MMO

It's a World of Warcraft screenshot, right? Well, no -- it's a screenshot from WTF?!, a Flash-based sidescroller parodying WoW. And it's note-perfect, too -- every interface element and the backgrounds and characters look like they're ripped straight from Azeroth.

Let's face it, money is as imaginary as time. The only difference between the cash in your pocket and the Monopoly bills buried in a cardboard box at the family lake house is this: your government mandates that the cash is accepted for all debts, public and private. In other words, it has value because they say so.

When you’re first acquainted with Twilight Heroes, it may seem a bit...well, average. In all respects, it looks a bit like a low-fi ripoff of Kingdom of Loathing. After a little while with the game, though, you learn that this isn’t true at all.

The basic structure is the same. You use up adventures/turns in different areas, fighting monsters with neat pictures and funny text. The similarities stop there, though. Twilight Heroes has a much darker and more serious feel to it; there are still jokes, of course, but your avatar and his enemies take themselves much more seriously-which isn’t a bad thing. The art is different, too; instead of relying of simple art to convey things, Ryme, the creator and admin of the game, takes ordinary photos and warps them in Photoshop, creating images that can, at times, be downright creepy.

In Kingdom of Loathing, players take the role of a loosely-defined “adventurer” to save King Ralph XI from the evil Naughty Sorceress. Along the way, you’ll fight such monsters as Sk8 Gnomes, Goth Giants, and Racecar Bob.

It sounds stupid, I know, but KoL is actually a very funny game. Originally designed by Zach “Jick” Johnson, the game uses his simplistic stick figure art. That, in addition to the extremely witty jokes, are some of the major draws to the game.

Will the real H.P. Lovecraft please stand up? One of the following three descriptions is from an H. P. Lovecraft story. The only thing changed in that sentence was the tense so that it would read in the present tense, just like descriptions in a game. The other two are from Lovecraft Country: Arkham By Night, a text-based game--a multi-user experience, if you will--available on the Skotos Network as part of a package of games. The package may be the best monthly expenditure on entertainment this side of Netflix. But that is a decision you'll have to make at a later point. Right now, you have to decide which is vintage Lovecraft and which is web-age Lovecraft. Is it a, b or c?