| Healthy World of Warcraft Replacement! |
| Hey you! There, on the computer of some sort, whether it be super or of the personal type. Do you like World of Warcraft? Of course you do! If you don't, you might as well get rid of all your posessions and start your new career as a monk. World of Warcraft, is OF FREAKING COURSE, Blizzard's MMORPG based on its popular real-time stagety series, Warcraft. I hope you knew that. Anyways, to tell you how popular the game is, here's...nothing. It's just popular. In terms of online RPG's, WoW is damn-near perfect. That's all I'll really tell you. I'm sure if you want to see how great the game is you can read Penny Arcade or walk down the street and ask the first person you see wearing a hat that says "Aggro" or a t-shirt bearing "I Play World of Warcraft". Get on that now. According to some, the game is perfect and anyone who thinks elsewise hates babies. Babies. But to the rest of us, it's not. One of WoW's biggest problem is how time-consuming it has to be in order to compete. In order to hang with the big-shot Orcs and Dwarfs you have play many, many hours a week or sign the devil's infamous contract. Plus, not only do you have to pay the inital sell price (if you're legal like that) but an extra $15 a month to enjoy the festivities. 2 negatives that can be a real turnoff to any casual gamer looking for a good time. That's when I set off on my vitrual journey looking for less expensive (hopefully free or cheaper) and possibly (definately not) superior games in the depths of cyberspace and Gamestop. I just found one. Sorry... Virtual Magic Kingdom Everything that Disney touches is gold. Gold dammit! So while reminising about one of the top 3 weeks of my life (school trip to Florida), the offical Disney website is one of my favoirte cyber-destinations. Look, a mini-clicky-adlike thing for something called the "Virtual Magic Kingdom". Hmm...I am interested. VMK starts off with a terrible, terrible, terrible load time follwed by a suprising deep character development system. And, like World of Warcraft, it has several races to choose from: -White: expert complainers, can buy more items -Black: enhanced athletic skills, easy to find group/gang -Asian: intelligent in math, play DDR well -Mixed: little of everything except they suck at most of it (see Paledin) I'm not Dave Chappelle, sorry. Anyways, after looking through the billions of options (mostly shirts) I decided to make a representation of Sora from Kingdom Hearts, complete with yellow shoes. Then I get to name my character! Just like in WoW! Since "Sora" is taken, he's going to be called "NotSora" because that's how all my alternate names are formatted. After that, we get another terrible, terrible, terrible load time. After that, the option to make a signature appears, which is where I discovered the terrifying VMK censor system. My first idea was simply, "I love Kingdom Hearts", but the single word "love" wasn't recognized as appropriate. How about "I am a fan of Kingdom Hearts"? And "fan" was too explict for them! ARGH. Here: "My signature is innappropriate". Suckers! Guess what's next? Another terrible load time for making my "Room". And guess what it's called? Never Land Ranch. Here's the basic map. It's the Virtual Magic Kingdom, so of course all 5 Lands are represented. Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, Main Street USA, they are all here. (By the way, I absolutely loved the real Magic Kingdom in Florida. So when the chance to relive my good time there came up, I took it. Smart decision? Not so much.) As you can see, there's "Quick Links" to several mini-games. Most MMORPG's are based on quests and battles. VMK is, on the other hand, mainly gives you distinct mini-games to earn stuff with. I'll get to specifics later. Exploring the Kingdom is point and click. Point to where you want go, click on the spot, and wait a few hours for your dude to react and walk to the spot you pointed and clicked. Yes, sometimes the lag on the game can make your player slower than Sam Adams after he at 14 pounds of mayonaise. But I can get passed that right? The game is free, WoW isn't. I have a few thousand more run-ins with the censoring in the game. If you type something that doesn't register in their "Safe-inary" it flashes red and you cannot send your message. Several words that you can't say: -job -occupation -guy -man -haha -dumb -silly -love So text-chat on VMK is more limited/crappy than the video game section at KOHL's. I can deal with that. The first world we'll visit is Adventureland, home to the famous Pirates of the Carribean and the Jungle Cruise. NotSora end up in the Enchanted (just like World of Warcraft!) Tiki Room and get blindsided by the song that accompanies my arrival: "In the Tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki room. In the Tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki room. All the birdies sing and the flowers bloom, in the Tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki room." I never went to the Enchanted Tiki Room while I was at the real Magic Kingdom (RMK), so I figured this would give me a chance to you know, catch up a bit. Nope. Not at all. Basically all it is is the song and a few Tiki masks in a room. I try to make conversation. NotSora: What in the ### are we supposed to do in this game? (2 minutes, no answer) Guest4563421: r u taken? NotSora: Excuse me, what? Guest4563421: ru taken? do you have a girlfriend? NotSora: Yes, yes I do. Guest4563421: well how about in the game? NotSora: I'm not following this very well. Um..no? Guest4563421: are you going to ask me out or not? NotSora: Wait, what? No, not a chance! Guest4563421: fine, be that way. Ugh...I am then reminded of the time where it was me who was getting rejected. Of course, I was not as brutally foward/talking online. If only there was someone to point the way... Don't be a dick, man. Ask her out. Come on, it's a fucking online RPG. Who cares, huh? It's not like you don't have the greatest girlfriend in the world, because you do, dammit. Look how happy I am! NotSora: On second thought, I think I will. Guest4563421: cool, now we're together Thinking very little of this, our ventures continue. I end up in Frontierland, which is a shop. Just a shop. Frontierland was one of the top Lands to visit, being it has 2/3 of the thrills rides in the RMK. But in the VMK, it's a shop. A bloody shop. Actually, no it wasn't a bloody shop. It would be kind of cool with some cowboy guts and coarpses scattered about. VMK has various shops scattered about it where you can buy stuff ranging for worthless junk to garbage with no uses whatsoever. My eyes grow tired, time to log off. NotSora will slumber for the first time... Day 2: more clicking, more boredom, more preteens. I decide to check out some of the minigames they seem to be advertising. The first one I try is a game where you create a fireworks show, like the one in the RMK that starts at 9 pm. By the way, they are fucking fantastic. The game itself, is simple. Some random color-coded shapes fly in the sky. Your goal: select the correct shape and click on the flying shape in time. It's kind if like DDR mixed with Duck Hunt, or Duck Duck Revolution. A couple more games of , but there is so much more to discover. I quickly head to Main Street USA. There we find and purchase a camera, to which I say "Oh! A camera!" and laugh to my own overused joke with no one within hearing distance around me. What can you do with a camera? Take pictures, or course! I can remeber all of my great adventures! Like the time where...uh...I stood around! And that other time where I had my character...type...stuff! And there are some "Hidden Mickey Shapes" around to photograph, but that requires you know...work. So, I stroll back to Frontierland, hoping to God that I missed 90% of it upon my last visit. Alas, no. It's still just a store. But this time, I "eavesdrop" on some unsuspecting players. They talk about being "Taken" and "Together" just like that one girl who I am virtual dating (sorry-_-). Then it hit me: VMK is where little preteens flirt online and hook up with members of the opposite sex because they are too young to do it in real life. "Noooooooooooooooooo!" I sceam, ala Darth Vader. After a quick log off, I take a moment to spiritually clense myself. Okay, so VMK can now be referred to as "Vitrual Preteen Dating Sim" or VPDS. I, suffering from accute boredom, attempt to play VPDS again. NotSora walks around Adventureland some more, looking at all the odd rooms that serve no purpose whatsoever. We eventually end up near another minigame, this one based on the popular RMK attraction, the Jungle Cruise. Never had a chance to ride that one, but I wish I would've just...uh...knew about before 2 months earlier. Haha...robot animals. The minigame itself is a mixture of a FPS on the PC, Excitebike, and Poke'mon Snap. You are on a boat, armed with only a camera. Steering the boat is possible, but the only thing you have to worry about is avoiding the rocks and the occasional power-ups. When I say power-ups, I mean items that are essential to the game's sucess. Don't want to collect that gas? Too bad, shorty. Better drive over that or you'll be taking pictures of the exotic fish as you become acquainted with your soggy death. Oh yeah, there's film too. Get that as well. Your camera is controlled by your mouse. Various animals use the common trick used by magicians and villians alike, which means they pop out in a cloud of smoke, sit there and go poof again. How much of the animal/what they are doing is crucial to your score. Getting a picture of a zebra's ass won't get you so much. But you catch a hippo in a full-body shot with it's mouth open will lead you to the promise land. Does World of Warcraft have brown gorillas with safari hats? Didn't think so. The game is not too terribly difficult or fun. After playing through couple times, I head off to explore more of land of adventure. 2 clicks, not kidding you, 2 clicks later I am at another mini-game. This one is, too, based on a classic ride at the RMK, the Pirates of a Carribean. PotC is actually a multiplayer game, where you actually play against other people. As a point and click...ship...attack...game, it's doesn't remind me too much of anything. You sail a ship and shoot cannon. Guess you could call it a RTS if you really really wanted to. But Brett, where's the funny (if you're into that kind of stuff. Or if you think what I do is funny)? My first game was 1-on-1, as both me and my human rival were given CPU teammates. I, playing for the first time, lost by a margain somewhere between 1 and 678,124 points. But my second time, I joined a game against a team of 2. Another kid joins their team because, it makes that much mathmatical sense. It's 3-on-1 in terms of humans and CPU's, with me having the advantage in the AI. The first game goes rough, quickly I am the only red guy sailing and get swarmed by cannonballs. My opponents, happy for their Round 1 victory, are boasting the best they could. The second round is a grossly different story. Me and my computer-controlled homeboys own the yellows and get a quick W. Then one of real players says, "Stop playing." His teammates acknowledge and obey, and the game ends. What the fuck? They lose a round, so they quit? Suddenly I am yenning for the little 12-year-olds on PS2 online. At least they you know, aren't total douchebag quiting fucktards. Frustration arises again, and NotSora eventually ends up in the VMK Monorail system. It's there, while chatting with some "babes", I discover the one loophole in the kid-friendly chat: you can say "make babies". Quickly, "I want to have/make your babies" becomes my favorite saying as my words annoy the virtual public. Their favorite sayings must be "Gross", "How old are you?" and "Finally, a person with the right idea!" My biggest complaint about VMK is the fact that the game doesn't allow you to do the stuff you really want to do. Okay, if I would do that, what punishment is given out is what I earned/deserved. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to do it! Remember me complaining about Frontierland and Tomorrowland? There's a reason for that: neither are even there yet. Their maps say "Coming soon!" There's SOME hope for the future. At least for another one of these gargantuan articles. And yes, I am taken, happily. If you want to join the world of the VMK, visit their site: www.VMK.com ...or Bizzack Hizzome ...or More Article badness |
