Second Life (PC Games, 2003)

Want to do stuff you wouldn't dare do in your current life? Want your dream job but never have to leave your house to do it? Want to build a world in your own image? Second Life from Linden Labs provides this for you and more as well at the price of FREE!

Second Life the next generation in internet chat puts a spin on the whole experience with a Virtual Reality style Game that allows its user to pretty much do anything they want. Instead of the old text on the screen, your presence in this online world is projected as an avatar. Your avatar is fully customizable in every way imaginable.

Want that special look for your avatar? You can either buy clothing, skins, animations, and attachments (like glasses, jewelry, or even wings!) for use on your avatar or if you believe you have the skill, you can make them yourself!

Want to build your dream house? You can do it with the build in Design Tool set. Allowing for the user to use multiple primitive shapes to mold, twist and pull as you please in order to design elegant structures or even attachments for your avatar. Not as extensive as a first person video game tool set but it does the trick.

Extending the ability to build objects, you can as well add custom scripts programmed in the scripting language developed by Linden Labs called Linden Scripting Language (LSL). This scripting language is fairly easy for the beginning programmer to learn. It also includes a huge amount of libraries ready for import and use in your own scripts. Make a gun, a car that move, bling for that jewelry piece, games, and more with this innovative language. Something no other game has!

As with most MMO games, this game features its' own currency. One thing i can say is Linden Labs has a fetish about Linden this and that. The in game currency is called Lindens (L$). Along with that the employees and helpers in the game all have the last name Linden. Enough about the Linden fetish back to the point. Lindens are managed by a full market system in the game and a backend called the Linden Exchange (LindenX). This is a full economy market allowing for transfer from L$ to USD ($). Real time statistics change the values all the time. Usually around 250-300 L$ = 1 USD which can be converted by premium accounts with a small fee of 1USD to a PayPal account transfer.

This game allows free movement of the character and you can even fly! First person and third person views but 1st person is not suggested, makes it hard to get around. You can teleport instantly to any other server on the grid as well. Search features for about everything are included.

Now for the cons. At the time of this writing, the game has gone through multiple updates. Client updates often. The lag in the game went from nil in August 2006 to sometimes unbearable in Feb 2007. The user base sky rocketed from about 100K users to 3M users in those months. This put stress on the old servers and network making the game rather unplayable. If you can deal with this since the game is free to play and download, then you are gold. Currently Linden Labs is working to fix these issues and i can see this game taking off.

One word of advice, if you are not into the chance of being asked for cyber sex, don't like people that much, or can't stand Furry then this game is not for you at all and I suggest you leaving it at that. If you can handle that join us in the fun.

You can look me up in the game username Erus Townsend