Anyone still playing? I was in a Best Buy on Monday, wondering what to buy with a 30 dollar rewards certificate. Then I saw it. For 20 dollars, EQ with the first 14 expansions (they're releasing the 15th on 10/21). First, I confirmed that it was indeed 2008, about 6 years after I last gazed into it's gaping maw and 9 years after it was released. And then I asked myself... why not?

It's still highly delicious, and they've added some of the features of newer MMO's that make it less annoying then it previously was. For example, you need not loot your old corpse anymore, and the EXP losses are pretty modest. And then there's the Find feature (glowing path to the named NPCs in the Zone), the Realm of Knowledge being a free teleportation hub to many of the areas, and the Delicious Cake of mounts (yay outrunning hungry bears)*. Not to mention that the tutorial is well made, and getting to level 13 took me about 10 hours, as opposed to the 70 it took be back a long, long time ago.

I guess what I'm saying here is that if you've played before, it's changed a lot for the better, and if you haven't it might be worth looking into. Another plus is that while the graphics are somewhere between PS1 and PS2, the System Requirements are modest, so any PC made in the last 6-7 years should be able to handle it. I'm playing it on a laptop with an integrated graphics card in window mode with iTunes, Trillian, Skype, and IE 8 Beta running in the background at top specs and getting a smooth frame rate for example. Technically speaking, you could even play it on as little as a 28.8 k modem although you'd have to kill yourself waiting for the updates.

Free 14 day trial, with the original and the first two expansions - http://escapetonorrath.station.sony.com/

Hey, Look it's Me - http://eqplayers.station.sony.com/ch...d=528281312740

* Free, among other things, with the Omnibus Pack that I got.