Games I Have Played
GoPets
GoPets Panda Paradise with Emily and Albert - read their blog here. You can visit GoPets and adopt a virtual cat, dog or panda too - Emily and Albert would love some new companions to play with! If you decide to come visit, you can find Emily and Albert in their Panda Paradise at 224,355.
I must admit to a certain amount of recreational fickleness that's plagued me much of my life. I remember years ago - I was probably 7 or 8 - opening one of those packages with the transparent red fish... when you held it in your palm it was supposed to tell you what sort of personality you had, and would continue to have; my fish rolled in the direction of fickle, and it seems to have stuck.
WoW was one of the first recreational activities that grabbed me long-term - knitting was a big one for quite some time, and I carried yarn and needles around obsessively for many months, but I would always leave several unfinished masterpieces littered about on the quest for the new perfect pattern or yarn - but WoW - WoW was something I felt passionate about for pretty much a solid year (though I am a confirmed and shameless 'alt-oholic', which brings to mind unfinished knitting masterpieces...).
I suppose gaming really smacked me in the forehead when I bought my Nintendo Game Cube about 3 years ago. Until then, I hadn't ever gamed, really, other than a strange little game called 'Jill of the Jungle' (which I loved because I could change into a fish), and the ubiquitous 'Lemmings'. I dated a career gamer for three years, during which time he would play Everquest for fifteen hours (or more) at a time. I never really understood the appeal, and was often horrified when he had to kill creatures I thought might make good friends ;-) My most commonly quoted reason for avoiding gaming was the fact I couldn't actually 'go into that world' - a concept I found terribly frustrating. So until my rather out of character NCG acquisition, I pretty much avoided the world of gaming and chose to focus my always obsessive focus on a thousand other distractions - far too numerous to list here!
Once I played the NGC however, I was hooked. I played the Sims2 on the cube almost daily, despite the outraged protestations of said career gamer ex, for nearly 6 months. He was (and continues to be) outraged at the dumbed down, unexpandable/uncustomizable nature of platform gaming. He nearly wore his molars out gnashing his teeth at what he considered a leave of all my senses (a phenomenon that continues to this day ;-)). He implored me to try the Sims on my PC, but I couldn't really afford the upgrade at that point (especially after buying so many new games for the game cube...), so I continued on happily until I finally got bored. Once I got bored of the cube I played Sudoku (surprise, surprise - also obsessively) until it inevitably started to bore me too (though I've picked it up again, and find it as compelling as ever).
And then I got my DS.
I love my DS to this day - I think I've had it for almost two years, and while I don't play every day, I play several times a week most of the time. Most recently I've been playing Natsume's River King: Mystic Valley (which, despite several reviews to the contrary, is delightful). I also picked up Ubisoft's Petz: Hamsterz2 which is pretty cute, but not terribly compelling. I've started (and discarded, true to form) Final Fantasy III, MegaManZX, Castlevania; Portrait of Ruin, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Harvest Moon, Yoshi's Island, Geometry Wars: Galaxies, Cookie & Cream and DiddyKong Racing (to name a few).
I forgot to mention, somewhere in the crazed focus of my gaming quest, a brief spate of time I tried to find something that would work on my older IBM ThinkPad T20 with the 8MB video card... (lol) If you're interested in that, you can read my one and only blog post in a long discarded blog meant to be longer than one post here.
So, back to my original thought... well, sort of anyway - WoW. I played WoW pretty devotedly (albeit in a scattered and alt-hungry manner) for quite awhile considering my past penchant for hobby fickleness, and I still love WoW. I play a lot less often now, though, for a variety of reasons (all of which make said career gamer ex crazed and aggravated... what was it he said recently.... "Trying to get a bunch of girls all playing WoW effectively at the same time would be like herding cats." (cheeky grin) This comment was prompted by my recent (and very explicable if you know me) descent into madness as I tried to find the perfect virtual pet. Flyff (read below), has a pet system - and an interesting one at that - where your pet continuously loses health when you have it out with you, and if you happen to be careless enough to let it die IT CANNOT BE REZZED! Seriously. Your pet dies and can never come back. I really loved Flyff until I learned that. Given my famed denial of death, I couldn't very well invest in a pet that could potentially die at any moment never to be seen again, so I went on a truly epic adventure trying to find a game that would give me a pet to love and nurture that wouldn't ever die permanently - no matter what.
Which brings me to GoPets (Virtual World Digest paraphrases "GoPets never die or become sick, despite the lack of care or how low their status may become" here). When I was first searching for this perfect virtual pet experience (I literally tried everything from Second Life to the Asian equivalent of WoW - Perfect World) I had some parameters in mind - I wanted something like WoW because I love a lot of the elements of an MMO from the linear, directed and predictable questing system to the rewarding (though time consuming) crafting system and yes, the social element (a desire on my part I still don't completely understand). Unfortunately, almost no franchise has nearly the budget Blizzard does, so most UIs are visibly underfunded and aggravating to use (no matter how hard I tried, the Mabinogi UI drove me nuts). Second Life is still not entirely there - it has some interesting features, but I can't escape the fact that everything seems so much like the life I already have. I realize this perspective will be scoffed at by the legions devoted to creating a fantasy life in Second Life, but something about it felt sordid and a little rubby to me. I can't yet explain what or why. I adopted the AI dog and downloaded the programming, but the dog doesn't walk - it kind of hydroplanes (which is a little unnerving) and at no time did I feel like I had a companion. I didn't even feel like my avatar was a companion. The only good thing about Second Life was Ravensdream Nightfire - a female avatar on Help Island who was truly an astonishing person, and to whom I still owe some custom creations...
After playing River King on the DS I knew I wanted my virtual pet to interact with me. The monster babies that become your companions in the game aren't the most astonishing examples of sophisticated AI programming, but they're better than the Second Life dog - they bounce along in an adorable manner, talk to you (limited script of course ;-)) and help you find bugs and plants with a little noise and animation. When you give them a fish they love they get very excited and a little heart appears in their thought bubble; give them a fish they hate and an angry cloud appears. For whatever reason this interaction is very satisfying. So that experience set the bar a little higher for me.
On my many Google perusals, I'd seen references to GoPets, and after looking at the screenshots I decided against it because the animals looked strange and a little creepy. But, after a truly mammoth undertaking (which I have yet to rant about) getting the Sims2 and Sims2 Pets to run on my laptop (Yay!), I decided to give it a go.
So now I have little Emily and Albert - two adorable little Pandas on their own plot of land equipped with toys, fishing pond and diving pool (watching them dive is really is too cute for words). GoPets is unique in my experience. It's social networking combined with MMO combined with virtual pet... You buy your pet things with shells (the currency), you can send friends gifts you buy, you can make friends very easily and your pets travel from your "desktop" to visit the desktops of your friends. My new friend, Amjag71, sent her sweet little Panda, Micha, to visit Emily and Albert today, and after much pointed ignoring on the part of my two little monsters, the three got on very well, sharing food, taking turns at the diving pool and napping together.
My pets give every appearance of interacting with me. When I rub the cursor over their bellies they stretch and smile, and little hearts appear over their heads. They go to each other, independent of any action on my part, hugging and cuddling one another while various heart-like images pop up over their heads; if you give them a teddy bear they very gently pat and hug it, and if I "jumpstone" Emily too much she has terrible tantrums at the last arrival, obviously angry about such rapid, high-pressure inter-world travel ;-) When I put food and juice out for them they come running (very much like my real-life rabbit Mr. B does) and settle in to share the food with great contentment, often falling asleep together when they're done, then waking up and jumping happily into the tub for a bath. Add the level of customization options available for them and their environment, and you have exactly what I was searching for - they even have their own blog (and the owners get one too).
I recommend GoPets for anyone wanting a virtual pet with whom they can enjoy a greater level of interaction, but who also enjoy MMOs and social networking. If you visit this link I can apparently earn referral credits which will allow me to buy the kids and all our friends new and exciting presents ;-)
Now I wonder where my next big obsession will take me...
Flyff
20080616: I can fly! (or at least Twiglit can). After 3 intensive days with my newly discovered (insanely addictive) Flyff (Fly For Fun) I finally reached Level 20 and my new ability to fly. Happiness.
I would never have made it through the last nail-biting level without the invaluable help of a little Assist named 'Pepper643,' who continuously buffed, rezzed and healed me (as I got used to my new (and soon to be nixed) Skill 'build,' who later explained he became an Assist because he likes helping people so much. Well, Pepper643, your help was greatly appreciated today, and you will be thought of as I soar through the skies on my new airboard and broomstick (I bought both due to a crisis of indecision ;-)).
20080613: After spending far too many hours searching for a new game (looking at everything from 'Mass Effect' to 'Dreamfall'), I finally stumbled on a little MMO I remember from a couple of years back - before the video card upgrade so I was unable to run it - Flyff (Fly for Fun), a 'free-for-life' Korean massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Immediately hooked, I wasted a good portion of my weekend racing for the goal of 20 when you are rewarded with the (rather unique) ability to fly anywhere in world on a broom or airboard. The soft strains of the very repetitive theme song pittered through my brain as I slept, walked, ate and worked, driving me to devote every spare minute to the task of earning my ability to fly.
The people in the game are extremely generous, helpful, charming and oh-so very very young... scrolling through chat you see comments like: "I turn 12 in October"! I continue to be astonished at how this online world strips away conceptions of age, gender and station. I can happily play for hours with a group of kind, intelligent, industrious 11 year olds who patiently guide this old 'noob' through the intricacies of watching aggro, obtaining the first job and how to travel from one city to the next. In just three days I made several new friends - all who approached me without hesitation, obviously happy and secure in their online personas; and grouping is this crazy delightful mass of people from all different guilds bouncing around killing things with abandon, inviting anyone who happens past so everyone can share the XP - I notice none of the politics that sometimes grate on me in WoW... and very little of the seriousness. All in all, I recommend Flyff without hesitation for anyone wanting a lighter MMO experience to wile away the hours...
