Most people spend Easter with family, friends and food. It’s a nice tradition and one I see no issue with. Being me, I spent the entire weekend searching for a new MMORPG to kill time with. It was an interesting search and I was finally successful after several false starts. Mind you the false starts were entertaining, but not long lasting.

MMO’s are seen as time holes. To get any enjoyment out of them you must spend hours and hours playing them. While there are a ton of people who play them that way it is not the only way to play. See I have always believe that you can spend only a couple hours per session with any decent MMO and still have fun. Plus get value out of your time spent playing. It all comes down to finding a free MMO that works for you.

That is the best part about MMO’s now. There are a metric ton of free ones. I went through five this weekend before finally finding one yesterday. The first two I don’t even remember the names or would link them if I did. They just weren’t that good. The two I tried and found decent were Cabal and Shaiya. Nothing major wrong with them just not the right vibe for my taste. I was about to give up the search when I stumbled upon Aion. I felt really stupid as I had read earlier in the week that the game was set to go free to play. The only hitch in the whole process was NCSoft’s servers hate me. This should tide me over until GuildWars2 drops.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBIV0BkpGdE[/youtube]

The video is just intended to give you small sample. Yes I am playing as a girl and I like it. I have said thousands of times I’d rather stare at that ass for a couple hours than some sweaty grunting dude’s. Speaking of time, during my first play session last night and this morning I kept it to exactly two hours. I also made sure I did nothing but quests. Which means no random level grinding by killing mobs. In four hours I am almost level seven and having a ton of fun with the game.  As some one usually put’s in about four or five per session, I was really surprised how much you can get accomplished in a shorter time span.

I have talked about the myth of the MMO time trap many times on Wonderpod and on this site. I knew that from my experiences with WOW that you didn’t have to devote your life to one game.  Aion was the first time I really sat down, timed my session and took note of how I leveled up. Look MMO’s aren’t for everyone and the more time you spend with them the faster you get to the woot elite portions of the experience. For those of you that are curious about these games, you can play them and have fun without giving up all other games. What I experienced this weekend with Aion proves that for me definitively. I think to often we forget that games are supposed to be fun.  Our experiences playing them should defined by the player and not some preconceived notion about certain genres. On top of that it was a damn awesome way to waste a holiday weekend.