I am Joe Blog’s Left Ventricle

Here be the link to the vanguard free trial.

What’s the trial? It’s a little island (the playable area a mere 2km x 2km - tiny for Vanguard) the developers have put together to show off the awesomeness of VG in 10 levels of gameplay. You can get to level 10 in all three spheres on the island, and with a free trial account you get 14 days to do so.

Wyvern - a flying mount within Vanguard

I beta tested the island on the test server last month and it is by far and away the best couple of hours entertainment you can get for free on planet earth. Vanguard is a hell of a game and the developers have pulled out all stops to show it off in the demo. I heartily recommend checking it out to anyone - whether you’re an mmo veteran or you don’t know what ‘mmo’ stands for.

My level 10 test character at the end of the trial

The stuff I love about Vanguard:

• You can go anywhere you want and do anything you want. There are very few limits and you can step right off the beaten path anytime you like and go exploring.
• The rewards for stepping off the beaten path can be great. Going where others don’t can be a big advantage.
• Adventuring is excellent. The combat system is complex enough to be fun for the first 46 levels so far with one character class.
• There are *15* different character classes, and all of them are unique. All of them are great. All of them can get groups, all of them can solo (some have more trouble than others). There isn’t perfect balance, there never will be, but nobody’s really left out in the cold.
• There are 19 different races. Some are really unique to the game, but all the tried and true fantasy races are well represented.
• There are two continents and one archipelago. Each of these three areas are completely distinct in their plant and animal life. You can tell at a glance where any screenshot was taken because their character is so unique.
• Qalia, the hot, dry southern contintent is my favourite. Deserts and an ‘Arabian Nights’ feel just keep me coming back. The lack of heavy woodland on most of it (there are some surprises ;)) means you can climb up on a hill and see for literally miles.

An Oasis in southern Qalia

• Thestra, the “medieval europe” themed continent has what you’d expect - pine and broadleaf forests, swamps and plains, mountains and rivers.
• Kojan, the Asian themed archipelago is a large cluster of islands and has its own unique stuff. I’m not sure what, in two years of playing I’ve hardly gone there. Which just underlines how big the game is really.

• The game is FUCKING HUGE. You can literally play several characters from level 1-50 and level up in different areas each time and STILL not have seen every dungeon or area in the game. Every time I turn around there’s something new I haven’t even HEARD of.

Everything you see, you can get to. That big city on the hill is full of evil Djinn and stuff. You can see the oasis from the photo above in front of it. One giant, consistent world.

• Crafting is the best I’ve seen in any game, period. It’s an entire “sphere” of play on its own. I’m a level 45 blacksmith and I chose to specialise in armour. This makes sense because I can make my Dreadknight excellent gear. If I work at it. I could have become a weaponsmith, or I could’ve worked with stone, wood, gems, or cloth and leather. Lots of depth there, many of the items for sale in the game were made by players.

Crafting... think rather than bash your way through problems

• There is this whole other sphere called Diplomacy which I don’t have time to get into. If you like card games, it’s for you.

Riding across the dunes at sunset

• It’s jaw-droppingly beautiful.
• Character customisation is pretty detailed. I was once crafting next to two other males of the same race, and we’d all chosen the same hairstyle. I was even looking from behind, and despite similar clothing as we were all similarly levelled blacksmiths, I could tell the three of us apart at the glance. One was more lightly built and another had darker skin. Everyone looks unique, and I recognise my friends in the game at a glance usually. There’s sliders for everything from the size of your butt to the slant and width of your nose…
• The music is awesome. There’s about 24 hours of original music in the game. Each area has its own unique themes and battle music for when the going gets rough. Some of the orchestral themes for the big cities will blow your socks off when you first hear them. And the second time, and the third, and so on.
• The dungeons. There are dozens of them, and many are huge. I’ve only really just begun scratching the surface here but so far, it absolutely owns.

Check out the vanguard free trial. You’re absolutely mad if you do not.

[Wed 23:35] <jamjam> Trading has been suspended on the Russian stock market after another steep slide in early trading.
[Wed 23:36] <sw> fail
[Wed 23:36] <jamjam> The US Federal Reserve has been forced to provide a $106 billion publicly-funded loan to AIG after talks to try and co-ordinate a privately funded bail out failed.
[Wed 23:36] <jamjam> if I was going to make that a more accurate article
[Wed 23:36] <jamjam> The US Federal Reserve has been forced to borrow a $106 billion publicly-funded loan to AIG after talks to try and co-ordinate a privately funded bail out failed.
[Wed 23:40] <jamjam> in the US
[Wed 23:40] <jamjam> they’ve privatised everything from education and electricity to your fucking back teeth
[Wed 23:40] <jamjam> but they’re nationalising home loan schemes and investment banks
[Wed 23:40] <jamjam> why would you nationalise an investment bank?
[Wed 23:40] <jamjam> what the fuck would you do that for?
[Wed 23:41] <jamjam> the only half-assed moronic reason would be to prop up something stupid that isn’t working anymore
[Wed 23:41] <jamjam> meanwhile russia’s stock market crashses
[Wed 23:41] <jamjam> oil and gas rich russia, who is holding Europe to ransom with gas prices and enjoying $100/barrel oil sales
[Wed 23:41] <jamjam> stock market crash?
[Wed 23:41] <jamjam> the only way you can get that
[Wed 23:41] <jamjam> is if a lot of people in russia
[Wed 23:42] <jamjam> believe the global economy is about to tank, bigtime
[Wed 23:42] <jamjam> and I can’t say I disagree much with their analysis
[Wed 23:43] <Eccles> heh
[Wed 23:43] <Eccles> its all going to shit
[Wed 23:43] <Eccles> yaaaaay
[Wed 23:43] <Eccles> err
[Wed 23:43] <jamjam> welcome to the 2nd great depression
[Wed 23:43] <Eccles> I was reading in the paper about CDS’s
[Wed 23:43] <Eccles> forget what it stands for
[Wed 23:44] <Eccles> basically its insurance against loans going crap, placed against property?
[Wed 23:44] <Eccles> however
[Wed 23:44] <Eccles> you dont have to own the property in question, or be involved with it at all, to take out a CDS
[Wed 23:45] <Eccles> so in 2001 there was @1 Trillion worth of these cds’s
[Wed 23:45] <Eccles> but nowadays, there is *62* trillion worth
[Wed 23:45] <Eccles> $10,000 for every man woman and child on the planet
[Wed 23:46] <jamjam> they should’ve let them burn

[Wed 23:46] <jamjam> the banks that fucked up
[Wed 23:46] <jamjam> and the fucks that bought houses they couldn’t afford
[Wed 23:46] <jamjam> propping it up a little longer isn’t going to help
[Wed 23:46] <jamjam> it’s probably going to make it worse
[Wed 23:46] <jamjam> deeper and longer
[Wed 23:48] <Eccles> aye indeed..
[Wed 23:48] <Eccles> wonder if I can find this CDS article online, it was damn good reading
[Wed 23:48] <Eccles> terry mcrann.. he knows stuff good
[Wed 23:48] <Eccles> lol
[Wed 23:48] <jamjam> oooh knows stuff good
[Wed 23:49] <sw> 2nd cousin of troy mcclure
[Wed 23:50] <Eccles> lol
[Wed 23:52] <Eccles> lol on the daily show they showed a clip of dubya calling the current crisis an ‘adjustment’ followed by half a dozen ‘experts’ calling it a tsunami, a 9 on the richter scale etc etc etc
[Wed 23:56] <Eccles> http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2008/09/15/100-year-crash-mccain-advisor-spurred-62-trillion-derivatives/
[Wed 23:56] <Eccles> that explains it about as well
[Wed 23:56] <Eccles> just read around the pointless political bits
[Wed 23:58] <jamjam> should’ve let the nerds finish taking over the world
[Wed 23:58] <jamjam> fucking irony
[Wed 23:58] <jamjam> we’d have made it active-active redundant failover
[Wed 23:58] <jamjam> they’ve tied it all together so that if one part fails they all do
[Wed 23:58] <jamjam> that’s ass-backwards you financial fuckwits
[Wed 23:58] <jamjam> all these assfuck companies have been wrong all this time
[Wed 23:59] <jamjam> promoting the CFO before the CIO
[Wed 23:59] <jamjam> massive chain of failure.org
[Thu 00:01] <Eccles> haha
[Thu 00:02] <Eccles> yer but we pay dem $1 million a yer! they MUST be smrt
[Thu 00:03] <Eccles> with any luck this will make mccain unelectable
[Thu 00:04] <jamjam> yeah
[Thu 00:04] <jamjam> wouldn’t want the republicans to have to preside over america’s financial collapse
[Thu 00:04] <Eccles> lol…

[Thu 00:07] <Eccles> http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2008/05/credit-default-swaps-losses-estimated.html
[Thu 00:07] <Eccles> well damn they knew this was likely to happen 4 months ago
[Thu 00:09] <jamjam> there’s no question everything’s going to shit
[Thu 00:09] <jamjam> the question is really how far, and for how long
[Thu 00:11] <jamjam> it’s possible nobody in high places is callign it
[Thu 00:11] <jamjam> because quite simply
[Thu 00:11] <jamjam> so long as people keep believing the bullshit, maybe it’ll go away
[Thu 00:12] <jamjam> I mean
[Thu 00:12] <jamjam> it’s 2008
[Thu 00:12] <jamjam> we have so much technology we could really get together and achieve anything we wanted
[Thu 00:12] <jamjam> we’re incapable of getting together, deciding what we wanted etc etc
[Thu 00:12] <jamjam> but even being totally useless fuckwits with no cohesion whatsoever
[Thu 00:12] <jamjam> we can achieve a hell of a lot
[Thu 00:21] * sw changes topic to ‘happy birthday jam!’
[Thu 00:21] <jamjam> tanks
[Thu 00:21] <Eccles> yeeeeeah
[Thu 00:21] <Eccles> happy boofday
[Thu 00:21] <jamjam> businessmen they drink my wine
[Thu 00:21] <jamjam> ploughmen dig my earth
[Thu 00:21] <jamjam> none of them along the line know what any of it is worth
[Thu 00:22] <jamjam> im 2 again
[Thu 00:22] <jamjam> *Throws a tantrum*