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Heh.

Excel's Thoughts from the Kitchen:

"'Creamy Recipe' ice cream? Do you supposed that somewhere in some filing cabinet there's a "Crunchy and Crusty" recipe? Or "Sharp & Jagged"?

"Enjoy with your favorite sauce" Right. Why don't they just be honest with us? "You're eating frozen ravioli. Open up whatever jar of sauce you have, and slop it on. There's hundred of types of jars, there's no way you have a "Favorite" Just freaking eat. Who do you think you're fooling? Loser."

"Milk shouldn't be sculpt-able."

SO! You all clamored for it! And now, I'm giving it to you like you're the last John of the night!

The Level 20 IN-Depth Sword of the New World review! W00t, as the kids say! THe first half is buried in the Sparkyyy Art Commision Whoring thread.

Welp, I've the the 20 cap for free players. Here more about what I think.

It's a very resource heavy game. Even my new duel core AMD 4200 has some noticeable load on it when alt-tabbed out. I"m not sure why this is. It does not seem to affect gameplay at all, but there is still lag issues when other players enter your radius of vision. I've heard from others that the game is very smooth, so maybe they just don't notice it as much. It may also be a bottleneck in my wireless internet. Other then that, it does run very smooth and pretty. heart

The RPG element is interesting. THere are 3 tiers of "level" to your character. The first oen is your inherent character level. This effects HP, MP, and other base numbers as such. Below is your "stance" level". Each class has several stances to use, which utilize different styles of combat and different weapons. As your stance level increases, so does the effect buffs of that stance. For example, the "assassin" stance is geared more towards speed and evasion, had has buffs for your evade and attack rates. Another stance for scout is Dos Cuchillos, which is a more damage-dealing geared stance, and does not have the evade buff, but has a larger attack speed and damage buff. Your stances can be changed at anytime (assuming you have the stance available to your charactor), depending on your weapon load.
Both your character and stance levels increase automatically with combat experiance

Still with me?

Now, below Stance level is the skill level tier. The skills are, duh, specialized skills that do tasks or damage and use MP points. The skills are unlocked when the stance they go with increase to the requisite level, and are leveled up by the allocation of skill points. Skill points are giving automatically, though the system for that is unknown to me.

I like this system. It adds a layer of achievement to the game, and lets you tailor your group to the situation better. Plus, the skills are pretty spiffy. :3 I like Slashdown best.

Now combat. As I suspected, it seems that the number of mobs, and their respawn rate, is directly effected by the number of players in the area at the time. In the newbie dungeon, it's not unusual to enter a room with 20, 30 monsters in it. This is fine if you enter that room with two or three other player-groups, or if you're several levels above the area, but can easy lead to a**-rapage if you're not paying attention and get unlucky. Especially if a boss mob spawns. A boss mob can hold it's own against you, even two players can be thwarted by one. There's a lvl 14 rare one in the newb area that, even at lvl 20, I will avoid at all costs.

However, once I moved on from that area and into the ~20 area, there was a very noticeable drop off in mob numbers, to the point where you could spend several seconds not in combat, even when moving. Zany!

I'm going to retract and amend my previous stance on the "leveled weapons" It's not that there shouldn't be leveled weapons, it's that the weapon sellers should be removed altogether. MOnsters drop selling items, HP restorers, and weapons (mostly bracelets for elementalists, which I can't use, and iron fists, which players can't use) and the dropped weapons have random buffs on them that increase their power. Store bought weapons do not. My scout has a lvl 8 knife with 5 buffs (very rare) that does more damage then the lvl 20 one I bought at the store.

There's also some weird system in the game where you can receive and use UPC cards to create player characters that are basically clones of certain NPC characters in the game. I disagree with this idea, and refuse to take part.

Now that I've hit the 20 cap, though, I'm pretty much hosed. Technically, yes, i can keep playing. However, I don't get any experience for my characters (duh), but i also don't get any more experience for my stances (sucks), but worst off all, monsters don't drop items anymore. Selling items is your primary source of income in this game, plus better weapons. And since warping to different points, instead of walking there, costs money, and ammunition, while cheap, is not free, I essentially have a finite amout of time left to play before I simply run out of funds, and no reason to anyways, as i have nothing to gain from it.

Will I go to the Pay to Play system? I dunno. We'll see how I feel. Once I get skilled up enough in Eve Online to use my battleship, I'll prolly cancel that game account, as that game has gotten very boring very fast, and any more advanced ships take to long to skill up to be worth my money. Mining Barges 5 took 50 days to learn, and that's WITH Learning 4. Sorry, but that's just riping off your customers, for $15 a month. SotNW is I believe ~$9 a month, plus an initial payment for the full game, I'll have to check those numbers and weigh them. However, I recommend getting the free version and trying it out, of you're in the market for a new online game. You WILL need broadband, as the .exe install file is 3.9 gigabytes. Which the graphics are relatively non-demanding and will work fine even on previous-gen cards, you're going to want at least a gigabyte of RAM and a hefty CPU to handle it.

In other game news, if you're looking for a fun, stylish, platformer-type game? Okami. What's Okami like, you ask? Think "Zelda", but actually ******** innovative, and not the same damn game you've played for the past ten years. I say that, with the first, last, and only Zelda game I've ever played being Link to the Past. And I STILL know that every game since then has been the same damn thing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WOqY1fOUjg
I heart Natalie.