Grumpy Kitty

I’m a girl gamer, a *real* girl gamer. I enjoy hacking, slashing and/or blowing up nasty monsters with magic! In fact, Tuesday’s are maintenance/update days for World of Warcraft. So while I’m waiting for the servers to come back online, I am writing about my secret online passion as a girl gamer.

I started playing computer games way back when on a Comodore 64. That’s right, that’s a LONG time ago, the early 1980’s. I recall playing several Dungeons and Dragon’s type games my brother (a huge D&D fan to this day) had. Very 3rd person cartoon-ish kind of like Ultima Online is now, but far more archaic. Then later on, more arcade like games (pac man etc).

While I much prefer the online MMORPGs (massive mulit-player online role playing games), I have also been known to spend time on the Sims 2 (I love building houses and gardens, not so much the people interactivity) and Pogo.com’s various board games (Mahjong Safari is my current fave).

When The Sims first came out, I found a severe lack of garden and lawn decorations. So I learned how to make them myself. At that time, it was basically learning how to “skin” a 3D object. Long story short, you made a flat 1 dimensional graphic that stretched across the 3d object to cover it and make it look like the real thing. If you are an old timer Sims fan, you may recall my website Down the Garden Path. For a few years I offered high quality Sims garden items and room sets for download. Sometimes, these sets of images (converted to 3d objects via the Transmogrifier, a player made program) took hours or days to make. Even though my downloads were part of a paid membership and I made some pretty decent money doing it, the long, tedious hours eventually burnt me out. I wasn’t playing the game for fun anymore, and I eventually stopped altogether.

Today, while waiting for WoW to come back online, I went to the Sims 2 site for a look on what’s new and exciting. And I got tempted to try the game again. It’s downloading now. I just love being able to purchase a game online and play it (an hour to go on the download bleh). So I’m looking forward to checking it out. My favorite expansions pre Sims 2 were the Pets one and University. Can’t wait to try the Sims 2 versions.

Another game most of us who play WoW are looking at lately is, Age of Conan. If you are my age (late 30’s), you’ve probably seen all the Conan movies on TV by now, just like I have. And the hard bodies too lol. So of course I had to go have a peek at this latest (and maybe greatest) MMORPG. They do claim to have the best options in game play style and seem to have taken note of some of the more popular things from other current MMORPGs that players want; houses, guild wars, seiges, pvp (player versus player). AoC offers a free one month membership. We may yet be tempted to try it. Though from years of experience, we tend to focus on ONE game at a time. Otherwise things get crazy costly with the expansions x2 every time there is an add on to the game.

Some of the other online games I’ve tried include browser based games. These types of games don’t need to download and install locally on your computer. One of the first I tried was Neopets. It appeals to a much younger age group, but was fun at the time. You adopt a pet, feed it, and then buy it toys and play games with it online. When Neopets first started out, it was easy to make their virtual money, if you had a fast browser that could reload a page to see when the stores restocked rare items. Which you then resold for a lot more money. Most people collected these rare items and put them in their own virtual stores to show off to other people (at insane prices you’d never pay so that they never got purchased).

I also tried Runescape, another MMORPG, but browser based. I found it overrun by young kids who mostly wanted “kewl” items and loot to show off to their friends. They simply hung around the major areas and chatted. Even the paid version was nauseatingly over crowded. So I didn’t play this one very long.

Going back, probably the first online game I played was called The Realm. Interestingly it’s still out there and playable. It was very cartoon-like and completely two dimensional. I met my hubby online there, some 10 plus years ago now.

After The Realm, we moved to Everquest and played there some 4 years. Hard core end game too. We were in one of the top raiding guilds of its time. A raiding guild is one which spends time together, sometimes 30-60 people at a time, fighing toward a final (or several) boss monster. In Everquest, that usually meant a dragon. Raiding guilds spend many, many hours a day dedicated to game progression or retrieving bodies from a wipe out. If one person screwed up the strategy, and got everyone killed, getting the bodies back from under or near the monster that killed us all was sometimes a several hour ordeal. Eventually Everquest burnt us out. We couldn’t spend 8-10 plus hours a day raiding. And to get anywhere in Everquest (EQ), you had to play with other people. It just wasn’t a solo type of game.

A few years after EQ, the hubby and I tried a few other games. But none appealed until we discovered World of Warcraft. So, several years after meeting on The Realm, Hobbsy and Arianera are still together and playing online games.

Tags: girl gamer, mmorpgs, online games