The first thing that I was greeted with when attempting to start the game was, naturally, the Second Life website. The site looked straight out of the early 2000's, and besides some facebook integration I could tell that the site was more or less the same as it has always been.
At first I wasn't able to get the game running on my system. Although the developers do maintain a Linux version of the client, it didn't want to work with my setup. Eventually I managed to get it... mostly working. I say "mostly", since I'm not sure whether the bugs I have are just issues with my system, or genuine problems with the ancient software the game uses.
Anyway - when I finally logged in, I was greeted with the tutorial area, like this;
For a while I thought there just wasn't supposed to be sound; I knew that the game had voice chat, but for whatever reason neither my headphones nor my mic were being picked up by the game. I didn't hear the background music, or anything. After walking around for a little bit I found the settings and noticed that, yup, the game audio just wasn't working.
Eventually I got a notification to add an area to my landmarks, and then teleported to it. The game was lagging horribly, even on my high-end system (I was running the game in my second monitor, that's why it has a lower resolution). Eventually, for whatever reason, my character started floating and just randomly flew off in a random direction - clipping through the worlds geometry.
Eventually I noticed the "Stop Flying" button, but even after making sure that I wasn't pushing the buttons that would cause you to give your best Superman impression...
I ended up in the air again.
I can only assume that most of the game's regular chat goes through VOIP, and thus I wasn't able to hear most of it - but regardless, the bits and pieces of text I did see were just hello and ok, and other such small talk. I did have someone add me as a friend earlier in the tutorial, but I can only assume they got tired of the lag before long and I was left high and dry with literally no one to talk too - not that the psuedo-web browser UI makes it very easy to figure out how to use text chat with people.
I tried to consult the help browser, but that ended up being a total waste of time.
I can't say that I see anything in this game. If you asked me to write about the "second worlds" of the internet, I'd probably have more that I could tell you about JanusVR - at least that seems to work a lot better than Second Life here.
