Good grief…how long was I out? Did I say a couple of weeks? I meant, of course, a couple of months. What should have been a simple enough job, of getting my internets moved to my new flat, swiftly developed into a nightmarish exercise in trying to beat bureaucracy at it’s own game, with it’s own tools, in a protracted series of phone calls to my ISP, British Telecom Customer Service, British Telecom Wholesale Division, OFCOM – the UK Telecoms Regulatory Authority, and basically anyone else who would listen, and the whole thing quickly degenerated into a farce not unlike the movie Brazil, only with less paramilitary plumbers.

Of course it turned out to be AOL’s fault in the end, which shouldn’t have surprised me nearly as much as it did. Not my AOL you understand – I did AOL once in the nineties, being young, new to the interwebs, and not knowing any better, I’m not proud, but went through the whole revelatory ‘There is a world outside my cell?’ eye-burning catharsis very early on, dug my tunnel to freedom and have never looked back. No, the whole farce came about because the chap who used to own my new flat before me, had an AOL account once, and it hadn’t been cancelled properly. Gah!

(I suspect the poor chap thinks he had cancelled it, but as shown in this recent relevant and eye-opening FARK.com thread, what tends to happen is that they just slap some free months on, to make it look, to all intents and credit card bills, as if you’re done with them… until some months later, when they start just billing you again. Such tactics would leave a ‘marker’ on the ADSL line, much like the one that was starving me of much needed online gibberish! I got the wretched cancer surgically removed in the end, hopefully preventing this relapse. I’m a goddamned hero, that’s what.)

Anyway…I’m not BITTER, and am merely GRATEFUL to be ALLOWED back out to play again.

Frankly, the way things were going, I was fully expecting to return to an Internet dominated mostly by talking apes on horseback, but it does seem like I’ve missed a bit of a Slow MMO Season all round; scanning back a few months of blogs shows a period surprisingly bereft of either the apocalyptic genre shattering, or mind-buggeringly idiotic that we’ve come to expect of our chosen soma. Some Vanguard mutterings, a bit of SWG dead-horse beating and an EVE World Cup. Seems a bit quiet on the snarky blatherings front too – lot of AFK blogfolk out there beside me. I blame Summer, a time when The Burning Skygod Is Angry.

First night back online was mostly uneventful – having reached a kind of sanguine calm about MMOlessness by now, I figured one more night wouldn’t hurt, and spent most of it just patching all my current titles, ready for action! Popped into EVE to set a skill training, (Why am I still paying for that? Answers on a postcard, because I haven’t a clue anymore,) and then, perhaps surprisingly, went and played with the Lego in Second Life for a good few hours.

Pioneers of the Digital Age that Linden Labs are, they seem to have added bendy building blocks and light sources since I was there last. Frivolous, but fun to play with. Not the stuff of Neuromancer though. Also quite interesting, from a ‘Civilisation In A Petri Dish’ perspective is the massive social upheaval and repercussions of their new Age Verification Policy, which as far as I can tell, consists of not having one anymore. Instead citizens are (visibly, in their profiles) branded with whether they’ve voluntarily submitted any Credit Card Info, and if they’ve ever bought money from LL’s money exchange. It’s either a horrific and precedental online child abuse case waiting to happen, or a startlingly cunning way to remove all barriers to entry from LL’s end, and instead makes the residents carry out the unpopular job of policing the troublemakers themselves, via the age-old tools of prejudice and lynch-mobs. “We don’t want you Unverified scum around here…” Certainly bears further investigation at any rate.

While wandering the Wilderness, the offline games I was playing, in approximate order of frequency were:

  • Dungeon Siege 2 – Surprisingly visceral fun. I realised that this is basically the 21st century manifestation of Gauntlet. Looks great, simple gameplay – shallow, but unpretentious. And fun!
  • Homeworld 1 – I’d always loved this game, but always sucked at it and never got past mission 4. With the aid of a decent walkthrough, I’ve now learnt that I was fundamentally approaching it the wrong way (i.e. Not like the Borg), and having studied how it’s supposed to be played (i.e. Like the Borg), am now fascinated with it all over again.
  • Alpha Centauri – Much mucking about with compatibility patches and ini files rendered this playable on my XP machine once more, and it was always technically excellent. I went Gaian Fungushugger Overdrive and won a very satisfying Transcendence (Tech) victory. I always end up with Tech victories in these games.
  • Civilisation 4 – A borrowed game, and a shame to have to give back. I particularly liked the way they’d worked Religion into the new system, and the thing is as addictive as ever.
  • Warcraft 3 – A reasonable substitute for the mighty WOW, and a fine game in its own right.
  • DarkStar One Demo - Available here for download. Nothing to do with Digital Anvil as far as I can see, but if you liked Freelancer at all, you’ll definitely want to give this a go. Similar, and more shiney!
  • Oblivion – Bleh. Very early on, it became glaringly apparent that but gaining power, I was actually the cause of Tamriel’s woes. I was personally responsible for all these monsters and brigands gaining power, godly artifacts and numbers, and in the end, the best thing for everyone concerned was for me to leave altogether. Stupid dynamic scaling. I’m not even sure what the ‘not being chased by minotaurs’ outdoor music sounds like all the way through…I never heard it!

And World of Warcraft. Also been watching far more Farscape than is really healthy for anyone, painting and decorating, and bizarrely enough, actual real life baking as a kind of substitute for MMO trade skills. Fear my leet bread rolls!

Nope, I didn’t lose my remaining shreds of sanity – I was actually playing World of Warcraft, offline. A borrowed internet connection and 1GB microdrive netted me a very serviceable Emulator for the title. More on my experiences in what must be the ultimate expression of MMO Soloing later (yes, yes, including the full gory URL details). For now though, it’s just good to have my mojo back.