Ever wonder what the child of ToonTown and Everquest would be? Wonder no more.

First off, the name. Free Realms is meant to designate that you have no required tasks. This is loosely true. If you want you can spend all day making food one day, and then the next raising your pet. Ah, but wait, you can’t raise your pet, because that’s where it isn’t free. Free Realms has a monthly “member” charge, akin to your typical monthly fee for MMORPGs, of $4.99. This is fairly reasonable I think, but I did not pay to try these items in beta (yes, if you wanted to test these items IN BETA, you had to pay). As far as I know, only a few people tested these as the pay-to-play option only went up a few days ago, and crashed constantly. The content is roughly 60% free, 40% member, per Sony, but I would say it would be much closer to 50/50, or perhaps reversing the 60/40 split. Besides the member option, there are numerous member items you can buy via micro transactions that increase your character’s ability, change its look, buy a pet, or accelerate the exp. The exp, let’s talk about that next, in fact.

In Free Realms, there are assortments of skills you can learn, from Pet Training to Chef to Ninja. Sadly, Sony has reverted to its Everquest roots here and made these have heavy duty grinding to level up. The combat “jobs” like Ninja and Brawler make sense, in a way, in that you get experience or “stars” by killing monsters. I’m totally ok with that. But if you want to mine ore, you have to play a Bejeweled clone for 5-8 minutes for *1* star per bonus item collected in it (which appear randomly). This was lowered recently, to extreme backlash, with comments of “we will raise it”, as it takes several hundred stars to increase your level by one. Nothing yet though. The Bejeweled clone model is used by Blacksmith and Chef as well, making it very annoying very quickly. The Chef job also requires massive amounts of clicking to hit timed events, making it carpal-tunnel unfriendly. Posts complaining of this in Sony’s forums were met with “learn to play” type posts, or people suggesting that other players buy multiple mice so that they can click them simultaneously to get faster times. *boggle*

The member only jobs, such as Wizard, Blacksmith, Warrior, and others have gone largely untested. The promise was made to the beta folks that a “Free Agent program”, or free membership, would be offered to some to test these out. It never arrived, and with the launch on Tuesday, seems unlikely. There are dozens of bugs I myself have submitted that I still see, and I have no idea how all of them will be fixed plus these jobs released. Sure, you can say with an MMORPG you are constantly tuning, but you also dearly want to present the best you can at launch in order to continue.

Game play aside, let me now talk about this from the perspective of a parent. The game is clearly marketed at the pre-teen community, with a semi-aggressive yet inconsistent word filter that migrates young players from the click-to-talk interface of ToonTown to the world of normal MMORPGs. The cartoony models focus on looks, and try to market to both girls and boys with pets and clothes for the female player and a card game for the boys. The card game is incredibly expensive compared to others on the market, giving 3 cards for $10. Any other game you can find that has an online component has at least 10-15 cards for $10. The way this is pitched is that it is not just cards, but you also get an in-game item that has nothing to do with the cards (usually a pet) as well, but I see this getting changed very quickly as it is unreasonably expensive.

The game is fairly pacifistic, with the vast majority of the jobs being non-combat related. They are all very heavy in the grind mentality though, which does not seem like a long term struggle. I could not see either of my kids deciding to play another 500 rounds of Bejeweled just to get a level in miner (which is how many rounds it currently takes, by the way), as you just vendor the ore. The combat jobs, the ones that were open, are decent, but one job, the Ninja has so few quests that you must chain kill for hours to gain a level. Again, typical for the industry for mainstream games, but with this audience, you want to focus on things that keep their attention. The combat itself is fairly boring, and mob AI is lackluster, so much so that I nearly dozed off in several instances. One nice thing about the combat is that in the main game world you will never be attacked, ever. So you can explore all over, and the world is quite beautiful, without ever having to worry about dying. Dying itself is glossed over and called “knocked out” which I must say is appreciated. ToonTown has a similar mechanic, and I’ve always appreciated that difference. No corpse runs here.

So in summary, while I enjoyed many parts of the Free Realms game, based on it launching on Tuesday I cannot recommend it. It is simply not ready. There are many pros of the game I simply did not mention (maybe I’ll write up some more tomorrow) and many cons as well. The game needs at least another month of beta, and much more testing, especially on what they are going to charge for, the member items. If I was a new player, and ended up paying for the member services, I would expect to get them. Without them being tested, in bulk not just internally, they will have bugs. Game-ending bugs? No one knows yet, but this sudden launch, which is apparently not even the developer’s wishes by the tones of their posts, may likely be one of the worst business decisions made by Sony in recent times. This is a very deep but unforgiving demographic they are targeting, one that has many many free options out there. They must market a superior product if they wish to succeed.

Oz Does Free Realms Beta is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

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One down, two to go.

- Ethic

ToonTown Learns A Lesson is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

We met at a nice steakhouse and the meal was fantastic. The conversation was pleasant and typical. Until the nerd-fest broke loose.

The kids all gathered around playing games as they each had a Nintendo DS. My wife and my brother started discussing World of Warcraft and the differences between high level raiding and casual play. My sisters broke into some rants about various quests available in ToonTown.

And there was me was trying to explain to anyone that would listen how much fun it is to prance through the Shire playing tunes on a lute, trying to demoralize the local wildlife so they quit biting me or performing a happy little song to cheer my fellowship up in The Lord of the Rings Online.

Five years ago, each and every one of them (other than my brother of course) would stare at me like I was speaking in a foreign language. Mom was still presenting this stare so I was at least comforted by that.

The world is changing my friends.

- Ethic

Gamer’s Day is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I logged in and set up a subscription for the account. I hit submit and it sits there for about 5 minutes. Finally I get a message telling me to call a toll-free number for assistance. OK, nevermind – I’ll just make a free 3-day account for him and try the subscription after that expires. Three days later, same problem. They accept PayPal, so I try to pay with that hoping for a better result but I have no such luck. So, I make the call.

The CS person was very nice, even after I told her how disappointed I was about how I had to call in to cancel last time. She went through a few steps, even offered to check and see if my son’s characters still existed on his old account (they didn’t). We decided to activate the new account and use PayPal to pay for it. They even offer a $79 fee for a whole year, not too bad. She takes my info and then asks me for, get this, my PayPal password. WTF. I told her that I cannot give that out and she said it was the only way she could set up my account.

I said no thank you and goodbye. Really Disney, it should not be this hard.

- Ethic

Back to ToonTown. Not. is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Hop onto the website and look for the cancel button. None to be found. Turns out you have to call them to cancel. BAD!

I called to cancel only to hear the all-to-famous phrase, “Your account was just billed for the next month 2 days ago”. BAD!

However, they said I could be refunded since it was within the refund time allowed. They cancelled my account and credited me back for the current statement. GOOD!

- Ethic

Goodbye ToonTown is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

In TT, you can wander around the city streets without fear of bad guys for the most part. However, if you get too close to one, combat will begin. Combat is turn-based and pretty simple. You pick which attack (called gags) you want to use and which bad guy (called cogs) to attack, assuming more than one cog. As you use various gags, you gain skills in that type of gag. When the skill reaches a certain point, you will get a better gag (more damage) in that same line. You can get new types of gags by doing missions for various NPCs.

Now during combat, other people can join the battle – up to 4 people total. There is no XP to worry about, but battles do end sooner with more people so I guess you could complain about that part. It could technically slow down your progress gaining new gags, since you used less gags to defeat the cog.

There are a variety of gags, from water (squirt the bad guy!) to pies (hit them with it) to a big feather that allows you to make the other players laugh, which in turn heals them some. You must buy gags in order to use them. You have to have a good quantity of them as each attack used one up.

To buy gags, you play mini-games against other players (or solo if nobody else joins) to win jelly beans. The jelly beans are the currency used to buy more gags. My favorite mini-game is the one where you have to shoot yourself out of a canon into an open-topped water tower. You control where the canon is pointed and the sooner you land in the water the more jelly beans you win. If you miss, you splat onto the ground and it loads you back into the canon for another try.

One of my favorite things in TT was the housing. Every player starts with a house and all players on your account (you can have 6) share the same neighborhood. Your can decorate your house with items purchased through the catalog, which you access from the telephone in your house. You can move and rotate where items are placed. You have a piggy bank that you can store extra jelly beans in, and a closet for extra clothes. You can enter any of the homes in your neighborhood (since they are all the same account) and walk around. You can even try on the other person’s clothes. You cannot take anything from their house, or rearrange their furniture. There is a pet of some sort wandering around the neighborhood that you can feed and take care of. Eventually, you can call him to a battle where he *may* help you out.

Chat is interesting in that they provide ready-made phrases for you. It is all in drop down menus, you drill down to what you want to say. They even provide more advanced phrases you can buy with jelly beans. It’s great for kids (no vulgarity), and you can get pretty fast at it. There is an option to unlock the chat, but I did not explore that.

If you have a friend in the game and you want to adventure with them, you can instantly travel to them by dropping a “portable hole” on the ground and jumping in. You will appear next to your friend. Makes for easy travel. You can get around the whole game with these portable holes, once you open the area up on the map.

The missions are fairly typical, like defeat 10 “pencil pusher” cogs. One interesting aspect is where you rescue a building. The cogs can take over a building and when they do it turns grey and boring on the outside so you can tell it was taken over. Players can form a team and go in to take it over by defeating the cogs inside. If successful, when you leave the building it turns back into whatever happy, colorful building it was before. Then, if you go into the rescued building, you will see your picture(s) on the wall as the heroes that saved the building. It will stay that way until the cogs take it over again.

They also have fishing and auto racing in the game but I did not try any of it. The Goofy Speedway looks pretty fun though. Honestly, for what I thought was a simple game, there is actually a lot of stuff to do.

I will probably spend some more time playing in the future, but until then: This is “Super Comet Thundertoon”, signing off. If you have any questions, I’ll try to answer them.

- Ethic

ToonTown Tidbits is a post from: Kill Ten Rats