Your character has 20 levels of largely solo questing to get through before they're even set loose in the game world, and there's this ongoing story thread about you being the chosen one or some shit. Playing up the dialogue in a MMORPG feels like adding wheels to a hovercraft, but nevertheless Age of Conan's intention seems to be to make every player feel like the hero. And when all I want is their quest, I'd prefer to not have to ask them how their day's going before they can get to the bloody point and tell me how many wombats they want killed.

Dialogue trees are included to allow you to get to know the NPCs, but frankly I find it difficult to care about the personal lives of gormless pissants who spend their whole life standing in one place picking their nose. Same controls, same terminology, same arduous blocks of motherfucking grind, same interfaces (right down to the quest-givers with big, gold exclamation marks growing out of their heads like they've just spotted Solid Snake shuffling through the undergrowth).Д«ut one way in which A of C does differ is in the emphasis on story. Some people might say 'ooh, maybe it's not trying to be,' but those people are going to hell for lying, because all MMOs are trying to be World of Warcraft. But I have had fun with MMORPGs at the time, or rather a MMORPG, and since comparison is going to be inevitable, let's just get the fucker over with: Age of Conan is not World of Warcraft. I hate what they do to people, turning them into nocturnal globs of flesh and Cheetos that communicate entirely in mouth-breathing, and I hate when I look back at my time with a MMORPG and realised that I've just flushed away months of my life that I could have spent writing a best-selling book or raising a child or pounding nails into my face. Add to that seventeen buffs to cast on myself, and my pre-questing preparation took so long I felt like an acne-riddled schoolgirl ready to hit Essex on a Saturday night.Д¬ontrary to popular belief, I don't hate MMORPGs. And it certainly feels big whenever you die or walk through a door and have to summon them all again one at a time. Not the biggest horde in the world - more of a hordette, really - but enough to obscure all the action with necrotic flesh and Phong shading every time a fight broke out. By level twenty, I had eight of the dopey fucks following me around. Over the first few levels, I was loaded down with a ridiculous number of evil black spells of dubious usefulness, creating an instant dilemma with each battle as I tried to decide precisely in what way I wanted to suck out an enemy's soul through his urethra.ДЄnd, of course, I could summon undead minions. The first thing that struck me about Age of Conan is that unlike my character's nubile, young, naked body that glistened invitingly in the morning sun, it wasn't very tight. In defiance of all this, I opted to play as a female Stygian necromancer with all the body sliders set to minimum and decided to see how long I could get through the game without putting on any armour at all, thus beginning the adventures of Thinderella, the Necromantic Naturist. Character customisation is, in short, a joke, and the punchline is that you're all going to be covered in the same generic, pseudo-medieval outfits pretty soon anyway. And even the smallest available boobies resemble a lamppost with two grapefruits nailed to it. So there's the standard 'advanced' character editing screen, but your rippling six-packs barely flicker as you rattle the slider back and forth.

Not that the game will admit that RPGs these days get laughed out of the room if they don't let you customize at least fifteen separate rolls of flab. And body-wise you get to choose between big, muscley football hooligan or wispy lingerie model. The choices of race are: white human, black human, or another white human.

But my lack of foreknowledge of Age of Conan will ensure a fair review concentrated on the outsider's experience, rather than complaining about the depiction of Daisy McSwordboobs from page 74, paragraph 3 of Conan Gets a Fixed-Rate Mortgage or whatever. I like the movie, because it was Arnold Schwarzenegger back before he was trying to be anything other than a gigantic two-legged cow-man who can't act. This is the bit where the big nerds get to beat me up and take my lunch money, because I have to admit I don't know much about the Conan mythos, because I'm afraid that thinking too much about a muscley man in sweaty pants will make me a disappointment to my parents.

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