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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
