My first tour was aboard the Independent Star Ship Slad-Goddoth. It was the spring of 2000, and a friend, Captain Yellowbeard Invited me to serve aboard his ship in the FOX Studios Titan AE 'game'. I took the assignment.

FOX ran a pretty weak game. It was mainly a bulletin board and e-mail tally, with the ship with the most crew - as identified by a valid email addy - won a prize.

The players filled out this skeleton of a game with their own web sites and forums. SO it turned out to be a bit of minor fun in spite of FOX's very weak management. When the big day came, there was a nifty little Drej fighting JAVA game, in which I'm proud to say I placed second.

We had enjoyed this experience enough to look for a free online multiplayer game to replace it. And yours truly located Planetarion. Well I thought it was pretty cool that I could have my own planet and star fleet . It reminded me of a primitive BBS game from which I had derived much pleasure during the 80s. So I signed up.

It was the end of round 1. And I was the rawest n00b that ever logged in. I was utterly unaware of how anything worked and powerless to affect matters anyway. But I did a little bean counting and soon had my own fleet. I was of no interest to the enormous predators that stalk a universe at round's end, so there were no shocking memories.. So I brought a good report back to my old SG ship mates.

The next round was different. We got a full dose. Hostile star fleets rained down from every direction. There were 60,000 players and any - or all - of them might attack our planets on five hours' notice. Powerful alliances of hundreds of planets clashed around the clock. It was fun - for a while.

We were too few and too small to help one another. But we did all right separately. I was elevated to GC and others became officers in their galaxies. We played out the round. And then most of us quit.

I and a few others played on into late 2003 : round 10. That appeared to be the end of the Planetarion line for us. With the departure of Archi, Sarge, and Varangian the last traces of the Slad-Goddoth team disappeared from the Planetarion universe. (Please see the review of Planetarion in the Game Room). Changes in the life conditions of our RL avatars make a game that requires round the clock attention impractical.

It was a relief not having to punch the Planetarion clock. But as they say, they just keep pulling us back.

After a couple rounds off my old droogs sought me out. I was a card carrying member of the NoS alliance until its swan song at the end of round 14.

We gnarled old vets were snatched up by other alliances in a sort of Planetarion Operation Paper Clip. I found my way into xVx : the Fifth Element.

Regrettably I am the only one of us still playing. I dont really have time for it..but it's like eating peanuts...

And, of course I needed a new Planetis planet too. I concentrate on training up N00bs over there.