Either the thought of playing in the world of Hello Kitty! makes you really excited, or you couldn’t care less. Nothing in this “first look” is going to change your mind.

Still here? Then you’re a Hello Kitty! fan, and just want to know what the game that you’ve already decided to play is like. Worried that you’re too old to enjoy Hello Kitty? Worry not. Last night, the youngest person who admitted to their age was 20. Most were older — one person joked that everyone seemed to be 40 or over. HKO is a social game, more than anything else. A kaffeeklatsch for fans of a bobble-headed kitten from Japan.

In the game’s opening animation, you learn that Hello Kitty! and all the other denizens of Sanrio Town have gone missing. It is your mission to travel into your own dreams and find your friends and have adventures!

Character creation, typical for games of this sort, gives relatively few options — but as is ALSO typical for games of this sort, you’ll find lots of items to separate yourself from your clones in game. Numberless outfits, pets, masks, funny hats… the usual.

You start off on the docks of a small port town and then — well, that’s it.

Start walking! Any direction!

Because, unusual for a modern MMO and unheard of for a children’s MMO, the game starts you off with no clear idea of what you should do next — I couldn’t find even one tutorial. You might be a savvy MMO player and immediately begin looking for NPCs with yellow exclamation points over their heads, and you won’t wander too far (clicking to move) before you find one, who names a vague direction where you can find (after a considerable amount of walking) another NPC with whom you will conspire to choose the best lunch – sandwiches or hamburgers? (Hint: the area map shows NPCs and quest givers).

Don’t touch those wandering monsters (yet) — you have no weapons, and they will kill you right away. Do feel free to harvest those shamrocks you pass — you’ll need them. A LOT of them.

Eventually you’ll be given a broken magic wand with which no monster in the first zone will be any challenge (right click on a monster and wait for it to die. Um, get knocked out). You’d get the impression that maybe combat isn’t at the heart of Hello Kitty! Online. HKO is not about the fighting. It IS about the CRAFTING.

HKO is for crafters who like to make outfits, homes and stuff, and chat while doing it. While you’ll kill knock down monsters for crafting components or just out of sheer evil joy, you won’t be forming up in front of a meeting stone and heading in with 19 friends to defeat Badtz-Maru. But maybe you’ll all have a dance party!

Crafting, again, has no in-game tutorial, so I’ll take up the slack. Quests will sometimes grant you recipe books. Others are sold by merchants. However you get them, right click on them in your inventory to learn the recipe. Click on the Production button on your right action bar to bring up the Crafting screen. Select the crafting school (cooking, tailoring, carpentry or forging), select the recipe, and confirm you have enough of the ingredients shown in your inventory, then click the Make 1 or the Make All button to make either one or all you have ingredients for, and wait. Yes, it’s essentially like crafting in World of Warcraft.

Many, may quests will have you making something, or making things to use as ingredients for other things. Most everything will send you out in the field to harvest the oddly shaped trees, bushes, flowers and local fauna. Most every recipe will leave you standing in front of the General Merchandise merchant, buying just one more stack of eggs and a cup of flour. Et voila, Chocolate Milk!

Just want to get away from it all, get back out into the country, get back to the land? Lucky you, you have a farm! Buy some seeds and fertilizer from the farming supplier, and talk to the farm manager about a quick teleport to your mule and 40 acres. Well, by “acres” I mean square feet. Your first farm is quite small. But why be content with that? You can visit other player’s farms (with their permission) and give them helpful tips like, “those inharmoniously arranged plants disrupt the feng shui of this land” and “all your crops are dead. Why do you hate your plants?”

Quick tutorial on farming: right click on fertilizer in your inventory, then right click on an orange-colored plot of land to fertilize it. Right click on a seed in your inventory, then click on a green-colored (fertilized) plot of land to plant it. Click on the water can in your inventory and then on a square where there’s a plant NOT on a blue-colored square. You already watered that one.

Pretty soon, your plants should be popping up like jack-in-the-boxes, and sometime after that, it’ll be harvest time. I believe, by the way, that the mysteriously house-sized empty piece of land is where you will build your house.

Don’t want to do questing, farming or crafting? Don’t feel like chatting someone else up with gossip about Hello Kitty’s boyfriend? Hello Kitty! Online has minigames for you.

Some quest lines end with the NPC really needing your very most urgent help with something. Tuxedo Sam needs you to do some fishing with him (he’s so hungry!) Another character needs help with surfing! The minigames are pretty challenging — that surfing one is a killer, as play alternates between ever-more frenetic “Simon Says” gameplay and twitch jumping. The fishing one needs ever more fish in very little time, where reeling in a fish consists of rapidly jamming the mouse button or going crazy on the space bar.

Like every other part of HKO’s closed beta, there is no help. You kinda have to figure out what to do as you go along — I imagine, by open beta, there will be tutorials and help available.

Since you ARE a Hello Kitty! fan (you made it to the end of this preview), I can’t think of any reason why you wouldn’t want to play this game. It’s grindy, but not too grindy. Lots of people around, all of whom are also Hello Kitty! fans. You get to do a lot of non-combat related stuff, socialize, dress up, collect pets, build homes, meet your favorite HK characters. The game has you register with the SanrioTown Hello Kitty!-based social networking site, where you can post screenshots and videos directly from the game. The game is free to play so you don’t have to feel you have to log in every day to get value for your money.

If you AREN’T a Hello Kitty! fan, then I can’t imagine why you’d want to play this game. If you’re a kid, there are plenty of games out there that are easier and more rewarding to play.

Here’s the new trailer for the game. The game doesn’t actually look like the trailer….

(Shhh! Hello Kitty Online’s closed beta started yesterday! Expect a HKO First Look once I’ve found my way around).

Massively reports that EVE Online’s next expansion, Dominion, has just been announced. Dominion brings a new focus on planets, undoubtedly setting the scene for EVE’s planetbound companion FPS MMO, Dust 514. EVE is also adding social media functionality to the game, and I have no idea what that means. Tweet every mission? No clue. Lastly, the walking around in stations expansion is given a name, Incarna, so I guess we’re stuck in our pods for at least another few months.

In the “But, I Want To Play A New Game Right Now!” department, Syp brings news that Dungeons and Dragons Online’s F2P mode is live, so, like, log in and kill stuff. I played D&D, the pen and paper game. We never had to grind dungeons to level. Sure, it would be impossible for Turbine to make new content every month, but the thing about an adventure is that you only go on a certain adventure once, right? Like, once you’ve spent the entire movie training to blow up the Death Star and then it goes boom, at least you don’t have to worry about doing the whole thing all over again.

Should children be raiding in WoW? Beau loses his cool over a podcast that gives advice on getting your 11-year old into raiding. I’m right there with him. Children should not be playing games that suck all your time when they should be out living their lives. Looking back on my own time, as an adult, sucked into full time raiding, those years are GONE. I would NEVER wish that on a child. Letting your young child spend hours each night playing WoW or any other timesucking game is a kind of child neglect. Do you really want your kid growing up, learning how to interact with people via what you hear over voice chat while raiding?

Syncaine’s staggered by the (apparent) mad rush of bloggers to return to WoW following the announcement of next year’s Cataclysm expansion.

… Is EVERYONE from the blog world back in WoW right now? Failbears all of you! (Like carebears, but when carebears go back to WoW they become failbears) So a month of nothing but “so I did this daily just to grind this rep/token/whatever, it was cool” reading huh? Awesome. To counter this I’m going to start reporting on all the iron nodes I hit in DarkFall (which according to my fiancé is all I do in that game), but each node around Hammerdale I’m going to give a different name, and then phrase them like this “Monday, I went out and complete the Northern Bob daily, just to work on my ‘smithing’ rep with the ‘character’ faction. I love the Northern Bob daily because while it’s both north and called bob, it gives nice rewards and I don’t have to commit hours to get something done”. God I’m bored just writing that…

I’m kinda of two minds about what I call “gameplay” blogs, where someone just posts what they did that day. If I play the game, they’re interesting, and if I don’t, I skip ‘em. Remember, like malaria and syphilis, you never entirely get over World of Warcraft. So I’ll auto repeat the page down key on a month’s worth of “I did something in WoW today!” posts because I know those bloggers will come back with cool stuff in the future.

There’s a reason, after all, that I don’t often post about what I did in EVE today ;)

The infosphere was abuzz with yesterday’s news that Imperial Disney had annexed Marvel comics. So I guess we’ll be seeing trailers for Disney’s Princess Collection ahead of Wolverine 2? Seriously, when I think of Disney together with Gazillion’s in-development “Avenger Babies” MMO, just one word comes to mind. Disaster. Synergy.

Information about EQ2′s upcoming “Shard of Lurrrrve” update continues to seep from the test server. Ogrebears has a quick, thumbnail overview of the different kinds of achievements you’ll be linking to prospective group leaders in the near future, while Stargrace takes a look at the “chronomagic” auto-mentoring system.

Re: WoW achievements, and I ask because I don’t know. Are the group leaders who are insisting they be sent stats and achievement links before they will let someone in the group, ever required to link their own stats and achievements? EQ2 is deep into the “Must have T2 and Mythical” territory already. Achievements are just gonna make EQ2′s community even more like WoW’s.

Warhammermer has all the good news on Free Realms’ daily slot machine lotto game. Spin the wheel, get a prize, step right up. I have no idea how that game is doing. I really liked it, but I have a career MMOer’s short attention span.

The Friendly Necromancer reminds us that tomorrow is the first anniversary of the launch of 2008′s most original new MMO, Wizard 101. And he even baked a cake! There’s MMOs out there, a LOT of MMOs, that I regret losing hours of my life playing. Wizard 101 is NOT one of those. I have enjoyed every moment in the game, and I still play it daily, leveling a new duo through the worlds (currently in Hyde Park, Marleybone). So, happy birthday, Wizard 101, and thanks, KingsIsle!

City of Heroes is currently running their Valentine event, the one time in the year when heroes and villains can come together and luuuurve each other. Visit Pocket D, the rockin’ night club presided over by the hip DJ Zero, his power vendors Chill and Dram, and somewhat alarmed mission-giver and part time DJ Scratch to find out how you can save the Rogue Isles AND Paragon City from an onslaught of super-powered war bots. There’s also some more information about the secretive Architect project, the future of interactive entertainment within City of Heroes. The Architect company will allow you to set the parameters, NPCs and goals for short missions of your own creation. It doesn’t seem like you’ll be able to actually build your own levels; you’ll select a setting and probably a size, where the NPCs should be and what they say and do, and off you go. Not quite the game creator I was hoping for, but looks like a good time nonetheless.

Want to try out the super-cute Sanrio-themed Hello Kitty Online? Now’s your chance. “Between February 14-17, 2009, SanrioTown members from select territories will be able to play Hello Kitty Online and participate in the “Happy Hearts” Valentine’s Day event. “Happy Hearts” will feature exclusive content and some really cool gameplay enhancements.” I had no end of problems keeping HKO running in beta. The patcher wouldn’t work for me at all, and when I did get in, it was just — grind grind grind. That said, I have not played it for six months and I understand from reading the updates that they have done some pretty substantial changes. They have completely overhauled farming, for instance. An Asian game built around farming makes me smile. Anyway, any Hello Kitty fan should definitely give Hello Kitty Online a shot.

Freaky Creatures is about to hit open beta. Freaky Creatures is more or less Webkinz for boys — you go to a store and buy creature packs with a couple of action figures in them and a USB drive. Plug the drive into your computer and you have digital copies of the actual figures, along with a bunch of extra parts and powers you can mix and match to make your creature your own. Then it’s off to the online universe to do battle with kids all over the world. FC stretches the Webkinz metaphor by not just having real toys to match their online counterparts and Flash-based mini-games, but games on the Xbox, Freaky Creatures valentines, and everything you need to make your Freaky Creature a palpable playground presence. I still can’t figure out if their over the top marketing to boys is meant to be ironic or really, they are hoping that their audience consists almost entirely of pre-teen boys.

And lastly, my idol in online MMO journalism and former boss at Massively, Michael “Zonk” Zenke, has jumped over to actual real game development by accepting a position as a game designer with SOE on DC Universe Online. Way to go! Michael, I’d have made your icon in DCUO if, you know, I’d been in the beta. But until then, you’ll just have to do with one from City of Heroes. At least I made you a hero! DC Universe Online has been doing something of a media blitz lately, and I have to admit that it’s looking pretty nice. My problem with it is more general, though. What if I don’t care for Superman or Batman? I guess I could be a villain and try to bring them down but, heck, to be honest, I just want to be part of the Green Lantern Corps and fly around battling Sinestro and having some quiet time with Guy Gardner. If DCUO lets me be in the GLC, I’m sold. Otherwise… well, I’ll definitely be looking forward TO THE BETA. Subtle Hint.

Ooops! I totally forgot about the Spellborn news! Well, another time.

As a Founding Member of Hello Kitty Online (you may now be seated), I was hoping to install it last night with the hopes that I would have better experiences with it now, than I did in closed beta.

In closed beta, I could not patch the game — at all. Only when HKO would release each patch as a separate download that I could run locally could I get into the game.

VERY frustrating. So much so that I eventually stopped playing.

HKO entered “Founder’s Beta” last Tueday, so I figured I’d give it a shot last night. After a ***2 gigabyte*** download, which they required you do through BitTorrent, I tried to launch it and — nothing. The cursor would spin for hours. I would watch an episode of Buffy — “The Prom” (I cried at the end even though I knew Angel wouldn’t abandon Buffy) — then check in on HKO and still, a spinning cursor. The two part “Graduation Day” — where the Mayor is trying to assure himself that though things look bad, his adopted daughter, Faith, won’t die, will be all right — hit a really personal note with me.

When I looked again, Windows Vista was reporting a file error.

So no gaming got done last night.

I guess I’ll just wait for release, buy the disk, and not worry about these mega-installs.

Why play Hello Kitty Online? It’s a game meant for kids, in closed beta, it was really grindy with that click-to-move interface Asian gamers apparently love so much but doesn’t really mesh with Western play styles, a title depending more upon its IP than any real innovation in game play? A game combined with social networking aspects that will likely be done better by SOE when Free Realms comes out?

It’s because it’s HELLO KITTY! And if THAT isn’t reason enough to play — then you aren’t the target market for the game.