Phantasy Star Online
Sega Dreamcast £39.99 Sega *****
It is up there with trainspotting and learning Klingon, but online gaming has finally broken free from geekdom. The reason is Phantasy Star Online: the world's first console-based online role playing game (RPG). Unlike the bearded fantasy cliches of PC titles such as Everquest, PSO offers a colourful futuristic environment, albeit with a limp sci-fi plot.
Despite a manual twice the size of most console games, PSO is wonderfully easy to pick up but has enough depth to satisfy serious stat-addicts. Your first task is to create your character and it is wise to spend time on this. You could patiently weigh up the combat or magic potential, or just play around with hair colours. It is this great dichotomy between accessibility and complexity that makes PSO such a revelation.
The next choice is simple - on or offline. Offline play lets you build up your character and undertake some interesting side-missions but the only way to truly play Phantasy Star is online. Getting connected is a cinch and before long you will be creating your own team or joining another. Then it is time for some planetside monster-bashing. As you cannot harm your team mates, co-operation is all and combat strategy is essential for success.
Thankfully communication is easy, with instant translation into five languages, and standard icons used to create an unrivalled team atmosphere. In fact, the communication element is perhaps the biggest achievement of PSO, taking the relatively simple hack'n'slash gameplay to a new level.
Sumptuous graphics are the icing on the cake and the only downside to Phantasy Star Online is cost. With the average session lasting more than an hour, you can expect heavy phone bills. In this rare case, they are worth it. (GH)
Three Kingdoms: Fate of the Dragon
PC CD-Rom £29.99 Overmax/Eidos Interactive ***
After Civilization, Age of Empires, and the legion of inferior imitators, the historical real-time strategy game seemed a used-up genre.
Three Kingdoms is not about to change that. Sure, the setting is rich and colourful. The game takes us back to second century China, where three warlords are engaged in a fierce battle for control of the fragmented empire. Using an isometric view, you can play as any of the three, each of whom has unique forces at his disposal. You know the shtick.
In order to build up those forces, you must first develop your home city by chopping wood, mining, building farms, and training peasants. Yay. Resource management. Has no one yet told games designers that resource management is the opposite of fun? Some of us have enough trouble remembering to buy milk, for goodness sake.
Anyway, once the city is up and running, things get slightly more enjoyable as you send out your troops, occupy county towns, besiege enemy cities and invent new technologies. You know. The usual. (One tiny difference here is that you must remember to keep your troops supplied with food or they will weaken and become useless in battle. Personally, I would rather spend a little longer training the soldiers until they were intelligent enough to forage for themselves.)
Military might is not the only route to victory, however. You can also win by making more scientific progress than your rivals, or by skilful use of trade and diplomacy. Hey, there has to be somebody out there who wants to try that.
Graphically speaking, it is pretty and the soundtrack is marginally preferable to having a plate scraped in your ear.
I know, I know, I have just described every historical RTS you have ever seen. But then, that is what this is. A dead horse being flogged, albeit in a competent and moderately entertaining way. (AB)
Globetrotter
PC £29.99 Vsion Park/EA *
In many ways there's something charming about Globetrotter, in that it harks back to days when games were a cottage industry and A-list titles frequently arrived with photocopied instructions and labels stuck to cassettes by the programmer's mum. Globetrotter turned up looking decidedly low-budget and boasting the most useless insert ever seen - a poorly drawn departure schedule. Not a promising start.
But wait. Having installed it, up popped a very professional video montage of people travelling to exotic locations, easily up to Lonely Planet titles and accompanied by some funky original music. Perhaps I have judged this too early?
Nah - it's rubbish. Video over, the game kicks in with hilarious results. Imagine Pokemon Snap without the 3D engine, with gigantic characters strutting across unconvincing, out-of-scale maps. Every level involves much the same thing: you have to go to a location and take photos of it, returning to base or travelling elsewhere within a set time limit. Some places can be walked to (simply point on the map and click); others need train, plane or boat connections. Along the way, you may be asked one of 4,000 simple trivia questions loosely based on local history. For instance, in London we are asked what performance led to the rise of the Beatles. Yes, it is the Ed Sullivan show - and that's London summed up, don't you think?
In fairness, there is the potential here for quite an interesting game, perhaps using a Sim City-style engine. But alas there are far too many problems to be cured by a simple makeover.
As a game, Globetrotter's credentials are uncertain; as a travel aid it is one stage below chronically inept. For example, although major bridges are pointed out on the map, characters can still wade through rivers leaving tell-tale splashes in their wake. Somehow, being able to choose their sex (it makes no difference to the gameplay, of course) fails to make up for so many laws of physics, geography and common sense being broken all at once.
All in all, Globetrotter looks and plays like a school project and cannot be recommended even to lovers of kitsch (which it so nearly is).
Whoever Vision Park is, this merely adds weight to the claim that developing videogames is a big boy's game these days. (MA)
