LOL DOE remember Pokemon for the Game Boy!?!?!?!?
Yeah, I played a lot of it back in the day. I got a membership, but barely for the gameplay and mostly for the forums. (At first, only people with membership could post in the forums, but I hear it opened up a bit more.) I still wonder whatever happened to the ten or so really tight friends I made on the forums after one or two years on the forums - no doubt they all have moved on to different forums. Censorship really sucked, all swearing was censored heavily (except for my last few months, when allowed "damn" and "hell"): censorship got intentionally too heavy ("fingers" was censored for being a sexual act while being the most important body part of playing a video game) or just fucked up entire sentences by bleeping out random words or characters.
But dammit, that was one of my first forums, and still was one of the bigger forums for its time. The mods were always really cool and funny guys, but they were forced to be strict in order to keep their power.
But the game? Yeah, the gameplay was pretty bad, but I still remember a lot of what I played because it was memorable. It was a barely more than a glorified point-and-click game with little strategy to it, and a combat flow that played way too slow and looked too horrible. (I hear they fixed that, though.) Grinding was an absolute necessity to get anywhere or do anything, and I think that's just the RuneScape experience. I really, really like the quests however, and every game should use the quests on RuneScape as a way to do quests right, because you never knew what to expect, and they always were great stories. The guy getting turned into a chicken? The queen slapping the king after touring him through a garden you painfully created? Dwarves drugging you into stupidity? The atoll run entirely by apes? Aiding a god trapped in the body of a cat? The Bar test that was pretty much "go here, get drunk"? I still remember all those quests because they were really unique and fun to experience. Very 'point-and-click' adventure puzzle game with a good amount of combat and socializing with others, and I did like it.
Hear the new CEO's making it a monetized horror, but has done a bunch of gameplay reforms. Most of the old team that started RuneScape seems to have moved on to other games or left the game industry entirely. Shit, I remember when Andrew Gower stepped down to let his brother Paul Gower run the game, and people were pretty upset then.
