[bad soda]

(edit:  click the picture of the title or visit ikariam.com if you’re interested after reading the article)

At work yesterday I was dragged into a one-way conversation with a customer about some crazy new computer game he was playing. He went on and on and I drifted in and out of interest; most of what he was tossing my way was typical of the kinds of characters I run into at Gamestop: rabidly eager to interest me (or anyone listening) in their newest obsession but painfully unable to describe it to the uninitiated. Most of the time it’s World of Warcraft, with some crazy throwing out statistics like “20.7 crit ratio” or name-dropping things like “Outlands” or “purple.” This time it was a game called Ikariam.

From what I could catch before I was subjected to more bold claims of pwnage was that Ikariam was some kind of MMO that played like a Civilization game and was absolutely free to play and completely browser-based (ergo no skeptical or lengthy download). To be completely fair to him, I am paid to act interested (and in this case and many others I genuinely am interested, if only because I like video games or because people are intriguing). Regardless, this was free and harmless so I gave it a shot.

While I’ve really only barely got my feet wet, so far it seems like a real winner. It’s more than fun enough to get around to, it’s actually worth playing right now. It is as described: a Civilization-style MMO that is free to play and is played directly from the browser. I was looking at my town hall within five minutes of getting to the site. It’s nice to see a registration that doesn’t give a f!@# about anything that’s not a username, password or email; and even better: you’re right into the game seconds after registering, since there are some kind of Fun Experts working at Gameforge who decided that they can wait a few days for you to finish your email verification nonsense and you can you know, just play first.

The visuals are vibrant and have a lot of character, blatantly going for Civilization imitation but pulling it off well. Animations are, so far, practically non-existent but the presentation is impressive enough to not dwell on it. Menus are fairly intuitive and there is a great “First Steps” link that guided me through the initial steps of play without feeling like an tutorial taskmaster.

The elements that make up the game are skeletal in comparison to massive titles like Age of Empires or Civilization, but it’s played on a completely different scale. The tasks in this game like “Build Barracks” or “Train Swordsman” don’t take 90 seconds, they take hours. Real hours. There is also a severe limit to how much can be accomplished at once, which means after clicking three times you may not need check back for another 30 minutes, maybe not for another 2 days. Clearly at higher levels of play this may be different, especially if there is a war to be waged, but basically this game has taken about 20 non-consecutive minutes out of my day, but I feel like I’ve been accomplishing tasks for the entire 24 hours since I joined. My units are gather resources, researching advancements, upgrading buildings, training experts and multiplying right now.

The only significant disappointment so far is that this is exactly the kind of game that would be bomb-dropping amazing on a Wi-fi ready handheld like the PSP or DS. The DS set up would be perfect, but with Nintendo’s wacky and incomprehensible “Friend Code” based online it’s pretty much impossible but the PSP has no such issues. It would at least look gorgeous on the PSP as well, even if missing a touch screen would make navigation more irritating. Right now it’s not 100% incompatible with my PSP browser but it may as well be, since it runs like every other webpage: ugly as hell and excruciatingly slow.

Ikariam fills an otherwise unoccupied niche for me, and feels like an innovative, high-quality approach to the “casual gaming” arena that seems to be the “it” thing for smaller publishers right now. If I could take this with me, say on my PSP, I think it could really grab up a ton of sales and new players.