My PSO Ep I&II trial pack arrived this morning (unfortunately the two day national holiday in the UK delayed its delivery).
So far I've only played online for about 30 minutes, but since my housemate needed to make an urgent phone call, I thought I'd knock out a quick report of my impressions so far.
I didn't make any specific notes when playing so a lot of this might be a bit vague.
Firstly, getting online was dead simple. The modem worked fine in my US/JP modded Gamecube and I just pulled the phone cable out of my DC and plugged it straight into my GC.
Once I booted up the game, I looked around to see if there was an English language option, but so far I haven't found one.
Actually working out which boxes to fill-in, with my ISP details took a bit of trial and error, but the instruction book has a lot of (tiny) colour pictures, so it didn't take long to work out. If anyone else is on the trial and finding this difficult, PM me and I'll do my best to help.
The first thing that is immediately worth commenting on is the keyboard controller. The controller handle bits and buttons are fine and it's reasonably comfortable to hold (although a lot fatter than a regular keyboard). It has a double cable coming out of it and uses TWO controller slots on the gamecube (presumably one for the keyboard bit and one for the controller itself). The cable is approx 6 feet in length, so if you like to sit a long way from your console, you'll need two cable extenders for it.
The keyboard itself is pretty small and I would say that the keys are about 2/3rds the size of those on a normal keyboard with a lot less gap in between them. This makes typing rather tricky although you start to get used to it after a while. Anyone with fat fingers is going to find this a problem.
Once I had everything sorted, I created myself a Ramarl (yes she does indeed fire sideways - well handguns at least, I haven't found anything else yet) and connected to the servers.
The servers themselves on the whole feel a bit slower than the DC ones. As you probably know, they're called Mercury, Mars, Earth and Venus. I went onto Mars and started a test game. Pretty soon a Japanese guy joined and sounded pretty suprised to find he had joined a game with someone from the UK, but he seemed pretty ok with it.
A few miscellanous points I've noticed so far:
Loading times (telepiping, person joining game, starting game etc) seem faster than the DC version. I would say about twice as fast, although I haven't measured it.
Telepipes look really weird. They have a big "heat haze" type effect on them that totally distorts the view of anything behind or in them.
The menu system is ever-so-slightly transparent so you can see the landscape behind it while in the menus.
The general graphics (so far I've only been into Forest) seem slightly "crisper" than the DC version. Forest 2 seems darker and the storm clouds in the sky look pretty good (although whether this weather changes I don't know).
There is a little more detail in some of the more mundane objects (fence posts, electrical barriers above locked gates etc)
The button layout on the GC controller takes a bit of getting used to. It's not what I expected. If you know the layout of the controller, the A,B and X buttons are your 3 shortcut buttons and the Y button is your chat key. Although this gives you a nice straight line of 3 shortcut buttons, I think it would be more intuitive to have A,X and Y as your shortcuts and then leave B for chat.
This next bit is total speculation, but it's also possible that SEGA have upped the rare count, or ease of finding weapons for the trial. I found a 9 star shield in my first run through Forest 1 at level 1 although I don't know what it is because I'm playing in Japanese !!!
Anyway, that's about all I can remember for now, and my housemate is off the phone, so I'll play some more and add any further comments later.
Tata.
M.
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