Very favorable article can be found here....
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/21/te...ts/21game.html
Clipped section below:
Ultima Online, EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot and many other games have left me bored and confused, but I finally found the compelling persistent-world experience I sought. It was, surprisingly, a role-playing game, and even more surprisingly, one designed for children.
In Disney's Toontown, your goal is to protect your cartoon world from the encroachment of "cogs," evil robotic Corporate Raiders, Pencil Pushers and Spin Doctors who are turning Toontown's colorful buildings gray and cold. You wield cream pies and water-squirting flowers against Sellbots, who can freeze your assets, and Cold Callers, who can attack you with the pound key. These fights take place in colorful neighborhoods like Melodyland, where the streets look like piano keyboards and the trees bear musical notes.
Toontown is colorful, imaginative and easy to learn. Character building is simple, and the player's experience is rewarded often with improved skills and weapons. Battle takes place in turns, allowing for some strategy.
Combining similar weapons can result in more powerful attacks, so if you are fighting alongside other players, one can suggest a water attack and then everyone can pull out a seltzer bottle and squirt gun to douse a cog. Assembling a party of players to do battle is relatively simple, and if you're by yourself and see someone else fighting, you can walk up and join in. If you can gather enough strong players, you can enter one of the cogs' corporate strongholds, where workers in look-alike cubicles witness your battles.
In many ways, Toontown is limited. You cannot, for example, have a real conversation with another player. The dangers of exposing children to unsupervised Internet messaging are avoided by making conversations menu-driven, although there is a mechanism to allow friends to chat if they arrange to do so in the real world. You also must create your character's name from a selection of titles and nonsense words, although the choices are broad enough to allow for names like Queen Bubbles Googlescooter and Bebop Twinkletoes.
Games like Galaxies give you more options, more ways to build your character and the ability to create a complete world and socialize with players, but while in theory I can see their appeal, in practice I get bored and stop playing. A game that combines Toontown's imagination and intuitive structure with the more advanced features of Galaxies might pull me into the world of adult persistent-world games, but for now, I've decided to make my home in Toontown. If you're ever there, come by for a visit. Just ask for Captain Zooblefink.