O Frabjous Day! Callooh! Callay! : Argo

Yes, alright, it's not that frabjous. It's not like SOE changed their minds and decided to give (or even sell) Vanguard back to its creators. What's so special about Pox Nora that it gets preferential treatment anyway? Not that I begrudge Pox Nora fans their luck. There must be some, right? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?.

Longtime readers of this blog probably have no recollection whatsoever of my brief flirtation with the SEA shovelware "steampunk" MMO Argo. It merited one post and it was something of a guilty pleasure, albeit a considerable one. It was the game I made an Allaplaya account for, which felt a little like forging my own long-handled spoon (not that I've ever actually forged a long-handled spoon, or indeed anything else...)

No sooner had I made a throwaway account on a garbage email address and bowed down to worship the devil himself PSS1, Allaplaya's mighty overlords, than they decided to pull the game from their sad collection of no-hopers roster of quality MMOs, leaving me bereft, or at least mildly irritated.

Yes, I've used these pictures before. What do you expect? Game's been down for 18 months.

In a pattern frustratingly familiar from my distressing experience with the even better SEA shovelware "steampunk" MMO, NeoSteam,  Argo continued to run successfully in Korea. Then, in July last year, it was reported that Games-Masters.com, purveyors of SEA shovelware quality MMOs such as Cabal and Ran (no, me either...) had acquired Argo for the European market.

Well, I'd heard that one before. Some company I'd never heard of, can't remember and really don't have the willpower to google, claimed they had bought NeoSteam for an EU release - that never happened. Fool me once and all that jazz.

Except this time it seems there really is a pony! Massively just reported that the European beta for Argo starts tomorrow and I just signed up. I really shouldn't be excited about this but I am all the same. It's like when your cat goes missing and he's gone for six weeks and you're certain he's gone forever and probably dead and then one day there's a knock on the door and you open it and a stranger says "Excuse me but I think this might be your cat" (True story).

So, I might get in beta or I might not and the game might actually come back or it might not but either either way it's another notch on the "MMOs never really die" tally-stick and that's a warm fuzzy if ever there was one, so be happy even if you never heard of Argo, never play it and have no idea what I'm making all this fuss about.