Second Life

Something has to be said for Linden Labs. Who else would have the balls to make a game purely designed around interaction with other people? Technically, there have been many games like this, but Linden Labs has mustered up the balls to create one of the biggest, most detailed worlds.... and now for free.

Second Life is about being with other people, like a lot of MMORPGs these days. The game is actually split up into two groups- the Teen groups and the Adult groups- so it becomes blatantly obvious they're working hard to keep this social aspect high. Essentially, think of the game this way- you create yourself, walk around in your own virtual world you can manipulate, and... talk to people.



If you've read any of my reviews on games like this before, you know I'm not particularly fond of games like this. Don't get me wrong, I love to chat. However, these games tend to attract some of the strangest people you'll find online, and this game is no exception. Expectt to be down-talked by a 12 year old on this game, which is really disturbing in it's own way. While some people are fun to talk with, just generally accept it as a rule that 99.9% of all people on this game are wierd.



However, Second Life has some good things to it. First of all, Second Life features an innovative Land Owning system, which allows players to buy and own their own specific plot of land, and make stuff on it. Because of this, the land is huge (But, to note, a lot of the land is empty nothingnes...). This definately has taken the "Conquest" theory from Final Fantasy XI and turned it upside down into something a lot better, which I think will extend the playtime on this game signifigantly. However, please note that, like anything else worthwhile, it costs money. A good bit of money.

The character creation is innovative, but needs work badly. While you can change everything from hair color to length of specific parts of it, you can't change the STYLE of anything. Your character is stuck with only a few choices in generic hair style, and any mix of them. Because of this, everyone ends up looking generically the same. Needless to say, the same applies for face styles and the like- unless you do something extremely stupid and make your character ugly, you're stuck looking like everyone else. Honestly, this is worse than just giving us a choice of generic looks, like in FFXI.



Overall, Second Life was a good idea, just like all the other 3D Chat programs that exist. However, just like those other 3D Chat things, it fails horribly at not realizing that the people who want to play these games are very, very wierd. Telling someone to just go and talk to people in a 3D world with no point other than chat is stupid- we have AIM, MSN, YIM, and now the Google Instant Messenger for that. Nice try, Linden Labs, but it just won't work.

2 star(s) out of 5

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