Second Life: A Reiko Arashi review *BLECH!*

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Reiko Arashi

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Mar 18, 2010
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DISCLAIMER: While most of this sounds true, or may be true - this is just a review, IT DOES not by any means actually express the views of the LINDEN LAB STAFF, or it's 60,000 residents on during one moment of the day.

So you're standing out in the middle of a simulator with hardly any clothes on looking like you just came out of the mental hospital. What to do, do we move left or right do we take a shoe off or do we make our hair pink? That's just the third of it, from there you learn you can PURCHASE currency like any normal person would tell you NOT to do as it's usually some form of pyramid scam built by the company that developed the game just so you'll support their donut eating mind wasting programmers.

We'll not go there.

After you're dorking around getting your money and realizing "OMG. I CAN LOOK LIKE ____ insert random person here ____ LETS SEE HOW MUCH IT COSTS!" - you hook your credit card to your account and you spend up like mad. You end up looking like a half-baked pixelized low-brow from the depths of the very first SIMS game.

In fact after you just spend about 100 US on getting a house, furniture and new clothes you're sitting there going.. "Wow, my skin looks worse than that free one i got when i was playing Sims 2" ...If you haven't moved on to playing the sims 3 yet, and realizing the gameplay is easier to deal with, go ahead and move forth into reading this review.

By now you're realizing you can make back or supposedly make back cash by taking the high creation road and battling it out with several other copyright contesters who make things that so seem like your own ideas. By the time you've had your second life nervous breakdown, move into the second life mental hospital - you realize you can go into second life MODELING.

Yes.

Modeling.

If you haven't already noticed the wide varitey of dishonest practices on second life, and amount of poeple that are creepier than a new york cabbie - wait until you learn what you get to do on the computer next.

In this VIRTUAL world we call second life, when you get to do modeling - you're not modeling VERSACE, or even LIP SERVICE clothing. You're modeling creations that took someone the maximum of two hours in photoshop. Some of them are even as quick as what's called a "COPYPASTA" - and they didnt even have to copybot to do it that badly.

So you use your arrows on your keyboard to learn NOT to strut down a real life runway, but a prim one. A poorly designed system can mean you're blowing your motherboard and your power supply out to timbuktu or even antartica. The final shows of you and your oddly designed avatar mixed with concerts and fairs and only 50 people make running down that walkway worse than molassses.

Top it off with the abusive people that even in real life you'd never want to put up with. Being yelled at for zig zagging down something that isn't real!

Once you've survived that, been told you're at risk for being AR'ed and other wonderful things that don't really hold ground when you're not even 3 weeks old in second life timing (Yes, they have ways of coutning days and years IN WORLD. Wow, really great.) - You try to make it out on the lawns of making more clothes - until you're then told you're a copypasta geek copybotter like the rest of them! (YAY! :D lol. People really have to deal with this, this is why i dont play this LOL)

Then the viewer system itself, breaks and you can't teleport, and you can't make tails or heads of anything - and your shape and skin have been reduced to an androgyous form named "RUTH"...

and the system reverts and restarts.

....and you cry in your soup for wasting your time with such a silly thing :)
 

lacktheknack

Je suis joined jewels.
Jan 19, 2009
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Interesting... consider at least giving us an idea of how the game itself works (ie. controls) next time.
 

Lyri

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Dec 8, 2008
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Reiko Arashi said:
....and you cry in your soup for wasting your time with such a silly thing :)
I'm going to be frank here, but this statement sums up this review entirely.
I don't play Second Life anymore but I never once modeled anything, your review is completely unfinished if you actually wish to review Second Life and not just one aspect of it.
 

SniperWolf427

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Jun 27, 2008
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What is up with the rants tonight?

I hate second life as much as the next guy, but one of the things I hate more is when people post stuff like this in the review board, dragging all of the attention away from people who actually work hard on their reviews.

Actually review a game or don't post.

Hell, this thing you wrote doesn't even make any sense.

[sub]I need a drink...[/sub]
 

Reiko Arashi

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Mar 18, 2010
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Well, after i posted it and reread it you're right it seeps liquid of nothingness and ADHD like the next random rant ...

More to the point VIEWER 2.0 BETA, the controls are poor - the new camera functions are shotty and very to the point, lame. The fact that when you log in your skin and shape are REMOVED and you look like RUTH with better clothes (Ruth being the oddly usual androgynous form that EVERYONE was reduced to before the CLOUD/GHOST syndrome). The idea in the original viwers that you could make the messenger boxes semi transparent, was great.

NOW you can't, they're big black and even if resizable - clunky and scarier than any poorly designed MOZILLA FIREFOX theme. Even some of the OPEN SOURCE viewers have better UI than the new 2.0 beta.

The fact they still haven't fixed most of the HUGE bugs that plague their virtual world since 2003, kinda behooves me.

With that i apologize, my first attempt at review was poor and shotty- and more like a confused rant.

Like anyone you spend three years wasted in a virtual world that could've been spent better on actual video games? LOL. Supposedly the SIMS3, despite what Yahtzee said about it, is better than second life.

But you're right, i should've clarified my review - and instead of making it a disgruntled piece of crap lol, made it a bit more understandable.
 

Therumancer

Citation Needed
Nov 28, 2007
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Second Life is not a game, it's a graphical chat mode. It's major feature was the fact that it was totally empty and put the abillity to design things totally into the hands of the players. The company supporting it by leasing SPACE to build things "permanantly" to the users.

Really there is no point to it, nothing to win, nothing to do. You pretty much just run around and socialize. The idea of the creation system is more or less that you can make your Avatar look like anything, ditto for a "home" or furniture or whatever. In general your only supposed to buy things from people who are talented artists and such, and from the screenshots and such I've seen some of the people are VERY gifted.

As a technology I felt it had some interesting ideas. However, the need to buy space pretty much limited what people could do with it practically. For example you could with enough skill build entire games in their "space" but few people could afford to keep the space leased.

Second Life mostly came into it's own as a backdoor porn community, catering to wierd fetish groups like furries, pedophilles, and others where people would charge 900 number type fees for "hot chat" combined with sexual animations and such. Not to mention the fact that you could stream videos and such, and thus it was a way people could charge for things like kiddie porn videos in a relatively safe enviroment. Some anonymous guy charges you as much as an adult movie theater IRL via Lindens to watch child molestation videos in his "house" on his virtual TV for example/


It also for a while managed to operate as a sort of blackmarket currency storehouse, as "Lindens" were easily changable to real money, so it was a place you could store wealth outside of any kind of govermental notice.

Both of those aspects eventually got attention and were shut down however.

Truthfully I kind of hoped Playstation Home would be a next generation version of this, but sadly Sony simply did not have the guts to go through with it. They were both unwilling to allow a "wild west" type enviroment, and had no desire to do what would be nessicary to try and police it. As a result "Home" kind of never went anywhere. Virtual item creation was first (after all how do they charge you for something you could create yourself?) Streaming video and music went next. All you were left with was a weak virtual chat room full of ads, virtual items, and a few minigames.

I've neither done Second Life or Home (though I keep meaning to try Home, I always wind up playing games myself instead). If your interested though check out Something Awful's "Second Life Safari" which will give you a pretty good run down (humorously) of what Second Life is and was line. I say "was" because the thing is so dated that I don't think even they care anymore.

Oh one other thing I will mention, there was an interesting technology developed through Second Life. This "Destroy TV" thing, which was an Avatar that could be piloted via a website and would do things based on popular spam/demand on the site (as I understood it) with a constant cam going showing what was going at right then and there. The people who did it were trying to sell the tech, I don't think it went anywhere though, but I saw some potential in that basic idea, not as it was there, but what could be done with it in an MMORPG type enviroment. Think of say a boss monster that instead of having pre-programmed attack routines was run by public website visitors (coming and going) who would determine what abillities it would use based on popular demand or whatever. :p
 

dr_mabeuse

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Mar 24, 2010
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I had pretty much the same reaction when I first signed up for SL: Okay, you've got this avatar together, you've got all this potential--all this stuff they say you can do--now what do you actually *do* with yourself?

Well, I had no idea. I stumbled around from random place to random place for a few hours and said the hell with it. I didn't see the point, didn't know what I was supposed to do, couldn't even find anyone to ask. I didn't bother with it for 3 years, and then something happened: I got someone who knew SL to show me around. Made all the difference in the world.

The initial learning curve for SL is steep and complicated if you don't have someone to show you the ropes. The place itself is nothing but potential and possibility, which means it's what you make it, so it's definitely not for everyone. If all you can think of to do there is model clothes, I doubt you're going to enjoy it much. But this time, I got involved with a poetry group, started meeting people and seeing how they used SL. Found some fascinating places, some exciting things to do, started to learn.

My conclusion: it's exactly like First Life. What you get out of it is exactly proportional to what you put in.