Requiem for a Game
I never knew I wanted to play in an MMO until Glitch. Sometime towards the end of October juergen asked, "Would anybody like an invite to the best worst time sink in recent history?" So I went to check it out. And then IM'd him.
me: "Also: we have egg plants. Egg plants make it very different."
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA no.
[juergen has a looooooong history of inviting me to sign up for things when he finds them. I usually don't, although I nearly always go have a look anyway.]him: Also, you get milk from butterflies.
me: ...delicious?
him: But first, you have to massgae them.
massage
me: LOL!
him: with butterfly lotion
Absolutely preposterous! I was utterly charmed by the ridiculous absurdity, and continued to scroll through the Encyclopedia and the endless Achievement pages. After a few hours I gave in and signed up, stumbled through the setup, found my way out to somewhere in Groddle (Meadow? Forest? I didn't notice then, and now I'll never know), and wandered aimlessly (because I didn't actually figure out how to access the map until much, much later) back and forth along a number of streets until I decided to quit when I got creeped out by an eerie heartbeat sound on a dark and dismal street in what I now know was Loimi Linger in Chakra Phool...
Before I went to bed I IM'd my friend a link to my profile, with the intention of signing back in again once he'd located and friended me (since it was getting on for 3:00am by then, he'd long since said g'night, and I had no idea what his in-game ID was).
...except that, since I didn't actually go the invite route but signed up directly instead, and since I never got any kind of notification when he friended me, and since a number of things distracted me until I forgot I'd ever signed up at all, I didn't sign in again until he posted a link to the Announcement on that fateful day.
But, but, but...! There were butterflies to be massaged and milked! Piggies and trees to be petted (and I didn't even know about wood trees yet; how I miss them now!)! Amazing scenery to be viewed, and so many foods to be prepared as I learned their recipes! Foxes to be brushed, and I had no idea whatsoever how even to find one to brush it!!! (I had assumed this would be much like petting the piggies, but I was sadly disappointed once I finally found a fox preserve. Heli kitties were much more satisfying!)
I feverishly began playing in every spare moment I had, which, since I've been unemployed for a while, was quite a few. I admired scenery reminiscent of gentle English countryside, the Alps, the Australian bush, and things out of Dr. Seuss. I listened to banjos and bagpipes, drums and digeridoos, and wintery piano notes worthy of George Winston. I laughed immoderately at sparkly rocks declaiming that everything should sparkle - except maybe vampires. I delighted in the highly-improbable Tinkertool, and even more in the even less probable Construction Tool. And everywhere, everywhere were the visible results of the worst of bad puns and other wordplay, and I enjoyed every moment of it!
I learned as many skills as I could, doggedly continuing even once I discovered that there was no way I would ever have time to learn them all, since I would never be able to afford to triple my brain capacity, so later skills were at a 1536% time penalty. I gathered quoins, planted and harvested, mined, and created things. I achieved odd (no, prime) counts of things, and I went on quests. I carved pumpkins with my pickaxe. I cackled madly when I discovered first the Famous Pugilist Grill, and later on, the High-Class Hoe. I seasoned beans to grow different kinds of trees, and eggs to hatch into caterpillars, chicks, and piglets. I ground allspice into garlic, ginger, and salt. I changed cherries into oranges and mangosteens. I shook up Face Smelters in my cocktail shaker, and drank them to offset energy expenditure while I smelted chunks of iron into ingots, and fed them into a metal machine (playing heavy metal music) to turn them into metal rods to feed to sloths who spat out snails ("Part-screw, part-nail (and managing to combine the less useful parts of both), snails are the product of a Sloth getting private time with metal rods.") to me which I used to build furniture...
I said "hi" to other players when I encountered them, and bestowed Random Kindnesses on them, even as they did me (and I was devastated on the penultimate day when first my butler and then every player I encountered greeted me with a "bye" instead of "hi"). And in the last couple of days I finally slowed down enough to realize that there was chat over on the right sidebar, and started connecting and communicating with other players...
The game has now been gone for longer than I actually played it, but I still miss it terribly!
Crossposted from http://montuos.dreamwidth.org/924769.html ;
comments on original post. If you do not have a Dreamwidth ID and you want to read comments on protected posts there, you can log in with OpenID using your LJ ID. Also, I have 17 Dreamwidth invite codes if you want one.
me: "Also: we have egg plants. Egg plants make it very different."
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA no.
[juergen has a looooooong history of inviting me to sign up for things when he finds them. I usually don't, although I nearly always go have a look anyway.]him: Also, you get milk from butterflies.
me: ...delicious?
him: But first, you have to massgae them.
massage
me: LOL!
him: with butterfly lotion
Absolutely preposterous! I was utterly charmed by the ridiculous absurdity, and continued to scroll through the Encyclopedia and the endless Achievement pages. After a few hours I gave in and signed up, stumbled through the setup, found my way out to somewhere in Groddle (Meadow? Forest? I didn't notice then, and now I'll never know), and wandered aimlessly (because I didn't actually figure out how to access the map until much, much later) back and forth along a number of streets until I decided to quit when I got creeped out by an eerie heartbeat sound on a dark and dismal street in what I now know was Loimi Linger in Chakra Phool...
Before I went to bed I IM'd my friend a link to my profile, with the intention of signing back in again once he'd located and friended me (since it was getting on for 3:00am by then, he'd long since said g'night, and I had no idea what his in-game ID was).
...except that, since I didn't actually go the invite route but signed up directly instead, and since I never got any kind of notification when he friended me, and since a number of things distracted me until I forgot I'd ever signed up at all, I didn't sign in again until he posted a link to the Announcement on that fateful day.
But, but, but...! There were butterflies to be massaged and milked! Piggies and trees to be petted (and I didn't even know about wood trees yet; how I miss them now!)! Amazing scenery to be viewed, and so many foods to be prepared as I learned their recipes! Foxes to be brushed, and I had no idea whatsoever how even to find one to brush it!!! (I had assumed this would be much like petting the piggies, but I was sadly disappointed once I finally found a fox preserve. Heli kitties were much more satisfying!)
I feverishly began playing in every spare moment I had, which, since I've been unemployed for a while, was quite a few. I admired scenery reminiscent of gentle English countryside, the Alps, the Australian bush, and things out of Dr. Seuss. I listened to banjos and bagpipes, drums and digeridoos, and wintery piano notes worthy of George Winston. I laughed immoderately at sparkly rocks declaiming that everything should sparkle - except maybe vampires. I delighted in the highly-improbable Tinkertool, and even more in the even less probable Construction Tool. And everywhere, everywhere were the visible results of the worst of bad puns and other wordplay, and I enjoyed every moment of it!
I learned as many skills as I could, doggedly continuing even once I discovered that there was no way I would ever have time to learn them all, since I would never be able to afford to triple my brain capacity, so later skills were at a 1536% time penalty. I gathered quoins, planted and harvested, mined, and created things. I achieved odd (no, prime) counts of things, and I went on quests. I carved pumpkins with my pickaxe. I cackled madly when I discovered first the Famous Pugilist Grill, and later on, the High-Class Hoe. I seasoned beans to grow different kinds of trees, and eggs to hatch into caterpillars, chicks, and piglets. I ground allspice into garlic, ginger, and salt. I changed cherries into oranges and mangosteens. I shook up Face Smelters in my cocktail shaker, and drank them to offset energy expenditure while I smelted chunks of iron into ingots, and fed them into a metal machine (playing heavy metal music) to turn them into metal rods to feed to sloths who spat out snails ("Part-screw, part-nail (and managing to combine the less useful parts of both), snails are the product of a Sloth getting private time with metal rods.") to me which I used to build furniture...
I said "hi" to other players when I encountered them, and bestowed Random Kindnesses on them, even as they did me (and I was devastated on the penultimate day when first my butler and then every player I encountered greeted me with a "bye" instead of "hi"). And in the last couple of days I finally slowed down enough to realize that there was chat over on the right sidebar, and started connecting and communicating with other players...
The game has now been gone for longer than I actually played it, but I still miss it terribly!
Crossposted from http://montuos.dreamwidth.org/924769.html ;
comments on original post. If you do not have a Dreamwidth ID and you want to read comments on protected posts there, you can log in with OpenID using your LJ ID. Also, I have 17 Dreamwidth invite codes if you want one.