Forumwarz: Episode 1

[Dracos]

Bottom line: It's pretty bitching and worth a look.  Not work safe, but fairly funny and clever.  Also free: www.forumwarz.com so there's no reason not to check it out.

Topline: What, you guys want details?  Who the hell has time for details in this day and age?  Okay, the details and the good.  Followed by the bad and all that shit.

Forumwarz is an online free netgame that's sort of a third generation Legend of the Red Dragon or so.  It gets props from me on a lot of fronts, despite it being fairly simplistic at the core game.  Featuring a single player episode overlaid by a multiplayer metagame, it presents a farcical take on the interwebs.  Starting as a stupid noob, you get to pick one of three classes (Emo kid, Cam Whore, Troll) and go and 'pwn' forums, navigating through all the retarded conventions of the internet.

I gots to talk about the theming on this.  The theming is fantastic.  They knocked it entirely out of the park and what started as 'oh, that's cute' ended as 'wow, just wow'.  The entire game is played in a sort of meta-internet client with 'sTalk'(gTalk), 'sentrillion'(google), and your own bookmarks.  It contains webgames within the webgame, fake email, etc.  Folks will hack you and you'll be asked to hack folks.  There's dozens of amusing parodies of netbehavior cliches and all of the forums are built on such.  You got guilds, hacker groups, cyberers, you name it, they're trying to cover it.  This is brought to life by a reasonably clever automated response system which is mostly prewritten dialogue playing a game of madlibs.  As you play, folks will message you asking for stuff, getting angry about stuff you're doing, etc.  Is it the internet?  No.  But it's a pretty neat parody.

The game is remarkably durable for a webgame.  My internet right now is fast but shitty, giving occassional huge delays in grabbing a site.  This theoretically should've been devastating to this kind of transmission based game, but it kept up without a hitch, providing a lot of well thought out recovery mechanisms that worked great for me not losing progress because my net hiccuped on me.

The core of the game is a pretty simple RPG.  You have a character of one of three classes with Ego (health) and Special (MP) where Special is a class appropriate power.  You have a computer and item equipped, boosting Ego and Special respectively.  You can go out to forums and fight threads, getting a bonus for how many fights in a row you complete until you pwn the forum, basically the same as going out to an area and fighting monsters until you've cleared it out.  Each day, based on how much cred(Experience) you gained, your charisma and your luck you gain a certain amount of gifts from the internet that you can sell for money.  As you gain cred, you'll go up in levels, unlocking special moves and boosting your core stats in a point buy fashion.

The game basically puts you as a pawn between several secretive and interwoven plots...alongside random folks who just bloody hate those god damn poetry guys.  This slowly expands as the game continues with the player basically trying to figure out 'just who are these guys paying me...and what do they really get out of this'?  The ending of episode one, in this direction, is fantastic.  It's an effective mystery story conveyed well within the game setting and putting a pretty dramatic tone for the next one.