I recently had the pleasure of witnessing, first hand, someone "level up" in Photoshop. I have always been a firm believer in the learning process consisting of a series of "plateaus", much like the leveling system for characters in just about ever computer game available these days.

As the ad hoc resident guru on all things computer related, I began with a brief discussion of their current level of understanding. After that, I simply began to demonstrate casual use of the application. By merely watching the way that I worked, she was able to deduce several new abilities and add them to her design repertoire.

It was fascinating to witness, I must say. What I take for granted as habitual casual use of a program contains years of learned responses that can each be correlated to various "abilities" associated with it.

Just like that, after months of struggling to learn the intricacies of Photoshop, she earned a new "plateau" of skills associated with Magic Wands...

Lesson? Don't neglect to stop in and check with your class trainer periodically, else you wind up missing the fundamentals necessary to ply your trade successfully.

Keep reading for a breakdown of the Magic Wand skillset under the Photoshop path specialization of the Designer class. ahem.

Now, many of us have already played an MMO and owned a pet of some type that was controled, by default, by some rudimentary AI in the game engine.

That isn't what I'm talking about, exactly.

Imagine your character... independent from you... and still functioning.

Consider your character to be like a child that you raise from 1st level. Just like real children, you must periodically turn your back on them and worry about what type of mischief that they could get into while you are not looking.

Why should players have to be directly responsible for the grind aspects of a game?

The possibilities that this creates are truly astounding, as I will proceed to illustrate...

• Global Agenda (2867)

  Play a Recon, Assault, Medic or Robotics mercenary... with a jetpack! If you miss playing Tribes, this game is for you! They even have PvE areas and arena combat that emphasize working with the rest of your team if you want to succeed. Not the type of game that you are going to solo, unfortunately.

• Atlantica MMO (2789)

  This game came out of nowhere and took the MMO community by storm. It is currently rocking the top of the charts over at MMORPG.com. I downloaded it in-between client checks, since it was free, initially based on the glowing reviews it was being given over on Ten Ton Hammer. I was not disappointed.

  Atlantica takes traditional MMO play-style and turns combat upside down by going back to a turn-based system. At the same time, they also provide the player mandate to populate an entire party of custom selected mercenaries of various abilities that function like additional characters with full enventory and equipment sets. Combining the re-simplification with the excessive complexity results in some strategic gameplay that is reminescent of Final Fantasy.

  If you played the Final Fantasy MMO and found it to be a boring grind, Atlantica's inclusion of up to eight mercenaries will very likely provide what you felt was missing.

• Perpetuum Online - Mecha MMO (2745)

  Now that the game has been released and I have had a chance to play it, I'd like to report that this is one very thoroughly developed game. Each player controls his or her own mecha, periodically upgrading to a more powerful mecha type. If you have been waiting for a mecha MMO to play, this could very well be it. Perpetuum delivers well on several different fronts, but has one or two aspects that I'm not entirely comfortable with yet. Read on for my more in depth breakdown...