Today I would like to share a little information about one of Techno Scouse’s favourite past-times. Don’t get your hopes up, I am not allowed to tell you all about her life as a burlesque performer, or how the act involves fire-eating, sequins, and usually several members of the audience passing out through exhaustion. Sorry… but my life’s at stake!

Instead, I will discuss the online game Final Fantasy XI. For thos who have no idea what this is, it is basically a role-playing game (not that kind… filthy reader!) where you have a character that goes on all sorts of “exciting” quests, kills goblins, and interacts with other freaks… i mean players from around the globe.

Characters come from the following different races:

Hume- unsurprisingly, these are human types. Mostly sporting the sort of hair styles not seen since First Division football stars of the 1980s. Long live the Mullet. The male players aren’t much better either. However, you CAN have a rather dashing player, with a shaved head, goatee beard, and big tattoo on his noggin. I opted to make my character look like this.

Elves- These ones look almost human, though their arms and legs seem disproportionaely long, and they have poity ears. and bad haircuts (this is a common feature for all races, so I won’t mention them again). Again, Elven can be male or female.

Galka- these are the bruisers of the game. They look like they could happily stop a small family car in its tracks and eat the inhabitants. They have a fine line of facial hair (sadly you can only have male Galka, as I bet the females are stunners!), and have names like Sweaty Mammoth or Brokeback Mountain.

Mithra- Frankly, these ones are just a little unsettling. This female-only race has a feline look to it… so little kitten ears, tail etc. The worrying thing is that the animation for these seems to automatically make them do failry suggestive poses. They will be sat on a set of steps, and it’s vaguely reminiscent of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Also, the armour/clothing somehow is more revealing than you’d expect- which surely makes it less protective in battle. For advanced players, who use the site www.ffxidats.com (and frankly EVERYONE should have a look at the pure beauty and quality of the design for that site) seem to enjoy making even MORE revealing clothing for Mithra. If you’ve ever wondered what a humanoid cat would look like in bondage gear, perhaps this is the game for you.

Just as a record, if there is anyone reading this blog who is interested in that sort of thing, can they leave a response at the bottom… just so we can all know? Thanks

Taru-taru- So gormless they named them twice. These little jobbies look a little bit like Mogwai in chainmail. They are meant to be extra magical, but are only about 3 feet tall. Think of Paul Daniels covered in Fuzzy Felt, and you get the idea. Techno Scouse’s character is a Taru. I wonder if she somehow felt an affinity to them (by which i mean that TS is magical. not that she’s short). However, having played the game (yes, I confess it), Taru are bloody irritating. They talk in this kind of baby-language, referring to moggy-woggys etc. Seriously… why would anyone think that is a smart thing for them to do???

Once you have chosen the race of your character, you pick a job. Frankly, life is too short for me to go through the different options, so I will pick out a couple in particular to outline:

Mage- these come in a variety of colours… white/black/red/blue. If you want to know more about the difference, get out more. They do magic, and make lots of lights flash on your screen. This makes them handy in battles and power-cuts

Warriors- Again, there are different types of damage-dealers, and they are handy at waving big choppers around. I wish I could make a sound effect play at this point, of Sydney James laughing from a Carry On film. I think it would be quite fitting.

Summoners- Right… these are the ones I want to mention in more detail. Summoners are great apparently. Techno Scouse is one of these, and a very good one for that matter (she didn’t even make me say that either). What they do is summon (hence the name) some kind of animal to come and fight the battle for you. You then tell the little beastie what to do, and it dies trying. This may not make much sense, so I have found the perfect illustration, which I hope will appear here

That’s right… the summoner is essentially Matthew Corbett, summoning the mighty magical power of Sooty to defeat an Orcish Bumlicker!

The wonderful world of Final Fantasy involves several different cities. Look em up yourself if you care . To get from one city to another you can walk (which takes forever and you run the risk of dying), taking the airship… which looks like a boat with helicopter propellers, or you can ride a chocobo. This is a bit like riding a horse, it’s faster than walking, and looks like it’ll give you a sore arse (insert punchline here). The key difference between horse and chocobo (other than one of them exists and the other is made up by a japanese programme designer) is that Chocobos are birds.

They look EXACTLY like this:

That’s right… ths internationally enjoyed game seems to have taken an idea from legendary 1980s light entertainer Bernie Clifton! What next… the Diddy-men a race of tax-evading Scousers with daft hair who attack the enemy with tickling sticks? Genius!

As I originally stated, Techno Scouse [note how I am mentioning her name as much as possible... she really loves it when her workmates call her by it, but she may pretend that she doesn't like it.] plays this game pretty much all the time. Sadly, that means that she will stay up til about 4 in the morning, to get some spandex jockstrap or sequined tiara on some quest, just so her little character has better equipment. She then usually wakes me up to tell me of her triumph. I never seem to share her joy.

One of TC’s other jobs in game is a White Mage. These are meant to be good magic bods who specialise in healing/strengthening themselves, their friends and anyone else they run into if they like the cut of their gib. When I started playing the game, I was told “Don’t worry, I’ll power level you” This means she would follow me along, I could kick off with oversized sheep and kill them, getting lots of experience points, while she kept me alive.

Sadly, she seemes to have learned the art of healing from the likes of Dr harold Shipman and Dr Crippen. I will hear the magic words “I’m just going to look for a notorious monster”, and then my character’s laying flat on his face as a huge wasps pisses on my corpse. It’s almost a standing joke that if I die less than 3 times in a night, she’s done a good job!

So… the moral of today’s post is that if you want to be a freakisah creature, dressed in bondage gear, and want to ride a pretend ostrich until you get killed by a sheep, Final Fantasy could be the best way to lose an evening