Saviour-V teleports into the Blood Phoenix Sanctuary, as usual...

OK, marathon review time. First of five. Not much to say.

Saviour-V notices the hidden panel open, and nods at the title shown by the monitor that pops out of it...

Our 1st review in this marathon line-up:

Online Pool

To be exact, this comes from Play89.com. Basically, you download the executable (no spyware, trojans and nasty stuff, thankfully), start it up, register at the log-in screen, and you're ready to go.

Saviour-V sighs momentarily...

Of course, there is no utopia. In the case of Play89 (and in the 2nd review, Play65), when I tried re-logging in a second time, I got the following message:

"Sorry, but we do not accept players from your country."

Strangely enough, I got in OK the first time. So, I make another account, and log in. OK the first time, but again, when I leave for lunch, and try to log in with the new account, I get that same error message.

Which brings me to a quick question: are Malaysian players not allowed to play, even for fun money, or is there something wrong with this system? Because there was absolutely no question related to the nationality of players when I registered.

Oh, well.

As for the game itself, if you're familiar with Yahoo! Pool, you can choose a room to either watch a game in progress, or play a few. And if you're playing for fun money, you'll get it replenished if you hit zero dollars; a luxury absent from real money games.

There's also a few tournaments you can participate in, and receive real money from, even if you're playing for fun. Although I've not participated in them myself.

The truth is, this is OK if you want to pass the time, but Malaysian gamers like myself would have trouble enjoying this a little because of the log-in issue. I really do hope that a more reliable system comes up.

OK, next!

Saviour-V teleports out of the Blood Phoenix Sanctuary, while the monitor begins retrieving data for the next set of reviews....