Thursday, June 22, 2006

Entropia Universe - The Silent Addiction

As well as spending ages on Myspace this week, I have also done something I said I'd never do, and got addicted to a MMORPG (which - for the unitiated - stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). The game in question is Entropia Universe.

I got onto it from a work colleague. A conversation began which revolved around online games (a conversation that comes up quite a lot in work, I'm sure you'll understand), now - previously - the only online games I played were Poker, Counter Strike/TFC and an old web browser game called Planetarion, which myself, Sibley and countless others got addicted to in sixth form and got bollocked for countless times for playing it in school*.

Anyway, he said he played Entropia Universe - and did a blooming good job selling it, so for the next 3 days or so, I downloaded it. Half way through a wet wednesday, I finished the download. And I jumped in.

Resisting the temptation to create a female character with an overly expanded chest, I instead created a ginger semi mulleted bad-ass you see to your right by the same of Synn Luna Whyre, which - if you're on the ball - is an anagram of my full name. Clever eh?

What wasn't so clever was the fact that I jumped in and spent the next hour and a half searching for stuff to do, and getting nowhere. I died. A lot. Largely due to the fact I was seduced into an area known as "Treasure Island", which is a pain to get out of, especially if you're new. Like I was.

Dejected, I left the universe for a while, and waited for my workmate to come online and show me around. Once he did, blooming heck did it get fun! I spent the next week or so 'sweating' monsters (extracting sweat from monsters, which can be sold for pittance). If you want to, you can skip doing all that and put money in the game to buy guns and ammo. I didn't, I'm cheap like that.

After a while, I became more integrated to the society I was in, so much so that I've started doing my own teleport runs (which are fun. In order to get new people started, a veteran guides a new player from one teleporter to another, so the new person doesn't have to) and organising hunts.

Anyway, the reason I'm telling you about this is two fold. First, does anybody else play it? They've got about 400,000 people - mainly Europe - playing it. I can't be that far fetched that one of my readers could play it. If you do, drop me an email or a comment and let me know.

If not, have I convinced you to play? Likewise if you want to start, just let me know, and I'll meet you in cyberspace.

That being said, I'm off to Liverpool for a few days, to finally move out of my house. I'll be gone until at least Saturday, and probably Sunday. This means that it's the longest I've been without t'internet for about 4 years. The saddest thing about the whole experience? I'll be my last Dominos for a long time.

* A small possible urban myth associated with it was that a kid's parents got almost into a fight with a fairly rotund teacher after said teacher (who was one of these boring sods who believed computers should be used for "business use only") called the pupil "A sad, antisocial bastard" for playing Planetarion.