Please pardon the lazy portmanteau, but Defiance has sapped me of a great deal of my creativity. I'm tired, friends. The new MMO -- that's desperately trying not to be an MMO -- from Trion Worlds has toyed with me for the last two weeks, and I won't pretend I'm not glad to be done with it.

But here's the kicker: I really wanted to like the ugly bastard. It's a grotty, confused construct that doesn't really know what it wants to be, and it trips up all the bleeding time. Yet it genuinely tries to do away with a lot of MMO tropes. Tries and fails, admittedly. 

So, if you'll just sit there and have a wee read, I'll tell you about my journey through the hideous, terraformed facsimile of the San Francisco Bay area, and of my hard won battles and all the times where I got disconnected.