Tabula Rasa is apparently the new game from Ultima-beard-master Richard Garriott, alias “Lord British.” I do groan at this though, as Ultima Online was something of a hit-and-miss venture, mostly involving misses, for me, involving several rabbit-related-deaths and 14 year old player killers screaming “HAHAH LOL OWNZ’D” as they screeched past, the faint scent of Mountain Dew falling upon my corpse. However cynical I was, I was looking to waste time, and thus I sat down in the booth and picked up the headphone/microphone set that they had connected, and joined a mission to defeat some marauding aliens. For once, it seems that a MMORPG developer has gone with something unobvious. The world is somewhere between future and fantasy, not directly assigning itself to either in fear of receiving the familiar stigma of the rest of the genre, as being an EQ-Beater, or a WoW-rival, or some other term that I have made up on the spot. The adventure began in the secure and safe “Sanctuary.” The guide explained that this was the place that was both completely safe from all harm, and the launch pad for all missions in the game. Missions, from what we were told, were even more original than the supposed big dog on the horizon, World of Warcraft. The mission that we were entered into involved an alien race called “Thraks” that we and the guide had to engage for superiority over a certain area.