Sociotown: Plays well with others

In SocioTown, the latest MMO from Outside the Box, developers are putting an entirely new spin on defining your own game. In fact, they’re letting you define exactly who can and cannot occupy your game space–and quickly. With the choice to toss out, punch out, or bat out any offending players, you don’t need a second thought or even a reason for being rude. If WoW implemented some similar immediate-batting abilities say, for funeral crashers, maybe the world of MMOs would be a happier, or rather more mournful, place.

Sociotown is an in-browser game that’s a mix between The Sims and Second Life, perhaps with a dash of Facebook. What makes it different? Well, the fact that it plays with Adobe Shockwave and requires absolutely no downloads means it caters to an audience different from the stereotypical gamer. Probably younger, probably with less means to either a) have a decent gaming computer with a suitable graphics card to run some more recent downloadable online games or b) pay an initial and monthly fee. That said, this game will appeal to a different demographic, but its graphics bring tears to my eyes. Awful, grimey, square-pixeled tears–check out the thumbnail to the right for a closer look.

As far as the beta goes, the nitty-gritty of the programming still needs work; because it is completely browser-based, there are limitations. For example, when customizing a character, each selection takes a second to a second and a half to load. This may not seem like much, but when you just want to scroll through a large number of selections, there really shouldn’t be a loadtime. Also, there’s only three hair colors, none of which are black (my inner “I want a barbie doll that looks like me” trigger goes off). When you compare it to something like The Sims 2, in which you can customize every component of your Sim’s appearance, down to the tilt of the nose, it’s absolutely unimpressive. One of my major qualms is with the fixed camera angle: this would be fine if the camera was actually intelligent or intuitive. But when you right-click to choose which way your character looks, the camera spins around so that you see everything behind you and have no idea which way you’re going. If you can get past the dodgy controls and camera, this game could prove to be fun.

Essentially, you begin the game as a convict. Strange for a game targeted at youth? Perhaps. Then, through some dialogue that needs to be run through a spellcheck, you get out of jail and find your “sponsor,” which is a person who helps direct you on what seem to be quests. You can also buy an apartment (which has a monthly fee), talk to random people, play music—whatever and however you want to play. There seems to be quite a bit to do, but limited in terms of maps; there is one town that’s accessible at the start, and it doesn’t seem easy to access others. Perhaps in the future, there will be the possibility of going elsewhere that doesn’t just seem like a typical downtown area.

Sociotown is selling itself as a social networking game without downloads or a fee, and simply as that it does the job. Mediocre graphics aside, the game has a fairly advanced networking graphical representation that generates from just chatting with others. It categorizes familiar versus new friends. And there are chat bubbles. This might be something you play at work with several other browser windows open. But I wouldn’t count on finding someone your age who isn’t lying about it. With the advent of social networking websites which are racking up huge popularity, such as MySpace, Facebook, and Digg, Sociotown seems to be capitalizing on a growing trend, bringing friends together through the internet, helping people find niches in this big world wide web.

Feeling social? Check out the beta.