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It’s been a while since I’ve given a new MMORPG a test drive… literally. It was Auto Assault, and I hated it The driving and shooting bit is kind of fun, but towns are an ugly heinous experience that left me feeling oddly soiled for having looked at them. Partying is meh. I expect it can be better than what I experienced, but the rest of the game is so generally uninspiring that I’m not surprised to hear that NCSoft has been losing fistfulls of money as a result. And, honestly, if I want a driving game… I’ve got several for my GCN/PS2 that don’t require me to pay a monthly subscription fee. Go Mario Kart!

So, I’m looking into the betas of Hero and Deicide Online. (Why can’t people come up with game titles that don’t have the word ‘online’ in them, I wonder?)

We’ll see what happens. I’ve got the Deicide client downloading right now (at the traditional 1kbps rate that one tends to expect from these kinds of downloads). The Hero client won’t let me download until the 14th or 15th when the closed beta actually starts. So it’s really a race. Will the Deicide client finish downloading before the Hero client lets me start downloading?

update – June 14th, 7:15pm

Well… It’s the 14th. Hero’s site has changed, but the client still refuses to download – saying that “Client Download will be available on June 14th”. Are they trying to kill their bandwidth all at once or something?

Deicide is still downloading Though, I admit, I had paused it for a few hours there.

update – June 14th, 9:40pm

And whaddaya know, the Hero client lets me download now

And of course, the Deicide download broke on me so I’m having to start over again. Apparently they patched versions or something and took the other file down.

So far, both games are really failing to impress, ne?

update – June 15th, 6:15pm

Well. Once Hero finally let me download the client yesterday, it didn’t let me play, citing that the servers wouldn’t be open until 11pm PST. I logged in at 5pm PST with no problems. It was slow, but it let me in and let me create a character (more on that another time).

I ran around for 5 minutes before Penny called and I left the game idle as I drove around the corner pick her up from work. Upon my return, I discovered that not only had I been disconnected (which would have been acceptable, even expected), but I also was greeted by a machine that had quit out of the client program entirely. No main menu or login screen. Nothing. Not even a stale crashed process from what I can tell.

My attempts to reconnect all hang – the third time, I finally got a timeout message saying that the server was down for maintainance or something. Perfectly allowable, but very inadequately handled.

And of course, Deicide is still downloading

Actually, it’s funny. The download froze on me again. Just locked up solid at around 31% and resisted all attempts to resume… I’ve got A’tuin downloading it now and will see if that makes any kind of difference. Not terribly hopeful though, for behold:

$ wget -c http://deicidedown2.ongameport.com/DeicideSetup_060615.exe
--21:12:51--  http://deicidedown2.ongameport.com/DeicideSetup_060615.exe
           => `DeicideSetup_060615.exe'
Resolving deicidedown2.ongameport.com... 222.122.25.48
Connecting to deicidedown2.ongameport.com[222.122.25.48]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 575,992,016 [application/octet-stream]

 0% [                             ] 3,495,201      8.24K/s ETA 17:46:32

It’s fluxuating pretty evenly between 5-12K/s and just plain hanging for a 20 seconds before resuming. I think I saw it burst as high as 14K/s a few seconds ago…