A Little .hack Math
By William Gibson (wfgibso@uark.edu)

I'm sure by now many of you RPGamers have experienced and beaten that which is .hack//Infection. I myself flew through the story in a little over fifteen hours. By today's standards, that is not just small it's insignificant compared to games like Morrowind. But after further playing the game I myself have found a game that rivals large RPGs like Morrowind.

Through sessions of listening Stone Temple Pilots, friends coming and going, school and sleep I went through the 30 or 40 areas that make up the story sides of .hack part 1. It's just not that big, then I started thinking about just how many keyword combinations you could make. For those of you that haven't played .hack yet, areas in the game are accessed by sets of keywords chosen from 3 list A, B and C. Depending on what keywords you put in, you get an entirely new area.

Starting with Part A you have 28 keywords not counting "Chronicling"(since once you've become the Hero of Zeit it's not worth going to anymore). This is the same in Part B and C. So with a little math we see that 28*28*28=21952 different combinations. That is 21952 different "Gott Statues" to go and pilfer. Given that even some of the easiest dungeons can take about 5 minutes to get to the bottom of that's 109760 minutes at least or 1829 hours+, that's more than 2 months if someone was playing the game every minute of the day! But wait a sec, there's another server to go to with just as many keywords. So you've just doubled that time. It also makes you wonder how many little secrets they might have put into this game.

The fact that most of us aren't crazy enough to import RPGs, since we can't read kana or kanji, so the majority of us have until May 5th for part 2 to be released. For those of you that have emersed yourself into the .hack experience already that's a long time to wait. I say why wait when you've got all the .hack you need for the next month sitting in front of you! I myself will probably have a good 100 hours logged into this game before .hack//Mutation hits the shelves and believe me, I'll be ready for it with all the Grunt Dolls and Yellow Cards I can hold. Will you?

Dear Goog,
I found a used copy of Valkyrie Profile recently, and was so happy I bought Dragon Warrior 3 and Maniac Mansion along with it. Were those wise investments?

- Steven

Gooooogleshnnnnng,
How about a tabletop RPG based on tabletop RPGs based on tabletop RPGs based on tabletop RPGs based on tabletop RPGs based on tabletop RPGs based on tabletop RPGs based on tabletop RPGs based on tabletop RPGs?
Ctrl+V rules.
Anyway, I just beat BOF5 without dying once, though I did use the "Give up" command to gain some extra levels. Really, I do not know what all of the 'too hard' fuss is about. I found that most of the strategies the game hints at (as in kicking people into traps, using mushrooms to lure enemies, etc.) were just long ways to get to work. Really, just throw a "meat", throw a "Bomb", and start combat. Then just wait a turn to get AP up, have Ryu run up and attack while the others pound away, and most enemies will get only one attack.
Really, the game is very lenient. Moving around costs no AP until you attack, so you can find the best point to attack from. Also, using items takes up no AP. SO, to all of you who say that this game is too hard- what would it be like if items cost AP, you could not move closer to your starting point to get AP, and monsters didn't just bumble along in a straight line towards you? Ha.
A question- which game is considered 'harder', Xenosaga or .hack? Thanks.
--Ewcoolio
"Ramble to question ratio= a183 to 11"

Hello

I've been a hard console rpg player before and I've played most of the rpg on the snes and the playstation 1 and now I dont have any console but I was wondering when will there be console rpg on pc. All the rpg I find on pc are like diablo and its kind off repetitive.

Do you know any pc rpg that look like console rpg? What can you recommand me?

Thanks

Alex

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