Allstar sign-up

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 I found some old sign-up photos stored away in my blog photo directory but they're out of date now.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.

Joara

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

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

Gamebus

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

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

Gametree

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

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

Windyzone registration

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

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

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

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

Netmarble Sign-up

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

I-PIN

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

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

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

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

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

Portals foreigners can't sign up for

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.

Plaync Registration

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.

Hangame Registration

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.

Pmang

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.