ToonTown in New York Times Article

[Whut-Cha]

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.

[Super Flappy]

That link requires registration. Here's another link, via Google, that does not.

[Iggie]

Woo woo! Let's hear it for the dude from NY TImes choosing Toontown as his online home! :-)

[Bellota]

Heh, I liked galaxies in beta, but I want a more stable job before I start playing more than one MMORPG at once. Toontown has the advantage of being cheaper than the others.

[Coganator]

This person hit the point right on the money.

"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"

If someone design a game like this for adults, Big time Money!!!!

[Loosy Goosy]

Originally posted by Coganator
If someone design a game like this for adults, Big time Money!!!!

I agree 120%. Gamers are getting older and with that comes
adult fancy. The biggest problem is knowing for sure no youngin's
can get in.

BTW Whut-cha!!! How are ya?

[Bellota]

Actually, something I'd almost be ready to suggest would be a group of "adult" servers that an account would need to activate before a toon could go in. (You know how secrets have to be activated by an adult before they can be used? Same thing.) In such a place, it would be "secrets" for all. (Speedchat would still be there, but it wouldn't be a requirement.)

Toontown on it's own stands rather well in gameplay to attract adults as it is. Why fix something that ain't broke?

Back to the article, I have a feeling that the guy's experience with fighting in Star Wars galaxies probably wasn't what he was thinking it was. You can (and sometimes need) to run around enemies and type out commands while fighting in SWG. If you don't, you'll get your butt kicked. ^^;