caroline's stuff that doesn't go anywhere else.

The Kingdom of Loathing.

What really caught my eye about the game was that it was simple: well, the graphics. They look like stick figures I used to draw, or this one cartoon I remember from watching "Liquid Television" a couple of years back. That's beside the point.

The Kingdom of Loathing, according to its Wikipedia page, is a sort of satire on the MMORPGs. I guess you could call it that, because of the characters that are available to play ... like the Disco Bandit or the Sauceror. My character, which can be male or female, is the Accordion Thief. This is the description for my character choice: The scourge of mariachis and polka bands, the Accordion Thieves have plied their malign craft since time out of mind. Their Moxie serves them well in both their adventures and their interactions with "the ladies.". In my case, it serves me well with the "fellas." Something like that. I already love this game because it's weird and it has bad looking stick figures.

I started playing maybe twenty or thirty minutes ago, but it looks like I've used up all my clicks, or in TKoL world, my "adventures." You get 40 a day, but it looks like they gave me some extra adventures, since when I looked my count, it said 80. And each character has three main attributes: muscle, moxie, and mysticallity. All of these can be gained through the different adventures you have, and the different things you can collect on these adventures. Also, before you can go to other levels, you have to complete some kind of "training" which occurs at Mt. Noob. While I thought this was fun at first, it got kind of repetitive, because I just found myself re-clicking everything to gain more attributes. It was funny and cute to read the first time, but then I just realized I was going in a circle. Maybe I'm not getting the game. But without the training, you can't click on anything else. Or, it just won't let you go anywhere else. When I tried to go elsewhere, it told me I couldn't, so that was frustrating. There is also something strange about being stuck at a place called Mt. Noob for a long period of time.

I looked around a little bit more and I found out that you can actually start playing against other people. I decided against this, mainly because I didn't feel like reading how and why, and I didn't feel like ruining my character, crazy_underwear, at this time. The whole game is really text-based, and while I think the little figures are really crappy and funny looking, when I think of a game, I don't think of "reading." I think that's why when you get Scrabble, the instructions that they give you are printed really, really small: it discourages people from reading it because it's a huge snooze. But, I think I'm smart enough on my good days, so I figure I'll eventually give in and read it, or figure it out on my own.

But seriously, I'm going to try and play again tomorrow when I get 40 more adventures because I want to see what else happens. You can't learn everything in one day with these things. I finally gave up on Urban Dead. That game just brought me a whole lot of misery.

posted by caroline @ 3:34 PM