Welcome!

Welcome to the opening post for Trials and Tribulations. Trials and Tribulations is a blog about online gaming which will feature me playing through a different MMO at least once a month. The name for this blog comes from the idea that some free trials to MMO are just that, trials. However some MMOs have free trials that are so aggravating that the word tribulation would be a better description of what they're offering.

I mention in the description that I'll discuss a little general gaming on top of MMOs and this is because lots of non-MMO games have great concepts that could and should be applied to MMOs. Soon I'll be writing about an MMO that looks like it'll be doing just that. This post however is just an introduction.

My name is Stephen B. though you may know me by my gamer handles Jargo or Jargonecius. If you want to contact me you can call me Steve or Jargo, whatever you feel more comfortable with. I am a long time gamer, ever since I was little I have had a love for games, the stories they portray and the lessons they teach.

In terms of MMOs you could say that my first real MMO was Asheron's Call in 1999 but I'd say this is the case because before this online games weren't really all that massive. I can think of a few smaller games like Legends of Kesmai which I doubt had much of a server capacity for a thousand players, let alone 8 million like World of Warcraft. If I had to name my oldest online game I'd have to say it was a little known game called The Odyssey online. This little game was a pet project by a man named Justin Schumacher aka Bugaboo and was made to prove that it was possible to make an online game with Visual Basic and prove it he did indeed. As far as I can recall the servers could only hold 54 people before they got unstable. This little game built in VB inspired me to work towards my goal... I want to design online games.

To wrap this up I thought I should post this for people who are wondering "What the heck is The Odyssey Online?" Some people did a remake and they're pretty nice guys and constantly adding content onto the classic. It's free except for the cash shop for optional powerful items which is a huge pet peeve of mine, but I'm willing to let it slide as it's not a huge game.

http://odysseyclassic.com/