I’m not really sure how to respond to today’s Blaugust Promptapalooza prompt, which is from Solarayo of Ace Asunder: Tell us about some of your hobbies outside of the realm of your specific niche. What even is my “specific niche”? Is gaming a “niche” hobby that I really need to develop interests outside of? Maybe the prompt should have been, “Tell us about the interests you don’t share on your blog”. ...
I’m actually sitting in Star Trek Online right now, hovering above the Deferi Mining Outpost 3, waiting for the Breen capital ship “Desna” to show up. So I can kill it. So, what it is with Black Friday? When did that become some sort of holiday in and of itself? Now we’re apparently exporting it to the rest of the world. Rumor Control: Elder Scrolls V to be an MMO? ...
I got a letter today from Neopets (remember them? Facebook for kids?) warning me my account was about to meet the Great Blindingly Pink Maker if I didn’t log in pretty soon. Talk about obsessions. Three years ago, I casually played Neopets to keep in touch with my nieces Jazzmin and Ilsa. It was fun to peek into the lives of nine year olds, but I couldn’t help stray a bit and start playing some of the games. ...
With the original Neopets founders talking up their new company and their new game, I decided to go back and check out how my Xweetok was doing in the older game. Hungry and dying. Poor Spitefur. I’d been ignoring her since I won Shapeshifter last April. That triumph was my final goal in Neopets, and I had no reason to go on… and yet this morning found me walking through Neopia again, looking at the sights, browsing the games, and oh dear, who IS that Ixi in the corner? With that game of hers? ...
It’s no secret I’m a big fan of Neopets, but it’s just come so close to being a fully fledged virtual world, it was just a matter of time before they took the step and made it one. I just happened to be browsing the post-mortem of Virtual Worlds 08 (about which I made some posts on Massively), that Raph pointed to and saw this crumb about Nickelodeon making World of Neopia – finally! Pet-raising, minigame-playing action in 3D! ...
Some of you might remember a little bit of Neopets mania last summer. There was this one puzzle that just seemed so hard, that I had to write a program to solve it. It took over my life for months. I finally gave up trying to solve it entirely. In February, I took it up again, and given some algorithmic help by a past champion, finally beat Shapeshifter. It’s all very Karate-kid-ish. ...
Yeah, I’m back on Shapeshifter again, that amazingly difficult puzzle game on Neopets. I’ve been thinking about getting back in that race again. I burned out on the puzzle back in September, but I have been getting encouraging notes from people urging me not to give up. There’s a strange community of solvers out there. People get up to about 25 on their own, then get stumped and either give up or try to write a solver. ...
Thanks to Emily from Neopets who kept working with me until I remembered enough details of what I had in Neopets so that she could send me the info I needed to log in again. Spitefur is staying in a luxury hotel the next five days until she gets back to good health. Now to take a look at Shapeshifter again…