Thud and blunder, by Crom!

Meaning, as you probably guessed from the title, that I picked up Age of Conan.

(“Ma’am,” says the concerned GameStop clerk as I hand him my $5 for pre-order, “you know that this is an M game?” I’m not sure whether he thought I was buying it for Kid Peligro, who was impatiently waiting for me to pay for a DS game, or whether he thought that as a mommy, I would faint on finding out that my new MMORPG had explicit bloodspatter and quests involving a whorehouse.)

I obviously haven’t had time to play it much, but I give it a D- on implementation given the lousy launch and backfilling on things like buddy passes, and an A on flavor and gameplay. It clearly wasn’t ready for launch. Surprisingly, though, they did a fantastic job on capturing the flavor of Conan. And there is a surprising lack of d00dz on the PvE servers. Yes, you can run around topless, but nobody does. Amazing.