Lewies Blog

I’ve just been addicted to these free games recently. I can’t get my eyes away from them. The latest ones are Project Entropia and Second Life. Both are free to download the clients and play within a 3D universe with thousands of other players.

Project Entropia was neat for a while because it was the only one I was aware of. The problem with it is that they are really heavy on trying to get your money - even though it is free. The game is set up so that you are at a disadvantage. Your weapons and armor constantly degrade and you have to keep repairing them. You never make a profit from any of your killing runs, so eventually you run out of money. Once you don’t have any cash in the game, you can’t do anything except chat with the locals or go “sweating”.

Sweating is the process of extracting sweat from creatures. You usually end up dieing a lot. The price of sweat depends on how much other players will pay for it. It is so low that it will take a long time before you can upgrade your weapons again to go out and hunt. If you don’t have the patience, then you go ahead and buy in-game money with real money. This is where Project Entropia seems to make its money.

Some people joke about Project Entropia being free. It is a very expensive game in my own opinion. They advertise that you can make real money by cashing out your in-game money. This seems to attract most newcomers. People give up after a while when they realize how hard it is just to sustain there own character without investing in it.

Second Life is a bit different. I was having lots of fun without money. In fact, they give free accounts a small weekly allowance. You can build things rite away and sell them to others. You are not limited to what you can build. It is up to your own imagination. You can also script things to react to other players such as playing sounds, spinning around, giving them free items, or just about anything.

So what is the catch? You can only acquire land if you have a paid account. The more additional land you want to own, the higher the monthly rate. Just like project Entropia, you can also purchase and sell in-game money as well for real cash. Paid accounts increase your weekly allowance by ten times. It is also possible to pay for your monthly fees with in-game money - so the game could still actually be free if you are good at selling things.

In Second Life, you don’t kill things. Actually, I am wrong. Some people have built games within the game. One is called Dark Life and you can kill enemies there. It also seems that there are more mature people in it. I don’t run into many young adults. This probably has to do with the fact that it isn’t a game of killing things.

Some people have come to Second Life from a paid game called The Sims Online (TSO). This is similar to Second Life in the ability to build things, but TSO was very limited. You had to pay for every small thing such as building a section of a wall. You could only choose from a small list of what kind of look you wanted to put on your walls. You were limited in the ways you could make money. On top of that, only a maximum of 16 people could visit any one place at once.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 18th, 2005 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.