Boy, it's almost like the VERGE scene is active, eh? I wonder what's up with that.

Okay, this time clips (that's his name, his name is clips) has come out with a very nice-looking demo for his project, [Element Cyber] (link fixed, -Grue). This is a science fiction RPG with an interesting battle system: battles take place on the maps and are tactical in nature. There's not much to the battles currently featured, but the system promises to be neat in the future.

First, the bad news: the graphics are somewhat inconsistent in quality and don't always mesh well. There's a lack of music in many parts of the demo. Finally, it's kind of slow. It ran pretty well on my (average) computer, but if your CPU speed doesn't have a decimal point you'll probably have some trouble.

Now, here's why you should play Element Cyber anyway: although the graphics are a little spotty, the chrs are very good and there are big speech portraits for major characters, which is a very nice touch. The opening area is almost entirely devoid of clear tile boundaries, and many other areas are similarly organic in design. And although this game is slow and a mite buggy, it does a lot of neat things to justify that. The main 'town' area in the demo is full of randomly-spawned entities, and you don't walk up to these people and press Enter to speak -- they just say things when you get close to them, without halting the flow of the game. There's a very nice help feature that's accessible in-game by pressing F1 (!), and the interface is very spiffy in general. My favourite part is how mousing over an entity shows you a closeup of his face and his name, even if he's just a random joe. Also, I was quite startled to see mirrors that reflect you; to my knowledge, that's never been done before in a VERGE RPG. Make sure you tough it out to the second area of the game, as it's pretty neat.