I started playing guitar six months ago, and the first two weeks in particular are the worst. You're just too inexperienced to do anything good. Star Wars Galaxies is no different.

Like Luke Skywalker, you start on the desert planet of Tattooine, and you can't do much more than Uncle Owen. You can't count your midichlorians (bah!) and start Jedi training. You can't take part in the Galactic Civil War, the part of the game that pits Rebels againsts Imperials. You can't explore the game's ten enormous planets, because the ship ticket would eat too much of your meager seed money. What you can, do, though, is talk to a cute little droid that introduces itself to you at the beginning. These droids cheerfully step you through the first steps of your chosen profession.

After I chose the Marksman profession (because I like guns), the droid told me to kill an animal right outside the dusty city of Mos Eisley with my carbine. Then it told me to use my special attack to kill an animal. Then it told me to kill ten animals.

Yeah, I know it sounds lame, but it was actually fun. I managed to gain some basic carbine skills, which amounts to enough skills to step into the real world of . . . missions! Missions give the grinding parts of Star Wars Galaxies some fun. You just go to a mission terminal (they're everywhere) and pick a few missions, then do them. Pretty cut and dry.

This is also the time I did some team-grouping. I met up with Roufuss from the TNL forum and out we went. We took some missions which involved, for example, fighting a gaggle of four spice fiends (drug addict criminals in the Star Wars world, I suppose). The game tags your enemies based on how hard they would be, and in this scenario, one was tagged as instant death and three as a fair fight. We stood on the hill overlooking them and decided to take out the instant death guy first.

Roufuss ran to them and started beating up the guy unarmed. Meanwhile, I shot him with my carbine, a pitiful little weapon that did 17-38 damage per hit (by contrast, the carbine I'm using now does something like 70-325 damage per).

It shouldn't be surprising when I say that not much damage was done. We would get maybe three quarters of the guy's health down before he incapacitated us both. Thankfully, Star Wars Galaxies has a generous death system whereby you do not automatically die when you run out of health. Usually, waiting is all that is needed before you are ready to fight again.

That is what we would do before attacking the guy again diligently. It would take three or four tries before we actually completed a mission. It took forever. But it was fun, a lot of fun. Actually, maybe a little bit too much fun, considering the monotony. We did this for a few days, building up reasonable amount of experience.

Eventually we got some speeders and decided to zip around the planet and see some of Tattooine's sights. Galaxies takes place between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, and the planet is filled with all sorts of sites you remember from the, umm, . . . first three movies. There are places like Lar's Homestead, C-3PO's and R2-D2's crash site, the Sarlacc pit, and a Krayt Dragon skeleton.

These locations, along with the universe's size, the kick-ass day/night cycle, the random weather effects, and the lack of cheesy zones like EverQuest or something, all conspire to give Star Wars Galaxies the most effective video game universe yet seen. The game perfectly captures that feeling of adventure and excitement that one would expect in a Star Wars game.

In spite of all this initial coolness, exploring Tattooine is just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot more more cities to see, a lot more stupid critters to kill, and a lot more missions to take. Plus, I really have to admit - at the point I am writing this, I am one dumb newbie.

To be continued