Lakeland Mirror

Issue date: 4/3/03 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Media Credit: Sony and Bandai

Bandai, a video game publisher, has never really produced anything truly memorable, until now. After several mediocre titles, their new video game ".hack," based on the anime series, is a hit.

The bases behind the anime is that in the year 2005 a massive online RPG called "Pluto's Kiss" gets infected by a virus which causes several million people in it have seizures or even die. All online RPGs are suspended after this and in the year 2007 another online RPG comes out. Called "The World," this is the game that you play in. Within moments of the game you are very aware of a problem with the server. Your friend is defeated in battle right in front of your eyes, and when you check in on him at home, he's at the hospital in a coma. But the game can't give someone a coma, can it? That's the mystery of the game.

To clear things up, you are playing a real life person. You have a desktop where you check email, world news, change preferences for your desktop, and enter "The World" from. As you play you get more music for it and you get more pictures for the background of your desktop. The news is what you would expect from future predictions. Though some actually have relevance to the game, many do not. There's one article based on stop lights that take into account the time of day, railroad crossings, and when a crime happens, the stop lights in the area all turn red so the criminal is slowed down.

Some of the other ideas will make you laugh, or look at it stunned in disbelief, so I won't tell you any more of the news. The computers are basically controlled by a company called Altimit. The company has a safety network so that the virus incident does not occur again. Within the game it's told that some say it's the perfect network, while Altimit has yet to boost anything and is always under the scope when they release updated versions. This company seems part of the larger mystery, but play the game to see.

The company that creates "The World" is the CC Corporation. This is the company that claims Altimit is a perfect program. Within the game you start to see them as the shifty bad guy, though you cannot put the entire puzzle together. Throughout the game they try to hamper your pursuit of knowing what is going on within the game. This ranges from deleting crucial posts to altering equally important posts. Obviously you will learn more about them in the other three games to come out, since finding the problem in the corporation would cause the series to end on the spot.

Graphically this game is stunning. They are nothing compared to some of the current games, but who would believe a massive online RPG would have those type of graphics? The music is excellent, each character that accompanies you having its own unique sound track. Each character also has its own unique personality. In game there are several times where people use the computer faces, reminding you that you are in the computer world. There are also interesting facts that you learn of people. When walking about I saw a conversation on a man that was away from "The World" for a while because of work.

In the end, this game was beyond worth its price and I can't wait until the second, third, and fourth installation come out. This game utilizes a great deal of the Playstation 2 and its ability to place information on DVD, though it didn't necessarily use the idea of a longer plot.

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