Atomic Skull

You "think"? what are you skipping over the cutscenes? /slap Go back to playing God of War II or whatever 3D crap people are currently going ga-ga over.

It looks good I won't deny that. And when you understand how they did it it's even more impressive. But it's not merely a high res SNES game. The animation system is far more advanced than that.

This game isn't nearly as "hand animated" as people seem to think. Just for fun ran it in Pcsx2 (I have a real game so don't flame me) and changed the emulator to wireframe mode. As it turned out the sprites in the game are really made up of dozens of little polygon billboards with hand drawn textures on them and linked together like a puppet. Same for the backgrounds, most of the plants etc are multiple polygon billboards all linked together to form a larger object. Remember the old wolfteam games on the genesis like Earnest Evans? This is the same thing only much more advanced. Here is a screen shot with the game rendering normally on the left and in wireframe on the right. http://s8.photobucket.com/albums/a11/askull/?action=view&current=odinspherepolygons.jpg I'm not trying to say that it's not hand drawn, but they sure did cheat like crazy on the animation.

Oh god no. Everquest is the Eye of Argon of MMOs. In fact if they were to ever publish Eye of Argon as a paperback the cover art would probably look a lot like EQ2's graphics. (Of couse we'd have other things to worry about at that point such as the apocalypse) I'll stick with FFXI thanks.

I played WoW for about 2 months, hit cap and found out that all there really was to do at endgame was PVP and raid Molten Core over and over and over and over. I never did like instances, they seem less real to me. There's no chance of just bumping into somone at random in a dungeon and teaming up to get somthing done or seeing somone else doing somthing else and wondering what that might be. Crafting was poorly designed. No failure at all. You pick a craft to make stuff for yourself, forget about using it to make money because a billion other people are going to he high level in that tradeskill too. Money serves no purpose beyond buying a mount and armor repairs. everything is bind on pickup. There is almost no death penalty at all, so there is no reason to avoid bad tactics or not do stupid things. You can throw yourself against an obstacal over and over untill you get lucky. I finally got sick of it and went back to FFXI. Comparing other MMOs to WoW is not a fair comparison because they are really two different markets. The vast majority of people who play WoW would not have purchased an MMO otherwise and it is designed with them in mind and not hardcore MMO players. So it's no wonder that the latter get bored and leave after a few months. I have a feeling though that in 2 years WoW will be where Starcraft and Diablo II is now. The people currently playing WoW are not long term hardcore MMOers and will eventually move on to the next latest greatest thing.

Hardest boss ever: Vrtra Runners up.. Vrtra's sister Tiamat And their brother Jormungand These guys are so hard that they often wander around unmolested for days on end. Few want to bother with them because your entire alliance will most liklely be wiped out.