Lately, GaiaOnline has been working a lot on their new game, a MMO they named zOMG! after a user contest to decide on, well, the name. Recently, though, the admins have finished it and opened it up as a beta test. People who bought passes through the gaia cash-shop to get a first-chance play, and users that have had accounts for 3 or more years are able to test it out. I happen to have had an account since March of 2004, so for the past few days, I’ve been playing this game.

The opening video, which you can skip if you don’t feel like watching it over and over again at each log-in, is really well-done. It gives a basic recap of the past few years’ worth of events on the actual site (ie: the grunny takeover, the fall of Gambino Tower). When you play for the first time, you start in a train. There’s one other person there who leads you through a tutorial of how to move and issue commands like opening doors and the like. It’s a built-in walk-through and really helps a player get a good grip on the controls. You can either use your arrow keys/WASD on your keyboard to move around or you can click the area you want to go.

Once you complete the tutorial, you end up in Barton sewers. You meet Dani, a guard that seems to know a fair bit about the area. Barry, another guard in the area, also gives you quests and a good amount of information. Talk to Dani and she will let you pick your first ring- yes, ring. All the weapons and abilities are given to you by rings. The tray at the bottom of your screen shows a hand icon and 4 spaces on either side. You can have up to 8 rings at any given time. Dani will give you a little “lecture” about civil duty and send you into the sewers for your first “task.”

You can click on your enemies and then the ring you want to use. The ” ~ ” key lets you cycle through all valid targets in the area, and the 1-8 keys correspond to the 8 ring slots on the bottom tray. Your health icon is the little red heart and it depletes as you take damage. You start with 100 HP. You also have a stamina bar, the little battery icon on the bottom tray, that you can refil by sitting. The G represents G’hi, a meter that you can fill up while being around other users. Barton Town, the area you go to after completing all of the tasks/quests in the sewers, is a good place to fill that meter up. It seems that the game creators want to almost force sociability and give some sort of reward for being around other users. Really, you can hear and learn some interesting things while in masses.

Once in Barton town, you can explore the entire area. There are a lot of quests to be had, and some of them even interlock. You can join or start your own crew, the partying system in zOMG!. Once you’re done there, it’s off into the great world to find new adventures!

The storyline itself is pretty well thought-out. It deals with the Animate, inanimate objects that come to life. Why they do this? Well, I’ll let you play it and find out, we don’t want any spoilers, now do we? For a simple control-based game, the graphics look nice and there’s no real lag. The avatars of the users are your avatars in the game, and each time you change your avy on the site, it changes in the game. The music is nice and calming, so it doesn’t get annoying after playing for a long amount of time, and the music changes in each area.

Anyone who plays GaiaOnline and has for 3+ years should really jump in and check it out for themselves. Other users should be allowed in within the week, and soon the full game will launch. It’s not a download, just a pop-up that can be minimized if you have to do anything else. It saves automatically, like any good MMO. Now, for me, I’m going to jump right back in and explore more! Hope to see you all in soon!

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