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.

Pointblank Part 3 - Inventory, store and notes

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

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

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

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

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

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.