For

Distributed by
Sega

There's been an explosion on the planet Ragol and you're one of the scout crew sent down from space to investigate it. Teams of up to 4, made up of fully-customisable characters including race, profession and appearance, must go and find out what caused it in a series of RPG missions which generally involve beaming down to the aforementioned planet and beating/shooting the bejesus out of scary monsters and super creeps. It's possible to play Phantasy Star Online both off- and online, the latter option being for the 'Billy No Mates' crowd or those who want to say hello to our friends across the continents and team up with them in order to defeat the baddies and complete the missions. At the moment, though, I'm trying to get hold of a US Dreamkey CD so I can route my online activities via Freeserve Unlimited. The standard UK Dreamkey discs do not allow you to change the necessary dial-up settings so I'd have to hand over mucho money to BT profit until then. Language barriers are not a problem as the universal translator system will provide hundreds of preset phrases and sentences in English, Japanese, Spanish, French or German. You can also type in individual words and phrases too via either a Speak-and-Spell-style A-Z onscreen keyboard or the official Dreamcast keyboard. At home, alone, computer-generated assistants are available for those who don't want to rack up the phone bill.

Without a doubt the graphics are gorgeous and easily the best thing about this release. Colourful and fluid, the best test of such a title is the ease at which they are rendered when changing location from inside a building to outside, or vice versa. I saw some clipping as you move along, but it's not a major problem. An ambient soundtrack flows along in the background nicely while whizzy SFX aid the opening and closing of speech and object windows. It's fair enough in its execution but nothing mindbendingly different. Playing on your own can get rather boring, but going online and meeting up with other real people is far more entertaining. Moving around your third-person characters is fairly intuitive, with the left-back button to centralise your view. The only hard bit is getting everyone together if you're meeting new people for the first time, but for those more organised you can arrange to meet at a certain time set in Internet 'beat time'. Watch-makers Swatch invented this form of time which divides the day into 1000 "beats" which, IIRC, starts at midnight GMT so presuming you can work out what the 'beat time' is, you'll all meet up together.

Overall, even though it took around half-an-hour after logging on for my first experience to find someone to play with, I did enjoy the game and only experienced lag when someone else joined. I just hope I didn't offend anyone by picking up items or money when some were left for me. I'd have typed more to confirm what I'd done but without the keyboard it's a pain to have a conversation. Although you don't have to play PSO online, you DO have to because it's not half as much fun if you don't. It's also a much better game to play online than something like Quake 3 because here you actually get time to stop and think, whereas the original Unreal, for example, had an offline mode with bots that aped the online world perfectly - because I also got killed every five seconds there. I'll look forward to the time when we have more complex games available for playing online and UNMETERED! Even a bash of Virtua Fighter would be a great laugh online. A word of warning though, if you plan to buy this game do not rent it first in order to try it out. I've never gone against 'try before you buy' before, but once the registration settings are complete your Dreamcast will not accept another Phantasy Star Online game disc so don't be caught out.

GRAPHICS SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC PLAYABILITY ORIGINALITY ENJOYMENT
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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2001.