For those of you who missed out, I'll give you a quick backstory: It was a cold winter's day back in December of '04. The sun was glistening on fresh banks of snow as far as the eye could see. Out in the distance one could view the most magnificent sight of a lone...
What? Right, right, it was supposed to be a quick backstory. Skipping ahead then: A player made an excited forum post about the game getting reviewed in a magazine. Naturally, I laughed it off, thinking it another attempt by the players to mess with one another. However, the discussion continued and the post was followed up with a transcript of the article. That made it a little more believable, but with these rugrats you never know, so I returned to my meal of roast halfling and put the nonsense out of my mind. Days later, I found myself at Barnes & Noble buying a pile of books, as I'm known to do. On a whim, I walked over to the magazine section and began rummaging around looking for this Game Informer magazine containing the alleged article. At first, the magazine was nowhere to be found and I was about to walk away, but then...
What's that? This isn't getting to the point any quicker you say? All of this is just pointless little details that nobody cares about? Well I never... oh, all right, you win. The point is I found the article, scanned it into my computer, and posted it on the forums for players to see. Not very exciting and I know you don't care. Honestly, I don't either, but I just filled up another paragraph on this blog that would've worked fine just having had the pictures and nothing else. Ha! Ha! My plan to bore you all to death is working perfectly!
Okay, fine, fine, I'm done with the insanity (for now). I'll leave you with two more images (below). To give a complete picture I photographed the magazine cover and the page that the article was on. As you can see it's nothing huge, but I found it interesting that one of the players I was talking to yesterday came to the game this year (2008) because of the article. He had noticed it back when it came out but ignored it until recently, so it's still having an effect, and it's a nice little thing that adds a bit of notability to Wyvern.
Plus, it's so minor that the Game Informer website doesn't mention it on its website under the details for this issue, so I figured, hey, it deserves to be documented somewhere and what better place then among my ramblings? No really, tell me of a better place. It deserves much more than this dinky little blog. If it could talk it would be screaming for help right this second. And wait, I think it's actually doing that. Yes. Yes! I can hear it! I can... oh, my bad. That's just another voice in my head, trying to mess with me... great, now he's laughing at me. Well he's not getting the last laugh. No, sir!
Transcript
Maybe you don't like the time investment required for EverQuest, or superheroes aren't your bag and you've no inclination to live in a city of them. And if you think about it, paying twelve to fifteen bucks a month to play a game can be a lot of money. Well, if these statements echo your own feelings and Kingdom of Loathing is too sarcastic for you, Wyvern might tickle your fancybone. With a style very reminiscent of the delightful Exile series (if you don't know about Exile, it's your loss), this completely free MMORPG has a lot to offer. And there are even MacOS and Linux clients available!
Wyvern is a classic western fantasy to the core. It's also tiny and can probably even run on your grandma's Pentium-60. It's got deep character customization, plenty of dungeons to adventure through, and a welcoming online community. The only downside is that it looks an awful lot like an NES game. But we guarantee that shiny $50 bill you didn't spend will help ease the pain of these primitive graphics (although the creators would surely appreciate any support you give them, since they're paying for the bandwidth costs out of their own pockets).
Though Wyvern is very clearly rooted in the glory days of text MUDing (you can play it just like a MUD, simply typing in commands and moving with the arrow keys), it also has a surprisingly easy to use graphical interface. Anyone who's familiar with the concept of right clicking to open a contextual menu should pick it up pretty quickly. Wyvern is still in beta, but the plan is to keep it free even when it becomes final (or as final as an online game ever is, what with updates and content additions and such). And at that price, it's definitely worth the 18MB download.
In Other News
By the way, your friendly neighborhood wizards are planning something BIG (I kid you not) and to wet your appetites I might just make a blog post next month that slightly scratches the surface of what it will be. But you have to good little boys and girls. Otherwise I may just have to sacrifice Mr. Wiggles to the monster that lives under your bed and we don't want that, now do we? Well... maybe you don't. Mwuahahaha!
But seriously, it's legitimately very exciting that I'm sure you're all going to love it once you know what it is. Stay tuned!
