It is a sad "day" (I put that in quotes because it happened last week) for our PSO gaming. A number of months ago I discovered that there existed a version of Phantasy Star Online that had local 4 player split screen support. PSO was always one of my favorite games from when it first came out. I also really liked the original Phantasy Stars. I did try Universe but was mostly lukewarm on it, though I'm thinking that's because I was trying to make it be PSO and it's just not the same game. We've been having epic fun with that game for a while now.

So periodically we would start to see some problems loading our save file. Arg! I had this happen with my other Gamecube card too. Turns out that the freakin' Wii burns up those poor little cards, especially if you have Connect24 turned on. That said, since you can't transfer a save for PSO, back it up, or anything really, we were basically screwed. Billy had some tools to try to do something about it but in the end, it was for naught. So so long our PSO characters that we had so much fun playing as. I certainly am not going to restart with new chars, at least not anytime soon. At best I could consider it if there was a way to save Gamecube games on something -other- than a Gamecube memory card. Like oh... an external hard drive or something like that. That basically leaves us looking for a new thing to spend a lot of time on. We'll find something for sure, just sucks that we were forced, ya know? Hell I just got a Dragon Slayer! I -love- a Dragon Slayer! =(

At the moment I'm trying out a demo of Phantasy Star Portable, and also checking out SCHTHACK and PSO Blue Burst to see what's up with them. I'm not about to play PSO in a "pay monthly or whatever for a guild card" format though. These two don't seem to require that. The gamecube one of course didn't either for local play.

Anyway, we'll miss you PSO. If anyone out there knows of a way to save Gamecube saves on something other than a card, let me know please.

What is it?

Archlord is a free MMORPG, no monthly fee, no purchase to get the game in the first place, just download and play. Unfortunately it's Windows only. At first I thought it was pretty but nothing too spectacular, but once I cranked up the graphics settings I found it to be one of the prettiest MMORPGs I've ever seen. Generally the people on there seem to be more mature than some others I'd tried. That doesn't mean there's no one on there who doesn't need to grow up a bit, but hey. ;) The quests are your generic repetitive tasks, but what else is new for MMORPGs. It's not real hard to find guilds (if you are into that sort of thing) that don't demand any of your time. In fact, I'm in one that is literally there to help new folk out, not organize big events or anything. There are big events that occur. Some planned by Codemasters that are special, some that are based around weekly "sieges". I don't know a lot about those as I've never been in one, but they're big multi-guild vs multi-guild type things, in an attempt to take over castles. Somewhere along the line your guild can fight the current Archlord to attempt to take over that status, which apparently grants you a lot of interesting boons. You look very cool for one. You can control the weather and assorted other things. I've never been Archlord and really don't have the patience for that sort of thing. It's pretty easy to casually play the game, which is what I'm after in general.

How much is it?

It's free. It's another type of game where you can pay real money to get various boons, but you don't -need- them or anything.

How do you get it?

http://www.archlordgame.com/
(it's a little convoluted to download it, and can take a while as it's pretty big)

Who am I on there?

I've got a couple of characters. There are 4 servers, one is dedicated to PVP. My main characters are on Evengarda, and are named:

- Graedus
- Nistrom
- Trella

What is it?

Gaia Online is a entire site of various interlinked mini-games and such. It's completely free and has something to do with some Manga. That said, recently they released a casual MMORPG that's completely flash/web based. What's even cooler about it is that the web site pieces work directly with the MMORPG. In other words, you don't "go to a store in game", you end up going to the main site and buying items there, then they show up in the game generally immediately. The characters are exceedingly customizable. The customizations generally mean nothing, so you can make yourself look exactly like you want without worrying about not having enough armor or something like that. The leveling system is rather interesting too as you don't have standard levels. Instead, you have rings on that you level up and their combined levels makes up your overall level. I'm still learning a lot about it as there is a -ton- of stuff going on in the game. Seems like there's always something else to do.

How much is it?

It's free. I think they make the funding to run the site off of ads and there's also microtransactions that you can use to get various things. I've never bothered and never missed anything. =)

Where can it be found?

http://www.gaiaonline.com/games/zomg

Who am I on there?

I am "The Jade Storm". I have zero friends so far. LOL If you are interested in the game, pop on and see if you can find me. I think you can private message me from the site to say hi.

For a while now I've been kicking around the idea of having a separate blog for gaming related things. While I have a personal blog, I also have a number of other blogs targeted as specific things, like this one. Here I intend to post thoughts on video games, reviews of games, and anything else I might come up with. I also had some ideas around things I might want to offer in a gaming site beyond just my own blog, but I'm not really going to talk about those until I actually do them. So for now, welcome to my site and soon there will be more than just this welcome post. LOL