Phantasy Star: Fringes of Algo

Sega has released a demo of Phantasy Star Online 2's character creation system today. The demo also includes a benchmark feature that can give you an idea of how well the game will run on your PC. The entire thing is in Japanese only, but the graphic interfaces are good enough that even someone unfamiliar with the language can use the system.

The demo can be downloaded here: http://pso2.jp/benchmark/download/
Click the big blue button around the middle of the page to access the download links. The second downloads from Sega's site; the first takes you to a Japanese gaming site, where the actual download link is about halfway down the page.

The benchmark is a video of characters running around a monster infested city and going through a few forest scenes (with lots of rappies). If you run the benchmark after creating a character, you character will appear in the benchmark sequence. After running, the benchmark with give you a score. A score of around 2000 roughly means you'll be able to run the game on low settings. 2000-5000 means the game will run on medium, while 5000+ means it should run on high.

I ran the bench mark twice and got ~1900 and ~2400. I could probably improve it if I shut down a few programs I had running the background. So I might play the game when it finally releases. If you run the benchmark, what score does it give you?

Need to try it ! Not sure I'll be able to try because my PC isn't very powerful (but as I didn't play video games on my computer, that's a bit "normal" : thanks for the link !
Great to be able to create your characters like all the PSO PSU games.

Will be fun to see how my present system does (guessing poorly), not that it should matter in another couple weeks since I'm in the process of gathering parts for a new system. Will be THursday before I have the chance to download and play with this though. Thanks for the heads up about it!

It's often hard to try all these demos so thanks again for all the links : can help us to remember !:)

Can't get it to run on my present system for some reason. Thought it had to do with language support settings, but I've played around with those a good bit off and on the past few days and still no luck installing it.

Aw, I'm sorry to hear that. Are you getting an error when trying to install it or something?

WOW! The first time I ran the program, I had no idea how to set up anything or even get it fullscreen. My score was somewhere around 12,200 that time. The second time I ran it I messed with the settings a little and figured out how to fullscreen it. My score that time was 30,765. So, I wonder how to max all the game settings? I can't read anything so it's really hard to tell. It looks really smooth though, ran at 120+ fps both times the whole way through. That is awesome, and the funny thing is that's all my CPU running the game mostly... If I had a new monitor that went above 1280 x 1024 resolution, then I could really see what my video card is capable of. So if anyone figures out how to max the settings, let me know.

Finally got to mess around with this on the new PC. New PC still being a work in progress as it's being a headache about acknowledging the third SSD, and I am determined to get triple boot working.

What I can say at the moment is that I am frankly stunned that my Windows XP (32-bit) score was higher consistantly by three hundred points over my Windows 7 (64-bit) score, fantastic . Even after going through and tweaking out Windows 7 for optimized performance it still scored 36 points less than XP in the default windowed mode and a whopping 157 points less than XP in full screen (1280x1024) mode. Frankly I can't make any sense of this oddness, but regardless, both score are well in excess over the 5,000 needed to run the game smoothly.

Got to ask you Prince Rhys, what on earth are your system's specs?