It would be rude for me to say we wasted our time reviewing Lost City, but in all honesty, it wasn’t worth our time. To begin with, our goal here at FTBkthx is to review roleplaying sims that have the complete package of brains, beauty, and brawn. Lost City missed the mark on brains and beauty, but doubled the amount of brawn. It was like watching a bumper car rally while getting hit in the head with a frying pan, or in other words, people bashed about like lunatics while our brains were melting out through our noses. But no matter how bad our experiences were in this sim, it has been decided that a review is necessary, and here it is.
Let’s start with the positive about Lost City: the sim is beautiful. Created by a myriad of builders, the sim is simple but pretty which scores high for us. Dear Nausea had no trouble loading the entire sim on his slow laptop, and was even able to navigate the grid like streets with ease and little lag. Easy to navigate, plenty of room, and lots of haunted buildings give this sim a great atmosphere for roleplay. There are even two residential sims attached that allow players to relax in comfort away from the hustle and bustle of the city traffic.
When I first reached the sim, I was bombarded by a pop-up menu with notecards full of rules. These notecards were well typed, well organized, and well versed, giving me a hopeful sign that the sim would be a winner. It was only until I began to interact with the masses at Lost City that I realized how fake these pretentious notecards were. To begin with there was no notecard involving any type of storyline, and even the website didn’t show that there was a storyline. How can you have so many people roleplaying so many races, but not have a simple storyline to even detail the date and time or background or important facts about the city? Not that this stopped us from trying to roleplay, but it did leave us lost in a sea of humanoids.
Once we approached the throng of humans, we were shocked to hear OOC chatter. After ten minutes, we came to realize that one woman’s “omg that’s mean!!!” wasn’t actually OOC (hence the no brackets), but was actually her RPing. They were all emoting like this: one line, net speak, too much punctuation, and no brain cells used at all. Maybe this is what has become of roleplaying online, or maybe this is just were the lonely club hunters now go to waste time and listen to bad DJs (oh yes, there were a few bad DJs there too!). The three of us stood there for quite some time, sharing a few one liners of our own, before finally giving up all hope.
So if you want a place to camp at with a combat meter on and some meaningless drivel, then I would recommend Lost City. But don’t pretend to call yourself a serious roleplayer. Some of us still try to type complete paragraphs, even if they are full of run-on sentences and fragments.
