The process of initial entry into Entropia Universe is fairly involved, compared to the other virtual worlds we've looked at. You sign up for an account via the site-- and you'll be asked for a broader range of personal info, such as your home address. You can activate your account once you receive approval via email-- but then you've still got to download an installer and a client. The download is massive and can take hours-- and you're not provided with torrents or even a mirror, either.

Once you're all set up and ready to go, login via a welcome window that also contains news updates on server status, in-game events and auction item values. From here, you can also optimize your connection settings-- and you'll probably need to set it to the lowest possible connection speed (even on broadband) if you don't want to get logged out constantly. Finally, the world itself launches in its own full-screen app, and it's not possible to adjust that-- if you like multitasking, web browsing and instant-messaging while you game, you can't do so here. In fact, you can't even minimize the game to access other apps without logging out.

According to the backstory, with which you'll be oriented on your first login, you're one of a group of settlers stranded on a strange futuristic world, tasked with colonizing while you learn to survive. Next, you'll create your avatar. The Entropia avatars are highly customizable-- rather than swap through presets, you can actually adjust each feature of your male or female avatar, from hair and skin tone to physical proportions to the spacing of the eyes. As avatars go, Entropia's are relatively nice looking, resembling those in Second Life with an exotic flair.

All new arrivals find themselves in the trade city of Port Atlantis with little more than the clothes on their backs-- the quickest way to spot a newbie is to see them sporting the standard-issue orange jumpsuit and brown shoes-- and nothing else. Port Atlantis contains information booths and tutorial NPCs along with an auction house, a revival terminal (at which you're resurrected when you're killed in the field) and the all-important trade terminal, abbreviated by in-worlders as "TT", where you can exchange any items you find for their current market value in the all-important PED. There's also a teleporter by which you can travel among cities, with the caveat that you must discover destinations on foot first before the short-cut becomes available.

Acclimating oneself to Entropia's elaborate controls is no mean feat, even for the highly experienced MMO gamer. Just about every mouse combo and keyboard key has a function-- and what's more, they're highly customizable, allowing you to set shortcut icons on your main screen or assign them to the keyboard. There are several modes of navigation-- first person and third person are only the beginning. Menu screens, inventory screens, keyboard maps, chat windows (private, team or general) and options panels can be accessed by pushing their corresponding hotkey (depending on what mode you're in). You can navigate by clicking or by the keys; your mouse can control your cursor to interact with various targets, or it can move the avatar's head around to change your view. If it sounds confusing, it is-- as a new arrival in Port Atlantis, I spent plenty of time tapping keys frantically, wondering at perplexing icon panels, with my avatar riveted to her spot, rotating her neck around awkwardly while I wondered why I couldn't move.

All of the play manuals are available on Entropia's website, so it became somewhat easier once I'd read the explanations several times-- still, it's quite a complicated interface to keep straight during the adjustment phase. Fortunately, Entropia's user community is exceptional. There's the in-world Mentorship Program, by which experienced users essentially form a long-standing team with new users to help them get up to speed, explain the ropes, and protect and support them until they can survive on their own. The mentor-disciple relationship is actually a rule-bound pact; after an initial grace period, the new user can't reject his or her mentor until they're adequately situated and equipped to be independent.

At first, I stumbled helplessly around Port Atlantis, hastily closing menus I never intended to open, getting stuck in corners and emoting inappropriately in the middle of populous areas. Whenever I asked for help in the main chat window, though (Help! All of a sudden I can't walk, and I don't know what I pressed), several other users were quick to respond with help, if succinctly. Entropia's users are from all around the world, and while I was hoping to get absorbed in the fantasy of being a space colonist, another newbie quickly burst my bubble by telling me he was from Mauritania.

I wasn't crashing blindly around Port Atlantis for very long before a man in full-body armor and eerie facial shield volunteered to mentor me. I immediately agreed-- after all, I had not a PEC (Project Entropia Cent) to my name, and no hunting equipment either. Without a mentor, new users would almost certainly have to put money into their Entropia account, converting dollars to PED to buy at least some initial equipment. My mentor patiently answered all of my navigation questions, and as we went, I gradually acclimated until only some residual lingering awkwardness remained.

Newbies striking out in the field start with the most menial of tasks-- the bizarre process of gathering "vibrant sweat" through MindForce, which seems to be a type of innate psionic power. Other team members will protect characters as they concentrate their power and then extract sweat from monsters in the field with a rather gross slurping sound. Sweat, like other by-products of monsters, has a PED value and can be sold or traded, but a newbie with virtually no skills will have to make several attempts in order to extract all of a monster. It's theoretically possible to earn a useful amount of PED by "sweating" monsters and selling it in bottles, but in the course of an hour my tenderfooted gal had extracted some 150 bottles-- and a unit of 1000 sells for about 6 PED-- the USD equivalent of sixty cents and perhaps enough for one low-grade weapon.

Users can exchange loot from the field-- animal products or scavenged fruit and dung-- for money or for items either at one of the trade terminals or with other users. After I'd been repetitively sweating mobs with my mentor defending me for quite some time (improving various skills related to using Mindforce or taking a hit), he offered to trade me the sweat I'd gathered for a pistol of equal value, much to my relief. My mentor was serious about his role-- disinterested in socialization of any kind, he kept me firmly on-topic with the mob-sweating. Once I had a weapon, we were able to kill and loot monsters together, yielding byproducts with a much better value than sweat-- by the end of a few days' work together, I had a full set of armor and a rather nice plasma rifle.

One of the more remarkable things about Entropia is its good looks. The sky, a wash of surreal sunset pink-orange over pale-view violet, a perpetual intergalactic twilight, is breathtaking, and the world is very well-rendered for being so large. The water effects in rivers and lakes are fairly impressive, especially from afar. Running across the variegated landscape, there were some moments that were positively cinematic. The music is a fantastic touch, too-- a sort of mellow ambient techno suits the environment, and the environmental sounds are lifelike.

With such an immersive, fully-realized environment, it's somewhat surprising that no one during my visit was interested in actually playing along-- social chat is highly minimized, at least in public (it's not possible to read others' private chats, obviously), and nobody seems particularly concerned with staying in-character. That's not to say it's an unfriendly crowd-- whenever I was playing alone, panicked runs to outposts looking for a heal or a Focus Charge (a sort of shield that keeps monsters that hit you from interrupting your actions), someone always stepped up immediately, albeit without comment. Users may make an avatar profile and invent info about their character, but most people hadn't filled these in at all, and those that had kept it real-life, with their home city, or favorite song.

The over-arching element governing gameplay is the constant quest for PED-- you can't do anything without it, or without, at least, items with a PED value for trade. Alerts in the chat window flash messages when users have made significant "Hall of Fame" trades or kills, and plenty of individuals merely advertise, repetitively, what they've got to sell or what they'll pay for yours. But the individuals I actually encountered seemed to be playing primarily for fun, not accumulation, accepting the currency system as just one of many necessary factors in a structure that creates a game they love.

And Entropia users are committed. When I got ready to leave, my mentor asked where I was living. I replied and asked in kind for the same info, wondering if my focused knight custodian was interested in making friends at last. Turns out he needed to know my time zone, so that he could know when to expect me back. I gave him my best estimate; "I'll be here another 7 or 8 hours," he told me.