and you need to think about it, team up, etc. He can equip two items which are grena..er magic orbs that have various powers. You get a choice between fireball, flash bang, poison, and smoke. Poison is very deadly. It will almost kill a character if they get near the gas cloud. These carry over between characters. Characters can also equip a ring and necklace specific to their class. They didn't have any necklaces available, but they have various rings which give different bonuses. The one I grabbed gave a 25% bonus to action points.

Alchemists are the wizards. They're quite powerful, but also vulnerable. Which is how wizards typically are in games. They have skill which is an instant kill when it's fully upgraded. At least, it seems to be for the evil side, the Horde. However, when I used the same skill on my Empire character, people didn't seem to die as much. Whenever an enemy shaman hit me with the instant kill crow of death, it looks like three crows coming at you, I was dead. That was it. Nothing you could do. The attack passes through walls. All you need to launch is a half second of visibility. The attack is made by putting the cursor on the enemy and right clicking. You can even jump up from behind a wall, target them and fall back down to safety. The attack will go out and seek them and kill them. It's incredibly powerful. Not as long range as the sniper rifle. I think I survived maybe 5% of the death crow attack against me, but it seems like as a good guy only about 75% of the attacks I made resulted in instant kills. I played matches where the Horde side had 6-7 of their 10 players playing shamans. It was a gong show. You could barely move without seeing crows sweep in. On top of that evil shamans super ability is a massive area of effect fireball which can kill anyone within a huge radius instantly. After a few rounds of that I found a more balanced room. A similarly built good team doesn't seem to have the same power. So, the character classes are not carbon copies of each other. I did play a couple rounds as a bad guy and the horde soldier's abilities were more focused on attack than defense. His passive skill was a bonus to his attack damage. The alchemist weapon is kind of an artillery cannon. You can shoot orbs out and if they hit someone, they'll blow right away or they'll stay solid and blow after a couple of seconds. Great for shooting around corners. Targeting of the instant kill ability is rough. Plenty of times it seemed like my cursor was read and I was clicking but nothing happening. Resulted in more than one death.

Warcry currently only has two play modes. Team death match and...wait for it... plant the bomb..er rub the crystal. I played one round of this. It's hard to make a Korean shooter without plant the bomb. This is a terrible game for it because you have two classes which have instant kills: Snipers and alchemists/shamans and one of those classes shoots through walls. When you choose quick play you'll get the screen you seen on the left. This is your map choice. The upper area contains the team deathmatch maps and the lower area is the rub the crystal maps. In this game mode you have to find 1 of 2 giant crystals and use your action key on them until they're activated. The other team has to wipe you out and/or rub the crystal in the other direction. Wax on, wax off.

Overall it's a decent little game. I have no idea when the actual release is. This is supposed to be their final test I believe, so it may be going live here any time. It has been a very long wait. I beleive I first heard about this game nearly two years ago. This practice of throwing a "coming soon" banner up on a gaming portal and taking two years to release kind of bothers me. At first, you're excited and can't wait for it. Then you realize it's going to take a long time to come out. You almost forget about it for awhile and then suddenly out of the blue you just happen to be on the site one day and you go "Oh yeah, that game." and find that it happens to be out or there is an open test up. This is driving me nuts with "Black Metal" right now as it looks to be very interesting, but they haven't updated in months and I have no idea what is going on with it. I'd recommend this one as a slightly different take on the shooter genre in Korea. Graphics are decent. Maxed out, it ran well on my new rig, and looks not bad. Level design is interesting. Most maps are not exact mirrors of each other which is kind of nice. They are close, and have similar features, but room layouts, even towers and things might be present on one side that aren't present on the other.

It took awhile but here is the gameplay video I recorded.

Technical Note on Korean Video games and Windows 7

2010-11-13T00:40:00.004+09:00

I forgot to note that when I first launched Warcry I was met with a black screen. With Warcry done for the night I also tried to install and launch Karma Returns to be met with a black screen. It turns out there is some issue perhaps with Aero glass and these games. You need to go to the game directory where the exe resides and right click it. Bring up properties and got to compatibility. Once there disable desktop composition. Click okay and you should be good to launch the game. Should you find yourself faced with a black screen and only a cursor present try this.

Warcry - Final Ground Test

2010-11-12T23:04:00.007+09:00

Well, I finally got a chance to play Warcry. It seems like there might be a few more games coming out now. Which hopefully means I'll get a chance to add a little more to this. I've also gotten myself a new rig which I'll detail in another post. Warcry is curently doing their "final ground test". I didn't realize there was a finish time each day, so I played 4 rounds and then quit, thinking I could go back later. I'll have to wait until tomorrow.

As for the game. It's not bad, but very melee heavy. I played as a Paladin for the good guys. I had a huge mace like weapon. The gun I had was pretty weak. I only managed 1 kill with it in 4 rounds. Other than snipers, most people were doing melee only. Melee, at least for the characters I found, seemed to often be the first hit wins. It seemed to frequently stun lock me while they finished me off. The same seemed to happen to them.

The first couple rounds didn't go well, but then I moved on to another map. After being horribly slaughtered I was all over this map and finished 20/10. It's tough to get momentum in this game and the game seems to know it. You get voice over rewards even after your second kill. It doesn't have to be together or anything. Just your second kill in a row without dying gets you one. 10 kills regardless of deaths gets you a voice over reward, and as you get higher and higher you get more and more crazy voice overs. With games going to 150 kills they don't expect many people to really get that many kills I guess.

You always start each game at "level 1" in that game. As you level up you unlock abilities. The Paladin had a shield ability, passive, as well as a healing ability, active and a couple others. You can't actually buy a lot of equipment for this game. You can buy some jewelry which gives you some small bonuses, and costumes, but no guns, melee weapons, etc. A little strange for a game of this type in Korea.

My initial impression is interest. As I get more of a chance to play it I'll do up an install guide and screens as well as a fuller review.

Mobicle visit - Part 2

2010-06-21T11:35:00.003+09:00

Here is the second part of my visit to Mobicle. In the first part I discussed their game TK Online. In the second part YJ and I talk about the Korean gaming market and where Mobicle is headed. First we talked about how the gaming markets differ between some countries. The most obvious difference between Korea and the Western gaming market is that Korean games, with few exceptions, are free. Korean games, as we know, work mainly on a microtransaction model. You get the game for free, and as you play you can purchase small things like XP boosts, costumes and other things like that to change your game.

The Western model typically has one buying a game and getting the complete game. Later you can buy expansion packs to add to the game. In recent years a lot of publishers and developers have been experimenting with downloadable content (DLC), to the chagrin of some players. Many Western players take exception to this model, especially when DLC is available at release time, feeling it should have been included in the game. However, Koreans are quite used to having to buy their extras. Another big difference is that most games available in Korea include no single player content, campaign or story.

YJ said that they prefer the current style of microtransactions. He sees it as better for consumers and developers. People have more control over what they buy and what is made.

He also said that the Japanese market was difficult to crack. It is different as well in that the Japanese prefer single player games. So it is harder to get an online game to catch on. TK Online is currently in development there, but it is yet to be seen how popular it will be.

I mentioned to him that I found the long closed beta style of a lot of Korean development to be a bit of a tease. Sometimes you'll see a game added to a portal and be put into closed beta a year or more before it is playable. I felt that Some players might get tired of waiting for it to come out and give up on it or move on. He told me that most gamers here are used to that so they don't see it as having any kind of major impact on their business. He said that sometimes there are a lot of unforeseen delays.

The game portals here are like the publishers in other countries. They are currently shopping TK Online around and have had interest from Neowiz, CJ, and WeMade. Their goal is to eventually tie it in with one of the sites and get it off its standalone site. Good thing we can sign-up for most of the sites, I should warn him away from Mgame and Nexon.

When asked if he preferred developing mobile games or online games, he said that they were very different, so it was hard to pick one. He said that Mobile games can be developed pretty quickly. Less than 1 year usually, while online games can take a very long time to develop, as we've seen.

He said he was very interested in Netmarble's upcoming "Marble Station". This will be a standard platform for web-based games. Due to their partnership with CJ who is tied into Netmarble they'll be able to work with it. This plays into their company's direction.

Mobicle wants to focus on three things right now: iPhone/mobile games, Social Networking Games and Online games. They've released a few iPhone games already as I mentioned last time, and have several more on the horizon. They've integrated some of their games with Open Feint, a popular social networking app on the iPhone, but actually want to develop their own replacement for it.

Mobicle sees that socializing is key factor to game enjoyment. They want all their games to have some kind of chat and interaction built into them, it is why they have such a heavy multiplayer focus with their games. YJ feels the gaming trend is pushing to MP, and I'd have to agree with him. As much as I enjoy good single player games, it seems the market is moving very heavily towards multiplayer with a lot of shooters coming out with very short campaigns which are little more than the tutorials of old. No more 30 mission stories like Doom gave us. You barely work up a sweat and all you have ahead of you is multiplayer. At least I haven't heard too many 12 year-olds screaming in my ear here.

I quite enjoyed the visit to Mobicle and hopefully if they have some big happenings in the future I'll get to go up and see them again and write about it here.

Undead Defense Champion

2010-06-13T14:54:00.006+09:00

Undead Defense Champion is a bit of an oddity. Despite the website address this game isn't an online game. This is a free to download zombie defense game. Download and set-up is pretty easy. You don't even need an account. Head over to the site, click the link, wait for the main site to come up and choose "game download". Install, during which you can choose an English option, and you're done. The English choice seems to only be for the installer. The game itself is still in Korean, but it's pretty easy to figure out.

Controls are standard for a game of this kind. You can carry 4 weapons at once. A knife, grenades, a pistol and one main weapon. As you defend against the zombies different areas will open up and you can get additional weapons in those areas. Hit 'E' to swap weapons. The menu is fairly straight forward. Half in English. I just changed the resolution to 1920x1200 and set it to "high". According to fraps I was getting about 40~ frames per second. It's a decent looking game.

The game progresses in rounds. After you clear all the zombies in the round a new round will start. There does seem to be a time component as well. If you don't finish one fast enough and there is one or two stragglers it will start a new round. There are a few "boss" rounds where there are some very tough zombies. One of the most difficult I've found so far is round 20 where there are 3 or more chainsaw wielding zombies. They're very tough and the second time through I didn't pass them. The game can go on for up to an hour. I assume, I haven't gotten past about 30~ minutes so far. You have 2 extra lives to help you last. Some zombies will spawn with guns later on, and zombies will have various speeds and toughness mixed together. Sometimes they will be both fast and strong. you want to be fleeing and dropping grenades or shooting backwards at that point.

The pathing is a bit off in this game. There is a spot where you can stand, pictured below, where if you step through the doors most of the zombies will turn around and go back around the other way. If you're in a bad way it's a good spot to exploit the AI and pick off a couple and step back through causing them to turn around. This does not always work. I would say only about 70% of the time so far. If zombies are close to you they will follow you through and the odd one will charge through anyway, so don't completely rely on this trick. It's pictured right and you can see me exploit it at the end of the video. If your health is below 25 when the round ends you'll be bumped to 25. Zombies will drop ammo boxes and med-kits. Med-kits seem to heal around 50%. Other than that, there is another bug where zombies will just walk over stuff, including debris. There is fire on the stairs. Don't try to jump over it you won't make it and you'll die fast. You cannot use the fire extinguisher you find in one hallway near the trick corner either. Trying to open it does nothing and it's very explosive. After the 20th level you need to head upstairs or you'll catch on fire.

All in all it is a pretty fun game. A good time killer. I'm hoping to make it to the end sometime and see if there is anything special there or not. I just need a good strategy for the chainsaw zombies.

Battery

2010-06-13T10:23:00.008+09:00

Thanks to Stanly for pointing this one out. Battery is a first person shooter due out this summer. I missed it because it isn't directly connected with any game portal. Even though Naver does a pretty good job of indexing new games, I still find games I miss from time to time. All I know so far is that it's coming out this summer, and they are using motion capture for the models. I'm going to attach a few screenshots I found. This is being brought out by Webzen and seems like it will run on an independent site and not as part of a portal. Webzen is also responsible for Huxley and if you have an account from the old Huxley website, it looks like it works. I seem to have an account already for this game and the only way I can imagine having it was from when I created an account for Huxley last year.

Mobicle visit - Part 1

2010-06-10T09:43:00.005+09:00

I went up to Mobicle a couple days ago. As you know Mobicle produces TK Online which is the first Korean game I've found that actually has an English option. Even though many developers are now targeting the English speaking market overseas they forget that there are tens of thousands of English speaking foreigners in South Korea who are potential customers as well. True, not all want to play video games but even if a few hundred were interested in a game it could provide a boost to many games out there.

Mobicle is a company that has embraced the foreign market. In addition to providing TK Online in English, they also have contracts in Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, China and The Philippines. They have a dance themed game that they've been working on in The Philippines for about 4 years which has around 4000 concurrent users called "iDate". They're hoping to try and bring it to Korea later. The company currently has around 53 employees. On Monday I met YJ who had just come back from a business trip to China where he was meeting their partner. YJ and I got a chance to talk about their business, their games, and the Korean gaming market in general.

Mobicle's bread and butter is their mobile games. They were founded in June 2004 as a mobile games company and it wasn't until 2006 that they started to branch into online PC games. They are responsible for the very popular Ma-gu Ma-gu a baseball game. They have a partner ship with CJ Internet to develop some games for them. As I walked around the office I could see many poster boards for the various cell phone games they make. Some were instantly recognizable. Recently they've begun to release games on the iPhone as well. From the list YJ sent me it looks like they have nine games out for the iPhone now including Cubetrix 3D which has gotten some pretty favourable reviews.

The first thing we really talked about was TK Online. It is what had drawn me to the company after all. TK Online has actually been in development for about 3½ years. However, 2 years ago they had some server issues and had to redevelop the server code from scratch. This is what has delayed the release so long. Also they are pushing the games in foreign markets right now. The game just completed its 3 closed beta in Malaysia, and is also being developed in Japan right now. Mobicle wants to finish the game overseas and then bring it back to Korea. So this means we may actually be waiting a little while for it. We can always hope that they will keep some kind of open beta open for us though.

I asked YJ what inspired TK Online's style. He said that Starcraft is a powerful force in Korea and competing with it wasn't exactly what they wanted to do. he said players enjoyed combining items to make different gear and that helped to set it apart from games like Starcraft. He also compared the game to Avalon, which is a similar styled game being released under another service. These kinds of games are helping Korea develop the RTS market. They feel that a company like Blizzard has so many years of research and data under their belts that their games come out very good and polished. Other companies who want to get started don't have access to that kind of experience and resources so it takes them time to reach that level. Perhaps in a few more years we'll see some very good home grown RTS games here in Korea.

Up Next YJ and I discussed the Korean gaming market and how it compares to other countries they do business in and the Western model.

Upcoming Tests

2010-06-08T22:39:00.005+09:00

Looks like Warcry is finally going to be open for play. June 18-20 will see the game open up. I will do my best to get on for a bit and record some video and get a few screen shots. Maybe we'll get a chance to find out if this is going to be interesting or not.

Battlestar is entering "pre-open beta" on the 10th. Not sure exactly what that is, but maybe it means that open beta is not that far off. You can watch a decent video on the main page right now that shows off the game. It looks like a very interesting FPS/RTS combo similar to Natural Selection, if you remember that old Half Life mod from long ago.

Apex just finished a closed beta test a week ago. Hopefully we'll see an open beta before too long.

Mobicle

2010-06-07T20:12:00.009+09:00

Today I went up to Mobicle. I met YJ their international business lead. We talked about TK Online as well as their other games and Mobicle in general. We even got into discussing the Korean game market and international markets. Mobicle has spread out globally and has several international contracts. I'm just going to toss up a couple pictures right now, and later I'm going to write up the various things we discussed. He gave me a tour of their office and I took a couple photos.

Blackshot

2010-06-04T16:27:00.011+09:00

Blackshot is a first person shooter from Gametree. I have also found the game in beta on a site in Germany. I haven't checked that version out yet, but I assume that this version has a much lower ping. As I mentioned before Gametree doesn't allow foreigner registration. So either borrow a friend's ID or get them to make an account for you. Once done, head over to the site.

Installation is straightforward. Hit Game start. It'll give you a pop-up about downloading the game. Hit Okay. It'll ask where you want the download, choose a place and let it go. In the screenshot you'll notice I unchecked a box. This box sets Gametree as your home page. So probably you want to uncheck it. After it's done downloading, installation will start automatically. Next next that to completion then head back to the page. Hit Game start again and it'll give you some message about an update. Press game start a third time and it'll launch the update launcher. Once that is done, it'll auto start the game. Once in the game you'll be allowed to make a character.

For some reason I can only choose female characters. Perhaps because my friend's ID is female or maybe you need to unlock the male characters. It's rather odd, and there doesn't seem to be much explanation yet. My choices seem to be either a skinny scout or a rather hefty M16 toting linebacker. I'm going with the scout as I like to do a lot of running around and flanking at times. I'll update later if I'm able to unlock the other characters. There are two character slots available. I'm not sure if that is the max or if more can be unlocked.

Blackshot offers some unique gaming modes. One of those modes is some kind of bunker defense game. You can play solo or with up to 3 companions. The goal is to defend the bunker for around 8 minutes. Enemies will constantly spawn and sometimes some of those enemies will be suicide bombers making a dash for your bunker. You need to keep the bunker intact so the more enemies you kill and especially the bombers, who take 2% off per explosion, the longer it stays alive. After it's over you get some XP, and both times I tried it I got a free piece of armor. Once or twice random helicopters will show up and clear the area for you. Some of the enemies will drop grenades and guns but you can't leave the bunker. You need to mouse over them, they will have a green icon, and press "G". You'll auto-equip them. You can only carry one gun, so you'll switch out the one you have. Your pistol has unlimited ammo.

I played this for a few hours tonight, the intro was written a few hours before and I stopped to play, and all I can say is that it is rough. Compared to Unit, there seems to be a steep "getting used to it" curve. It will be hard to avoid comparing this to Unit since I'm enjoying Unit more than I thought. Right now I'm ranked around #100 overall in Unit. On Blackshot I don't think they've invented a number low enough to describe my rank. I was going 1/15 in my early games. I got slightly better as it progressed but I never surpassed a 1:2 kill:death ratio. This comes from a combination of factors.

Grenade radius seems to be larger than Unit. So many times I thought I was safe and I ended up losing 70-80 health. I didn't last much longer after that. Guns seem to be extremely important in this. My starting gun seemed extremely under powered compared to what I was getting hit with. I'd empty half a clip into someone and it seems like only 2 or 3 bullets from them would kill me, even when they weren't head shots. 99% of the time I got the drop on someone they responded with a head shot. The rest of the time the head shots didn't seem excessive. I really don't know what it was, but every time I caught someone looking the other way or I'd come up behind them, they'd spin and it'd be a head shot.

This was very frustrating. Compared to Sting which was head shot crazy this is kind of middle of the road.

Guns can be purchased a couple ways. You can buy them by the hour or purchase them for a single match. Hourly purchases range from 1 hour to 30 hours and in game purchases run for about 10% of the price of the hourly rate. For example one gun cost around 500 points for an hour rental, but about 40 points for a single match purchase. You can average around 200-300 points per match even as me getting slaughtered. If you are in game and want a new gun, press the "B" key and you'll get an overlay to purchase a new gun. This helped me slightly, as did increasing the mouse sensitivity, but I think I'd need a lot of practice at this game. I was pretty good at flag capturing though and made up some points through that. A kill is worth 1 point, a flag worth 5 points, but somehow in the end kills still seem to be worth more money and experience wise. Grab a lot of flag points and get slaughtered and you won't find yourself really getting more experience and money than someone who has half your points but they're all from kills. Armour seems to be only available from this map. After a win you get random pieces and other odds and ends. You can't buy it in game and the store doesn't seem to have a big selection. So you might want to play some bunker maps to build up your character.

The other play mode is set the bomb. I did better at this, even winning a couple maps. However, my luck ran out and I ended up getting slaughtered non-stop in the next round. Everyone caught on to my tricks.

Overall I think this is an interesting game. The survival bunker map is kind of interesting. I'm not sure how much more I'd play this because I'm enjoying Unit so much these days, but if I get bored with Unit I might give this another go. Perhaps in a couple weeks I'll do a "Weekend with Blackshot" and see if I can't change my luck with some time getting used to it. Menus are standard, nothing fancy or unusual here. I'll see if I can annotate a screenshot, but looking at the menus for of the other games I've done should tell you what is going on.

I decided to try Youtube for the video this time. I've been less than happy with the quality of Viddler recently. I think the next video I make I'm going to try and get it at 720p. I've been recording in Fraps at half size, but I'll need to record full size to do that.

Warcry UI Movie

2010-06-02T19:09:00.003+09:00

The folks over at Hanbiton have released a UI video for Warcry. This has been in beta for some time now so I'm hoping these last few teasers are a run up to the actual game being released. This Is Game tells me that the game has been in service for about a year and a half. I'm not sure how long it was developed before that, but I think Korean games need to come out faster. The teaser time is exceedingly long. So I think they really need to keep them a secret longer. It's one thing to build some suspense, it's another thing to string people along for a year and a half waiting with no announcements about an expected release date, or at least not one I can actually find.

A weekend with Unit

2010-05-30T23:34:00.008+09:00

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

2010-05-28T19:52:00.003+09:00

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

2010-05-28T17:31:00.004+09:00

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

2010-05-26T20:15:00.006+09:00

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

2010-05-25T18:04:00.004+09:00

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

2010-05-23T22:50:00.007+09:00

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

2010-05-23T20:26:00.003+09:00

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

2010-05-23T15:15:00.001+09:00

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

2010-05-23T02:07:00.005+09:00

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

2010-05-23T01:24:00.006+09:00

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

2010-05-19T22:06:00.004+09:00

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

2010-05-18T09:50:00.003+09:00

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

2010-05-17T20:49:00.003+09:00

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

2010-05-17T20:11:00.005+09:00

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

2010-05-17T12:34:00.003+09:00

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

2010-05-16T21:49:00.005+09:00

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

2010-05-16T21:37:00.003+09:00

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

2010-05-16T17:53:00.005+09:00

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.

Aion English and Gametime

2009-10-20T20:39:00.003+09:00

Just a mini-update. I've been playing Aion a lot. It is pretty enjoyable, even in Korean. My Korean is terrible, but I'm understanding a bit more than I expected. Due to the nature of the questing system it is pretty easy to muddle through most in the game without too much trouble. You can always tab out and use an English quest guide of you're stuck. I've got a level 17 Chanter if anyone wants to join me on the server.

I tried the English language pack for Aion that was passed around during the Chinese beta. It doesn't seem to work. I think the Korean version and, what I'm calling, the international version have different architectures. So adding another language pack won't do it.

I also figured out how to tell how much time you have left if you buy an hour pack. When you log in you'll get a yellow message as your first chat message telling you how many hours and minutes you have left. Since I'm having fun, I'm considering buying a 30 day pass. I'll update on that if it shows anything different, but I expect it'll show an hour count and an expiry date when you log in since you have to use the 300 hours in 30 days.

JustiShow

2009-10-18T18:56:00.010+09:00

Ever wondered what would happen if someone turned a beat-em up into a questing MMORPG? We have one in the form of Justishow. Not sure what the name means. I thought after the last few days of TK online, I'd try something different. This is not the usual fair. This is brought to us by the folks over at Mgame. As I pointed out earlier, Mgame is a portal which doesn't allow foreign sign-up. So if you want to try this game out, you'll need to get a Korean friend to create an account for you.

The install is fairly standard. Head over to the site and log-in. Click "Game start" and you'll get the usual active-x parade, and then a launcher which installs the game. You'll want to click 실행 on the installer to get it going. Also uncheck that box because it sets Mgame to your home page. Unless you really want that, I can't think of a reason why. The game will walk you through the standard install screens. Nothing surprising there. Next, next, click okay to the agreement and then it'll finish up. Once that is finished, close the launcher and head back to the main page. Click Game start and it will begin.

The game starts off in ultra low-res. Resolutions that I didn't even think existed anymore. Once you're in game you can hit escape and bring up the system menu (first choice) and change the resolution to something more palatable. Before that though you'll be presented with a character select/creation screen. The creation is fairly basic. Pick one of 3 base models and one of a few hair styles. I don't think there is any meaning to this beyond aesthetics. You'll be kicked back to the selection screen when you're done. Just click on your newly made character and hit 게임시작 to get yourself started. You'll be launched automatically into the tutorial. Its a series of messages (that you can ignore) and pictures which show you which buttons to push to do things. Run through the various screens doing the tasks and you'll eventually find yourself on a street with a guy in a trenchcoat. Important note, if you see an NPC with a red question mark it means they want to give you a quest. Stand on them and use space bar to active it. Just click the highlighted quest dialog button and then accept it. This is basically all you need to know to get going. It is fairly straight forward. Run around and beat stuff up. This is a side-scrolling beat-em up. Reminiscent of various console or arcade games.

The gameplay is done with the few keys you learn in the tutorial. After you get through a couple quests and screens you'll be deposited in a town. It has a store. All travel is done through various glowing way points. Stand on them momentarily to activate them. You'll be teleported to the next area or into a building. I only played a short while, but its a fun little casual game. If you level up, you'll get a skill point. Click the button to open the interface. It is fairly straightforward again here. Just click the litte + button next to the next skill to upgrade it. Eventually you'll get to a branching choice for which skill tree to go down. Once you have a new skill drag it to the quick menu on the right so you can activate it during combat. You can reorganize that pane as you need. Video when the site finally takes it.

TK onlne - The second day

2009-10-16T22:17:00.006+09:00

Well it is day two of the TK online test. I got to play a full game. Only a practice game, but a full game none-the-less. It gave me a better picture of what this game is. There are other units you can get. As you upgrade your gear you can buy summon spells which summon groups of units. These are time limited but you can use them over and over, even if you have a full compliment of units. As far as I can tell if you wanted to be patient you could summon tons of units and swarm your opponent. This makes an interesting strategy where some people keep the enemy busy while you have someone in the rear protected summoning a ton of units then sweeping in and wiping out the enemies base.

I tried a couple of play modes. Death match plays for an amount of kills. These are player on player kills. Not deaths from random mobs. Also siege mode which requires you destroy the enemies base. Both are interesting. The siege mode is a long slog with many human players because it takes awhile to dig away at each team's base. Your heroes aren't that strong and expect them to die a few times. The healing potions are not that powerful. Taking one isn't an instant save and they're better used when resting between fights.

I shot a video. Its uploading now. When it is up I'll attach it. It shows some gameplay during a siege match. I'm summoning units and heading forth to attack. The heroes abilities seem to be hit and miss. I use some..but other ones don't always seem to fire when I try them. I need to pay closer attention to error messages to see if there is something up with that.

Defeating the bases are a challenge. Each base is guarded by pre-set towers. They're a little strong and if you go at them alone, probably you will die. You should take some generic units and summons with you. Each base has some buildings that spawn units who rush forward and attack. You can bolster them with summons to make larger armies. The units you summon are controllable, the base ones are not. While doing all of this you should also try to manage your inventory and crafting. It is a pretty tense game during a busy fight trying to manage everything. However, that is what makes it exciting.

Had some issues with the video update last night, here it is:

Tk online First Impressions

2009-10-15T17:20:00.002+09:00

Sent from my iPod.
I logged in promptly at 4 as I didn't have a lot of time. Game is fun
but not an RTS. It is more of a diablo or dungeon siege light, but
with deathmatch. The game is also almost entirely in well written
English, except for a couple error messages. Which means I don't need
to provide any play instructions. I will provide screenshots and
video later as I'm on a bus.

Back home now. I'll add some screenshots here. I will try and do a video shortly to show you what the gameplay is like. Its fairly straightforward. Click the enemy you want to die, pop some potions activate a special ability or two. There is a simplistic crafting system as well you can use to make items for yourself. You gain gold as you kill enemies and there are regular infusions of gold you can use to buy these things. There is an interesting system with 2 characters. Your main fighter and an "aide". His job is to run around and buy this material for you. You control them independently.

TK online update

2009-10-14T23:05:00.004+09:00

Well, I got an e-mail telling me there will be some kind of "double point" bonus during the test. I'm not sure if that means experience or what. It did also include a working link to the download client. You can get it here. Log-in, click download. Even works in Firefox. No IE required. The page doesn't look formatted properly, but it works. Not big around 320MB or so. Once its down, run the install. You actually get an English install choice. You can run it when it is done. There will be a launcher, click update and then start the game. You can't play now, you can get the log-in screen. It will fail to connect, but with English log-in prompts and an English error message. This game just gets weirder and weirder for a Korean game. I'm all for easy, but its certainly breaking the mold. I don't know how much will end up being in English, I suspect they didn't write any of the flavor text in English, but maybe some menus and other options might be in English. If enough foreigners check it out maybe we could convince them to translate the flavor text.

TK online Group Test

2009-10-14T13:51:00.006+09:00

Awhile ago I commented on two seemingly defunct Korean RTS games. One of them, TK online, has come back to life. I was surprised to see an email for them in my inbox. They've announced a group test from October 15th to 25th. Running from 4 pm to midnight every night. Good news is that even though it is a stand-alone site, you don't even need an ID to make an account. It just verifies your e-mail address. So get signed up and try it out. It will start tomorrow night.

First head over to the official site and click the registration link under the login box on the left. If you are not familiar with what the registration link looks like, its on the left, black button labeled "회원가입". After doing so you will get this lovely pop-up to the right. The upper button just shows us the poster, the lower button starts the registration process. You will then get our standard ToS checkbox questions, click the left most check boxes after each one. I don't know what the right one does, but I expect its the "I don't agree boxes". On the next screen you'll input a name (use Korean, make anything up if you want), then you will have to enter your e-mail address on the next line. Then press the gray button. After pressing this, the site will send you an e-mail. Go check it and get the code, put that code on the last line and press the ever familiar and wonderful "확인" to continue. On the next page you're going to pick out a few miscellaneous details, like your user name, password, gender, age, and "Do you want to get our spam/updates" radio button. After setting all those obvious fields press "확인", and that is it, finished. Fantastically easy. You can log-in now if you want, but you can't download the client yet. It just generates that same pop-up about registering. Even though I'm logged in. Perhaps the client download will be available tomorrow night. If not, its going to be a very boring group test. So for now, I have no screenshots or videos that I can show. Not my own anyway, I found a couple random ones on the site. Though these shots make them look almost like different games. I think there is a persistent hero that levels up in all your games that you play. You can get items, etc for him.

Steeldog Video

2009-10-12T14:07:00.009+09:00

I found a video of gameplay for Steeldog. As I expected, the game is all about vehicular combat. The video is from the closed beta and shows a deathmatch. I think this is taking place between two users. The vehicles seem very agile. Able to jump and zip around the screen, even in mid flight. They also seem capable of spawning walls, cages and other hazards. I can't find any info on when the closed betas are going to end. I think Korean companies don't like to commit that kind of information to public record in case they don't make the deadline. It looks like it could be interesting, but I expect if its simply player versus player it could be challenging for someone who isn't fluent in Korean if there is much customization on the vehicles. It might be difficult to figure out what all the options do. I hope they'll release it soon.

Aion

2009-10-10T13:51:00.012+09:00

I finally decided to give Aion a try. Anyone who likes games and has a pulse has heard about it coming out. The game has been out for almost a year in Korea, but last month was released to the rest of the world in English. While I haven't found a way to run the English client on the Korean servers, it does give us access to plenty of English quest guides and info on the game. The games are mostly the same. For those who want to play the game fully in English apparently the North American version of the game is not region locked, so you can buy a copy stateside or a key online and download the client and get a month plan back home and set it up.

So why play the Korean version? The client is free. Lower ping. Got a Korean gaming friend? You can play together. With the time difference to your home country it might be hard to play with any friends back home. Also if you're at a PC방 you can play Aion. You won't find the US version of the game installed in any PC방.

Aion is the first non-free Korean game that I've tried. So the process is slightly more involved than a normal one. It was slightly confusing, and because I did it out of process, we're going to follow that method. So head over to the Aion site and follow along. First thing is to make sure you have your account verified with a cellphone. If you don't, my instructions won't completely help you. So if your ARC doesn't match your cellphone, get the ID that does. In my case, a friend helped me set up the cellphone, so I used their ID to make my account on this site.

Often the game can be installed by clicking start. The site usually detects that you don't have the game installed. It does that, to a certain degree. Clicking game start will launch a pop-up. You need to click the left blue button. This will install some activex and install the PlayNC Launcher. Great right? No, because for some reason Aion can't be downloaded via the PlayNC Launcher like other games. Why? I'm not sure, but I'm going to guess sunspots. So what you need to do after the launcher is installed is to click below the start button on 클라이언트 다운로드. It is the left longer button. This will cause a new pop-up, a round of activex and a new special downloader for Aion. Its several GB, and took me around 20 minutes to download. Once it is downloaded it will auto-install. Once that is done, resist the urge to click game start again. Since we have to pay for this game, we'll need to actually pay for it first. If you start it, it gives an error about something being expired. Just below the user information box we'll see the word 결제. They have conveniently made the word bold. Clicking this takes you to the payment option screen.

Having the account verified with your cellphone is about to come in very handy. We're going to use our cellphones to pay for the game time. You can see they have a couple plans. A monthly plan (non-recurring I believe), a 3 month pack, a 30 hour pack and a 3 hour pack. I have no idea who the 3 hour pack is for. I guess someone who just wants a taste. I chose the 30 hour pack as I tend to play in spurts. Decide which pack you want and click "구매" below. You will be taken to a new page showing the cost of your item. In the #3 section you can see payment choice. I have no idea what ARS is, and the last choice appears to be through online credit card/debit. The first choice is to pay with your phone. It should be checked by default. Leave it checked and click on 결제 again. At this point you'll get a pop-up asking you to verify your ID number, and punch in your phone number. This will send you a text message with a secret code. Type that in on the website after you've received it and you'll get another text indicating you've paid. At this point your account is all topped up. After buying the 30 hours, I cannot seem to find a place to figure out how many hours I have left. I have a feeling I'll get a text message or some kind of warning when I'm getting low.

Now that you have paid for your account, you're set. Go back to the main page, click on start and the game should launch. You'll get the PlayNC launcher (which now works) and a pop-up with info about the servers. This is information about which races can be played on each server. Most are okay but some servers are maxed out on some races. If they're red, you can't play that race on that server as far as I can tell. The blue column 천 is for the sky people and the brown column 마 is for the bad guys. 마 translates to demons or devil. I'm currently playing on the last server on the list, 우르툼. It was the top server when I logged in, so I just went with that.

After the game starts you're going to get an agreement form. It comes up every time. I can't find a button to disable it. Click the left button and you can continue. You'll be able to pick your server at this point. If you want to pick the same server as me and send me a message in game, go ahead. I'm not that high of a level yet. Character creation is pretty straight forward. You can muddle through it without any help. Pick good or bad, pick a class, play with sliders for body shape/facial features. Once you are in the game there is a lot of leading by the nose. So you can probably do pretty well without reading any Korean at all. My Korean is pretty basic, I've looked at the odd word in my dictionary, but mostly I've used an English wiki. It is PlayNCs official UK wiki for the game. You can check that out here. It has quest lists, with locations, pictures, everything. They are also working on an interface for the iphone. So when that shows up, or if you have an ipod touch, you can use that as a companion for the game if you get stuck. There is a link to it on the main Aion page. Just look for the icon on the left and it'll take you through to the app store. It's currently in Korean but they've stated that they're working on an English interface as well. It will probably connect to the NA or UK version of the wiki. In game performance is fine for me. Chugging a little at 1920x1200 in the big city, but otherwise its relatively smooth even on my aging laptop. It seems to autodetect the settings, but you can find the options menu in there and play with the sliders if you want. The only thing I did was to disable AA. My old 7950 GTX shouldn't really be trying to take on AA. I'm uploading vids and screenshots, but if you want more, they are pretty easy to find these days.

New Comment System

2009-10-08T15:41:00.002+09:00

Nothing about a game, but I added a new comment system to the blog. It should work better and lets you use various accounts to comment, including facebook, twitter, etc. You can also embed images now. So if you're having trouble with something you can embed a screenshot and maybe I can help out. The comment system is called Echo. It also features real time posting, meaning that it will update the comment thread without reloading the page.

Landmass update, imbc

2009-10-06T22:59:00.004+09:00

I had previously been asked to try Landmass. Its a first person shooter with battle suits. Cool trailer. Interesting screenshots. Website is a dud. The free board is full of people wanting to play. The game portal is run by MBC, one of the TV channels here. Its the equivalent of the NBC gaming portal. You can imagine how well something like that would be run back home. After logging in, I need to agree to a set of terms and when I click okay, the page gives an HTTP 500 error. Same error trying to access a lot of screenshots, free board posts, etc. The site last had news in March, but since then nada. I don't know if its abandoned or what. I will check back later and see if they've straightened it out.

The good news is that the IMBC game portal is very foreigner friendly. They allow in English account creation for foreigners. Both in Korea and living abroad. For those living in Korea you need to fax your ARC over or attach an image of your ARC for the account verification. The instructions are completely in English so I don't need to walk you through it. Just go to any game page and click the familiar registration button and you'll be taken to the IMBC site to process your registration. You get games but also a lot of other content. There are only a small number of games there, there is a soccer game, a couple MMORPGs, and a 3D dancing program called On Air. I'm probably not going to talk about that one so if you want to try it out go ahead. Really this is only useful if you want some MBC content or Landmass becomes operational again. There is possibly a fishing game but its also down right now.

Nolto and Metalblack

2009-10-06T14:43:00.005+09:00

Nolto is another small games portal. It doesn't allow foreign sign-up, and seems to focus mainly on MMORPGs and casual games. Not terribly interesting unless you're fluent in Korean, or want a different site to play Jang-gi on for some reason. The reason I mention it is because it is the site which will host Berkanix. What is Berkanix? Well I don't know exactly. It is currently in the teaser stage. However it looks like they are going to target a western audience with this game as well as a Korean one. The teaser site contains an English site. It has 3 episodes, a couple of minor flash games to drive those episodes and a bit of a trailer. Beyond that there isn't much information. I don't know if it is going to be an MMORPG or FPS. However if it is in English, then either is fine for us. Let's just hope if its an MMORPG the English version can be played in Korea. This might be worth watching.

Awhile ago I mentioned that MetalBlack was in development over at Plaync. Well its still in development, but there is a new trailer with more details up. Including some detailed gameplay. I updated the old post because the old trailer was no longer there. It looks like diablo with guns, but interesting. Steel dogs is still in closed beta. There hasn't been too much released yet this year. I'm currently keeping an eye on Hessian. Its an FPS with cover, I think similar to gears of war. Looks pretty decent. Also has neck breaking finish moves. I'll post on that if I can get more info. It is currently in closed beta.

Age of Seventh Dragon

2009-05-23T16:01:00.007+09:00

Age of Seventh Dragon is a web-based strategy game. You're probably familiar with these style of games. They're completely browser based. There are plenty of these out there and while you could just as easily play one in English, this one has a couple of interesting features and of course its in Korean which always gives us an opportunity to pick up some vocabulary. The first thing that works to our benefit is that since these are browser based you can copy and paste just about everything and run it through google. Google doesn't do a bad job translating most of it. It is all fairly easy to understand. The game is run through a small portal called "Webgamech". I haven't tried the other 2 games yet but they may be web-based as well. This also means you can play them easily at work if you want. There isn't anything to install, but you'll need an account. This one doesn't let you use your ARC, so time to order pizza again and call your friend. I'll wait....okay I assume you've got an account now.

Head over to the website and click the big game start button and the first thing that will happen is you'll be asked to log in again. Once you've typed your password again, you will be asked to choose a server. There are currently 5 servers. Number 5 is the newest and currently has a little "new" icon beside it. You can have a game on all servers, so don't worry about making a permanent choice. The other servers are just more established which makes it more difficult to get started. Even the new server is a little crowded already. After you pick a server, if it is your first time, you'll be presented with the game set-up screen. This screen will let you type your Lord's name, pick your race, starting region, and if you have a coupon enter it. I have no idea what the coupons are. Now that you've set all that, click on the button at the bottom and your game will start. You'll be presented with an option for a tutorial. It is all reading and in Korean. Some pictures, but I didn't see anything overly helpful there. You're better off clicking around until you get the hang of where everything is. First thing we'll see is the main game screen. This is the screen you'll do most stuff from. You can click the empty green squares to build something or existing buildings to upgrade them. Every building has tons of levels. The first thing you need to do is upgrade your farm in the lower left. You can't do anything until you do that first. To do that you can just click it and then you'll see a link in there for upgrading/building. As I mentioned earlier any time you want to translate something you can copy it and throw it in google, its fairly good at giving back something readable on these descriptions. Across the top of the screen you have choices for "City", "Hero", "Map", "Guild", "Market", "Ranking". The hero screen lets you put equipment on your heroes and see their stats. The map screen lets you view the world around you and interact with it. The other ones are fairly self-explanatory.

As with most games the point here is to build yourself up and take over the world. So far I've managed to put together a few buildings, a couple soldiers and attack some trees. I also took over a distant crystal mine. you can use the resources you have (upgrading them for big bonuses) and if you find resources on the map, take those. Every game I've been in all the resources are already claimed, but I did find 1 free crystal mine and took that. Non-resource squares let you send armies in to fight enemies of some sort and hunt for random elemental crystals. No idea what those do yet.

I've only scratched the surface of this game, but its completely playable without any Korean skill. All the actions are time based, not turn point based. So you don't have X actions per day. You can come back in a few hours after you've made some resources and do more stuff. Build buildings, attack squares, etc You'll see a countdown on the right of the main city screen about your actions. If you need gold, you can click the town hall and there is a link to gather 200 GP in taxes. When you make heroes and armies those will get listed on the main screen as well. The time required for attacks is based on how far away the square is. First you'll have to walk there, then your guys will attack, then they will walk back. You will get a message with a battle report (mostly readable). As I figure out more things about this game I'll post updates.

Jang-gi

2009-05-19T12:45:00.010+09:00

Jang-gi is Korean Chess. If you've played western chess at all, you can probably learn Jang-gi quite quickly. I learned to play it on my cell phone and in a couple of weeks of playing it on the subway I learned the moves well and could play a decent game against the second lowest level. It can sometimes be hard to find real opponents to play against, and if you want to play against a friend who is far away you might need an online venue to do that. Since Pmang even allows foreign sign-ups for people not in Korea, with a little fudging, you can play against people back home too. I'm not going to talk about the rules here, but more how to get the application up and running and annotate all the various options. If you want to read the rules you can read about it here and here

First up after you cruise to the site you'll get a menu with various town choices. These indicate a level of play. If it is your first time I recommend free play or the beginner level. After you choose one you'll get a couple pop-ups and the pmang installer will do its thing. As always if this is your first time to the site, you'll have to install a few activex controls. After choosing a town you'll get the main lobby. If you want to you can change the room, but unless you're meeting someone in a specific room you probably don't need to. There are various options including the ability to watch a game in progress. This lets you jump into any game which isn't limited to 2 players and observe it. While in the game you also have the option of rewinding it and watching the moves up to that point. You can report a room, but I don't know what that entails and it is probably unnecessary. Also you can create your own room. There is a chat at the bottom. If you click on create a room you'll get a little pop-up. You can pick a title for the room, set the limit on how many people can join, and set a password. The join limit is for limiting observers. The minimum you can set is 2, or you can choose 4, 10 or unlimited. I can't possibly imagine why you'd want to arbitrarily limit a game to X amount of observers but you can.

Once you're in a game you'll have a choice to set things like take-back, time limits, move limits, etc. You can also switch your horse and elephants position if you like before the game starts. I'm not exactly sure what 접장기 is. I believe you can also use the grayed out button to switch sides. In this particular game I think the room owner took his side and I was forced to play the other side. As well there are various buttons you can do things with down on the right hand side. They includes help (in Korean), options, invite another player, and screenshot. If you are watching a game you will see controls under one players name where you can back up moves or move forward to see current moves.
Of course I won't be posting a video of this because it is a board game. Not very exciting to watch. The interface is fairly simple to use and if you're interested in playing Janggi this is probably a good choice. I tried to play it on Hangame but that site required some strange verification process before you could start, I think because on hangame you can play for real money. I couldn't do the verification because my Korean cell phone is not in my name a friend helped me create the account and I used my foreign ID to create the hangame account. The names don't match. I'd have to make a new account using my friend's ID.

If you have an SK cellphone and want to play Jang-gi on the go, I recommend World Chess/Janggi 2. It includes western chess and Jang-gi in one game. Practice games of various levels and tournaments. If your phone is bluetooth enabled you can play a bluetooth game against a friend who has the same.

Metal Rage

2009-05-18T15:48:00.009+09:00

After a bit of a hiatus, I'm back with a new game. This is another shooter, but this one comes in the form of giant robot fighting. Metal Rage is run by a very small portal called GameHi. Unlike other portals they don't really have a main page. The site basically consists of three sub-sites for the three games they have a customer center if you try to go to the main GameHi website. They have an MMORPG and Sudden Attack, another FPS. This site will require you to have your Korean friend sign up for you using their ID. So I won't be walking through the sign-up. Even though the name field is very long, attempts to use my Foreign ID resulted in it telling me to choose "Under 14" when I had chosen adult, then after choosing "Under 14" I was met with an error that said there was a problem with the name.

The website is pretty easy to navigate. After you're logged in, click game start. It'll install a couple activex controls. After those are installed it'll direct you to the client download page. Click the download link and you will get a pop-up. Click "확인" and you will get the installer. Like many installers before it, you can change the folder if you really want or just hit "젼송시작" and let it do its thing. After it downloads 100% that button will change, and you can press it again to install. Once it's finished installing you might want to delete the setup file. This isn't done automatically and it's around 1.1 GB.

The menu is fairly simple and not much needs to be touched. I went to the options and maxed the resolution. Again on my laptop with max resolution the game ran and looked great. I didn't get any slow-ups except when I was taking my fraps video. The inventory/store button is the same. One useful choice is the game type sort/filter. This one presents a drop-down menu that lets you pick the game type and sorts based on that. Very handy for finding a specific type of game. All my photos and videos are from deathmatch. The cards are some kind of buyable/reward object. I haven't completely figured them out. I have 2, they look like weapons, but I can't find them in the store.
The store/inventory is fairly normal, except it also lets you choose which four mechs you want to take on a mission. You have many choices but you can only have four at a time in your bay. To swap them just select one that isn't in the bay and double click it and it'll be moved to the bay slot. From there you can buy new weapons, choose which ones you want to take, etc. There are a lot of choices here and you could probably spend quite some time setting mechs up. I might get into that later. I swapped out a couple mechs after a match or two just to try them and jumped into some games.

Gameplay is standard FPS fair. Move. Shoot. Die. No headshots though..so that was nice. The repair mech is also the turret builder, so you get a two for one deal here. There is a sniper mech, also a mech who can immobilize and turn into a giant cannon with a shield, and many other interesting abilities and guns. I quite liked this one, and I expect to play it quite a bit more. Currently its in open beta, so there is a chance some things might change.

Sting Part 2 - Gameplay

2009-02-19T16:28:00.005+09:00

Sting gameplay can be summed up in one word: Headshot. This game seems to have the most headshots out of any of the FPS games I've played. My first few games seem to have been non-stop headshots and I would guess that in the first 5 matches I died about 70% of the time from headshots. Which is why there won't be an immediate video for this game. I'm trying to get up the gumption to go back in to it.

As with many games you gain some points as you play. You can use these points for guns, aesthetics, and skills. Skills are some abilities that you can have. One is healing, one is speed and one is respawn speed (I think, I didn't actually try that one). The abilities recharge over time. 3 levels total. The longer you let them charge the more benefit you get. Let the healing go to level 1, you get 10 health, level 2, 30 health and level 3 50 health. It takes time, so you better hope you're good at staying alive. I never got to use it for more than 50 and then 10 more before I got killed. The screenshot is a rare moment when I was not dead and near an enemy. The headshot hit box seems to start around mid ankle and run to about 5 feet above your head. The only time I didn't seem to die from a headshot was the rare time they killed me instantly with what appeared to be a heartshot. This is one of the roughest twitchiest shooters I've played. This is a shame because the graphics are nice, and the skill feature is very interesting. It adds a little strategy and depth.

The character classes are interesting, and as I said you can have 4. If you want to switch you actually have to exit the match and pick a different one. Each one progresses independently in terms of points, weapons, skills, etc. Each class is a different nationality. No Canadian, but there is an American. Gameplay modes are currently limited. The game is new and growing. Most of what I saw was team deathmatch. I don't know what else is currently there as I didn't really see anything else available. This game does have bots. Headshot loving bots. Some maps will let you play against a team of bots. You can even create private rooms with some bots if you want to play alone. Maybe just for practice. The bots are not pushovers. Everything is fairly intuitive, one thing to note is when your item expires, you can repurchase it for a discount. So don't go buy a new one. go to your inventory and buy it for a discount. I made this mistake and when I went to my inventory to equip stuff I found the old stuff still there but grayed out. Clicking it gave me an option to buy it again. Nice option and also unique.

In conclusion I personally won't be playing this one a lot. It has some nice features, but I find the headshot feature a total killer. I don't know if this is fully out of beta yet. I didn't really see any cash items so maybe not. In that case there is hope that they will shrink the headshot box down by about 90%. If you want to have a look at the new features it might be worth it for that reason. You might find the twitchiness okay. I'll tack the video on the end of this post perhaps tomorrow if I can get up the energy to go back in.

Sting Part 1 - Installation and Menus

2009-02-18T15:09:00.005+09:00

I was going to do a different game today, but someone asked me about FPS games so I tried this out yesterday to see how it was. Sting is a FPS on an independent site. The game is made by YNK games who are responsible for a couple of mmorpgs and who also has a 2D flying game in pre-beta. From my searching on Naver this seems to be one of the newest FPS in Korea. So if you want to get in on the ground floor, you might want to try it out. It has several unique features will I discuss in gameplay. First off you'll need a Korean to sign up for you. It only takes 4 characters for name input.

Once you have an account, you'll have to click repeatedly on the gamestart link to install a couple of activex controls (at this point my computer is like a poster child for activex control addiction) and then launch the installer. This installer isn't a normal launcher so you won't see it again after you install it. Which means no screenshot, but it is relatively simple to navigate. You'll get the regular buttons letting you pick a folder to put the download in and then you can press go. It'll download and you can again hit go to launch the install. When the install finishes, the installer doesn't go away. You have to close it. After you close it you go back to the website and press game start again. Unlike other installers it doesn't auto-close or change in to a launch button.

Once you're in game you'll be prompted to pick a graphical settings level. Pick the right most to get the highest quality. I get decent performance on my machine at 1920x1200 on that setting. You need to manually adjust the resolution later. Next you'll be prompted to create a character. This is one of the ways this game differs from other games. You can't just change your class on the fly in this game. You can have up to 4 characters of different classes (or the same one..but why?) and if you want to change them you'll have to exit the current match. You build up their gear, points, ranking, etc independently. After you've created your first character you can jump in to the channel. The first screen is a general or clan select. Pick the top choice. It will auto-select a channel.

From the main screen you can do a lot of normal things. Inventory, manage your characters (and switch them), and get to the settings area. Exiting here will actually take you back to the channel select if you want to jump around the channels to find more games or different games. Items in the game are purchased on time again. You guy buy things for a set period of days. A note on hangul for this game. I mentioned in Pointblank how I had trouble using alt-shift to switch the input language. This game blocks it all. I have no idea why. The only way I could type in hangul in this game was to change my default input language to Korean and restart. You will still type in English letters by default, it just means the language bar will be sitting on Ko and not En when windows starts. You can use the right alt key to toggle between hangul and english letters. This solves the problems in all games. Tomorrow, gameplay!

Portals foreigners can't sign up for

2009-02-17T12:00:00.008+09:00

So in this post I'm going to give a big giant list of all the game portals I've found that don't allow foreigners to sign up for them. You'll have to ask one of your Korean friends to make an account for you. I recommend ordering some food and having them spend 20 minutes making you an account for all of them to get it out of the way if you can. I'll be covering various games from these sites, and you might see one you like. I'm not going to detail the sign-up because I assume your Korean friend with a Korean ID can read Korean.

MGame has the requisite number of about a dozen MMORPGs, and then some other games. They have a first person shooter in the way of Operation 7, a real time tactical game that has some relation to pearl harbor, an arena combat game called Crashbattle and a couple of casual and overly cute RPGs. They are apparently responsible for Knight Online. This is a Korean MMORPG that was a really blatant Everquest ripoff in terms of interface that made its way over to North America a few years ago. It wasn't that impressive then, probably not that impressive now.

Up next, Netmarble. Netmarble again has a dozen or so MMORPGs but they have more developed categories of action, sports/fps, and casual. Netmarble has the Korean version of Perfect World. If you're familiar with that and want to play on a server with a low ping I recommend it. Since Perfect world has a few english editions it might not be a big deal to find a walk-through if you want to play it. They also have Sudden Attack which is a wildly popular but long in the tooth first person shooter. Most of their action games are fighter beat-em ups. So if you're interested in those you might want to try some of them out. There is a Gundam one. Gundam games are hard to find in the west. They have Gunz which is a game that has enjoyed some popularity outside of Korea as well. They also have a mech fighting game called Metal Rage.

Hanbiton doesn't have an overly huge abundance of games but they do have a few interesting ones. They have the only place you can still play Hellgate: London online. They acquired the IP as it was going belly up. You can download the game (huge for a Korean game over 5 GB) and play it for free. It is an action RPG so there is a lot of text, but there are walkthroughs for the English version if you can't sort it. They have a FPS in beta called Warcry that looks very interesting, and a golf game that has strangely been ported to various other game systems including the play station and playstation portable called Pang-ya. To me this site is worth it just for Warcry, it looks like it will be very good.

I'm going to mention Nexon. Technically foreigners can sign up for Nexon but you have to go to their office (and possibly still speak Korean there) or fax them a DNA sample. So if you've got a friend making accounts for you, you might as well just have them do this one up too. Nexon has Counterstrike online (with a zombie mod), Warrock (a game that also showed up in North America with an atrocious beta) and combat arms another relatively popular FPS. They also have a new cute FPS called Bubblefighter which involves water guns and forming giant bubbles around people. They have a handful of sports games and a fighter or two.

That's it for game portals that I've found that need a Korean to help you do the sign-up. I'm always looking for more and if I find some new ones I'll post them. I still have another couple of game portals that foreigners can sign up for on their own. I've also found that independent games typically don't allow foreigner sign-up on the sites. So if you see some of those you like you'll have to order some more food and get your friend back over.

Pointblank Part 3 - Inventory, store and notes

2009-02-16T15:45:00.004+09:00

I didn't post yesterday because I was busy playing Pointblank and sorting out some more stuff about it. It is truly a fun game. The first thing I want to mention is typing in hangul in the game. When I first loaded it up I was surprised to find that no matter what I did I couldn't type in hangul in the game. Apparently the game blocks the alt-shift keys from doing their job and switching the language bar. These are the default keys. Luckily windows lets you switch them to ctrl-shift. Doing so allowed me to switch the language bar and then use the right alt key to toggle English/Korean letters. I'm not sure what their thinking is in disabling these keys, but if you find yourself similarly stuck, I recommend trying that.

The store in Pointblank functions like some of the other stores. Things you buy are for x number of days. In this case, 1, 7, 30, or 90. With increasing discounts the longer you purchase it for. This rewards people playing a long time. However if you have to take a break you might lose your items and have to drop more points on getting them back. When you go to buy a weapon you can choose the time you want to have the weapon, check the various stats and then buy it. If you want you can also gift it by click on 선물 instead of 구입. Most of the stats are similar to AVA or konglish. There is a weapon that sounds like a pea-shooter that is apparently very deadly as I always get wasted by it. I particularly like the heavy machine gun and use it in the helicopter maps as it really does a number on them. In the inventory you can activate an extra weapon for each slot and in game you can toggle around them, so you aren't entirely limited by your inventory set-up prior to entering the game.

After a short while you'll burn through the first few missions. After you've used them all up you'll notice that you don't get a new mission. To get a new mission you need to spend points unlocking it. For some odd reason you can unlock the missions one at a time or unlock a whole group. I can often finish a whole mission in one match so I'm not sure why you'd want to bother unlocking a single mission at once and not a whole group. You only get the big prize for completing the big group anyway. If you're not getting any new missions, you can go to the mission area, and click the drop down menu. choose a mission you haven't done and buy it. A full mission seems to cost around 5000 points and you'll likely get almost that much back just in the time it takes to complete it. For completing one mission I got a weapon for a day, you also get point bonuses, and some other stuff. Again, just buy all the missions, I can't see the point in getting one at a time. It would just be a headache. You can change the active mission (if there is something you're having trouble doing and want to move on) just by going in and clicking a different uncompleted card. Most of the missions you'll do just through normal gameplay. Killing people, throwing grenades, etc. Sometimes you have to kill with a specific weapon or sometimes you have to kill them when they are looking at you. If you don't know what weapon to use, press "T" to bring up the weapon list in game and compare the names to the mission. You'll usually find a match.

Pointblank Part 2 - Gameplay

2009-02-14T12:00:00.006+09:00

As I said in the last post, I was pleasantly surprised with Pointblank. I wasn't sure what to expect, but the game was quite fun. The gameplay centers around sexy police officers and criminals shooting each other up. The graphics are nice and the gameplay interesting. There still isn't any gun sights except for sniper rifles, but the play modes are various and there are destructible environments. There are 5 types of gameplay on the main screen but one of them I couldn't try. Every game I tried to join gave me an error. It was called "Challenge"(챌린지). Not sure what the point of it is. The first kind I'll mention is 폭파미션. This is a demolition style mission like counter strike. As you know I'm not a huge fan of these, so I just confirmed its play style and moved on. 1 death, plant an explosive device.

저격전 is Sniper Deathmatch. You can only be a sniper and you face off the enemy in opposing buildings. You can try to sneak across and wreak havoc with your knife if you so wish. 단쳬전 is team deathmatch. These and all other maps seem to always be played to 100 deaths. Gameplay is pretty fast, and people make ample use of smoke grenades. The game play is a lot less twitchy than Karma 2. It is still fast, but I found myself getting slaughtered far less than in Karma 2. Not everyone stepped around the corner with guns blazing. I decided to play some team deathmatch and it was a lot of fun. On the map I played you could hurl grenades to break up a wall and try and move through. On another map there was a library and you could get on the roof and shoot out panes of glass to drop down.

The last gameplay type was the most interesting. It is called "파괴미션" which means demolition, but I'm not sure why. I didn't see any demolition happening on the map. What I did see is circling helicopters that you had to try and take down. You could pick up rocket launchers and take them out, and at the beginning of the game, someone would spawn in it. They could either bail out, or jump on the minigun and start blazing. The video I've included has me jumping out and then killing some people, but I've also uploaded a video of me shooting the minigun which was pretty fun. It means you can't die until the end of the mission. The first team to blow up the other team's helicopter wins. You don't control the helicopter either. It is on a set pattern. At one point it will drop down and dock with the playing field if you want to get on it you can. I can't see the advantage of being on it and not being in control of the minigun. The helicopter moves far too much to be an effective sniping platform or anything like that.

This game is really quite fun. Up until now AVA has been my favorite FPS in Korea, but Pointblank is a serious contender. It is missing some of the finer controls, like weapon sights, but I didn't miss them that much.

Pointblank Part 1- Installation and Menus

2009-02-13T14:21:00.006+09:00

As I was preparing to install this, I thought "Yay, another FPS. I certainly put a lot of those on the blog". Well with every site having several of them, they are an over-represented genre in Korea. Plaync has little outside of MMORPGs which makes it tough to put much else up from them. However, I must say I was pleasantly surprised with Pointblank. First thing we'll do is head over to the Pointblank page after having logged in at Plaync. Click the big giant game start button to kick off the install. Now, Plaync has a custom built installer that handles all their games. You can open this application, the Plaync launcher from your start menu after you install this first game. Should you want to try other games you can easily download them from there rather than opening the individual pages. The install process took long enough that I was logged out of the Plaync site, so if you get an error when you try to launch the game, go back, refresh the page and login again. Then click start again.

Now you want to click the button labeled 설치 and it will start to download. When it is finished the install will kick off as normal. That button will then turn in to an upgrade button, why it doesn't do that on a first install I don't know, and then finally it'll turn in to a play button when all is said and done. After the game launches you'll be asked to pick a nickname which can be the same as your ID if you want. The rules for ID/nickname creation on Korean websites seems haphazard and confusing. The display name can't be the same as your ID, but the nickname can. It is also going to throw up a few welcome screens after you choose the nick name, just close those down. One warning about the menu. There is apparently some kind of auto-join in play in this game. If you're just sitting in the channel it is going to offer you games. You can see this message on the left. It will look something like that, with a different number depending on what room it is offering you. Click 취소 to ignore it. You'll get one every little while. If I can figure out how to disable them I will be sure to post it.

Now on to the main menu. The first thing you'll want to do is change the resolution. Joy of joys, the menu actually changes resolution too. This automatically gives the game bonus points. There are a number of standard features, shop, inventory, settings, clan, friends, and missions. Missions little quests or tasks you have to do in the course of your playing. As you do them you'll get experience and notifications about them. In the beginning you have to do something like kill someone, or get a headshot. It seems like you'll complete them just through normal play so I wouldn't worry too much on them. If you get stuck on one, try running it through google or phone a friend. One thing I did notice is that the background music was unreasonably loud in this game. Go into the sound settings and turn that down. The background music is controlled with the upper slider.

Up next, gameplay, videos and screens.

Plaync Registration

2009-02-12T12:00:00.002+09:00

Plaync is another game portal in Korea that allows foreign registration. They are behind games such as Lineage and Aion. The layout is actually slightly different from most game portals and features just a small game box on the right and the rest of the main page is filled with advertisements and stories about games.

Start registration by clicking on the text link underneath the login box. On the next screen you'll see three choices. I chose the blue one, a cube like fellow wearing a blue suit and headphones. Accept the TOS on the next screen and then enter your name in capitals, last name first. The registration page is actually a little small compared to most of the other sites. Input an ID and nickname. One is for login, the other is what is displayed. Pick a password, and this time you'll have to complete a Korean captcha. You'll need to switch to Korean typing to do this. if you haven't learned to type in Korean, you might want to find a friend to help you out. There is no address field on this one. Email and phone number and that is it. After filling these out, click okay and you'll have your ID. I found this to be one of the easiest sites to sign up for.

Plaync is an RPG heavy site. Most of the games they have are RPGs and only have 1 other catch-all category "Casual games" which everything else goes in. They have an obligatory first person shooter which I'll do a write-up about and they have a couple of nice looking games in development. One is Steel Dogs, some kind of car combat game, and anther game called Metal Black which is a 3/4 isometric shooter.

This looks like it is going to be quite interesting. There are no promo videos or screens for Steel Dogs, but the site graphics indicate vehicular combat. There is an on-going alpha test, I'm going to see if its possible to get signed up for it.

The Elusive Korean RTS

2009-02-11T14:08:00.006+09:00

If you've spent any amount of time in Korea or even hearing about Korea you will know that Koreans are obsessed with Starcraft. I was not surprised then when I went hunting for Korean RTS games that were not Starcraft, I came up mostly dry. By mostly I mean that I found no current Korean made RTS games. I haven't completely given up the search, and I did find some, just not playable at this time. I'll detail a couple of them here.

The first is TKOnline. The TK stands for Turbulent Kingdom. TK was an active RTS that apparently started to undergo a redesign last October. News on the site is scarce, and there haven't been any updates. There are users occasionally posting on the site asking about updates, but so far the devs have said nothing. If it makes a come back you can be sure I'll write about it. The art style is a little cartoonish and reminds me vaguely of Warcraft 3. It is an independent website and not part of a portal. The company behind it is Mobicle who seems to be mostly focused on a few mobile games. This is their only PC game that I can find.

The other game I've found is a game called 3rdplanet. This RTS game doesn't appear to have been released yet and I can't find an announced release date. The graphics do look nice and it appears to be a sci-fi RTS with some giant robots. There is also some kind of card game mechanic, but I'm not sure what that is. The company behind the game is UTPlus. They have one other game listed on their website called M Project, but there doesn't seem to be any other info on it. Also with a name like M Project, it is a little hard to search.

Personally I find 3rdplanet to be a little more interesting than TKOnline, but I plan to try them both, if and when they're released. None of the game portals I've joined have any RTS games on them and it appears very few companies want to try and compete with the juggernaut that is Starcraft. With Starcraft II coming out it will probably make the RTS market in Korea even tougher to break.

Update: TK online has finally been released. So for those interested, see my latest post on it here. The 3rdplanet site is returning a database error, so that doesn't look so good.

Karma 2 - Gameplay

2009-02-10T10:33:00.005+09:00

Karma 2 has a handful of gameplay modes, but as I stated earlier, most of the gameplay is focused in team deathmatch maps. The vast majority of maps you will see in channels are team deathmatch and the other types of maps are almost always empty. Which made it hard to play those ones to try them out.

Survivor is a gameplay mode that is basically team deathmatch but 1 death per round. I don't know exactly why people enjoy these maps. They're pretty boring to me, but then again a lot of people like counter strike. I just hate getting shot up early and having to sit around for 2 minutes before I can die again in under 10 seconds. Maybe the problem is I'm not good at those kinds of maps^^ I played a few games of it, some interesting maps, and it seems like there is the ability to get low and shoot out from under some things like vehicles which makes it interesting. On the right you can see me about to snipe a guy during a survivor level. I'm pretty sure I missed and some flying debris took me out.

Another map type if occupation. Occupation is 2 teams on a small map, with a control point. The longer you hold the point the more points you get. Reach a certain limit and you win. I died a lot in these games but it was fun. sometimes the games are over quick. I think the limit has to be higher, maybe 2-3x as long would be better. I had a couple games end in around 1 minute. The problem is the team which takes the control point first gets a major tactical advantage.

There is another map type which I didn't translate before. It is konglish and means "One Flag" its similar to occupation but takes place in a trench scenario. Not sure why it isn't just part of the same rotation.

Team deathmatch is fairly standard. What really sets this game apart is the control. The mouse feels very laggy when turning and there is no way to adjust the sensitivity of it. When I tried to turn to shoot at someone in this game, I felt like it was just too slow compared to AVA or Wolf Team. I'm not sure why. I got used to it after a few games and it wasn't too much of a big deal, but still a little noticeable. Perhaps its some kind of realism thing. I'm not sure. Team death match is pretty fun. Like AVA you get money when you level up and after every match you get some experience points. All items are done on in-game time so if you want to buy some new grenades, helmets, etc keep an eye on the time. If it expires you won't have that item. They're cheap and keeping them in stock is no big deal. The guns are expensive but every level you should be able to buy one or two guns. Those stay forever. There is no zooming on the guns except for the sniper rifles. Its possible to get mortars which is interesting.

Its a reasonable game. There are 4 classes to play, soldier, sniper, rocket launcher guy, and heavy soldier. The maps are interesting and varied. You die a lot and quickly. It seems everyone steps around the corner firing so don't expect to get the drop on anyone.

Karma 2 - Install and Menus

2009-02-08T13:48:00.005+09:00

Karma 2 is a newer first person shooter in Korea. It is developed by Dragonfly studios. Dragonfly studios has a game on Pmang, but Karma 2 isn't on a game portal site. It is hosted on its own site. It also doesn't allow foreign registration. So if you'd like to check it out you'll have to ask one of your Korean friends to set up an account for you. Account creation is pretty fast and since they've got to do it, they can understand it. On the off chance they just give you their KSSN and say you can make an account it is pretty straight forward and many of the options are similar to the pmang account creation and you can follow that guide on making the account. Karma 2 also got a little western press for their recent promotion in which they had some Koreans dress up in Nazi uniforms and run around some parts of Seoul to advertise.

The install is fairly straightforward. This is another one where you'll have to click the left text link under the game start icon to kick it off. It is around 830MB. Once it is all installed you can go ahead and start the game. I had to do a brief update even though I just downloaded it, and there was of course an activex control on the page that I had to install the first time I pressed game start.

Once you have it up and running, I believe you have to choose a nickname on first run of the game. It will immediately auto-select a channel for you and present you with a list of games. You can change your channel later if you want. This game continues the trend of "resolution only effects the game and not the menu". Which means your menu is stuck at 1024x768. Not a big deal, but it doesn't look that sharp on a 1920x1200 resolution. As to performance, I've played several maps at 1920x1200 with maximum settings for overall, models and 2x AA and still pulled from 50-100 Frames per second depending on where I am standing. Korean games seem to run fairly well on mid-range systems. Mine is starting to even flirt with the lower-end of mid-range systems and I can still play games that look great.

This menu is really easy and basic. We have the familiar settings button, exit, an inventory/store, a few stats in the lower left a list of games, channel, and players in the channel. The inventory/store consists of first an inventory screen where you choose your load-out and then a store screen where you can buy the items. Items here are mixed purchases. Some are permanent, like weapons and some are time restricted like gear. The time restriction on gear is in-game minutes. A previous game we played had calendar day purchases and time, this one has it based on in game time. Which means if you take a break for a week you won't lose your items, but if you play a lot you'll have to buy stuff more often. If you want to buy something choose "구매". This means purchase. You can choose how long you want to buy the item for, usually you're given 3 choices of time length. After you've bought the item go back to your inventory and equip it again. When the time limit of an item is getting close to expiring it will begin flashing so you can be alerted of it between games.

Games can be sorted by type, people in the game, room name, etc. Enter one by double clicking. In the game room you can see your inventory items, choose your class for the game, pick a team, etc If you need to there are quick links to the settings (most require the game be restarted), inventory, and item management. There is often no start button unless the game has already started. They just assume everyone is ready, it is a little strange but at the same time it does get games going a little faster as people don't have to sit around going "Hey guy, hit ready so we can start!". This game keeps track of your global ranking and how it changed with the experience you got in the last game.

There is one game type I haven't quite been able to sort out. I don't know what the name means. It is konglish of some kind but not obvious. The game seems to be a kind of deathmatch in the trenches with objectives, but most people seem to ignore the objectives. It is the unlabeled game type in the first annotated menu. By far the most popular game type in this game is Team Deathmatch. I'll chat more about the game types and gameplay in the next post.

Real images from Raycity

2009-02-07T12:18:00.007+09:00

I mentioned briefly in my post on Raycity that the streets and buildings are based on real locations in Seoul. I was out in 압구정 this morning and snapped a couple photos to show some of the similarities. I often pass this corner, so it was quite familiar to me when I drove by it in the game. It isn't perfect mind you, but its close. The subway exit goes in a different direction for example, but 2 years ago when the game was made, I'm not sure it could have faced that way. These are just cell-phone pictures, but I think they do the job.

The building under the bridge is the Hyundai department store. It is the rich people's department store, where a sale is something still priced at $200. The other buildings are some random apartments. The attention to detail here is pretty good. They've matched the road sign perfectly. Even the air conditioners on the sides of the apartments are there. I'm not sure if they fashioned these based on some low resolution photos or what.

Taan Part 2 - Gameplay

2009-02-06T16:33:00.005+09:00

Taan's gameplay is fairly similar to that of an old PC game called "Scorched". It is based around several players competing on a 2D field and throwing highly destructive and explosive things at each other. The ground itself can be destroyed which means the layout of the playing field can change drastically in the course of a game. If you're not careful you can get dug in to a hole that you can't get out of. The enemy will be able to peg you as you can't change your position and you will be quickly defeated. Taan has two main types of gameplay.

The first type of gameplay is mission mode. Upon entering the main menu screen you'll see a flashing icon telling you to click the mission mode. This mode is a single player mode where you do battle against the AI. You must defeat 3 waves of scarecrow birds (new evidence suggests they're scarecrows, but they look like birds to me). On the easy level this is seemingly trivial. You have 40 shots to kill a number of birds. In the 4th round you must defeat the boss in 10 shots. I haven't had a situation arise where I haven't managed to beat this. You will acquire various power-ups during the gameplay you can use, but other than the boss they're not really needed. Even against the boss I haven't found them overly necessary unless I want to kill him in the first 3 or 4 shots. After the game concludes you will receive some experience and get to pick a card. The card gives you some random chance of getting gold, 10, 20, 50 or 100. If you're playing in a PC방 apparently you get a 50% bonus. I think many of these games give bonuses if you play it in a PC방. Perhaps the idea is that if you are playing it there other people will play it and it may earn them more money.

The second type of gameplay is player versus player. You can compete in rooms of up to 8 players on the same screen. Each person takes a turn making a shot and it cycles. Prior to play you can push a button to change weapons. The weapons are similar but have different effective ranges and patterns as far as I can tell. Press "무기선택" in the game room itself to change your weapon. It literally means "Weapon Selection". At some point during the gameplay you'll end up dying. If you die, instead of the game being over you have a new role to play. As a ghost you can fly around and pick up various power-ups. If you want you can then add them to a team member's shot. Making it possible to add 6 power-ups to a single shot. Just be sure to push the button for it before your team member shoots. After each shot you can fly a short distance towards a power-up. Just click on the one you want to head towards. If the enemy also has dead players, they will also be trying to get them. The game will end when one side has been defeated and you will again get some experience (much more than the single player game) and some more gold.

As a casual game this is pretty fun. You can jump in to the game pretty quick and play a match or two if you have a few minutes to kill. You can easily play it with friends if you have some you want to play with as there is the ability to create password protected rooms as well. Below is part of a round I played.

Taan Part 1 - Install and Menus

2009-02-05T16:43:00.008+09:00

I'd like to think I could be perfect and update every day, but occasionally days are going to get missed. Up next is a more casual style game. It is called Taan and it is a Scorched clone. This game is a turn based game where people lob explosives at each other, individually or in teams. Head over to Hangame and look in the "캐주얼게임" section. You want to find the game called "슈팅대전 탄" This is a fairly straight forward install, similar to the other hangame games. Look for the download link in text on the left underneath the big giant green bomb. I didn't experience any surprises during the installation. Most of the installations will be fairly typical and unless there is something unusual about it, or a new unexpected screen or something of that nature I won't comment in too much further detail on them other than to point out links to get things kicked off. After the installation you'll get the typical hangame updater after you click start.

First thing you'll have to do is create a character. "새로 만들기" will let us do that. 새 is often used to mean new, and 만들 is often used to mean creation.Go through the basics of choosing a gender, hair style, shirt color, etc. This will be your in-game avatar for the battles. While it is a scorched clone, it seems to be based on cute kids hurling dynamite and nuclear ordinance at each other. This is the premise for many Korean games. On the next menu you can choose a server (level based or free play, not really sure of the big difference yet) and a channel. The next screen is nice because there is a high amount of english on most of the buttons which explain the basic premise of what things should do. You can refer to a more annotated version on the left.

This game has a couple of play modes that are significant. One is mission play where you play against some predefined mission and hurl dynamite at birds. The other one is where you hurl dynamite at other children. The mission button will take you to the bird slaughter. From this menu you can do all kinds of things including buy some things with the money you earn from matches, work on your level with missions, and apparently play bingo. I haven't gotten in to the bingo yet, but apparently designers here have a thing for bingo. A note on the resolution, the best you're going to do is 1024x768. Unfortunate but the graphics still look good enough for this style of game. The menu for this is reasonably straight forward. There are again cash items and regular items for purchase. A lot of aesthetic items. I'm not sure if any of them have any effect on gameplay or not. I haven't gotten that far in to it. I'll post some gameplay info tomorrow so you can get further in to it.

Wolf Team Part 2 - Gameplay

2009-02-03T16:52:00.005+09:00

Now that you're settled in to Wolf Team let's go over some of the basic controls and gameplay. There are not a lot of the finer controls you'd find in some other shooters here. For example the only gun I've found that zooms in is the sniper rifle. The mousewheel does not scroll your weapons. E is not the catch-all button for doing stuff.

I didn't get a chance to try all the various game types, because the game selector is a bit of a bring-down. It isn't possible to sort the games by game type so it makes it hard to find a game available of a particular type if you want. I jumped in to a couple open games and gave it a go. The first I tried was death match. This is team deathmatch in which you have an option to turn in to a werewolf at will. You'll probably want to try this out as soon as you can as it is one of the unique features of this game. If you find yourself in team deathmatch or other game mode where switch is allowed, you can do so by pressing 3 which selects your third weapon. 4 generally brings up your grenades. If you have more than one grenade you can hit 4 again to swap them. Each time you spawn you'll have to pick a load-out of weapons. The default load out gives you +50 weapon points. Other load-outs cost you weapon points. You also get weapon points for winning rounds and making kills. You can customize these weapon load-outs in the main menu screen. Guns, grenades, etc each have an associated cost.

One thing that I noticed is that any guns, etc you buy come with an associated time limit. You can buy a weapon for 24 hours if you want. You can also buy it for 7 days, 30 days and 90 days for reduced per day costs. This is using in-game money not real money. If you play the game a lot you can make some big in-game money and load yourself out with big guns and things for long periods of time. It is an interesting model and rewards someone for playing a lot. The games can be quick paced, with small, sometimes complicated maps. Which mean a long life is fairly rare. As a werewolf you'll have increased spead, jumping ability and a pretty sweet claw attack. A couple of swipes usually puts someone down. It takes time to switch to wolf or reload so if you're in tight with a wolf and need to do one of those you might as well go have a sandwich because you're dead.

The other game type I tried was a wolf vs human elimination style. One team is werewolves the other team is humans and you can't switch. It is one death per round play until one team wins 9 rounds. The humans have an objective but the games I played revolved around the teams ignoring that and just killing each other. The video below is from this style of game. This was a traditional temple style map. The humans appeared to be invading to set a device. Not sure if it was a bomb or what. I tried to set it once and an invisible werewolf ate me. Apparently were wolves can disappear. I am not sure how that is done because each of these games I played I never ended up as a werewolf. In the deathmatch games the werewolves cannot disappear. You'll also notice the giant turret gun one of the guys has as a main weapon. I didn't get to use it, but it seems pretty nice. In some other rounds he dropped some wolves pretty quickly with it. Over all I thought this was a pretty decent game with some unique features. The menus certainly leave something to be desired, but I'd recommend it for anyone wanting to try a shooter that is a little bit different.

Wolf Team Part 1 - Install and Menus

2009-02-02T11:33:00.008+09:00

If you find yourself in Korea with a less than top of the line computer you might want to try Wolf Team. I'm not saying it is a bad game, just that it is less graphically demanding than say AVA with its unreal 3 engine. I don't know what engine Wolf Team uses but it does appear to be last generation. Frame rate is capped at 60. That doesn't mean it isn't fun. It has a very unique premise. You can turn in to a wolf during death match and some maps feature humans against wolves. Let's start with the install. Head over to Hangame and login. Click on the link under the FPS section for "울프팀". This is one of the places you'll notice that sometimes the transliteration of English to Korean doesn't make a lot of sense. Personally I would write "월프팀" as the name they use doesn't even include a "w" sound. Now once on the Wolf Team page look underneath the big Game Start button. This one is a little tricky. Click the right text link "수동다운로드". This is the client download, it is around 450MB. Save it somewhere you can find it. When it is finished kick it off and you'll be presented with a set of familiar install screens. Click through and when it is finished go back to the website. I ran in to a small problem here. It didn't seem to register that I had installed the game, so when I clicked Game Start, I just got a blank page. I refreshed and it seemed fine. Push start and you'll get the Hangame updater. It will probably also update nprotect. Push game start again to launch the game. Now on the first screen you'll see channel select. There are only a couple of main channels usually full, so pick one. You'll notice the resolution is off, but there is nothing you can do about the menu resolution. It is stuck at 800x600. If you click the settings button you'll be able to change the game resolution. As well as the over-all quality level. Underneath the resolution you'll see 3 check boxes. "그래픽 품질" means quality level. Starting highest to lowest from the left. As far as I can tell they apply right away and there is no need to restart. On the main menu you'll see a few buttons. They call clans "prides" in this game. You can go to the store and buy some new weapons after you get some money and change your load-out. The age of the game shows in some of the options. On the game select screen you can't sort by users in a game, which means it can be hard to find a game if the first few pages are full. In a full channel it might take you a couple moments of clicking. Alternatively you can hit quick play. Unlike AVA which has some more detailed and complicated menus, the menus for this are fairly straight forward and simple to use. The store and inventory screens are rather basic and obvious. There are some cash items here, these items are bought with "Hancoins" and again they're generally aesthetic in nature. Next I'm going to show you some screen shots, talk about game play and a video.

Hangame Registration

2009-02-01T15:34:00.007+09:00

Let's move on to another portal, frankly one of the best portals. Hangame is separated from the rest of the portals by its high number of mobile cell phone games. If you own a cellphone in Korea, and I know you do, you may at some point have wanted to try a game on it but were probably slightly mystified as to how to go about it. Hangame allows you to browse their full catalog of cell phone games, which is rather extensive. They feature games for 3 providers, SK, KTF and LG. It also seems to be the main repository for cell phone games. If you browse for games on your cell phone you'll be taken to the same catalog. You won't have to pay data fees to browse the games list here though.

Unfortunately I don't have a second cell phone to create a dummy account on this website, so I'll walk you through the early registration. After registering for Pmang this should be slightly familiar. This site will take your foreign registration card and there is no delay in using the account. On the main page we'll start by clicking "회원가입". First you will have to choose your age. You can choose adult here. There is a simple/basic ID choice on the right. I don't know exactly what it entails, but I think it doesn't require a citizen number. The text does say something about it not being a full feature account, so I'm not sure what is not available. First you can enter your name and ID number. Up next you'll presented with the standard TOS check boxes, go through and check all those and move on. On the next screen you'll be presented with a choice about how you want to verify your registration. The top choice is to use your cell phone. Select it and hit okay. You'll get a pop-up where you can put in your cell phone number and send out a text message for verification. After this you should be presented with the standard information screen. I seem to recall there being a headache on the address section. When you get to the address section it is going to let you search for your postal code. You need to type in (in hangul) the name of your city or 동. I live in 화양동 so I typed that. Then it will present me with the postal codes from that area. I found mine and chose it. It autofilled my city, 구, etc based on that postal code. After that I could type the rest of my address. Apparently this has to do with the potential for you to win some prizes through the website. If you don't know your postal code, ask someone, or just choose anything in the general geographic area of where you live. They're not going to send guys to your place to check it out. Well they might, but no one has visited me. Now that you've finished you should be able to log in right away. As part of the installation I'll quickly point out the mobile games area. The mobile games are is the bottom left most game area. Above it is the flash game area, they have some fun ones, and then a shareware area where you can download popular shareware titles with time limits. Click on mobile games and it will take you to the mobile game site. You'll see a spot at the top where you can click your cell phone provider. Doing so takes you to the game specific to them. They'll give you the top 10 games, sort them by genre, etc. RPGs are again very difficult to play unless you know Korean well. I personally recommend Family Mart Tycoon. It is the first cell phone game I got and it is very fun. Your goal is to build yourself up from a subway vendor to the boss of a very busy Family Mart. If you want to get a game click on "다운" it will ask you how you want to pay for. Click on "휴대폰결제". Then you can type in your phone number. It will send you a text message and say "Do you want to get this game?" If you're on KTF it will send a confirmation code you punch in the website. If you're on SK you'll get a text message where you can push a button to grab the game. I don't know what it does for LG. Generally these games cost around 3,000W + data fee for download. Sometimes you can get older games around 2,000W or 1,500W.

Heroes/마비노기

2009-02-01T02:54:00.005+09:00

This is apparently a coming soon title. Even though its an MMORPG it looks extremely hack and slash and may be rather accessible. A google translated korean blog I've found indicates that it will be using the source engine. I don't see a specific day for release, but I am seeing 2009 mentioned in the same breath as a lot of stories about this game, so I think we can expect it this year. This game is hosted on Nexon which is a game portal. I'll be chatting about it soon. Below is another trailer with some different views.

Update:Apparently closed beta ran past december, so chances are this is not that far off from being released. It could be available as early as a couple of months from now.

Raycity Part 2 - Gameplay

2009-01-31T15:27:00.007+09:00

Even though Raycity is an MMORPG it is of the "lead you by the nose" style, which makes the gameplay perfectly accessible to foreigners who don't really speak Korean. When the game starts up you'll find yourself in a small town area. There will be various NPCs standing around who want to give you quests. You can drive up to one and press enter. When you take a quest it will indicate how to do it in one of two ways. If the target of the quest is another NPC or something like and you're in the same area as them you'll see a big arrow point at them. If it is to do a specific cab mission you'll see markers on the main map telling you the area in which you can find the mission. You can just keep clicking okay and next until you've accepted a quest. Press L to bring up your quest menu and see your listed quests. Choose one and you'll select it as your active quest. If its a mission quest, bring up the map with TAB and you'll often see some quest boxes on the map. These tell you the areas you can go to to find the missions. Drive to those areas and you'll see various fares standing around. Quest ones will be a different color. Grab as many quests as you can and exit the town by driving in to the blue glowing area. The reason you want to grab multiple quests is that you will often have a fare that can satisfy the requirement of more than one quest at once. You might have a simple quest like "Drive 10 women to their destination" which becomes completed while you're doing a quest about picking up a specific individual. As you complete a quest, you'll see faint white words appearing mid-screen, these are updating various quests that you've just satisfied. I've seen a single individual add to the total of 4 different quests at once, so its worth it to drive around and pick up as many as you can. It can get confusing, especially if you decide you want to start clearing them, but it can also save some time. In the map above you'll see a white circle in one of the quest areas. After you leave the town you might want to head towards that one and pick it up. This is a tutorial quest giver who shows you various mission types and other things. She appears to be new as I don't recall her being there before and when I went in game to make some screenshots I hadn't done any of the quests for her. You can do around 12 different quests of various levels and then she'll pass you off to quest giver in the second "town" area. For all its simplicity I've gotten my car to level 57, and my character to level 17 (they're independent as you can change your car and level it separately) and in all that time I've probably been able to complete 99% of the quests without issue simply following this strategy. There is the odd quest that just has no real indication on screen where you are supposed to go. You can abandon it, or if you really want to do it, keep it and you might get lucky. Alternatively you could phone a friend. I don't know exactly how to unlock new areas, but I have. I believe it has to do with levels or perhaps doing specific quests. In the towns you'll also encounter various NPCs providing services. Things like gas, repair, garage, vendors, etc. You can buy new engines for your car and you can buy things to add some style to your car. You can't paint the car unless you want to pay real cash for it. So whatever color car you buy is generally the color you are stuck with. You do get a selection of reasonable solid colors to choose from when you buy a new vehicle.

You will notice that as you do missions some times the patrons will give you what appears to be junk. These are for bingo games. In the towns you'll find vendors who sell bingo cards. You have to place these items on them and try to make lines and trade them in for other items. If you want to complete them, grab a couple and find people who drop the items you need on it, keep doing missions for them and you'll get enough to get the item. You can have up to 10 bingo cards at once, but I find all the junk really starts to clutter the inventory so I prefer to do it as a concentrated effort, selling or trashing the junk when I'm not doing bingo. If you do the tutorial quests you'll understand what you need to get the most reward from a fare, but the jist of it is this: some people like crazy driving (most of them) and there is the odd person who doesn't. If the person cheers when you do something do it more, if the person freaks out, don't do it. The odd person who doesn't like driving prefers that you stay in the proper lane and don't hop over other cars. The people who like crazy things usually like near misses, hopping over cars and driving in the oncoming lane. Here is some gameplay of me on a mission. Not all fares will be upset by things. Most fares get upset if you slam in to buildings or other cars, but some won't care at all, so slam around all you like.

I also wanted to mention that Raycity is actually based on the streets of Seoul. Driving around some places I've seen familiar subway stations and even business fronts that I've passed frequently.

Raycity Part 1 - Install and Menus

2009-01-30T21:53:00.009+09:00

Raycity is another game offered by Pmang. This is a stunt driving taxi MMORPG. What exactly that means is that you drive a car, jump over other cars and take little old ladies to their hair appointments. Apparently though those little old ladies like it when you jump over other cars and drive in the wrong lane. Before we get to that, let's get to installing it. Head over to pmang and click on "레이시티" you'll find it under NBA Street Online and EA Sports Fifa Online 2. Raycity makes our new favorite button even easier to find, it is labeled in English. Go ahead and push it to start the download manager. Choose a different download folder if you want, and then begin the download, wait for it to finish and kick off the install. So far its fairly similar to AVA, the only difference will be at the end. It is going to give you some extra check boxes. These check boxes will once again toss a pmang short cut on the desktop as well as a Raycity start up icon, and a quick link to the screenshot folder for Raycity. I pretty much always accept the default because I can always delete a short cut or something later. Now once you've finished the install, go ahead and start it up. The first thing you will see is this lovely image on the left. Apparently teenagers in Korea need to be told that causing your car to bunny hop 15 feet over a delivery truck is illegal and a bad idea. Also a cartoon cop is the one to tell them this. Super imposed over 3 sports cars tearing it up. Talk about mixed messages. Now once you've gotten past this screen you'll see the initial channel select screen. I'm not going to annotate all the menus in this game because some of them are pretty sparse. The channel select screen is pretty straightforward. Red means the channel is pretty full, yellow is not bad, white is the best. Generally channel one is red and the rest are yellow. Depending on the time of day you might catch a white channel or two. Using your list of words from AVA you should be able to notice that the first 20 channels are labeled "General Channel". The remaining 4 channels are labeled "Over 19" We're also faced with 3 buttons on the bottom instead of 2. "검사" means "test" in this case its going to verify the data files of the game. Why it permits us to start the game and then verify the data files I'm not sure. I've never found a need for it. I suppose if you're getting a weird bug you might try it. "끝내기" means "finished" or in this case quit. Clicking it will end your session. The remaining button let's us select a channel. Optionally you can double-click one of them. In the next screen we can create our character and car. This allows you to pick a name and a car for your character. Unfortunately I made my character a long time ago, and you can only make one. I'd rather not lose my progress to make a tutorial on that, but as I recall it was fairly simple and I muddled through it with barely being able to read the alphabet. I'll see if I can get screenshots of the creation though. To start your profile creation click "프로필 생성". I'll assume you've completed the process with no issue. If you do want to delete your profile you can click "프로필 삭제". Add "삭제" to your dictionary, you'll see this word from time to time and its an important one not to mistake. "나가기" means to back out to the previous screen. After you've made the profile you can click the familiar start button in the middle of the screen.
The first thing you'll notice is that your resolution is not good. On the right you'll see the main annotated menu. This is most of the main features of the menu as well as a few graphics options. This game performs very well. My system is a Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, with 2GB of Ram and a 512 MB 7900GTX. With max settings and 1920x1200 resolution I am pulling down anywhere from 110-150 Frames per second depending on where I'm driving in the city. I've never dipped below 100. Unless you're running this on a toaster you should have no problem running this on max settings. I recommend you start with the highest you can take and try it out. There isn't much point in tweaking anything here. For now, try driving around and doing some missions. F9 will give you an overlay of all the keyboard shortcuts (in Korean) but it can give you an idea what buttons you should be pushing. This is not a mouse game. Use the 4 arrows to drive, space to jump, ctrl to boost, shift to drift turn. Next up will be more in depth information on gameplay, screens and video.

AVA - Alliance of Valiant Arms - Part 3

2009-01-29T17:18:00.012+09:00

Now that you've familiarized yourself with the menu system, let's actually dive into a game. The game type I usually play is escort. Escort takes place on one of two maps. The first map is built around a gas station type area, the second one is built in a general rubble area sans gas station. They're fairly similar. Gameplay revolves around escorting a tank through 3 check points before time is up. Each team takes a turn. The first team sets the benchmark. Do it before time is up and the other team will only have that much time to win. Fail and the second team only has to beat your progress to win. In the left-hand image you can see the unique weapon for this map. It is the rocket launcher. Rocket launchers are available in several positions around each map. A player can run up to the case, press "E" and after a short time the case will open and you can take a rocket launcher. They come with 3 rockets. 2 rockets are enough to stop a tank. If a tank becomes stopped you can run up to it and hold "E" again to try and repair it. 2 people can repair it at once speeding up the repair time. Usually your enemies will be filling you full of holes while you do this. It can be really easy for a team to get bogged down if a tank gets jammed up in an area that makes it hard to get a safe position to try and repair the tank in. Other things to note in the screenshot are the position of the tank on the map, the progress bar (exclamation points are checkpoints) and the time remaining on the bottom. Checkpoints are also spawn points. As the offensive team passes a checkpoint the defensive team's spawn is pushed back one and the offensive team's spawn is moved up.Hiding behind the tank might seem like an ideal spot to be, but the rockets provide explosive damage and usually the opposing team will be shooting the ground beside the tank. Someone needs to be near the tank to cause it to move, but once you've repaired it, its a good idea to get out of there. Life expectancy of someone near a tank is around 4.2 seconds. I've included some footage I shot during a team deathmatch map. I was going to shoot escort footage, but had a sound screw up with fraps so I had to reshoot it. This type of map is two teams on a small map with a tight engagement zone. Its usually about 5 seconds or less before you engage an enemy, so you have to be fast. If you can get more than 2 or 3 kills before you go down, good on you. Anyway you can watch me take a couple down and get taken out a couple times myself. I noticed today that when I leveled up I got money. I think this is the only time you get money. So if you want to buy more weapons and armor play a lot to increase your experience so you can get more money.

AVA - Alliance of Valiant Arms - Part 2

2009-01-28T10:59:00.007+09:00

Now that you have the game up and running let's have a deeper look at the menu system and where each option can take you. On the left you'll find a fully annotated image of the main menu. A couple of important things here. First the general channel is where you will play your games. It is selected by default. The ranked channel is usually almost empty, and I don't have any info on clans. I've never played an event. The help is completely in Korean so not much help to us. The money in this case refers to in game money. Earning it seems to be completely random. I have no idea how exactly it works. Just after some games I'm given some money. It has occurred on all maps at one point or another. The orange bars illustrate how full a particular channel is. Each channel can handle around 2000 people. At the time this screenshot was taken (10 am on a weekday morning) there were around 2700 people in game. You will pretty much always be able to find people to have a game with. I am told "보급" means supply, but I have no idea what that statistic's relation to the game is. Let's select the beginner channel and move to the next menu area.

This is where you'll spend most of your time looking for a game. First thing you'll want to do is choose a class on the left. You can pick between Scout, Rifleman and Sniper. The Scout can later buy the P90. This gun is basically easy mode. The inventory screen will allow you to manage your inventory and the store screen will allow you to spend the in-game cash you earn. Buying armor, weapons, etc. On the right you'll see a variety of rooms, maps, game types and with various levels of players. The escort missions usually involve escorting a tank through 3 check points. The demolition maps involve placing a bomb at a certain point in the map and the deathmatch maps are fairly standard. The demolition maps have the distinction of only allowing 1 death. While the rest allow multiple deaths. The training map is 4 players against a wave of bots. You can practice your tactics. There are two play types which don't seem that popular and didn't make it on my screen shot. The first is 수송. The word means convey or transportation. The game appears to be a map designed in such a way that one team is attempting to reach an extraction point. The other team is tasked with stopping them from reaching the goal. The second is 점령. I couldn't get access to a game of this type. The word means "occupation" and it may be a game type revolving around capturing an area and holding it. If I can find a game running of it, I'll post on it. For now let's move to the store screen and have a look at what our options are here.

Once you get some money from playing a few rounds you'll be able to get better guns and armor. The repair all button will generate a pop-up that will indicate an amount of money used to repair your equipment. Not all of it can be repaired and you should check on your armor and what not from time to time. You can select the three classes and out fit them entirely differently in terms of weapons. Outfits and backpack items are shared between the classes. The outfits allow you to pick helmets, body armor and other clothing items. The backpack item lets you choose some things like the ability to carry more grenades or extend your radar ability slightly. Switching to the inventory screen will allow you to select your load-out from what you've purchased. Cash items are for those who want to pay real money to get some bonuses. These are usually in the form of experience point bonuses, aesthetic helmets, extra clips, etc. These rarely impact the actual gameplay. Most times you're going to be dead long before you run out of bullets or grenades.

On the right you'll see a sample inventory screen with a couple labeled items. You can add magazines to both weapon types, extra grenade slots, choose weapons and improve the quality of your armor and radar. Just double click what you want to switch in and out.

As for the game launch screen, it is fairly simple. If it is a team match there is a button to switch teams, otherwise hit the start button to indicate you're ready and after everyone is ready you'll hear a countdown. If you need to, you can make a last minute change at the store or inventory screen. This should give you all the information you need to get started playing. Up next, in-game screens and gameplay.

AVA - Alliance of Valiant Arms - Part 1

2009-01-27T23:43:00.009+09:00

Now that you've gotten yourself signed up for a game portal its time to start actually playing a game. I'm going to make this multi-part. The part is going to deal with installing the game. One of the benefits of the Korean PC game business model is the website integration. They want to encourage people to go to the website to see specials, buy things for the game, get information upcoming events, and other advertising.

For foreigners we're really only concerned with one thing. The big giant start button. In this case its a big giant read button labeled "게임시작" This is a mix of Konglish and actual Korean which means "Game start". If you have the game installed it will launch the splash screen and the game will start. No fuss no muss. I'm going to assume you're logged in at this point, if not, make sure to find the login box and type in your credentials. Now as soon as you're reading push the button. If you don't have the game its going to launch a couple things to download the game. To get the screenshots and refresh the procedure I uninstalled the game. Apologies to anyone who gets lost if there is a step I may have done 14 months ago that was part of the site setup and not the game setup that shows up for you at any point during this. Possibily in the form of an activeX control that might be the download manager. If so, you know the words for confirm, and how to install an activeX control so let it do its thing.

The first thing I saw was the AVA downloader window. Important things to note here: You can change the download location of the main file, click the black box with the folder picture. Then press 시작. A new word to write down here is "닫기" this seems to be an all purpose window that means cancel or close. You will often see this word on the bottom of pop-ups on websites and other places. The Korean internet being what it is, you should have this downloaded pretty quick. When the download finishes the 시작 button will have changed to 실행. This means execute or install. Pushing it moves us forward.

On this screen you'll notice it gets a little easier. They're nice enough to label the next button with an N. "다음" means next. The next window will be standard TOS stuff. Choose the top radio button and press "다음" again. It is going to ask you where you want to install. It will create a top level directory for all games from the site. The parent company of Pmang is Neowiz. You can let it do the default and keep all pmang games in one directory or move it wherever you want. I always take the default. No sense in tempting fate. Now you will find yourself on the final screen with a prompt (I) and the word "설치". I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out the meaning of this word. Press it and wait several minutes. It will conclude with a couple check boxes asking if you want to create desktop icons. Leave them checked and you can decide what to do with them later. You will notice there has been no program group entry installed in your windows menu for this game. You can use either the desktop icon that was created or go to the website and press "게임시작" again to start the game.

At this point you will be treated with standard game intro screens, movies, etc and then find yourself at the lovely main menu. Important things to do first. Your resolution is probably messed up. Look for "환경설정" this is the settings menu. The first screen that comes up will allow you to pick your aspect ratio and resolution (conveniently in english). The rest of the settings are in Korean and I haven't messed with them too much. Eventually I'll post a translation. Back out of that and have a look around. Some of the items you'll be able to figure out what they are, but for now the other important word to note is the upper right hand corner. "게임종료" means "end game" or "quit". If you get lost in some menus, keep pressing escape to get yourself back to the beginning. In part 2 I will cover how to join a game, important words, play modes, how to buy weapons, and other necessary things.

Pmang

2009-01-26T16:04:00.009+09:00

Pmang is what is known as a games portal. There are several of these in Korea. They basically work as an aggregate site for some parent company to distribute and advertise the various games they have commissioned either in-house or through outside developers. The bonus to players is that they need only a single ID and they can gain access to dozens of games. They generally span many genres (action, FPS, sports, flash, board, and card games as examples).

Pmang is most notable for the game AVA, at least if the amount of advertising says anything about it. AVA is a first person shooter that uses the unreal 3 engine. I'll detail the sign up process for the site. I should note with almost every Korean website you visit, you'll almost always have to install an activeX control. Korean websites love activeX. I haven't run in to any problems with any of the ones I've installed. I can't guarantee that it will be the same for you, but with all my various software I've never had anything blow up or stop working.

The first thing you'll see on the front page is an orange button which has the word "신규회원가입" loosely translated it means we need to push this button to get started. Now you might think since you have a foreign social security number you could sign up as an adult on the site, later we'll encounter sites which allow us to do that, but this is not one of them. If you attempt to do this you'll encounter an issue where even though you can input a very long name, it will complain if the name is not in hangul. I'm not sure if this is an oversight on their part or what. First click the foreigner picture and move on to the agreement page. This is standard TOS stuff normal to any website. Check the two boxes and add the following word to your growing dictionary "확인" this is the Korean word that means "okay". The other word "취소" is one of many words used as a negative on these forms. While the first is fairly consistent the negative word seems to often change.

You will now be presented with a couple of boxes and some new words to jot down. The first word is "이름" it means name. In this case they're looking for your whole name as it would appear on your alien identification card. Type it in capitals and don't leave anything out. It will just slow down the registration process. Next is your birthday in YYMMDD format. The next is your gender. "남" means male and "여" means female. Also handy if you find yourself in front of a pair of bathrooms that don't have pictures on them. Click okay and you'll be presented with another box. They're asking you for a 4 digit number. This will become your ID number. Write down the whole string starting with your birthday and hit okay.

Now we're on to the main registration form. There are some keywords and items here. "아이디" as it sounds is "ID", "닉네임" means nickname. "비밀번호" means password. The one below that means repeat your password. "비밀번호 찾기 질문" means secret question. "이메일" means email. "주소" means city. "전화번호" means cell phone number.

These are fairly explanatory. First upon clicking the ID field a pop up will appear asking you to choose an ID. It will first confirm availability. You can only use english letters and numbers in this ID. The nickname allows you to use hangul if you so wish. The password can be 6-32 characters, including english letters, numbers and special characters. I believe it must contain one letter and one number. For the secret question just choose a random option from the list and type something as an answer. Write it down just in case you ever lose your password and what to try and recover it. For the email you can choose one of the main korean email providers or choose the last item on the list to use your own email address (like hotmail, etc). Uncheck the box if you don't want spam. In the cell phone area choose your provider and input your number. This can be used to recover your password as well. Uncheck the box to avoid sms spam. The last field is an image of your ID. Take your alien registration card, get a nice scan of it (or a really clear picture) and attach the image to the form. Hit okay. Usually within a day they will approve your account and you're good to go. You will have successfully signed up for your first Korean game portal.

Gaming in Korea

2009-01-25T13:10:00.000+09:00

Video gaming in Korea is certainly a different beast from gaming in other parts of the world. While many things are familiar, there are many unique concepts here that are only now just starting to peak their head outside of Korea and outside of Southeast Asia.

While console gaming is fairly typical here, PC gaming works on an entirely different business model. Games are often given away for free and then micropayments for things like clothes, paint jobs, weapons, etc are used to generate income for the company that has published the game. This sounds ideal. The Korean internet is full of free games that are often high quality and interesting, but for foreigners it can be difficult to access these.

The Korean internet is a closed one. Korean websites generally require you use your Korean Social Security Number to create an account on them. Gaming websites are no different. Foreigners who stay here receive one, but they receive a special foreign social security number. Some websites will take these, some will not. Many websites are set up to only take 3 or 4 character long names, which is standard for Korean names, but far too short for a foreigner to input their entire name. Others don't restrict the length of name input but haven't installed the tools necessary to check the foreign social security database.

I'm going to review various games, gaming portals and other game related news in Korea. This blog will be aimed primarily at foreigners living in Korea. As most games are online only games, gaming in Korea from outside Korea can introduce a lot of lag. Playing with a 400 ms ping when everyone else is sitting at 15ms is a bit of a disadvantage. Before we get started I suggest the following:

Learn to read Korean letters. Known as Hangul, the letter system is not that difficult. Even if you can't understand the words many of the words use in video games are Konglish. Konglish is English words written in Korean letters. If you can sound them out, you can guess the meaning. As an example 로그인 (lo-geu-een) is pronounced very similar to and sounds like "login". I learned using Declan's Read/Write software. Its very affordable includes sounds, and stroke order. If you'd like a free solution, you might try Learn Korean.
Add the Korean IME to your language bar. This is the Korean input system for Microsoft Windows.
Change the language for non-unicode programs. Some games don't have all their fonts coded properly and if you don't change this, the text will show up as garbage characters instead of Korean letters. Change this to Korean.
Make sure your have your alien registration card. While not useful on all sites, I'll make note of the ones that it can be used on and you can create accounts on those sites.
Similarly make sure you have your cell phone. When creating an account they generally need to associate a phone number with the account. They'll send you a text message and you'll have to input a confirmation code.
Make good friends with a Korean non-gamer. While the foreign registration card can be used on some sites, many sites do not allow foreign registration. If you're interested in trying one of those sites you'll have to ask your friend to make an account for you using their social security number. This won't be available to you after it has been created.
Create a growing dictionary. These are common words to all games. For example: 시작 means start, often labeling buttons to start the game. 힘 means strength and is a word often used in RPGs. Making notes of these as quick reference can help you navigate a new game.

RPGs are a very common genre in Korea. They range from the simple hack and slash clones to the complex story driven games with many side-quests. These are generally off-limits unless you have an intermediate or higher level of Korean. The only exception might be in games which have a "pull you by the nose" play style where they highlight the quest giver, quest target, etc. Often I willl feature screenshot or video guides on how to sign up for various games and get started in them but translating and creating walkthroughs of Korean RPGs is far beyond my ability.