. . . Agent 47

Regular readers of the gaming side of my writing will be aware that I recently completed the Unofficial Walkthrough / Guide for game play in the title Hitman: Absolution, which is the much anticipated and long overdue next game in the Hitman video game series, but is also oh so much more than just that.

I say "oh so much more" for very good reason, because when you read between the lines and if you are even just a little familiar with that game series you will be aware that Absolution is not only the 5th game in the main series, but also presents the wrapping up of basically all of the plot, story, and sub-plot elements for the previous four titles in the series, being intended to provide a measure of closure for series fans as well as serve a more practical function: providing the tabula rasa that is required when a studio is about to embark upon a new and previously un-hinted-at massive change of focus.

In a nutshell, the Hitman series began with a pair of games that revealed in violent detail the origins of the character after which the series is named -- The Hitman who is a legend in both the underground organized crime community and the world-wide law enforcement communities, being widely considered to be if not an outright myth, then very likely a catch-all character who has been given false credit for the perfectly executed actions, contracts, and hits of a dozen or more different men, with the end result being what most experts in both communities consider to be a fraudulent and undeserved reputation for a man who probably does not exist at best, or the outright theft of many of the most spectacular hits of the past decade being wrapped like a mantle of reputation by a third-rate mechanic with no right to that glory at worse.

The truth of the matter is not the middle-ground rationalization that is often the case in such creations, because the truth is that every one of the legitimate stories is just that -- and most of the widely embellished stories based upon unsubstantiated rumor are also true and factually laid at the feet of the man who was responsible: the ghost figure known far and wide as The Hitman, and more intimately by the shadowy entity that serves as the broker for his special talents, The International Contract Agency (ICA) as Agent 47, the true identity for that ghost.

The Tragedy of Agent 47

With all good stories there is often a bit of tragedy and poetic origins behind the story, that foundation often being lost in the noise of the events or, more likely, never being known or shared precisely because the man who it is about chooses not to share it.  Such is the case with Agent 47, who has no real name; the product of genetic engineering in a secret lab in eastern Europe, 47 lacks even the comfort of some certainty that somewhere, somewhen, there was a man and a woman whose love or relationship spawned him.  Obviously not, since the only thing that 47 can legitimately write on a Mother's day card is "My Mother was a Test Tube" and on a Father's Day card, "My Father was a scalpel."

Starting with that lack of biological bonding, the legend that is Agent 47 cannot even lay claim to the origins of many a fictional and historical hero, since he was not born in a dark corner of the world and then raised in an orphanage, but rather was born in a well-lit lab having been created by the selective culling of organic material from a single female who provided an egg that was initially stripped of all of its genetic details, intended to serve exclusively as the foundation of organics that is required to create a human being, but as a neutral foundation, offering that human no traits or other biological links with the donor.

All of the traits, and in particular what was considered to be the important traits, such as physical capabilities, mental acuity, a lack of moral compass, and a willingness to use violence as a tool to attain the ends that he is programed to attain -- the entire exercise in leveraging the bleeding edge of genetic science was oriented towards a single goal: create the perfect killing machine in the form of a chameleon of a man whose entire focus was the art of the hit.

All of this was accomplished by a defrocked physician and scientist named Ort-Meyer, who it should be noted, used his own genetic materials as the underlying focus for the mental portions of the design for Agent 47.  In the end, while there were literally hundreds of failed efforts, the success with Agent 47 -- who is if you have missed the point that I have been hammering home all along a clone -- was not simply a lucky stroke, nor was his ending up in the employ of the ICA, but all of it, including the rather bloody exit by which he parted company with Ort-Meyer, was the results of carefully engineered and executed plans created by Ort-Meyer.  

Oh, there were a few bumps in the road, and it is pretty clear that Ort-Meyer was not expecting his creation to systematically assassinate every one of the men who contributed to his genetics -- including Ort-Meyer -- but that is material for another article, for another time.

You now have a pretty clear grasp of who Agent 47 was at the start of his career as the ICA's star hitman and special field operator.  It goes without saying that the first almost 30 years of his life were spent in a densely packed series of special training, and his perfect record of contract assassinations for the ICA speak to the success of those efforts, but there is on additional factoid that you need to know about Agent 47: much of the underlying cause for his success as a hitman is thought to be the result of the fact that he was intentionally created with an extra (47th) chromosome.

The 47th Chromosome

If it seems that I am writing about Agent 47 as if he were an old friend, the reason for that is really because in a way that is precisely what he is.  Well, if not an old friend than by all means a lengthy acquaintance with whom a great many adventures have been shared.  In fact that is the point of this piece, because I have just embarked upon the replaying of many of those early adventures in the form of the just-released new game compilation that has been called the Hitman HD Collection (a trilogy consisting of Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, Hitman: Contracts, and Hitman: Blood Money).

I will very soon be reviewing each game in the collection over at The Cape Cod Time's Game On review section, where I recently reviewed both Hitman: Absolution, and the new and related mini-game called Hitman: Sniper Challenge that was created as partly a promotional vehicle for Absolution, and those reviews have fomented the to-be-expected sense of nostalgia that one tends to reserve for events of a personal nature that while not really shared with others, still tend to have had a rather formative impact on you.

In the case of Agent 47 that impact was to instill in the gamer in me a decided respect for the stealth approach that can be used when playing shooter titles (whether they are intended to be stealth-based or not) and the result has been an interesting effect on my game play style.  It would be fair to say that the experience of playing as Agent 47 has had a lasting and interesting impact upon my general outlook and attitude when it comes to combat shooters in general, and the civilian mob/OC shooter in particular.

When a medical type speaks of the 47th Chromosome (normally humans have just 46) there is a very good chance that the conversation is about the disease known as Down's Syndrome -- largely due to the fact that the existence of that extra chromosome is thought to be the cause.  What you may not hear -- it is pretty unlikely -- is that the presence of a 47th chromosome does not necessarily always result in retardation or Down's Syndrome.  In fact there have been a very few isolated cases in which the extra chromosome actually served to enhance the human who possessed it rather than damage them.  Sadly that enhancement tended to be accompanied by some other undesirable side-effect, like the person lacking any moral sense or being inclined towards a career as a serial killer...

Of course those negatives did not prevent certain countries with strong military feelings to underwrite experimentation in the area of genetic science, with an eye towards creating super-soldiers by installing that extra chromosome.  The idea was, obviously, that they would experiment with it until they caught a breakthrough that allowed for a better understanding of how it does what it does, and how to get it to do desirable things.

Forget for the moment that to do this it was necessary to experiment on human beings, and forget for the moment that there are international treaties whose basic function is to prevent that sort of thing....  It happened anyway.  Hell, so does cloning, but nobody talks about that, do they?

It is rumored that the US has completed a long series of cloning experiments, and may be the second most knowledgeable nation when it comes to understanding how the process of cloning works.  You did note that I said "second" right?  The first would be Russia, or more accurately the former Soviet Union, who it is reliably reported had tremendous successes with developing a reliable system for cloning to the point that they could not only clone desirable organs with an eye towards transplants to extend life for individuals who were judged worthy of the great expenses involved, but the former Red State could also just as easily clone entire humans.  

It is even rumored that the ex-Soviet cloning programs uncovered interesting data about genetic memory, a subject that previously was spoken of in only the most basic and speculative of terms.  Today it seems that there is a wider acceptance that in addition to passing on trait-based data that is used as part of the blueprint for making a new human during the normal reproductive process, the mother also passes on a large amount of what is called foundation memory -- why hot is dangerous, the large collection of instinctual reactions to biological and animal threats, and a bunch of other low-level emotion-based reactionary types of information.

Basically the memory that is being passed on is not really memory as such, but skills, or perhaps more accurately reaction-based data, but also -- and this is where it gets interesting -- muscle memory.

It has long been thought that when one or both parents are gifted with expert skill in something like playing a musical instrument, any children that they have might also enjoy an easier process for the acquisition of similar skills.  While the Russians have not fully mapped out the genetic areas that are involved in this process, this exchange of mother-memory if you will, they were able to succeed in isolating and passing on the music part of it.  There is a rumor that they also have successfully mapped out some of the physical skills areas, including the sorts that are of interest to athletes who desire to compete at the Olympic level...

Can you imagine a generation of clones of Alexander Popov,  Anna Kournikova, or even Evgeny Plushenko?  I bet the Russians can...

While I am not sure that the folks over at IO were completely unaware of those programs, it does make for interesting speculation and an amusing notion that they were more than just a little aware of them.

Either way, when I get to the point of writing the game reviews for the new HD Trilogy you should consider yourself invited and encouraged not only to read them, but to play the games.  While they are not fully remastered (that is to say they have not been redone, but rather have been converted to run on the new platforms and in HD quality) they do offer you a chance to step back in time and experience these games in much the same way that we did a decade ago, and that is certainly worth the cost of admission...

I have to go now, there are contracts to be completed...

. . . the need to maintain a good website for freelance writers.

The life of the typical freelance writer -- particularly writers who exist in the shadowy in-between world of traditional print and online publishing (a necessity these days as you have to go where the money is) -- tends to be a very predictable one in most respects.  

You may not know what you will be writing about from day-to-day or even hour-to-hour, but you do know where in the world you will be in physical terms with some easy predictability.  These days the lion's share of the work that the typical freelance writer does is centered around their personal computer, with assignments arriving via their email inbox and delivered in much the same fashion (unless the publication has an online form through which completed assignments are meant to be delivered.

One of the consequences of this new way of transacting business is the necessity for every writer to create and maintain a personal website or, at a minimum, a personal web page that serves as both an online identity and the focus for their work; it becomes the center of their business in other words.  

Editors these days expect to be able to access a wide variety of information on those pages or site, from instant contact data to writing samples, as well as biographical information that will provide a sense of who the writer is as well as what they do.  While most (if not all) of that information will never make it into print, the function that it serves is to give the editor a sense that they know who the person is that they are assigning work to or hiring,and that the writer is accessible to them so in that respect the form that a writer's page/site takes is pretty important, because it ends up being a virtual extension of a real person.

First impressions count for a lot -- my mother told me that and I believe it -- so the first impression that you make as a freelancer through your site should be an accurate reflection of who you are but it should also have enough character and oomph to catch the eye.  Obviously you cannot risk going over the top with it, but it should be memorable enough so that the positive impression that it makes on an editor lingers.

With that in mind you would think that every writer would take pains to be certain that their website provides an accurate reflection of who they are, and offers at least a minimal slice of their character and personality, right?  Well, no, not so much really.  In fact if you took the time to Google the search terms "+freelance writer +home page "+portfolio"  what you end up with is a long list of sites with predictable content but pretty much lack any sense of personal identity.  

The effort that you make in creating a site that represents the identity of the author is especially important for the freelance writer, and not just respective of the impression that it makes on editors who offer potential assignments, but perhaps even more important is the impression that you make on your readers -- after all the reason that you do what you do is for your readers, right?  Right!

The treatment that they give is more like a brochure than a personal statement, and these sites and pages appear to have been stamped out of preset designs rather than serving as examples of the creative spark that exists in each writer.  A very strange trend if you ask me, because I know a lot of freelancers and they are almost all, to a one, characters in their own right.

Addressing the reasons behind why these creative and capable writers who are otherwise interesting and even amusing people have come to the conclusion that they are better served by bland lists and tend to rely upon blog-style cookie-cutter designs -- formats that have about as much to do with the individual writer as the ticket stub for a train trip from Boston to New York -- and I confess that I am left quietly surprised by this trend.

While this is a subject for another post, on another day, before I get to the real subject of this post I wanted to share with you the results of several conversations that I had with different freelance writers whose sites pretty much mirror what I have just described, the gist of the conversation being opened with the question of how they chose the design that they chose...

"The appearance of the site really is not as important as the information it contains so as long as that information is easy to access and easy to read, what does it really matter?  It is not like an editor is going to form an impression of me from the design of the pages where I stick my portfolio," was one thoughtful reply.  "Maintaining that (website) is such a hassle.  I used to write a blog on it but I realized that nobody really cared, so now all I have to remember is to update my portfolio," was another.  Clearly they have the impression that their online presence is mostly wasted effort when it comes to what amounts to personal branding, and that is a shame, because when I looked at the other side of that coin the position was diametrically opposite...

"You can tell a lot about a writer from their home page," an editor for an online gaming entertainment site I was pitching a feature to said.  "In my experience the freelancers who take the time to create an interesting site for their work and themselves are the sort of writer who puts in 110% effort in the assignments that I give them, and besides that if you think about it, the fact that they take the time and put out the effort to create a site that reflects their personality and their skills is always a good thing," they observed.  "I can choose from a hundred freelancers for each piece I need written, so the ones who make a lasting impression on me are the ones I remember first."

It is probably a good thing that you cannot see facial expressions through webchat and IRC, because the writers I was talking to would likely have been shocked by my needing to carefully pick my jaw up off of the floor at their replies, and the editor would have taken note of the smug expression on my face caused by their confirming a reality that I had long suspected.  

The writers seem to be convinced that the image that they present to the world -- and what is much more important to my way of thinking to their readers and editors -- does not really matter or have an impact on how they are perceived by both groups, but I know -- I know -- that is not true.  Coming up with a good (and accurate) site design that helps to communicate who you are as writer is a very important step in creating your personal brand and in introducing you to the world, and especially new readers who are just discovering you.  Then there are editors -- don't forget the editors!

Once you have decided on that design and its elements and you start building your site, you should borrow a trick out of the playbook of web design pro's though, and immediately begin tweaking your site by paying attention to the way it is being used.  You get that information through the site stats that most hosting companies make available to you free of charge.  And that does not apply just to your website either -- you can use the stats from different elements of your site -- this blog is a prime example -- to see how it is being accessed, how it is being used, and perhaps even more significantly you can obtain a snapshot of the people who are visiting -- and reading -- your pages as well...

At least some effort towards improving the effectiveness of your website needs to be made on your part as its creator whose partial goal is to introduce your character and personality to both your readers and new editors who might throw you a bone in the form of a writing assignment.   It is not enough to make it and then wash your hands and say "I'm done!" you have to set small goals for yourself aimed at improving it and then do it!

Tweaking Your Site

If you happen to care about how your website looks, the impression that it makes on the average visitor, and how they use it, you already have some props and respect from me; I am convinced that the presence of your website or page is as important as good telephone manners and punctuation when it comes to making an impression on editors, and even more important for your relationship to your readers.  I am also convinced that the care that you take in design of your site/page and the information you put on it besides the required things like contact information and your portfolio are worthwhile and worth the effort.

The choices that I made for the recent redesign of my site were very personal and reflect both my character and personality -- actually the creative spark that set me in motion and resulted in that puzzling design came from a casual comment from an editor that I had pitched a piece to, and in the follow-up call they made some comments and observations that, though personal, set my imagination on the course that eventually took me to the design you can see on my home page.

They did not end up commissioning that piece -- they wanted a variation of it, which I was happy to accommodate -- but in the midst of that conversation they observed that they found me puzzling; they commented that they admired my pluck -- that my appearance and personal situation (I use a wheelchair to get around) would probably depress most people to the point that they would not be out there pitching feature pieces but rather would be depressed and hostile towards life.  They thought that my can-do positive attitude was admirable, and wondered what the secret was to my staying upbeat in a world of constant pain that is largely hostile towards people who cannot walk. 

"Drugs," I replied.  But they knew I was joking.  The truth is that just like every other life-altering situation, you have to make a choice; you either make the best of what you have or you give up.  It is incredibly easy to blame others for your disabilities and your inability to have the things you want or lead the life you want; it is a lot harder to take what you have and build upon it, and when you are physically handicapped I believe that making the choice to be emotionally compromised in the bargain is the surest path towards self-destruction and self-pity.

When you consider the alternatives -- lead a bitter and unfulfilled existence, don't get the things you want, make other people miserable, and in the end when you tally up everything you did not get done and all of the failures that your life presents, you still only have yourself to blame.  I would much rather try and fail then to not try at all, and besides that when you try and succeed the impediments that you overcame tend to make those successes all the sweeter as a consequence.  Now that directly impacts the entire issue of both an online and real-world presence for me, and probably in ways you have not considered.

I never conceal the fact that I am disabled (the politically correct phrase would be mobility challenged) but on the other hand it is usually not a good idea to make that the first thing an editor learns about you if they happen to be looking for someone to cover an event that requires travel to another city or country -- and I have and will continue to accept those types of assignments, because I firmly believe that the struggles associated with travel are my personal problem, and not something that I want to encourage the average editor to consider.  With that in mind you can probably see how my website and online presence is incredibly important to me -- and why tweaking it and making it more effective is worthwhile effort.

Despite the relative importance of that destination and presence online, very few writers appear to have even the slightest idea of how that resource is being accessed, and which pages receive return visits -- the sort of raw data that the people who create websites pay particular attention to since it allows them to fine-tune a website to improve its results and make it more effective.  Considering the fact that for most freelancers they are the web design and development department for their business, as well as the creative team, and the standards inspector, writer, editor, and chief bottle-washer.  We cannot be all of those things without forming an intimate attachment to what we create, but we can be all those things and still remain completely ignorant of the actual use of and impact that our sites have on the readers.  Heck, you don't even have to try to reach that level of ignorance, you just have to let it happen.

Knowing what the device and Operating System are for the people who are accessing your site can be as interesting and as important as knowing where in the world they are, what the percentages are for the nationality of your visitors (change that to readers) are for each piece, and when the stats cover your actual writing, features, news, reviews, and the like, this information morphs from statistics to valuable data that can help you sell your skills to editors from publications you have never even considered pitching to before.  When you discover you have a large reader base in Germany that you had no idea existed, that is new you can use!

Stats for Speaking Of...

When I first discovered the collection of stats that are available -- at the click of a link -- I was blown away.  There was all sorts of useful information to be had, in fact I will share a sampling of that with you now:

-- Visitor Percentages by Browser --

• 17% -- Chrome
• 46% -- Firefox
• 21% -- Internet Explorer
• 01% -- Mobile
• 03% -- Opera
• 08% -- Safari

-- Visitor Percentages by Operating System -- 

• 01% -- Android
• 06% -- iPad
• 02% -- iPhone
• 02% -- iPod
• 03% -- Linux
• 08% -- Macintosh
• 03% -- Other / Unidentified
• 72% -- Windows

-- Visitor Percentages by Country of Origin -- 

• 01% -- Belgium
• 10% -- Canada
• 04% -- China
• 06% -- Germany
• 03% -- Mexico
• 01% -- Poland
• 03% -- South Africa
• 27% -- United Kingdom
• 42% -- United States

In addition to the above stats I can also learn what pages on my various sites refer the most traffic to this blog, as well as what other sites online (mostly my home page and Google) refer readers in, where they are coming from and what search terms that they are using that ends up bringing them to my site and this blog, which blog posts generate the most views and how often, what the daily traffic looks like, and a plethora of other information. 

On the hosting account for my website I can get the same information but in far greater detail, and in fact the stats system can be custom configured by me to allow me to drill down to specific information such as what the percentages are for each of the Microsoft OS's that are covered by the entry for "Windows" -- if you are curious and I was, I recently took a look at that information displaying the data as daily stats and learned that over the course of the past seven days the presence of Windows 8 is steadily increasing, which suggests that contrary to the rumors online, people are actually buying and upgrading to the new Windows.

A jaded -- or clever -- writer might take these stats and use them to tailor the contents of their site in order to narrow them to the most appealing information, so for example I might start writing blog entries whose subjects include the Firefox web browser on Windows 8 and examine Internet interests of people in the USA and United Kingdom, which would nicely hit the top percentage of users already visiting my sites.  Or I could do the same thing but change the focus of habits to people from Poland if my goal was to improve the traffic from that country.  You get the idea about how this information and these stats are actually useful for improving the site, right?

. . . Final Fantasy XIV

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The months, then weeks, and finally days that had to come and go before the release of Final Fantasy XIV were often filled with stray thoughts like "wow it sure will be nice when I can actually play that game" because, and I am being honest here, I missed the original FF based MMO (Final Fantasy XI) that I used to play a lot with friends but that I honestly do not have time to play today, or tomorrow, or really whenever.

That is sort of the point, really. Total lack of time. But when something is new and shiny and has that new MMO smell you will be surprised at how much time you can MAKE to play it. Plus there is the added fact that several of my best mates live a long way away from me, and the only time that I get to spend time with them, as well as having an excuse for rambling hours-long VOIP sessions, is when we are playing MMO's.

OK, so where was I? Oh yeah, looking forward to playing FFXIV...

So the game arrives via Sir UPS, and I pop it into my PC and load it -- the PS3 version will not be arriving before March 2011 at the earliest, so it was PC or nothing -- which meant that I also had to locate my PC gamepad and plug that in. Then I had to find the drivers for it because (surprise) I have not actually used that device since before I made the switch to Windows 7.

Once FFXIV is installed and I have my gamepad plugged in with the drivers installed, I go to run the game and... It has to patch.

Three Hours Later

The patch is finally downloaded and installed -- and it only took 3 hours! How cool is that?! I remember patches for FFXI taking 8 to 12 hours, so this one was not bad at all! With the game properly patched, and even though I know that my best mate has not finished installing his copy yet, I go ahead and run the game. I create my character, I do the appearance edit and decide on the basic stats, and finally I am ready to play. I hit play.

I appear in the game, and wow, the graphics are WAY better than those from FFXI. There is an almost haunting realism to them, and as I have created a Mithra, my human-like cat chick, or maybe cat-like human chick... I am not sure... Whatever! Stands at the entrance to a long avenue in a city made of stone, and there she stands. I cannot move. The gamepad is not working.

The lights on the gamepad that are lit when it is properly loaded are lit; clearly the drivers are there, so it should work. And yet not. A quick web-search and I know why! I need to actually configure it to work for FFXIV, which means quitting the game and loading a separate config program. I do that, and five minutes later I am once again standing at the entrance to this long avenue made of stone. There are NPC characters around me, but oddly no player characters.

I push forward on the right joystick and start to walk -- Cool! The gamepad is properly configured!

I take three steps.

The game freezes.

A message pops up: The Server is now going down for Maintenance.

Oh man!

I check the message board on the official site and learn that this "Maintenance" will take 8 hours. I go to bed.

The Next Evening

The soonest that I can log in and play is late the following evening, because as much as I want to play, there are all these other things that I have to do, like work, and family, and you know, stuff. But here I am, and bonus! My best mate has installed and patched his copy, so I get to do my initial exploration of the city with him! Very awesome.

This is NOT Final Fantasy XI...

It is sort of like FFXI, but not. A lot is different. For one thing the leveling system and the jobs are much more complex and require a great deal of careful study of the conversation dialogue that I am having with NPC's. Confusion is everywhere, but slowly things begin to make sense.

I spend an hour and a half exploring this new city, but I am unable to locate the player housing area. I know -- I KNOW -- that there has to be one, and yet I cannot find it. Finally in a fit of desperation I Google it, and I learn that the reason that I cannot locate it is because it is not there. There is NO player housing in this game. The good news though, is the proper way to express that fact is: "There is no player housing in this game... Yet."

OK, so there will be. There is also no follow command, and the help button leads to a notice telling me I should load a website whose URL it provides. That was not optimal. Ideally when you are looking for help in a game, the help should be IN the game.

My first impressions of FFXIV

This game was published before it was finished. So much is missing that I am actually in a slight panic as to why they released it at all... Of course that just means that it can only get better from here, right?

When the game was originally announced years ago, I was still playing FFXI at the time, and I remember thinking that a new MMO would ruin FFXI because it would draw players away. But then at the time I did not realize that I would be one of the players who would stop playing FFXI due to time and life issues, so I sort of imagined that I would still be playing FFXI at the time, which would have made picking up a new MMO almost unthinkable. Now not so much.

First impressions... I like the crafting system better than its implementation in FFXI but I do not really understand the finer points of the crafting system here, so I am not sure how valuable that opinion really is...

I really like it that you no longer have to find a moogle to change jobs -- that your job is totally dependent upon the tool/weapon you have equipped. That is very cool. But I do not understand the different jobs other than the obvious ones -- I mean a fighter is a fighter, but what I think must be White Mage actually feels like a combination of Blue and Black Mage... Obviously if you are not familiar with those classes that does not mean much to you, but there you have it.

There is a strong feeling of a tighter information density here, and a distinct and almost painful lack of community cohesiveness. In the previous MMO you had this definite sense of belonging to your home city -- which was like in this mew MMO pitted in a pseudo-war against the other cities. But the other cities are largely unknown quantities at this point... And still there is this glaring absence of any sense of identity and community.

I am hoping that this is just that fuzzy period of time in which you are just getting to know a new environment and not a true lack of cohesiveness, because that identity factor is a very special part of what made playing these games so attractive.

The other players in the game are a LOT less chatty than those in FFXI... Perhaps it is simply that everyone is new. The game has been publicly available for only a week, and I am clearly overwhelmed by the newness of it all, so I have to presume that so are the other players. Sure, some of them have been playing for almost a month if they bought the Collector's Edition (I did not), because they got early access to the game. So at least SOME of the players should be confident enough to start to be chatty... But no.

One pleasant surprise is that Mithra have tails! That may sound strange, but you see some of the early information that was released about the game two years ago and that was a subject of conversation in FFXI was that Mithra were losing their tails in the new game. I am happy that this is not true, but I cannot explain why that makes me happy.

With games like this you really cannot write a review for months because it takes months to really get a sense of the game -- so if you are expecting a review to appear in Game On you will have to be patient.

My first impressions are that I need some more first impressions. But there is a lot here to like, and assuming that they get busy adding into the game the things that should already be in it, this looks like it will be a very cool MMO home for years to come. They just better get housing in before Christmas, because I am looking forward to the traditional Christmas Quests and setting up my tree, and oh man... Must resist MMO....