"You're not the time Kent, you're not the time!"
If you're following the game with the titles the last entry was a reference to an episode of The Simpsons. Some neighborhood boys it seems destroyed Principle Skinner's bird bath then hurled rotten egg onto the front of his house then when he looked out the window they were mooning him. To make him angrier. Thus the humor and clever writing revealed in that brilliant show. Yelling at them to let them know brandishing their buttocks at him was only making him angrier. Now who wouldn't find that humorous?
The last entry I had actually meant to go into this game I've been playing or did play called Neocron. But it's more than simply the game. It's the experience now associated with my playing of this game.
Neocron was in a beta stage in early to mid 2002. That means it was being tested before release to work as many of the problems and program out as possible for the public release, for those of you from Swansborrow (if you don't get that don't be surprised, no one will). I was in college at the time and generally avoid playing games during the semester but since this was my first experience getting to play game in beta so I was jumping at the chance. I should also mention Neocron is a MMORGP (that means it's a "Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game" or a game that can only be played while on the Internet, for those of you in Swansborrow). For the record I did as good or better than I was usually doing in my grades for the semester.
For the first several weeks of playing the game I didn't really understand what going on or really get to know or talk to anyone on a regular basis. But about I would guess a month in I finally had the idea of doing a general broadcast on the public chat channel to all players to request aid in taking on a really tough location in the game known as the sewer. My character was still rather low in the rankings and I couldn't handle the higher level of sewers. I wanted to take on the infamous level 5 sewers so I requested aid from all comers and managed to gather a good-sized group. I'm not even going to try and remember the name of the players.
At the point in the game there really wasn't much to do or places to go. Just killing the same monsters in the same sewers over and over was pretty much it. I wanted to do Sewer level five because it was so hard and had an even harder monster at the very end known as the queen spider, ranked a very dangerous *** (three stars). And maybe if I was lucky 5 others and me could beat it after much effort. In subsequent updates to the game this queen spider and whole sewer was significantly as the vernacular goes "nurfed".
Eventually a semi-regular group formed. Thing is it was a little difficult keeping track. The game had a sort of "buddy list" feature but it was constantly getting wiped along with the server constantly going down without warning for unspecified amounts of time making it difficult to track the same people from one gaming session to the next. Eventually some how I found a group a players and some we all managed to keep track of each other from one server crash to the next. At the time the much coveted clan feature was still a distant future feature coming soon. So we all started wearing the same color pants and shirt (one of the few things we could actually change about our appearance). This was the easiest way to make it obvious we were all part of the same group.
I'm beginning to think a short blog entry is too much to accomplish. So this will have to be a two parter. So stay tuned for part two...
