EVE Online should be the greatest game until Holodecks happen: it's got blowing stuff up, the community makes a Terminator factory look lazily unfocused, and it corrects the real world's hideous oversight of birthing us too early to be rogue smuggler starship captains.  But does it live up to the potential?  I played the thirty-day trial a while back and, without revealing the results of my review, ask "Why does this suck like a black hole that needs crack money?"

Initial impressions are excellent: most MMORPGs look like they're running on computers rejected from an Amish old folk's home, choppier than a murderous lumberjack with all the collision detection of an anaesthatized pillow.  EVE fixed that by being in space, and when "being in space!" is your problem-solving strategy you're automatically nominated for the Nobel Prize For Awesome.  With attacks attached to number keys most mehmorpigges have you engaging in desperate axe-wielding melees by precisely-ordered pecking at digits like you're typing out pi.  It kills the immersion.  Your actions couldn't be further from the mood if you were having sex in binary.  EVE fixed that by, again, BEING IN SPACE - hammering at keyboards to unleash laser death isn't just acceptable, it makes you feel like a bridge officer of the USS FuckYeah!  

How could you screw up such a surefire system?  You either already know or twisted your face trying to say "more-piggies?" a paragraph ago.  If the Death Star had been a giant pepper mill designed to destroy planets making everyone sneeze simultaneously, it still wouldn't have had as much space-grinding as EVE.  

1.  Corporate crime

We're all interested in EVE because of those awesome high-level crimes we've read about.  Clans ripping off entire computerized corporations and - in one case - a manager stealing the entire contents of his bank, buying an Uber-Death-Ship, posting a gigantic bounty on his own head and shouting "Just try to catch me losers!"  That's way cooler than real crime.  But in reading those you've already enjoyed all the fun there is: just like real white-collar crime, each of these epic events is built on a billion hours of boredom by people who never see the fun stuff.  

In-game corporations have shift-work, assigned tasks, even interviews - and the day I pay for the privilege of sitting through a job interview to work inside a game is the day after I take a serious head injury.  Also: losing your 401k because of some billionaire bastard is one thing, but losing an entirely imaginary one for the same amount of work?  And still getting upset about it?  That's tragedy that'd make Hamlet nudge his dead dad and say "Look at that loser."

2. Fights

I really enjoyed the spiraling dogfights, switching power between XUV and IR laser arrays, right up to the point where there was only one way to win: equip missiles with very slightly longer range than the enemy, pick a fight, and fire while running away for half an hour.  

EVEficcionados are already screaming "You're playing it wrong, you need to get to higher levels where it's fun!", to which I reply: Fuck you.  The next weapon tier could be a Milla Jovovich-missile targeting my crotch, I am not and never will work a game to get to where it's fun.  If it's not fun, I stop playing, because hammering your head against a brick wall of pain jut to get addicted to something that then seems great by comparison?  It's like assholes trying to get you to smoke all over again.  Except lung cancer doesn't steal quite so much of your life.

3.  Moving

EVE does revolutionize MMORPGs in one way: your daddy's games might let you reach the actual enemies before grinding, but masterful EVEologists understand that "Getting from A to B" is an utterly unharnessed area of pointless soul-destroying clickery.  EVE uses a Babylon 5 style gate system - take a gate into hyperwhateverspace, come out close to another gate, take it to the next, etc.  This is extraordinarily boring, which is why there's an autopilot.  But autopilot risks you finding anything else to do, which is why it's crap. 

It hops you into realspace about two minutes too early, leaving your ship crawling at real-space speeds the rest of the way.  Which is like jumping out of a London-New York flight ten miles from the coast and swimming.  Reading the FAQ to find out how to make it stop doing that, they've got it all listed: simply set your autopilot to go to the next gate, let it engage, then manually disengage it and come out of fastyspeedyspace closer to the next gate, then re-engage it.  Repeat for at least five gates depending on how far you're going.

They have a full four-step procedure for fixing a problem they purposely put into the game.

This is where I deleted my account, uninstalled, and personally opened up the hard drive to spit on where the bits had been.  Understand how much they hate you, how clearly see players as hamsters in credit-card-powered wheels:  they wrote a script for the autopilot, then they wrote more into it to make it crap, then they wrote an FAQ detailing exactly how crap it was but how - by only sitting at the computer in an utterly mindless fugue state mouse-clicking three times every two minutes - hundreds of thousands of players can (one hundred times a day) undo what took them twenty seconds to do once.  You could randomly launch a nuclear warhead and, because of all the ocean and the sparsity of cities, probably wouldn't screw up that many lives.

So, yes, EVE: No.  It really had the chance to make the best thing ever.  Then it realised it had the chance to make even more money out of MMORPGers, who are now about one step from being reclassified as a type of rock with a bank balance.