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>> Tom Merritt: "Watchmen: The Comic" has become "Watchmen: The Movie", and now "Watchmen: The Online Multi-Player Game" for the iPhone. Hi. I'm Tom Merritt. Here's a first look at "Watchmen: Justice is Coming", the iPhone app. You download it from the store. It's available right now only in the United States for 99 cents, and it gives you access to this lovely looking MMO - Massively Multi-player Online game. Now pretty cheap for 99 cents to be able to connect with other people, but remember, you do have to have a good, solid Internet connection for it to work. And we're going to find out that that net connection could prove this game's undoing. When you come in, you get treated to a little bit of music that comes right out of the speakers, or in your headphones if you've got those on. You enter and are prompted to create your first new character. Once you press "Create new user", you'll be able to pick the gender of your character as well as the skin color. You'll be able to customize the personality. You look at Roscharch's face, and you tell me - is it a clown face, a skull, a dead dog, or a butterfly? Obviously, it's a pretty butterfly, come on. Then you get a few stats on your costumed hero, and you can go into a tutorial that'll show you how to play the game. Once you create the character, press "Existing User Connect", and you're taken into the game. You get treated to a fancy little graphic of Dr. Manhattan doing his thing while it loads. And then you'll be taken into a cut scene that takes you on a little fly through of the New York City from "Watchmen" while it's connecting to the server and loading up your character. And if you're unlucky like me, it will crash. That's one of the problems we're having today is this morning when I first downloaded this, I was able to play the game, move around, do lots of cool things, but right now, it's crashing over and over again. I think it probably has to do with the servers because we've seen a lot of folks online complaining of the same thing. They were able to play it at first, but now that more people have it, they can only get a couple of minutes into the game, five minutes of the game, or in this case, just a couple of seconds. So, we'll keep giving it a try to show you as much of the game as you can, but essentially, once you get into the game, if you get into the game, you move around by just touching where you want to go. There's a map. You'll see exclamation points. You click on an exclamation point, and that will give you a little bit of a plot development of the game and maybe a task that you need to head off and do. You'll encounter enemies, and you'll be able to fight them, and as you gain experience points, you get better at fighting them. You'll also encounter other people on their iPhones playing the same game. You can chat with them. You can fight with them. It's just like a regular MMO. It's a really good looking game. It loads pretty fast for the iPhone app. The only problem right now is the connectivity. So if they can solve that, get their servers up and running so that this thing doesn't crash all the time, I'd say it's probably going to be one of my favorite games ever on the iPhone. Until then, it feels a little bit like a waste of 99 cents. That's it for this first look. I'm Tom Merritt, CNET.com.
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