Meet Tobold in Free Realms

Neither Free Realms nor the Empire: Total War patch were released yesterday, despite the announcements. The Total War people blamed distribution problems, and said the patch will be on Steam today. We'll see.

Free Realms launched today, one day late, and I was able to create my character. I even already got my manually entered name approved: You will find me in Free Realms as

Tobold Stoutfoot

Searching just for "Tobold" with the character search function at the moment only turns up me as well. I would be happy about lots of friend requests from readers, as guilds don't appear to be supported yet. I just don't know yet whether it is possible to make friends without first meeting in game.

My toaster doesn't have internet access, so I couldn't test whether Free Realms would run on a toaster. What I did have at hand was an Acer Aspire One 8" netbook, which I used to create my character. That worked, but then entering the game only resulted in an error that for Free Realms your video card needs to support at least 1024 x 768 resolution, which the netbook doesn't. One point for WoW, which happens to run on a netbook. But otherwise the system specs for Free Realms seem to be on the low side:

Video card: Supporting 1024 x 768 resolution, and having a Vertex Shader 1.1 (recommended Geforce 6 or better)
Intel Pentium 4 or greater processor
Windows XP or Windows Vista operating system
Broadband internet connection
512 MB RAM (recommended 1 GB)