I've realized over the past few days that I'm not very good at vacation.

I had a relaxing few days up in Bellingham, visiting my cousin, but it's been rather dull aside from that. I get up in the morning, get some coffee, and then start being lazy, which continues throughout the entire day. Maybe it'll get better, but that remains to be seen.

In the meantime, I decided that I ought to find something that keeps me busy. I've chosen to go light on the programming and blog entries while away from work, and so had to find something that would keep me occupied without causing me to put in any real effort.

Yesterday, I stopped in a store and saw a copy of Star Wars Galaxies sitting on the shelf. For those of you who aren't in the know, Galaxies is the new Start Wars based online role-playing game. The idea is that you'll get online with thousands of other people who got bored during their vacations, and go out to kill a bunch of cuddly little animals on several virtual planets.

Sounded kind of neatish to me. I was familiar with the whole EverQuest thing, but had never played it. The idea of going online and engaging in virtual copulation with an elf really turns me off. However, the idea of going online an engaging in virtual copulation with a robot seems perfectly all right to me.

As my grandmother mentioned during dinner on Sunday night, in reference to my being of French descent, "It takes all kinds."

Indeed, it does.

So, I bought the game. Took it home, unwrapped it, and actually felt kind of excited. Star Wars was a rather largish part of my youth, and the prospect of running around inside of it got me a little giddy. I'm not really into the whole role-playing thing, but thought that Galaxies might offer something to someone such as myself anyway (the tone of this sentence could be taken to imply that I'm engaging in a bit of "foreshadowing" here).

It doesn't.

Oh, wow, it doesn't.

I mean, it really, really doesn't work for me.

Whoah. Really. Whoah.

Doesn't.

Why this game is digital doo-doo

The first indication that I might not enjoy it was the large collection of awful user reviews I had read before buying it. It was consistently getting low ratings from all sorts of players, and was constantly said to have been released while still obviously incomplete and in beta. This didn't surprise me, though, as I had read reviews of other similar online games, and it seems that it's an industry norm to release them half-baked. So, at my own peril, I ignored the comments. Plus, I'm a bit of an empiricist, and so rely on my own experiences as a source of material against which to pass judgment on things. It's an expensive way to live, but because of this method, I can now reliably tell people that sprinklers damage laptops, and that it really is hard to quit smoking, especially if you're trying to kick a smack habit at the same time.

Installing the game was a pain. I dropped it on my laptop, and there it died. I started getting device failure messages. Lame. Went to the online tech support knowledge base, and found that Sony Online thought it would be funny to mix the knowledge bases for three of their games, making it very difficult to find what you're looking for. I'd search for help on Galaxies, and get a list of knowledge base articles on how to troubleshoot virtual safe-elf-sex in EverQuest. It was frustrating. I eventually gave up on the laptop, installed the game on my desktop, and dropped Sony Online a note saying that the person behind the knowledge base should be driven out into bear-infested wilderness with a steak tied around his neck.

I really did send this email. I was mad.

I'd say that I had it up and running a couple hours later, but it was really just up and limping along. It ran like utter crap, looked like crap, and therefore, in my book, was crap.

I tried again on the laptop since my laptop is more powerful than the desktop. Found out that I could get the game to run by turning off all the nice graphics features. That's OK with me - A good game will stand on its own, even when it looks like it was done by those horrible people who do all the paint-by-number clipper ships that are hanging in the cheap nautically themed motels up and down the west coast.

A good game will stand on its own under such conditions. Galaxies, on the other hand, really needed the prosthetic leg of good graphics on which to balance itself. Without good graphics, this game is just wallet rot. It's fifteen dollars a month of rootin-tootin' tedious doldrums.

My first day in the Star Wars universe

Having grown up with the franchise, I'm pretty familiar with the action and adventure of the original trilogy. It wasn't until the new movies that I realized Star Wars was really about galactic check balancing and stupid things like elected queens ("Yes!" say the people - "We want her to tap into our tax dollars for personal use. She's perfect for the job!").

Galaxies, although set in the time period between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, continues, in a spiritual sense, where the new trilogy leaves off. I know that I've just referred to the new trilogy as though it were already complete, and that this might not be fair, but let me assure you: The last episode is going to be about as cool as having your brain sucked out through your eye sockets.

There is, just like in the new movies, no real plot. There's no point. There's no fancy princess rescuing (at least I didn't find it), there aren't any cool characters (probably because most of the other characters are actually real people), and Darth Vader doesn't even know I exist.

In Galaxies, you don't get to play the part of someone like Luke Skywalker or Han Solo. Rather, you get to be the humanoid sea lion in the cantina who gets him arm chopped off in the first thirty minutes of the movie. You get to be an extra.

My first few "battles" will give you an idea of how incredibly lame your role will be in Galaxies, should you decide to fire it up.

My first battles

I was a little shaken by the initial installation, but managed, against all odds, to retain some faith in the game once I finally got it started. I popped up in a city on some planet, the name of which I don't know - Let's call it "Planet Stupid Planet."

So, I was on Planet Stupid Planet, and thought that I ought to look for something to do. Without a plot, and without any characters to guide you, you're pretty much left to your own devices, and so make your own decisions about where you're going to go.

I decided to go forward.

I went forward for a few minutes. It was pretty cool. Sometimes, buildings got in my way, and I had to walk around them. Other times, some of the other human players in the game would stop and try to talk to me, so I had to walk around them, too. The first moments on the planet were all about dodging things that you didn't want to deal with.

The city gradually gave way to rural surroundings. The graphics got kind of nice at this point. There was grass swaying in the wind, clouds moving slowly across the sky, and insects flitting about.

About thirty seconds into my walk outside, I came across an animal. It looked exactly like a bunny rabbit. There was absolutely no attempt made to give it an otherworldly feel. If you went down to the pet store right now and asked to be shown a bunny suitable for ownership, then they would bring you something resembling, in nearly every way, the animal that was sitting before me. I hate that. In the game, the thing is called a "Durma" or a "Duruma" or something like that. What were they thinking? That calling a bunny by some stupid name automatically makes it an alien? It's like Star Trek, where every single alien was a human with blue makeup on: "I'm blue, ergo, I am an alien. Hi. I speak English, too. Here - Have some alien soda pop. Come listen to some alien pop music. I'm an alien because I'm blue. Never mind the fact that I'm wearing Roman gladiatorial armor. I'm an alien. I'm blue. I'm an alien because I'm blue."

Argh. Anyway...

I had read a little bit of the manual during the three hour installation process and so knew that, under the proper conditions, animals in the wild can be tamed and made into pets. Since I'm not that interested in killing things, I thought I'd give it a try.

I got up close to it, and it went nuts. The caption next to it changed from "Durma" (or whatever it was) to "Crazed Durma."

I mean, here I was, walking up to the rabbit so that I could turn it into my friend, and it just attacks me.

How is this game any different from real life? What does it have to offer that I can't get for free on the street? If I want to get attacked by rabbits, then I'll just go outside.

What's really irritating is that the thing completely kicked my butt. It chased me all the way back to the city, where I was once again surrounded by people who were trying to talk to me.

"do u want 2 hav elf sx?" someone asked. "i hve class 4 rabbit killing skillz. i kill teh rabbit if u want 2 b elf sex wit me."

Any game that requires you to become someone's virtual elf-sex-slave in order to take out the rabbit that's been beating you up is, in my opinion, a very bad game.

I took off and headed for another planet. I thought that the one I had started out on was some sort of an intergalactic breeding ground for rabbit-slaying dominatrix elf fetishists, and that my luck might be better elsewhere.

The next planet wasn't much better. The elf-sexers were still there, but, rather than being attacked by rabbits, I was being attacked by something called a keetle which bore more than a passing resemblance to a beetle. I don't want to say that the designers of the game simply substituted a "k" for the "b" in "beetle," but I think it's possible that that's what happened.

After getting my butt kicked a few more times by some big bugs, I thought that I should go off and do something a little easier. Wandering around for a few minutes brought me to a menacing looking pile of rocks, and I opened fire on it.

I must have stood there for about ten minutes, listening to the incessant shriek of my lame pistol, trying to kill that pile of rocks. I was so bad at it that another player, who obviously pitied me, came along and helped me to defeat the rocks. At the end, because I wanted to be polite, I engaged my buddy in a little conversation:

"Thanks for helping me kill those rocks," I said. "I was outnumbered, and couldn't have done it without you. It was exciting, though - Just like in the movies when Luke Skywalker fought those rocks in that one scene. You know, where the rocks attacked him, and... Er. Well, anyway, thanks."

"no prblem do u want 2 hav elf sex with me??!?!!" he replied.

This was getting depressing. I wandered off and eventually took out my aggression on a pile of dirt that gave me a real run for my money.

Around 3:00 AM, I decided that enough was enough, and shut the thing down.

Lucas, again, has taken my childhood dreams and flushed them down his golden toilet.

If I ever meet him, I'm going to poke him in the eye.