Barbelith Underground > Games & Gameplay > What video games are you playing at the moment? You scum, you... degenerate... scum...

My advice: start with the second game, then go onto the first once that's complete. If you try and tackle them in order of release, you're likely to get so frustrated with the first that you don't bother finishing it and can't face even starting the second. They've got seperate storylines, so doing them back to front makes no difference to your appreciation of the plot.

Playing more Final Fantasy XI again after a break during the week - it's one of those games that you pick up and can't put down, so I've decided to limit play to weekends, prevent myself from staying up all night when I've got to be up the next morning.

It's a strange beast. I stand by nearly all of my previous criticisms, yet the more you play it the better it gets. Visually, your choice of starting city has a huge effect on how impressive it is - the human city is ugly+ (the elven one isn't much better), but Windurst is much nicer. And there's a really weird thing going on with levels of detail - land textures are all an indistinct, fuzzy mess and make everything look pretty nasty from a distance, but zoom the camera right up next to your avatar and it almost looks like a different game. Characters, when close up, are lovely. The Tarutaru look fairly unappealing in the still portraits on the character select screen, but in-game they're charming, helped a lot by some great animation (screenshots to follow, maybe - one of the good things about the way that PlayOnline works is that it allows you to take screenshots within its games, save them to the console's hard drive and then email them to yourself and other people).

It's almost like Squenix took the engine from the PC version and married it to the interface from the PS2 version. Something's definitely been ripped straight out of the latter, anyway - disgracefully, one of the menus still has Dual Shock button icons in it.

Despite all of its problems, once you know what you're doing it comes very close to being something truly magical. It's difficult to describe - it's an extension of the usual MMORPG thing, but not one that's got anything to do with structure or overall design. It's the way it makes me *feel* when it all gels together - when you're in the middle of a particularly difficult solo battle and a couple of other players run past, notice that you're taking a beating, turn back and stand watch over you, healing and buffing you as and when you need it, then see you through to your victory and applaud, wave and disappear without a word.

It's behaviour that feeds off itself - because you remember how cool it felt to have that happen to you, you then spend an hour wandering around the field you're in, healing other players. Or when you die and another player sees it happen and takes the time to walk up to your body and kick the 'crying' emote into action. It's here that the animation comes into its own - I managed to get into a two-person team last night where all communication was carried out through the use of emotes.

It's a damned shame that the game makes you jump over some insanely high hurdles before it allows you to experience this stuff. At least now that I know most of the controller shortcuts and whatnot I can talk newbies through them myself.