GETTING JACKED IN - INSTALL
"Tank: Everyone please observe...that the fasten seat belt and no smoking signs have been turned on! Sit back and enjoy your flight!"

So I signed up for the Matrix Online newsletter awhile back and kept receiving those spam e-mails about what's new, and look what we're going to do, now wait we're releasing...eventually etc. and finally decided to get a BETA key from Fileplanet. Once I had my key I could either wait in line for 103 minutes with FP or download the 28mb installer from the Matrix Online website. 28mb, what a great size I thought. Now somewhere along the way, I thought that the install was only 1GB. I begin my download and throw it into the background while I go play a few rounds of Railroad Tycoon 3. About 3 hours later I really find my system slowing down and I pop back to desktop and it advises me I'm running low on space. Now I only have a 30GB harddrive so I think nothing of it and delete a few bittorent files I had kicking about and go back to my game. Another few hours go by and again my system starts slowing down..Once more I get the "You are running low on disk space" message and check. Sure enough, only 10.8mb remaining. So I go and look at how much I've downloaded over the past 7 hours and see that the game has taken up 4.5GB. Wow. Then I check the website and it says that I'll need a total of 7GB. Damn. There goes my pr0n collection....the things one does for gaming. Needless to say, I was quite happy with the download speed from the Matrix website as the 7GB seemed to go at a pretty good rate.

CHARACTER CREATION/TUTORIAL
"Cypher: It means buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, 'cause Kansas, is goin' bye-bye."

Right from the get go, the game sucks you in as you take on the role of the "Operator" (think 'Dozer from The Matrix) trying to find a "Red-Pill" prospect. It goes through a sequence of computer searches while you give your character a slick set of duds and what-not. Then you find yourself in a dingy room with the chair and a Zion operative. After learning how to move and operate the camera, you get the choice to take either the red pill or the blue pill. I haven't taken the blue pill yet to find out what happens but when you choose the red pill it really begins the Alice in Wonderland experience as described in the movie. There are some cutscenes of you in your pod, and the hovercraft and then you find yourself in the "white room", with two chairs a table and a television. The game tutorial continues as they load up a dojo and you get the basics of the combat system, and then you fight "Bob". More on combat later. The tutorial covers the basics of movement and combat well but lacks in areas such as loading/unloading abilities and what to do in the game.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS
"Agent Smith: Have you ever stood and stared at it? Marveled at it's beauty? It's genius? Billions of people just living out their lives......oblivious.... "

After the tutorial you are "jacked in" to the game. As the zone loads you see your avatar, and everything around you in matrix code (Think how Neo sees everything). You can move around and what not while this is happening and I have to say, it's quite cool and a lot better than other games where you stare at a static screen.

So there I am standing in for all intensive purposes, a parking lot. I see a bunch of people running to and fro. And a bunch of other people standing around on the sidewalk, sitting by fences and a huge crowd gathered around the telephone booth that I've started at. Like I said about the tutorial, it's great for telling me how combat works (more on this later) but I really was left with a huge void as to what to do. I found myself just running around an exploring this gigantic city that I was in. There were no zones to load, so I presume that the entire city is just one huge zone (from what I gather there are 3 cities in the game) and this really helped make the game seamless. I wandered into an apartment building and found that this thing was HUGE! I could take the elevator, or the stairs and then I got to the roof. Wow, what a view! My exploration of the city was cut short however when I decided to take an alley as a short cut and was promptly struck dead by a gang of street toughs. Word to the wise, avoid dark alleys! Having died, I was brought back to the Loading area outside of the matrix where you can choose what clothes you want to wear (if you have made, bought or found any) and what abilities you want loaded...think, "I know kung-fu!"..except as a new recruit you don't know jack!

INTERFACE
"Morpheus: Good! Adaptation, improvisation, but your weakness is not your technique."

The user interface is pretty simple and straight forward. Target window top left, your character bar top right. A chat window bottom left and you can pop up a map on the bottom right. All of the windows can be resized and moved around however I wasn't able to find a lock button. Graphically speaking the game is up to par with the other MMORPG's being released this year, but as it's in beta there are a few texture issues and some clipping problems as well. The game seems to throw me into 800x600 by default (it was kinda choppy at 1280x1024) and this can make the chat window take up 3/4 of the left side of the screen. Also, what with swapping abilities left right and center, it kinda sucked having to set up my hotbar every time I died, or wanted to change some abilities. I just wish that I could setup hotbar #1-10 depending on what load I wanted to carry and just switch hotbars. The map is pretty detailed as it shows vendors, hardline booths and mission start points. The loading area is easy to manage, and includes a marketplace where users can buy and sell goods/items.

MISSIONS
"Agent Smith: You're going to help us, Mr. Anderson. Whether you want to or not."

Eventually I figured out that this little cell phone icon on my screen was to contact my local Zion operative. If you've played City of Heroes then it's the same premise. You call them. They tell you to go to site A, perform action B and then collect phat loot C. You can even choose the length of the mission depending on how much time you have, and the difficulty level. I selected the easiest, shortest mission - Go to the Zion hideout and meet with some operatives. Finally I had a sense of direction as a circle appeared on my screen with the distance to my door (again, think CoH). The door wasn't that far and I took the elevator up to the correct floor, spoke to Joe Blow and Sally and voila, mission complete! I collected my virtual monies and got the hell out of dodge before an enemy Agent could lock onto my signal. Apparently if you stick around a mission site too long then the agents show up. Icky.

The missions progress nicely along a storyline until about level 5 when you are given a choice of contacts between Zion, Machine and Merovingian. Choosing a mission from one faction can gain you reputation with that one, but lose you reputation with another. The storyline is actually kinda neat with you retrieving documents, hacking into computers, killing rogue programs or locating more red-pill subjects. The variety of the quests is refreshing, and I don't feel like a Fedex employee when it tells me to take documents to this office, because once I get there I find myself fighting toe-to-toe with building security in the lobby and it's just so fast paced - get in and get out.

EXPERIENCE VS. MONEY
"Trinity (after Neo dodges bullets): "How did you do that? You move like they do. I've never seen anyone move that fast."

Everything that you kill gives you experience points. However, experience is only part of the game. Using the money you earn from corpses or completing missions can be used to buy skills (or you can make them). Then you upgrade those skills with money again. So while killing a member of the Crazy 88's may only garner you 50exp, searching the corpse may grant you 2250is and a few cool items. Most of the areas have collectors as well which will give you cool trinkets/gadgets if you turn in items such as medallions and coins from the local gangs' corpses. I am usually a 'jack of all trades-master of none' kind of player so I found myself spending my money on skills in each ability tree.

ABILITIES
"Neo: I know Kung Fu."

After you are 'awakened' you have access to four ability trees.

[]Awakened - a bunch of utility abilities such as detect weakness and hyper jump. A lot of people I've seen levels 1-10 use a lot of the awakened abilities it seems.[/:u:c24e419db6]
[]Operative - Think fighter class. This eventually breaks down into spy (stealthy fighter) and soldier.[/:u:c24e419db6]
[]Hacker - Think mage/priest. You can 'write virii' or patch code depending on whether you want to heal or harm.[/:u:c24e419db6]
[]Coder - Tradeskills. Ability to create.....ANYTHING![/:u:c24e419db6]
Abilities can be loaded or unloaded into memory from the loading area, or any hardline (special phone booth) but you only have so much memory capacity which goes up as you level up. I started out as a hacker, but have since bought or
made all of the abilities in the first two tiers of each tree. This is where the game shines in that you can be ANYTHING you want, WHENEVER you want. Your party needs a patcher? No problem, hit a hardline and swap out your kung-fu grip for some heal code. Out to solo? Just jack in and load up a proxy (pet) program, create it and then jack in again and load up some fighting abilities. Feel like a little downtime? Just take some code bits that you've collected, load up your coding abilities and start creating clothing and items that you have decompiled. The game plays quite differently based on the loadout that you have selected but this system is my favorite so far out of all the MMORPG's because I don't feel locked into anything. The only thing that seperates me from the next guy over is how I've spent my money...well that and my sweet vinyl pants and 3/4 length pink fur coat.

COMBAT
"Morpheus: This is a sparring program. Similar to the programmed reality of The Matrix. It has the same basic rules...rules like gravity. What you must learn is that these rules are no different than the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent...others can be broken."

There are two forms of combat: free combat where you just stand off to one side launching virii or firing your Bormann 5000 shotgun at an enemy while they fire back, or close combat where you choose from a variety of attack forms and then a
number generator determines who's attack gets through (paper, rock, scissors on steroids) The close combat animations are pretty slick. In any given fight you'll find yourself fighting hand to hand, hand to gun, gun to gun. All of
these are represented well with grappling, disarming of weapons and even BULLET TIME! The fighting system really immerses you into the game when it's running smoothly. I ran into some lag problems though and it really detracted as the fighting got choppy/blocky and I found myself fighting a corpse every now and then. Realism suffered a bit because I found that I could attack a large group of street toughs and just pick them off in ones or twos. If things weren't going my way there seemed to be problems with pathing which I could exploit (Hey, it's beta..gotta find those bugs now!) so as to send the creatures back whence they came.

TEAMING UP
"Morpheus: Were you listening to me, Neo, or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?"

Eventually I hit a mission where I just kept getting my butt whupped by some pesky Merovingian soldiers and asked a passerby for some help. Needless to say, the mission was a lot easier with another person along. For the life of me though I couldn't really think of anything to talk about...nor was there really any reason to interact. Maybe it's because of our relatively low level. His fighting ability and my coding ability were such that he didn't need my help in a fight and I just made sure to keep myself healed. After a few missions together we added one another to our buddy lists and went on our merry ways.

You can form a guild/clan/gang or a "crew" as it is known but since I'm such a loner and a newb at that I didn't really gain any experience with this feature.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING
"Agent Smith: Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability."

All in all this game will have my money if not at release then shortly thereafter. It is refreshing in that it's not about swinging swords, chanting spells and slaying dragons. I find the game has a fairly fast pace, especially the missions and immersion is achieved easily. What really has me my interest is that I can be anything in this game at any point instead of being locked in to one particular class. There are bugs of course, as it's beta. There are design flaws that are sure to emerg as I continue to play but all said, after a week, this game has me hooked![/][/]

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