I'm playing Second Life.

What the fuck?

I seriously cannot be trusted alone with technology.

This game has the least responsive control I've seen since pre-QuakeWorld multiplayer Quake over dialup. That's not an exaggeration. It takes one or two seconds for your avatar to respond to anything.

Why would you play this when you can play Runescape?

No.

It's 2008, please teach me how to play an MMO.

And yes, the game really is called Angels Online.

Anything That Moves: Nostalgia Edition

I'm playing Dofus. Hey, remember this? No, not Dofus; clicking the edge of your screen then when your little guy gets there the game switches to another screen. I guess I must have missed it, because I'm still playing this game even though it crashed while I was browsing the help screen.

It might be that the music reminds me of Secret of Mana, apart from the fact that (surprise!) it doesn't loop correctly. It's the flutes playing in harmony and that synth that sounds like a choir of robots.

I made a friend. Ever notice how the first friend you make in a new MMO always has the same personality? Sometimes I think it's one of my parents keeping an eye on me. Here's my new best friend in Dofus. I am pretty sure he just ripped me off. That's ok, what are friends for.

So I'm some kind of a rogue. Peep those welfare epics. Got my Skeletor hat, got some Wolverine arm warmers, gtg. It follows that I get to set traps all over the place. These dumb sheep won't know what hit them. Pointless creatures! All they do is chew grass until something kills them.

It seems the free game is limited to 20 levels and a little island that floats in the sky above the rest of the world. Considering you can level to 1000 in this game that isn't much, and the real game is $7 a month, so either they're doing something right or they're just crazy. Some of the YouTube videos for this game make it look a tiny bit impressive, so I might stick with this for a while and see how it goes even if I'm kind of scarred from being scammed by my only friend for some level 2 sheep gore.

Here's a picture of me murdering the last of those motherfuckers using only my innate cunning and a deep knowledge of the shadow arts. This is the last time I post more than one screenshot in an article because Blogger makes it unbelievably painful. Maybe it's time I claw my way out of this sinkhole and force-feed myself a refresher course in html. Do they still use html?

Postscript: Woah, it's Courier. Not every day you see someone ranting about MMOs in 12 pt Courier, I guess. Enjoy.

What's with installers?

To save time, or something, while Shaiya was installing, I figured why not download Dofus and Cronous while it's going. Between them they are about 3/4 the size of the Shaiya installer and I thought it might all complete around the same time, so that I can conveniently start hating one as soon as I'm finished hating the other.

The Shaiya install took forever. Cronous and Dofus both finished downloading in the meantime and I felt a little silly because they must have slowed the install process some, right? No, they didn't. Shaiya actually spent more time installing after they finished than while they were going. My connection isn't even that fast.

These had better be really really awesome, not just everyday f2p grindfest awesome.

See this thread at mmorpg.com for a hint at the motive for this new wave of self-torment.