PixlBit

Hello my fellow gamers. It's that time of the week again, and I thought I would post up some of my thoughts on .hack//Infections and what I do on my spare time. 

 

 So before I picked up this game, I knew very little about this series. I watched a little bit of the anime at one point in time, but other than that, I was fairly clueless about this game. With my expectations a bit low, I decided to give it a try. .hack// is a game....about a game. An mmo which is now the best selling game in the world is called....The World. But something is wrong with this game. People are falling into comas while playing this game, and nobody knows why. Our main character, Kite, starts out playing the world after getting invited to play by a famous player named Orca. After Orca show's you the basics of the game, you find a strange monster with infected coding and as orca tries to stop it, you witness him getting "data-drained" which results in Orca [I forget his real name] falling into a coma. During the encounter, Kite recieves a bracelet that lets him data drain and hack gates, and he escapes from the monster before getting completly killed. Now, Kite is investigating different parts of The World to find the cause of his poor friend and whatnot. 

 

The story is actually rather engaging and if you'd like to know more about "The World" you would have to read the books, and watch the anime, which I may do later on. So when you start up the game, you actually start at the desktop of your computer. You can check email, news, and also change the music and desktop background that you collect through the game.  So the game plays like an MMORPG (surprise!) and the combat is actually fun. How it works is you have 2 party members with you which can be changed in and out depending on the state of the story. Other characters have lives, so they won't always be online. The AI is actually fairly convincing in the game. When you head to town, your party members will actually go out and buy items such as health potions, and other nifty consumable. They also level up on their own, so even if you don't have them in your party, this way, you can call in anyone and they won't be completely useless. All of the characters you can invite to your party also have some side quests, and the more you have them in your party, the more their affection grows for you. Eventually, you'll recieve emails from characters on your friends list that tells you a bit about them, and you can even reply on some of them! 

 You attack by pressing X and your party will generally fight on their own. You can issue them commands to use any skills that they have, or you can ask for first aid. They do this quite effectively...well, most of the time. Skills also work differently, and you recieve them based on the weapon and gear you have, rather than learning them like your traditional RPG's.  

 So, I've beaten the first .hack already, and transfered my save to the second game which I've started playing a little bit. A very fun game, and the grinding is actually not too bad (I've figured out how to abuse the level up system :D). If your and RPG nut, I recommend you give this a try, it's a very different experience from your typical RPG's. 

 

So, on to what else I've been up too. I actually compose music, and I'm also designing my own mod for a game called Arcanum.  I've working on some music for my mod and an rpg that my friend is making. The story draws alot of inspiration from the Mother series and I'll probably put up a place you can download a sample of the game from once we finish debugging it. 

 Here's  a link to a few things I've made these past couple of weeks.

 http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/465688

 http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/468095

So that's about all I've been up to lately, besides school and work, I try to have fun on my own time. Once I beat .hack//outbreak, the second game in the series, I'll let you guys know what I though of it. Until then,

Game On pixlbit.