...and enter the world of Dereth in the game of Asheron's Call (or Asheron's Crack, as it's been called). If you ever played on a MUD (multi user dungeon) in college, you'll feel right at home in AC, which is essentially a graphical MUD but yet has so much more to offer.

AC is an online-only game, there's no way to play it without a net connection. While at first I thought that was annoying, once I started playing I realized that the game would be *nothing* without the thousands of other people playing it - all at the same time as you. While you do run into idiots fairly often, you also run into witty, intelligent people and you can carry on great conversations (inbetween fighting beasties, of course).

The graphics in the world (which resides on the AC servers at zone.com, the MSN gaming zone) are truly amazing. The weather changes, the time of day changes - twinkling multicolored stars in the sky at night, cloudy and sunny days, and even the occasional view of the aurora borealis in the nighttime sky. I started playing the game only a couple of weeks ago, but I read on the web that on December 16th, it started snowing - before then, the world had been mostly green and brown but now everywhere is covered with a blanket of snow.

One of the nice parts about most data remaining on the server - it gets *updated*. They apply patches every once in a while which fix bugs and add features (for example, the snow). You can submit feature requests and the people at Turbine and MS will read them, although of course they have plenty of other things to do than implement everyone's pet feature :-)

You can customize your character to the utmost - even choosing different eye/eyebrow/mouth/nose combinations, eye and hair color, hair style, etc. You assign points to various stats - strength, endurance, coordination, quickness, focus, self. Each of the stats play a role in determining your character's skills - a character with a high quickness stat will be able to run quickly. A character with a high focus will be able to identify the stats on items and other characters. Each character also has skills that they can have at 4 levels - specialized, trained, untrained and unusable. Some of the skills - war magic (used for attacking monsters), life magic (healing and its reverse, draining health on monsters, protection against different attacks, etc), fletching (making arrows for bows and crossbows), lockpicking, sword/staff/dagger/mace/etc. You can increase your aptitude at most skills throughout the game by spending experience points on them.

Creating a character is very complex - it took me three tries to get it right :-). When you play the first time, get a more experienced friend to walk you through the character creation so that you don't put hours into your character and later want to change some major facet of it.

One of the more interesting parts of the game is the allegiance system. The way it works is this: a beginning character can pledge to a patron and becomes a vassal of that person. The patron then gives the vassal tips on how to play, gives them special items or money, etc. In return, when the vassal gains experience points, a portion of them will be passed along to the patron, so it's in the patron's best interests to make sure the vassal is doing well. Of course this relies on trust - the patron has to trust that the vassal won't demand goodies and then immediately break the allegiance. And the vassal has to trust that the patron will help them out from time to time. But it's the first time I've seen such a system that *works*.