Online Role Playing Games Have you ever played an online role-playing game or, more to the point,

have you played one in recent times? Thirty years ago, Tolkien's The Hobbit was all the fashion on the Commodore 64. It was a 'huge' game in which the player took the part of Bilbo Baggins on his a dventures which closely followed the book. It was a text-based adventure with a couple of stationary illustrations and everyone thought it was the the height of game-playing. However, it is a joke compared with what is on offer today. The Hobbit would pla y on an eight-bit machine with 64 KB of RAM. Today, I have a modest 64-bit compu ter with 2GB of RAM and that is not fast enough to play a game I downloaded yest erday. I downloaded the free version trial of Guild Wars, which comprised 35,000 + files of around 2GB in size. It is a far cry from 'The Hobbit' though. In Guild Wars, you can choose your cha racter or avatar as it is correctly known, select its height, skin colouration a nd other things, decide on the angle you would like to view from at will and zoo m in and out of the image instantaneously. It is as much like 'The Hobbit' as a n ocean liner is to a pedalo. When you have picked your avatar, man or woman, you are brought e, but the character of the avatar alters with actions that you s, called quests, that you complete. In other words, you become e experience, which permits you to accomplish other things that sly unable to do. out into the gam take and mission older and acquir you were previou

As you progress through the game, or even as you wander without direction around , you will meet other avatars, some of which will be controlled by the computer, but most of which will be controlled by other human game-players who can be liv ing anywhere in the world, but who will at that time be sitting in front of thei r computer screen. The setting of these games could be anywhere, but most are in some unspecified m ythical past. Castles, dungeons, dragons, royal family, magic, swords and such l ike are very frequent features of lots of the games, although some are set in ou ter space, some are quite accurate historically and one or two are set it 'moder n times'. As you work your way through the game, you will get presented with quests. Some of these quests you can achieve on your own, but you will require help with othe rs. The help you need could be in the form of a tool, a weapon or an extra (magical) ability or it could be the assistance of a friend. it is up to you to work out how to do it. Some games have a uni-directional progression, meaning that you must complete ta sk number one before moving on to number two, but more complex games allow some quests to be completed 'out of sych' and yet others tailor the order or type of quests to the avatar that you decide on right from the beginning. Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on numerous subjects, but is curr ently concerned with <a href="http://mortalkombat4.org/mortal-kombat-controls.ht ml">Mortal Kombat Controls</a>. If you have an interest in gaming, please go ove r to our web site now at <a href="http://mortalkombat4.org">Mortal Kombat 4</a>.