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 that the stupendous success of World of Warcraft has had a chance to inspire veritable legions of similar games, there is no more "end-all-be-all" MMO out there anymore. While most new MMO's seem to stay comfortably below the "bar" raised by feature sets in games like Everquest II, it is high time that a company figured out a way to be a little bit more innovative.

While there are varying levels of graphical detail present in MMO's, the feature sets have been static for some time now. The most recent trend has steadily remained in the PvP direction, unfortunately.

What areas are left to innovate in, though? I mean, now they let us group up and kill each other, right? What more could we possibly need?

• Atlantica MMO (2435)

  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.

• Age of Conan (1988)
• Spore (1950)