Oberin: Another Mac game I can't play

One of the stories I recently dugg on digg.com was about free online games. It's kind of amazing how many games of this kind are actually out there - check out the list on the site. I'm sure most of them suck on ice, it's still impressive that there are more than a few developers and players out there supporting communities like these. It's an indicator of things to come - the big games, like WoW or EQ, will still be around, but their membership will be dwarfed by those who play smaller, niche games for far less money. Game code is important, but community makes or breaks any game. When I briefly played EQ Mac, I was totally impressed with the support I got from characters in the game. People actually took the time to shepherd me through to other worlds, show me how to hunt stuff, and invite me into hunting parties. Sure, a lot of it was for their own benefit, but they didn't have to be as polite and understanding of a n00b as they were.

Which is where the free online games page comes in. The depressing part is that there was, as far as I could tell, one game out of that entire list that even supported Macs. It is, in fact, entirely Mac-only, and it's called Oberin. (Not the music school - that's with an "l".) I took a look at their site and it looks pretty professional, so I downloaded their client, thinking "What the heck? It's free." Not a huge client, so the graphics can't be stellar, but hey - if dudes take the time to develop something this complicated, the least I can do is create a character and explore.

Except I couldn't create a character, because the server was down. Hmmm, bummer. But they're not shy about announcing that it's a beta game with plenty of bugs (and probably always will be, given that it's being worked on by all of 3 people), so perhaps they have scheduled server down-time more often than most. Forgivable. Certainly they're hosting on a reliable ISP somewhere.

Except that's not true either. Seems from this forum post that the server is down because it runs on a G5 belonging to Glenn Seemann (HEE, sorry, couldn't help it), who is listed as the "Lead Programming, Lead Gaming System, Lead Graphics, Lead Webmaster, and Lead Everything Else". Apparently Glenn's G5 has crapped out in some way, and Glenn is on vacation, so whatever, no server for the weekend.

This is where I start to get a bit peeved. I mean, c'mon, what kind podunk operation is this? It's enough to put a guy off from joining a free online game. More than that, as the only free online game for Macs (that I know of), they have an obligation far bigger than most to keep up the good name of the Mac gaming community, which has been under heavy fire from the outset and is not looking altogether healthy now that the move to Intel has been announced. What, Glenn can't give remote control of his server to another developer while he's away? There actually seems to be a sizable number of gamers playing this wretched creation (which I can't even see so I'm not qualified to call it "wretched" or anything else), and it's not helping the "recruit more players" cause to have the server down on a weekend. All weekend. Sheesh.

So now I'm sitting at home on a Sunday, blogging about some stupid, junior-varsity game I've never played but want to, waiting for some guy named after jizz to come back to New Orleans, fattest city in the nation, and restart his G5. This had better be worth it. Feh!

Update, 9:46 AM: I poked around more into some of the better-looking (read: 3D) free online games, and it turns out that there are a few that have OS X client versions. Nice! Now downloading Realm Wars and Planeshift, and of course there's RuneScape, where I naturally already had an account but haven't played much owing to the somewhat slow, jerky, and strangely audio-free support of java applets in Safari. I played RS on a PC once and it was noticeably better, if only because there was music. More on the quality of the other online games once I get them installed. (Might have to do this on the dual-G4 desktop instead of the iBook G4, for fairness.)