For my freshman year English class at Drexel University this past year, I was tasked with writing a case study detailing a problem surrounding one of six topics and providing possible solutions for it. I chose to write about Second Life and how so few people actually play it. We were supposed to provide evidence of our research, and I decided that the best way to do this would be to play a bit of Second Life and take screenshots. The following is what I came up with.
I apologize in advance for the fact that I was unable to resize the pictures... stupid Dtoid BBCode restrictions.


Welcome to DRAXL ISLAND



Editing an avatar...



There are sliders to adjust pretty much every part of the body.



Such as the size of your avatar's eyes, for instance.



WOLL SMOTH:



Two unedited avatars just chilling...



The same two after a round of avatar customization...



You can attach pretty much any object you have to any body part. Here I attached a wooden box to my skull.



I ACCIDENTALLY A WHOLE COCA-COLA MACHINE. IS THIS BAD?



You can perform all sorts of gestures. This one is called play dead. The animations look weird when you've got stuff attached to you.



So I decided to actually be useful and make some legit character designs like someone who actually cares.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce my two new character models: Spike Jones...



...and Negro Jones!



Negro Jones is very professional.



Hey look, a house on a platform in the sky...



Now it's time for an impromptu lesson on creating objects!

Make sure you DON'T check the "Allow anyone to move" box. You don't want anyone going anywhere with your creation, do you?



As you can see, I've just created a big wooden... roundish... thing...



And now we move it over into the house...



Yep. No one is getting in there!



And now we fly away. We'll let the owner of the house enjoy our creation in private whenever they get back.

This is exactly why so many people stop using Second Life.



Today, on the continuing adventures of Spike Jones, it would seem that I have found the Hells Biker Homeland.

It also appears to be vulture country...



What a lovely jpeg of NYC!



Oh no, it would also seem that the Hells Biker Homeland is giant octopus country as well.



As it turns out, the Hells Biker Homeland has a pretty sweet nightclub. I can even DJ!



THIS LOOKS LIKE A JOB FOR...



NEGRO JONES!


Awww, yeah. Negro Jones gonna bring down the houuuuuuuuse!



Too bad there's nobody else here...

:(

I was reading Rev. Anthony's "Games Time Forgot" and it got me thinking. The games he writes about may have been forgotten by time, but they haven't been lost completely. Somebody remembers them - if they didn't, Anthony wouldn't be writing about them. But what about those games that have disappeared altogether? Has there ever been a game that you remember playing years ago, the name of which you have long since forgotten, that no matter how hard you search you are unable to find even a single record of it ever having existed?

Almost ten years ago, back when my computer was still running Windows 2000, my dad brought home a CD of hundreds of old freeware and shareware games from the Apogee and Accolade era. They weren't all that old at the time. Let me tell you, this collection had everything. It had Crystal Caves, Epic Pinball, Duke Nukem I and II, and a bunch of shitty DOS-based card games. It had Jill of the Jungle, Spear of Destiny, Raptor: Call of the Shadows, Secret Agent, Balloon Challenge, and a number of the Commander Keen games. There were games enough to last me a lifetime.



One of the games that captivated me the most was a top-down 2D space game, similar to Star Hammer. I hesitate to call it a space shooter because while it did include all the elements of a space shooter, it was much more than that. The game was set in an vast 2D universe. In order to keep track of where you were, the universe utilized the Cartesian coordinate system with the sun at the center of your solar system set as the origin. The player could fly around to different planets and take jobs from their inhabitants. Often the jobs would entail finding a ship or another planet within a certain range of coordinates and then negotiating with or destroying them before returning to the planet that originally gave you the job to get your reward. I distinctly remember that the universe was so vast, in fact, that flying to one of the coordinates I was supposed to go to took me at least an hour in real time, not including my stops at many of the planets I came across on the way there. The last mission I can remember had me flying across to the other side of the galaxy to find some kind of warp cloud or wormhole that sent me to a new part of the universe and marked the end of the shareware portion of the game.



One day I came home from school to find that my dad had "upgraded" our computer to Windows ME and that none of the games on the CD worked anymore. After that, I put the CD away somewhere and forgot all about it. Gradually, the name of that game that I had once enjoyed so much faded from my memory. A couple of years ago something made me remember the experience, and I began my search to find the game once again. Try as I might, however, scouring the internets high and low has proved fruitless. It's almost as if the game never existed. There's not one screenshot from it that I can find on the internet. That's all it would take - I'm sure of it. A single screenshot and I would know that I'd found it. Until then, my search must continue. In the words of Tim Allen, "NEVER GIVE UP! NEVER SURRENDER!"







Sorry if I tend to ramble. This is my first c-blog, so if I'm doing it wrong, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know so I can avoid doing it wrong next time.