A Very Half-Assed Reaction to the Age of Conan Video Game

In the tradition of my very half-assed reactions to fantasy stuff, I will here review the Age of Conan MMO. There's a free to play intro, so I decided I'd take a crack at digital Hyboria.

First things first: the game needed to download 3+ gigs of stuff before it would play. That's in addition the ridiculously long install time. Even after that, it had to update itself for at least another ten minutes after I launched the game and got into the character builder. After I built my character, I had to wait ANOTHER ten minutes before I could actually fire up the game.

If you had any doubts that I was going to make a "Conqueror" class Cimmerian hero with the height and muscles maxed out, you haven't read enough of this blog. Surprisingly, the Cimmerians in this game are quite pale. Makes me wonder, considering how often Robert E. Howard refers to Conan as a "bronzed" man. Well, maybe he was just dipped in bronze at some point in his career.

First, the good. I kind of like the combat system of selecting to attack left, high, or right depending on where your enemy is defending. Since the screen shows you were best to attack (wherever the enemy has the fewest arrows), it's basically the world's easiest game of Simon Says, but it does get more interactive than just rick clicking something and going for a pee break while the fight unfolds.

I was hoping these three basic attacks would last me, but soon enough as I leveled up (the game threw levels at me the way I throw coins at dancing girls in Tarantia), I unlocked a bunch of abilities that have a short warm-up meter and then unleash an attack that takes a few seconds to cool down. So though I could say it's more or less like World of Warcraft, what I really mean to say it's more like World of Warcraft and less UNlike World of Warcraft. Still, the three basic attacks does work for me. It's kind of fun, forcing the player to take an active role in the fight... if you ignore that you're just swinging wildly away at each other anyway while you both stand still. Hack and slash, swashbuckling brawling this ain't.

NPCs have exclamation points over their heads when they have quests for you and question marks when you're ready to complete the quest. If you don't know why this is a criticism, you've probably never played a fantasy MMO.

After coming across a maiden in need of saving literally thirty seconds into entering the game (after someone bitched at me about me being a slave who just survived a shipwreck and told me to go into town), I killed a few beach combers, freed the maiden with a key one of them dropped, and then she started following me around, cheering and clapping every time I got into a fight. She became my very own personal cheering section while I got chewed on by baddies. Yay gender equality.

At this point I should mention the performance. My six year old computer (the retired Southern gentleman planter Colonel Aloisius Dell) did most emphatically NOT enjoy playing this game. I turned the settings all the way down until the graphics looked worse than World of Warcraft (flat textures, pastel colors, crude movements), but the screen would still freeze for a few seconds when there was too much going on--usually when I was getting stabbed in the nipples.

I beat up some pirates and their pet cats, found a few slightly less awful items (I started the game with a broken oar as a weapon--apparently I couldn't even find a whole oar), and beat up a fat guy who used to be my slavemaster. In this conversation, the game made sure to earn its M rating, making reference to "raping" my ears, calling the dude a "whore's son," and various other jargon Tarantino would have been proud of. It would have been a tense scene if our conversation wouldn't have drawn on so long, or if I could have just broken it off with a kick to the groin. He's all "Hey, my slave! Come be my slave again." I'm all "I'm going to kick your balls off." He's all "Don't be like that. Let's get you into town and I'll sell you." I'm all "I'm going to tear you a new asshole." He's all "There's no need to get bent out of shape. We can work this out. Here, put these chains on." I'm all "I'm going to tear off your head and shit down your neck." He's all "If you really feel strongly about it...." I'm all "CAN WE JUST START PUNCHING EACH OTHER ALREADY?" He's all "Well, if you REALLY want to." (Conversation paraphrased.)

After I beat up some Picts (hanging out in Tortage, in the Barachan isles? eh, it's a demo area), I headed past some vine-covered idols of dark gods (points) into a forgotten jungle-swallowed temple (more points) to fight some ghoul-type monsters. After doing my usual ass-kicking, I grabbed the key to a door and headed through the rest of the jungle. I punched some gorillas in the balls (REH loved using gorillas as enemies, so even more points here), then came across a flowing river of lava.

I really could have just gone over the bridge, but I decided to see what happens when I touch the river of lava. I gingerly dipped my toe into it, only to be told that I've been incinerated. A few seconds later, my character died, and I respawned. No biggie. My cheering section even found me a moment later and we continued with our day as though nothing happened. I talked to her, and she didn't even seem to notice that I, apparently, just died a horrible flaming death not thirty seconds ago and reappeared somewhere in the jungle. There was a gimmick about me being marked somehow and not allowed to die by the gods, but this really broke my sense of being immersed in a gritty fantasy world and reminded me I was playing a game.

When I arrived at town, I was told I couldn't go into town since I was wearing my slave chains. Instead of just putting on a really loose long-sleeved shirt, I was told to go talk to the blacksmith, who then told me he couldn't take my chains off until I helped him shore up a dam to keep lava from destroying the town. I had to go grab materials for him to help build the dam. Now, anything involving lava is awesome, so I might have forgiven such an obvious fetch quest, but this is a game with Conan's name literally all over it. It's not called "adventures in extreme engineering."

The blacksmith also reminded me of another complaint, which might seem trivial, but it really chapped my loincloth-clad ass. In character creation, I maxed out my character's muscles and height, and yet it seemed like every male NPC was A FREAKING HEAD TALLER than my guy. Maybe I get bigger as I level up or something, but nothing makes me feel weenier than having to crane my neck to look up at every Tom, Dick, and Harry who wants me to fetch his widgets. And a Conan game should NOT be making me feed weenie, BY CROM!

And then I saw my first other player. He jumped out of the town, bunny hopped right by me, swinging his sword wildly, and disappeared around a corner. I wish I was exaggerating.

At this point, I exited the game to go pick up some library books, and when I went to boot it back up, I found out I'd have to download the entire three gigabytes AGAIN. I guess it just lost the first three gigs or something. In a fit of rage, I buried my axe in the monitor and shouted, "BY THIS AXE I RULE!" (Okay, that's a Kull reference, but it's close enough via "The Phoenix on the Sword" connection.)

The verdict? It's an MMO. It's got some gimmicks, but it's just another MMO. There are buff classes, healing classes, magic classes, and melee and ranged DPS classes. Maybe the graphics would be better if my computer was made during the Obama administration, but that's not really at issue here. An MMO is a grind. You fight the same enemies over and over. You execute pointless, grinding quests. You swing wildly at enemies until one of you falls over. You kill "weedy grunt enemy" and "slightly bigger, though only slightly less weedy grunt enemy" a thousand times before you finally start equipping things that aren't called "torn ragged brown-stained loincloth with a hole that lets the breeze through." You're not changing the fate of empires or thwarting evil wizards, you're doing the same linear kill sprees a thousand other players are doing at the same time.

If you're looking for the tight action, the thrilling swashbuckling, the intense emotion, the wild bloody exotic ADVENTURE that is Conan, a video game just won't cut it.

It's almost like I saw this coming before I even tried it....

Now if you'll excuse me, the necromantic ghost of Robert E. Howard is at the door, and he's got a knuckle sandwich he needs to give me.

(PS Yes, I did go back and play a little more, but it wasn't getting any better, so I got bored and did the blog. I told you it was half-assed.)

A Very Half-Assed Reaction to The Legend of the Seeker

I watched a single episode of The Legend of the Seeker, on which I will now base my opinion of the entire show. It wasn't even the first episode, but episode 18 of season 2, because that's the closest to the beginning Hulu would show me for free. I obviously don't care enough about writing a review to bother spending money on it, or even the time it would take to find a pirated stream of the first episode. Here be spoilers, but since I have no idea who is whom and what's going on, it would be difficult for me to spoil anything majorly.

The villain is hideously cheesy. He has a goatee, long hair, a cape, and speaks with a British accent. To add an even more obviously derivitive level of cheese, he's dead in this episode, and longs to come back to life, missing "the taste of a crisp apple." At the very end of the episode, he grabs an apple out of a basket, takes a bite, and looks meaningfully at the camera. I wish I could make this up. At that point it went from ripping off Pirates of the Carribean to being an outright homage to it. (I called him Cheesy in my mind, since I could never figure out what name they were saying.) He was also the hero's brother, which he constantly reminds the viewer by calling him "brother" at the slightest chance. Makes me wonder whether fantasy worlds are really just composed of three extended families. And a bunch of peasants, of course.

Perhaps because the episode was so late in the series, there was no character development for any of the main characters. In fact, I'm not entirely sure what any of them do. One of them seemed to have the ability to take over the mind of anyone whose eyes she looks into, which they called "confession." I guess having grown up Catholic confused me about the actual meaning of the word, but it would explain some things about organized religion (oo, burn, but I don't really mean that about religion; I only wonder if the show/writer did). There was also a wizard (played by the gyrocopter pilot from the Mad Max movies) who could shoot fire from his hands and said everything important with his eyes OPENED REALLY WIDE. There was one laugh out loud moment when he "cast a spell" by holding his hand off-camera while the spell sound effect went off. BUDGET-TASTIC.

Perhaps my biggest complaint is that the show all felt like it was set in a generic medieval world. The villains wore chainmail and tabards fresh from the prop department and got chopped up with minimal effort. Major plot events unfolded in a generic tavern. Everyone wore tunics and boots and dresses. The hot warrior women villains wearing tight tight leather seemed to have been lifted from any half-assed modern fantasy novel, which I suppose is what the source novels might well be. I confess to never having read them and having no intention to do so. So really, this review is more like quarter-assed at best.

The show was also rife with generic fantasy names. I have a theory that you can judge any fansty story by adding together unpronouncable names and generic words capitalized to form proper nouns. It's like golf: the higher your score, the shittier your fantasy. There were more than a few of the former: when spoken, I count any word as unpronouncable if I have no idea how to spell it even after hearing it a half-dozen times in the show. Of the latter there were plenty: The Keeper, The Seeker, The Spirits, The Midlands, The Stone of Tears, The Creator, The Lands of the South, The Sisters of the Dark, The Veil... seriously, is there a shortage of proper nouns in this world? It's like whoever was coming up with names for things just gave up halfway. Along these lines, I could call my magical chair The Chair, my keyboard The Keyboard, and my computer mouse Raymond, because I also haven't mentioned that half the characters have completely normal English names like Walter, while the other half have generic fantasy names. Here I should give an example of one of those generic fantasy names, but I wasn't paying close enough attention to actually pick any up. Or know how to spell them.

The episode centered around what I can only call a wacky caper by two minor villain characters, as the 'story' plot it was woven into consisted of The Seeker trying to take The Scroll from The Sisters of the Dark to protect The Veil, and the writers may have realized this was way too generic fantasy to hold even their core watchers' attention. So wacky buddy hijinx it was. (I realize it was the Scroll-of-Something-or-Another, possibly the Scroll of MacGuffin, so I didn't list it above, but they DID refer to it for most of the episode as simply 'The Scroll.')

To reiterate, there were plenty of fantasy staples: an evil temple, a tavern, a Renfaire town market, bad guys in chainmail carrying crossbows, Burning Hands, a villain with a goatee and English accent, an old wizard with long white hair, a generic fantasy hero with a destiny and no charisma (I'll rant about destiny some other time), cold-hearted villain women who are both way too good looking and way too thin to be a combat threat, etc, etc, etc.; I could go on about these at length, but it also seemed like the heroes were just too darn powerful for me to think they might not succeed. They blew through dozens of bad guys hardly taking a scratch. In one scene the characters find it almost laughably easy to transfer a character from one body to the other and bring another character back from the dead. This scene had me in near stitches because the actress spoke the 'magical language' (repeating the same phrases over and over) with an ahfahl Amahrucan accahnt. Nothing ruins the magic of a made-up language like that swallowed R.

The hero of the spoof Krod Mandoon, although that show was absolutely awful, seemed kind of likeable for his everyman personality and sense of humor. The hero of this show (the titular Seeker) only seemed really focused, because he just looked at things intensely. Or maybe he just needs glasses. But like I said before, this episode didn't center on him, and I'm not sure if he got more than ten lines in the whole thing.

There were, however, some moments I found kind of cool. ... Okay, I've sat here for literally five minutes since typing that, and none come to mind. But there really were some moments that made me think, "Hey, that's kind of cool." At the end of the day, every criticism I've had, I say with love. This is the corny, derivitive crap that I've seen pop up again and again in books, magazines, roleplaying games, TV shows, and movies. And, like an annoying friend who just keeps coming around, it's grown on me, and now those silly tropes and over the top plot devices are familiar and, yes, even dear to me.

The production values, while TV level, weren't the worst I've lived with, and I do love me some fantasy, even when it's hardly great. It's magic, heroes with swords, and escapist. I've been telling bad fantasy stories with my buddies since I was a kid, and some part of me loves even the really cheeseball stuff like this. To paraphrase what Brian Posehn says in his video about "Metal By Numbers," compared with sitcoms or reality TV, even shitty fantasy rules!