Ok, Closed beta 1 finished on 6/20/06 and beta 2 began on 6/21/06 to last 24 hours. Huh? I'm not sure what they are doing with the second one since it still looks like the first closed beta. Maybe they are doing something with the servers, but I have no idea.

Oh well in any case there's not much to report as it really is a repeat. Kill, pick up loot, go to next mob, wash - rinse - repeat. UI is still the same, information is still skimpy, and typos haven't changed. What more can I say. And I'm supposed to do a review on this later.... sigh.....!

Since today is Father's Day, I'm keeping this a bit short. Second on my list is the fact that I'm talking about Hero and not about other games, I have changed the names slightly. If you know who I'm mentioning then you get the idea. If you don't, then to bad.

The NetGame people finally got the servers to stop chugging along and things got better playing wise. My first impression is that it plays like Ziablo II, or Build Mars. In this case you click on a mob, hit the [A]ttack key, watch your character beat the snot out of it, then run to the next one. Every now and then I hit my heal key to make sure he doesn't die.

My character is a warrior type with a hunters ability to train pets. So far I haven't been able to train a banana, they just keep attacking. Another thing with asian type game companies is their ability to be very skimpy on instructions, and examples! One of the things that NetGame needs to do is hire someone who can write the English language a lot better then the present employees.

Other then that, it was another two hours of swing and swish, finally getting my character up to 1st Dan, or level 10 to all you English blokes. The level thing is broken down into Dans and Ryus. A Ryu is a single level with a Dan being 10 levels. Those plus your abilities determine if you can use a better weapon, which is familiar to Crudgeon Liege. With that I'm ending this portion of Hero and getting back to relaxing. Have a great FATHERS DAY y'all!

As I thought, Hero got off to a really shakey start for a closed beta. First on the list, I wasn't able to download the client till yesterday morning. That was a blessing in disguise as I've been home six weeks now. That's a whole other story and it involves depression.

Start up was later in the evening though, around 4:30 pm I think. I actually got in around a half hour later since they were having login problems. Then once in I had problems getting a character created. Finally, I was able to get into the actual game play. That's when the fun really began! The lag hit like a ton of bricks and everything was running 5 minutes behind the client / server return.

Because this was happening, you couldn't figure out if there was a problem with the UI or just the lag. Things on the client side weren't bad such as moving around, but interaction with the environment was a matter of guess work. Things were making noises and you had no idea what till you realized later that other players were killing mobs, but you weren't seeing them.

There were moments when things cleared up enough that you could actually do something, which helped me get to level 3, but in all it was a really frustrating evening. At one point they even screwed up their forums which got a laugh out of me, since I knew what they had done, and had done this to my forum. This morning I received notification that the servers were down for maintenance due to yesterdays problems and would not be up till 1:00 pm central time. We shall see what happens then.

When next we report I hope to give you some actual game information.

Well, I can't quite give you an idea or much information about this new online game yet. The main reason is the start date isn't till tomorrow, but the client download was supposed to be today, and as of 5:35 pm central daylight time we are still waiting to do it.

I've done beta tests before so I know that there is always a slight delay. In this case we have some confusing information coming off the website. Where the two download links are located, both are still down, but the button to start playing turns out to be tied to Ares which is in open beta. That's giving a number players confused looks as this client happens to be 612 megs in size.

Since this has a oriental flavor I would suspect the company to be Korean or Japanese. Right now I'm not sure which but would suspect it to be Korean based from the looks of the characters portrayed. Until they get the game moving I really don't have much else to sayat the moment. Till my next report, take care.