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By Danny "Ralsu" Gourley

style="font-weight: bold;">About This List

Please refer to the href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/Top10F2P">Top Ten
Free-to-Play Games Portal to find out how to get a game you
make or like on this list.

Week in Review

This week, I tested three free-to-play games for the first time: style="font-style: italic;">Dream of Mirror Online
(DOMO), Dungeon Runners,
and Shaiya.
DOMO
sucked me in, and I played it the most. Because I tried so
many new games, I did not get to explore the online mall for style="font-style: italic;">Mabinogi or find
out if Fiesta
becomes too much of a grind in the mid-teens. I'll look into them both
more next week.

DOMO
impressed me enough to crack the list in the #5 slot. The hundreds of
people href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=27227">who
flooded our forums to get free DOMO gifts the last two weeks
were there for a reason. The game is fun. The graphics are a bit
cartoony--the enemies look like something a five year old might see on
Cartoon Network--but the game is pretty serious. It has some decent
depth, or so it seems. I have played around with adventuring to level
10 and taken alchemy to level 3. I have yet to explore the love system.
The classes seem interesting, and the game is designed to let you mix
and match the skills of different classes to suit your needs. I'll keep
playing this one.

I tried Dungeon Runners
at the behest of Crickette, the Community Manager for the game over at
NCSoft. Like a few of the top games on this list, it is immediately
playable. It feels like a finished game and runs smoothly (I was
getting roughly 40 FPS even with FRAPS running). style="font-style: italic;">Dungeon Runners
pokes fun at a few of the tired conventions of the genre, too. My
biggest concern with the game is the way it seems to try to force me to
stop playing for free and pay some money. Granted that the fee is only
$5 per month, this list is about free games. I will examine this one
more closely in the next week.

Shaiya
wasn't really on my radar, but I wanted to try a game with an edge
after logging so many hours in the cutesy world of DOMO. style="font-style: italic;">Shaiya is in beta
and feels like it. The translation is fairly weak in places as many
phrases are just fragments. The fragments there are enough to clearly
explain what is going on but absolutely crush any hope for immersion.
I hit level eight this week and will play more soon.

All three of the above games made their way onto the Top Ten list this
week because I believe I would rather play them than the three I
dropped off to make room for them: Age
of Armor, Pirates
of the Caribbean Online, and style="font-style: italic;">Wonderland Online.
Let's see if I still feel that way after another week of testing.

The List

Coming up, I will be trying Exteel
and continuing my exploration of the three new games from this week.
I'll also take one more look at Mabinogi
and Fiesta.
Finally, Open Beta for NeoSteam
began this week. I'll be all over that.

Enough chatter. Here are my Top Ten Free-to-Play Games for this week!

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colspan="4" rowspan="1"> style="color: white; font-weight: bold;">Top Ten
Free-to-Play Games

May 22, 2008 style="text-align: center; width: 75px; background-color: rgb(114, 105, 62); font-weight: bold; color: white;">Rank style="text-align: center; width: 75px; background-color: rgb(114, 105, 62); font-weight: bold; color: white;">Previous style="text-align: center; width: 105px; background-color: rgb(114, 105, 62); font-weight: bold; color: white;"> style="width: 334px; background-color: rgb(114, 105, 62); font-weight: bold; color: white;">Game

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