Aeria Games is taking their latest baby out for a walk around the park.  The open beta/unnoficial release of Shaiya: Darkness and Light is enough to get any MMO-grind enthusiast's heart pumping, with shiny weapons, shiny armor, and a world populated with pointy-eared runway models.  For those that get sweaty palms when they see packs of standstill mobs, or have to wipe the stars from their eyes when surrounded by empty shells of oversized architecture, Shaiya could be your new home away from home.

There's some low-stress, easy grind action to be sought, and I crafted a male elven ranger I named "Reza," representing the "light" side of the Darkness and Light subtitle.  The temptation to make a statuesque female elf is practically irresistable, but in the end ... I just can't roll like that.  I won't blame you if you do it just to admire the artwork though.  All of the women sport a lovely decolletage, if you'll (literally) pardon my French.

Reza appeared on the outskirts of some elven complex known as Aelbaegeu (I think it's pronounced "Ally Baggett") where I deftly dodged -- with flips and air spins -- to the side as new players spawned into the world every couple seconds.  I marveled at the utterly confusing surrounds, as huge snowflakes fell from a largely blue sky, sunlight streamed through deciduous trees doing their best impersonations of evergreens, Monarch butterflies flitted about sunflowers poking out of the snow, while horned monkeys and red-tail foxes meandered through one another's herds.

Aelbaegeu itself seems nothing more than an ivory monument of sorts, with a few halberd-packing guards posing between at-attention and at-ease under open-arched entryways.  The only dangerous-looking creatures in the vicinity were some wild boars sporting meta-plated armor.  With spikes.  They're rather harmless until you blast an arrow at them, however.

As Reza spoke with some of the resident NPCs of Aelbaegeu, it became apparent that the Engrish filter hadn't made its full rounds yet.  One guard asked me "Are you a person participating in a fight newly this time?"  (I wonder how many times they strained that one through Babel Fish.)  While an accessories merchant not 50 yards away hit me with fluent netspeak by proclaiming that "Treeshade Monkeys freaking pwned my shop."

And with player characters running around with names ranging from "Shadowkiller69" to "AoiHitomi" to "Kajsa" -- the last of which I'm quite sure isn't readily pronounceable in English -- having conversations with other players might yield similar variations in lingual proficiency. 

Shaiya opens up with a perfectly shallow backstory, and perfectly shallow gameplay, that just might keep my attention fixated for a little while.  It's everything that the Western Hemisphere has come to loathe about MMOs.  But "oh well" is what I'm sayin'.  I never needed much of a backstory from Pac-Man.  Not when there's so many mobs out here to munch up like little yellow pellets.