...No, that wasn't an exclamation of excitement, that's the name of the game. Yes, I know it sounds kind of stupid, but my best friend said the same thing and even she's forgotten it by now, so you could stick this MMO's name right up there with the Wii and any guy who's first name is Dick in that people will move on from it quickly enough.
http://www.dabbledoo.com/ee/images/uploads/gamertell/zOMG_Logo_thumb.jpg
zOMG is the spawn of Gaia Online, and I can honestly forgive you if you've either never visited the site or can passively admit you don't care for it, but kindly reserve all the shit-flinging about how Gaia is only populated by underage Narutards and not accuse me of being part of that demographic, because while I'll admit 90% of Gaia's userbase is made of fail (like 90% of schools, movies, and humanity, going by Sturgeon's Law), it can be avoided. Heck, I've only posted in one thread the entire time I've been on the website, which is at least a year or two, by secluding myself to a group of casual roleplay addicts large enough to populate any run-of-the-mill overcrowded high school classroom.
I spent pretty much all my free 'net time with my fellow Tim-Burton-loving, epileptic-fandom-tree-creating friends, ignoring any changes Gaia made unless it posed a danger to my 503 cosplay mules or added a shiny new item (although the latter was soon dropped by the introduction of overly-expensive cash items and a drop in quality of the cheaper, regular donation gifts). It wasn't until one of my friends became a beta tester that I acknowledged the existence of the game, and even then I never clicked on the start button until it had been out for a good couple of weeks.
But a good amount of OMGs blasted to bits with my Solar Ray power and the end of the preamble to this review brought me to where I am today, so I digress and move on to the core of my ramblings.
The premise of the game is fairly simple: thanks to one of Gaia's many zany apocalyptic scenarios, every lawn gnome, purse, and anchor in a worldwide web radius has come to life with the sole intent of screwing shit up. You and all the other members of the website have been given a series of magical rings with powers ranging from invisibility to machine gun fire to flipping bad guys the bird, and go out to screw THEIR shit up in return. You'll spend your zOMG playtime trying to pick which bauble you want to beat a living drum like...erm, a drum with, grinding minions for level-up orbs, exploring a number of colorful locales from dude ranch to jungle ruins, and did I mention the grinding?
Once things kick off, you're presented with one default laser ring and set free into the servers to tend to the quest-related needs of various NPCs. Finish a quest, and you'll be given gold, maybe some Null Fragments or a recipe (which are required for crafting items), the occasional new ring of your choosing, and charge orbs. You use the charge orbs to upgrade your rings and increase your level. Other than that, combat isn't too complicated, although you can organize your rings in special ways to give you bonuses, such as the Pirate set, the Demon set, the Medic set, and so on.
But when it comes to fighting, all you really have to do is run up to something and either click on it or press the number key corresponding to which of eight available rings you want to use. You've got the standard health and mana bars which regenerate over time (rather slowly in the case of health, so you might as well save yourself the grief and make your first extra ring choice a Diagnose for all the flak those mushroom cannons will be giving you). If you run short on health or mana, your best bet is to run the hell away because most enemies can be thrown off your tail eventually, and then kneel down somewhere away from the spawn points so you can gain your power back and then go re-charging into battle. This is done by pressing the 'sit' button, and the reason I pointed out that you need to run away for this is because taking a hit while in the kneeling position triples the amount of damage you take. Run out of health and you're incapacitated until someone with kindness in their heart and the appropriate ring revives you, or you're forced to teleport back to the checkpoint crystal you use to upgrade your rings, which also serves as a sort of teleportation hub across the global map. Running out of mana means you can't use any rings, which is just about as bad because they're the only things that hurt those irritating little mites called Animated.
You also have a little circular meter labeled 'Ghi', an odd sort of life energy thing, that goes up when you're in the presence of other players and goes down when you're by yourself. Apparently Ghi gives you little bonuses like increased accuracy when it levels up, not any mind-blowing abilities like the excited blurb would have you believe, but I find the entire thing sort of a waste. It doesn't even seem like Ghi abilities are triggered by the meter being full, because I was launched out of my seat in alarm when the level-up tune blasted out of my speakers when the reader only said 34 out of 100.
On the subject of other players, that's also a substantial part of the gameplay. The servers are populated by every other person on the site whose computer doesn't freeze during the loading screens, and you're encouraged to join up with them in temporary crews or permanent clans to take on enemy mobs and tough bosses. There's a recruit panel for doing this, which gives you a handy-dandy view of all the other players depending on their level in ratio to yours and what rings they have equipped, but to my experience nobody seems to use this. You have a better chance of running around looking for a group with the obnoxious shout option (unless everyone's already filtered it out of their chat bars after those two Bleach-obsessed n00bettes in the corner loudly verbalized their cybering session to everyone in the area), or just clicking on someone and hitting 'invite'.
There's really no other way to drag out the mechanics of the game, because that's about all you have to do. Sure, you can farm Air Fluffs and save up enough cotton to make yourself a fuzzy sweater, but there's no nonsense about armor or all that, mostly because I could sympathize with the staff of Gaia Online for not wanting to go around and add stats to all of the customizable items. The stuff you craft is purely cosmetic and mostly meant to be sold on the marketplace for rewarding amounts of gold, which is a much-welcomed change since only last month the ranks of the website's wealthy and elite were dominated by anyone with enough allowance in their piggy bank who could buy an evolving item and sell it for hundreds of thousands of gold.
Despite the moderate simplicity of it all, I have to point this out before I get to the pent-up rants that caused me to write this thing: I love zOMG. It's really addictive. I went out to mow down the forces of the lawn gnome army after sending a message to my friend, and by time I was snapped out of it by my Internet crashing from the activity she had assumed I'd died, decomposed, and turned to dust. It filled the gap caused by me growing bored of Guild Wars as I do from time to time and being stuck on that damn Yaridovich in SMRPG, and I honestly think it's preventing me from going back to either of those things with its shiny, insanity-dripping deathgrip.
Unfortunately for me and my hatred of creepy-crawly things, zOMG has more bugs than a pungent banana found in the far corner underneath your bed. Because I'm so fed up with them, I'm going to list some of the ones I've encountered for you:
- Upon talking to an elderly lady about delivering a lunchbox to her son, she suddenly developed short-term memory loss and forgot she'd spoken to me, prompting her to give me the quest dialogue EVERY TIME I talked to her afterwards. The quest appeared, uncompleted, under the 'finished' section in my menu, although the markers were still plastered all over the map. The corresponding NPC wouldn't give me directions to the son, and when I finally did find him, asking him about the lunchbox suddenly erased any possibility of talking to him at all.
- I took a quest from the rancher's stupid son to kill 20 malevolent cloves of garlic, but after I did, he refused to give me my reward unless I accepted the quest a second time. I know the quest is repeatable, but I should not be FORCED to repeat it if I just want my gold.
- Concerning the same rancher, once I took a quest from him to hook up his son with the sexy farmhand, it suddenly disappeared from my quest log and was replaced with something about wandering through a cemetery to find his prize cow. He wouldn't talk to me about the other quest until I did so, but after I did bring the cow back, he said he had nothing else for me to do, in spite of the glaring quest marker over his head and the fact that I still hadn't brought together Purvis and Rubella.
And that's not even counting all the stuff I hear on the technical assistance forums about disappearing rings, glitched boss spawns, and computer crashings...which would be a nightmare to count, because every day there's fifty extra threads in the place about them.
You'll find yourself having to kneel and heal up a lot more than you want to. Your maximum health is increased with every new ring and level up, but your mana stays stubbornly at 100 points, and you automatically deplete mana with every attack and spell you use. This needs to be fixed, preferably by letting people increase their mana bar alongside health, so we can do more than ten attacks against a psychotic zombie helicopter before having to go off and take a breather.
zOMG also falls prey to the tired old MMO trap of fetch quests. You know the kind: kill 20 of this thing, 30 of that, or bring me five sparkly treasures from the corpses of the wooden dolls. One of these comes very early in the game, where you're forced to blow up the gnomes' mushroom cannons and bring the fungal heads back to a guard for reconnaissance, but I swear I had to kill about 500 of them before I even got my first one. In the next area, there are FOUR fetch quests, and you can always expect an extra one once you progress. Sadly, the low drop rates don't just apply to quest items. They also apply to charge orbs, which you need to get from monsters as well as NPCs if you don't want to be eaten alive by the next sand castle golem to cross your path, so the entire thing sort of boils down to one big gamble.
On a more minor note, being an Internet MMO, you can expect some more tame, run-of-the-mill problems too, like n00bs stealing your hard-earned kills or idiots who run level one guns blazing into battle like Kilroy Stonekin and get you all sent back to the start of the level once you've been systematically slaughtered.
If I had to compare zOMG to, say, a schoolkid giving me a project to grade, he'd probably receive something right on the line between C and B. He picked a sturdy criteria and pulled it off beautifully, but happened to make very persistent factual errors in varying degrees of severity, some of them only noticeable if you really looked and others glaring enough to bore you down to a bloody husk, and in some places made very daring design changes that could've worked, but fell flat and dragged the entire presentation down. That doesn't mean he didn't give it a bonafide college try, though, and he was pretty darn close to succeeding. All in all, it's still something that deserves to be hung on the bulletin board during parent teacher conferences, and it might even be one of the rare works you take home and show to your grandchildren when recounting fond memories from your teaching career. Sometimes it seems like pure, unadulterated brilliance, and other times you just want to throw it in a bin.
Bottom line, play it. Even if you don't like Gaia, it's probably worth making an account for in the end.
http://www.dabbledoo.com/ee/images/uploads/gamertell/zOMG_Logo_thumb.jpg
zOMG is the spawn of Gaia Online, and I can honestly forgive you if you've either never visited the site or can passively admit you don't care for it, but kindly reserve all the shit-flinging about how Gaia is only populated by underage Narutards and not accuse me of being part of that demographic, because while I'll admit 90% of Gaia's userbase is made of fail (like 90% of schools, movies, and humanity, going by Sturgeon's Law), it can be avoided. Heck, I've only posted in one thread the entire time I've been on the website, which is at least a year or two, by secluding myself to a group of casual roleplay addicts large enough to populate any run-of-the-mill overcrowded high school classroom.
I spent pretty much all my free 'net time with my fellow Tim-Burton-loving, epileptic-fandom-tree-creating friends, ignoring any changes Gaia made unless it posed a danger to my 503 cosplay mules or added a shiny new item (although the latter was soon dropped by the introduction of overly-expensive cash items and a drop in quality of the cheaper, regular donation gifts). It wasn't until one of my friends became a beta tester that I acknowledged the existence of the game, and even then I never clicked on the start button until it had been out for a good couple of weeks.
But a good amount of OMGs blasted to bits with my Solar Ray power and the end of the preamble to this review brought me to where I am today, so I digress and move on to the core of my ramblings.
The premise of the game is fairly simple: thanks to one of Gaia's many zany apocalyptic scenarios, every lawn gnome, purse, and anchor in a worldwide web radius has come to life with the sole intent of screwing shit up. You and all the other members of the website have been given a series of magical rings with powers ranging from invisibility to machine gun fire to flipping bad guys the bird, and go out to screw THEIR shit up in return. You'll spend your zOMG playtime trying to pick which bauble you want to beat a living drum like...erm, a drum with, grinding minions for level-up orbs, exploring a number of colorful locales from dude ranch to jungle ruins, and did I mention the grinding?
Once things kick off, you're presented with one default laser ring and set free into the servers to tend to the quest-related needs of various NPCs. Finish a quest, and you'll be given gold, maybe some Null Fragments or a recipe (which are required for crafting items), the occasional new ring of your choosing, and charge orbs. You use the charge orbs to upgrade your rings and increase your level. Other than that, combat isn't too complicated, although you can organize your rings in special ways to give you bonuses, such as the Pirate set, the Demon set, the Medic set, and so on.
But when it comes to fighting, all you really have to do is run up to something and either click on it or press the number key corresponding to which of eight available rings you want to use. You've got the standard health and mana bars which regenerate over time (rather slowly in the case of health, so you might as well save yourself the grief and make your first extra ring choice a Diagnose for all the flak those mushroom cannons will be giving you). If you run short on health or mana, your best bet is to run the hell away because most enemies can be thrown off your tail eventually, and then kneel down somewhere away from the spawn points so you can gain your power back and then go re-charging into battle. This is done by pressing the 'sit' button, and the reason I pointed out that you need to run away for this is because taking a hit while in the kneeling position triples the amount of damage you take. Run out of health and you're incapacitated until someone with kindness in their heart and the appropriate ring revives you, or you're forced to teleport back to the checkpoint crystal you use to upgrade your rings, which also serves as a sort of teleportation hub across the global map. Running out of mana means you can't use any rings, which is just about as bad because they're the only things that hurt those irritating little mites called Animated.
You also have a little circular meter labeled 'Ghi', an odd sort of life energy thing, that goes up when you're in the presence of other players and goes down when you're by yourself. Apparently Ghi gives you little bonuses like increased accuracy when it levels up, not any mind-blowing abilities like the excited blurb would have you believe, but I find the entire thing sort of a waste. It doesn't even seem like Ghi abilities are triggered by the meter being full, because I was launched out of my seat in alarm when the level-up tune blasted out of my speakers when the reader only said 34 out of 100.
On the subject of other players, that's also a substantial part of the gameplay. The servers are populated by every other person on the site whose computer doesn't freeze during the loading screens, and you're encouraged to join up with them in temporary crews or permanent clans to take on enemy mobs and tough bosses. There's a recruit panel for doing this, which gives you a handy-dandy view of all the other players depending on their level in ratio to yours and what rings they have equipped, but to my experience nobody seems to use this. You have a better chance of running around looking for a group with the obnoxious shout option (unless everyone's already filtered it out of their chat bars after those two Bleach-obsessed n00bettes in the corner loudly verbalized their cybering session to everyone in the area), or just clicking on someone and hitting 'invite'.
There's really no other way to drag out the mechanics of the game, because that's about all you have to do. Sure, you can farm Air Fluffs and save up enough cotton to make yourself a fuzzy sweater, but there's no nonsense about armor or all that, mostly because I could sympathize with the staff of Gaia Online for not wanting to go around and add stats to all of the customizable items. The stuff you craft is purely cosmetic and mostly meant to be sold on the marketplace for rewarding amounts of gold, which is a much-welcomed change since only last month the ranks of the website's wealthy and elite were dominated by anyone with enough allowance in their piggy bank who could buy an evolving item and sell it for hundreds of thousands of gold.
Despite the moderate simplicity of it all, I have to point this out before I get to the pent-up rants that caused me to write this thing: I love zOMG. It's really addictive. I went out to mow down the forces of the lawn gnome army after sending a message to my friend, and by time I was snapped out of it by my Internet crashing from the activity she had assumed I'd died, decomposed, and turned to dust. It filled the gap caused by me growing bored of Guild Wars as I do from time to time and being stuck on that damn Yaridovich in SMRPG, and I honestly think it's preventing me from going back to either of those things with its shiny, insanity-dripping deathgrip.
Unfortunately for me and my hatred of creepy-crawly things, zOMG has more bugs than a pungent banana found in the far corner underneath your bed. Because I'm so fed up with them, I'm going to list some of the ones I've encountered for you:
- Upon talking to an elderly lady about delivering a lunchbox to her son, she suddenly developed short-term memory loss and forgot she'd spoken to me, prompting her to give me the quest dialogue EVERY TIME I talked to her afterwards. The quest appeared, uncompleted, under the 'finished' section in my menu, although the markers were still plastered all over the map. The corresponding NPC wouldn't give me directions to the son, and when I finally did find him, asking him about the lunchbox suddenly erased any possibility of talking to him at all.
- I took a quest from the rancher's stupid son to kill 20 malevolent cloves of garlic, but after I did, he refused to give me my reward unless I accepted the quest a second time. I know the quest is repeatable, but I should not be FORCED to repeat it if I just want my gold.
- Concerning the same rancher, once I took a quest from him to hook up his son with the sexy farmhand, it suddenly disappeared from my quest log and was replaced with something about wandering through a cemetery to find his prize cow. He wouldn't talk to me about the other quest until I did so, but after I did bring the cow back, he said he had nothing else for me to do, in spite of the glaring quest marker over his head and the fact that I still hadn't brought together Purvis and Rubella.
And that's not even counting all the stuff I hear on the technical assistance forums about disappearing rings, glitched boss spawns, and computer crashings...which would be a nightmare to count, because every day there's fifty extra threads in the place about them.
You'll find yourself having to kneel and heal up a lot more than you want to. Your maximum health is increased with every new ring and level up, but your mana stays stubbornly at 100 points, and you automatically deplete mana with every attack and spell you use. This needs to be fixed, preferably by letting people increase their mana bar alongside health, so we can do more than ten attacks against a psychotic zombie helicopter before having to go off and take a breather.
zOMG also falls prey to the tired old MMO trap of fetch quests. You know the kind: kill 20 of this thing, 30 of that, or bring me five sparkly treasures from the corpses of the wooden dolls. One of these comes very early in the game, where you're forced to blow up the gnomes' mushroom cannons and bring the fungal heads back to a guard for reconnaissance, but I swear I had to kill about 500 of them before I even got my first one. In the next area, there are FOUR fetch quests, and you can always expect an extra one once you progress. Sadly, the low drop rates don't just apply to quest items. They also apply to charge orbs, which you need to get from monsters as well as NPCs if you don't want to be eaten alive by the next sand castle golem to cross your path, so the entire thing sort of boils down to one big gamble.
On a more minor note, being an Internet MMO, you can expect some more tame, run-of-the-mill problems too, like n00bs stealing your hard-earned kills or idiots who run level one guns blazing into battle like Kilroy Stonekin and get you all sent back to the start of the level once you've been systematically slaughtered.
If I had to compare zOMG to, say, a schoolkid giving me a project to grade, he'd probably receive something right on the line between C and B. He picked a sturdy criteria and pulled it off beautifully, but happened to make very persistent factual errors in varying degrees of severity, some of them only noticeable if you really looked and others glaring enough to bore you down to a bloody husk, and in some places made very daring design changes that could've worked, but fell flat and dragged the entire presentation down. That doesn't mean he didn't give it a bonafide college try, though, and he was pretty darn close to succeeding. All in all, it's still something that deserves to be hung on the bulletin board during parent teacher conferences, and it might even be one of the rare works you take home and show to your grandchildren when recounting fond memories from your teaching career. Sometimes it seems like pure, unadulterated brilliance, and other times you just want to throw it in a bin.
Bottom line, play it. Even if you don't like Gaia, it's probably worth making an account for in the end.
