Nine Years of Neopets

If you’ve used the Internet for a significant amount of time, especially in the early 2000’s, if you have a child or a young relative, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of it. Neopets is the virtual pet site that’s been up and running since November 1999.

As of September 14^th, 2010, I’ve been on the site for nine years.

...Rachel. You’re a college student. Why on earth are you playing that game…still?

The short answer is simply that it’s addicting. Is/was. I certainly don’t play it like I used to in elementary/middle school, when I easily blow hours at a time on the site. Nowadays, I couldn’t tell you last time I spent an entire hour in one day with it.

It is a virtual pet site yes, but it’s also a game arcade and a social medium as well. The site has over 180 million accounts today. It’s coming close to having one trillion page views. It’s fantastically popular. The creators were heavily involved, they had accounts of their own and were known to interact with regular users. Many, many "plots" have been spawned since it's inception, some as hunt-and-gather type of things where clues are spread out for you to unlock some secret. Others (my favorites actually), were actual wars where you got to pick a side and fight against baddies to see whose side could get more points. But the site's gone through some massive changes in the last few years. Not all I’ve particularly agreed with or even appreciated, but the general public claims it’s been for the better overall. I don’t keep up with the politics so much anymore, now that I’m in college and I have other stuff to keep myself busy. But I was very active in the day of the sale—when Viacom bought Neopets in 2005. This led to a plethora of changes and a huge spike in users as well as an eventual site-makeover.

One of the biggest changes involved a ton of redraws of pets and the ability to 'customize' them, or dress them with clothes and...stuff. The pets pictured overhead are called "Lupes." The first pet I ever made was a blue Lupe and originally looked like the top one.

I know I’ve taken a couple hiatuses, but somehow, I’ve managed to come back, and I’ve kept the same 2-3 accounts the whole time. (Those unfamiliar with the site, the Neopets Team…the rule makers, essentially, have said that one human being is allowed to have 5 accounts to accommodate all the Neopets you make or adopt.) My first account was made September 14^th, 2001, and my second about six months later. I use the second the most.

Originally, when I was still a little kid, I played the site daily. I made and adopted pets. I opened a shop and sold spare items, I explored far and wide, I played their arcade games so much that I made enough money to buy “paintbrushes” to change the color of my Neopets. When I painted all of the pets on my first account and had 300,000 Neopoints (their currency) I thought I was hot stuff. I might have been in 6^th grade by the time this occurred.

But then...I actually learned some stuff. In the first two years for sure, I taught myself HTML on the free “pet pages” each pet came with. I made up back-stories for my pets. I joined “guilds,” which were essentially just clubs of people, and in my first few years, it was essential to me to be a part of a worthy guild and to socialize with its members. When I turned 13 I played around with their chat boards, which were really more like forums. There, I learned about role-playing for the first time.

In a way, Neopets taught me a lot. So the long answer here is that I keep coming back to the site because I have a nostalgic spot for it. It’s taught me a lot about Internet politics, about business, about how people fuction, about websites, about storytelling. It gave me so much practice in writing and drawing that I’m grateful to have found the place. It is just a game, the pets are just pixels, but when you invest so much time into it all, it becomes more than that. It may just be a website that only exists in the invisible space that is the Internet, but it’s become something of an actual place to me. Of course it’s changed and I’ve not kept up with the news or the politics of it lately, but back in the day, it was like sliced bread. Not only could you play games and be imaginative, but you could meet (presumably) real people who liked it as much as you did.

Again, even though I’m pessimistic and old-fashioned and prefer the old site with its real sidebar (and not this top bar that I still don’t like the organization on), I’m glad its still around. It’s been a pretty great nine years, and I’m perfectly content to keep coming back, even if it’s only to play the arcade games between classes.

Now wait for it...old school ad time!

Donkey Kong Country…Returns

The first time I heard news of this game was on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, of all places. I will admit I didn’t keep up with E3 that well, other than there was some stuff going on about Harry Potter and the 3DS, but those are different apes entirely (haha, see what I did there?).

When I heard them say, “we’re going to play this game” and saw the screen in the background, I was in shock! I had no idea that a worthwhile DK game was in development. I'm still moping about losing my DK64 cartigride and spent a fair amount of last summer playing the original Donkey Kong Country to make up for it.

...and I’ve had my SNES since I was probably 6 or 7, and never had I gotten to the final boss, King K. Rool in the game before. I was tickled. Really, I was just thrilled with the game overall, because it wasn’t so difficult you didn’t want to play it, and it wasn’t so easy that it was boring. What really got my attention for this game was the art and the graphics. The pre-rendered sprites and the beautiful sets blew everything else out of the water in 1994. It was design like this, colorful, imaginative and all and all just good-looking art that originally made me want a career in video games.

Of course I loved the characters as well, and the general gameplay (racing through nature and using parts of the course to advance from point A to B, like the vines and barrels) that made me keep buying Donkey Kong games. I had DK Country and Diddy Kong’s first game for the SNES, one game for the old black and white Gameboy that I’m quite fond of, and then DK64. The original was most definitely my favorite, though I liked the length and complexity of DK64 just as much.

Though the plot of these games might not have always been the best thing (DK, hire some security for your damn bananas if you must), King K. Rool was always a favorite villain. Who would have thought to put crocs up against apes? The games were heavily linked to nature and really, to a certain degree believable. Animals are territorial and are protective of their stuff, and animals fight out in the wild.

So as for this new game…



The geekiness center in my brain just explodes. How many new Zelda games have we gotten in between DK64 and this? At least a couple, right? Donkey Kong was due for a new adventure game. I didn’t even bother with DK Jungle Blast because I’m leery of buying specialized controllers, and the controls plus game just didn’t seem very fun at the time. Then Nintendo started pulling DK out of Mario Party as a playable character, so it seemed like the ape just fell off the radar for a while. Thankfully come November 21st, we’ll be reunited again.

But I’ve got a couple qualms upon watching the demonstration on Late Night. Though it’s nice and traditional, why…is this game for the Wii…a side scroller? The articles I’ve read go on and on about the entire game being rendered in 3D. Why is it I’m not able to explore in every direction, including that third dimension? Boo. Third dimensions tend to make things more interesting and far more open. Red Dead Redemption is being celebrated because of its massively open map that lets players do whatever they so choose. Zelda’s Twilight Princess was so very open. DK64 had a pretty big home world map too, if I recall correctly. Although I suppose if this game wasn’t a side scroller, a lot of that “traditional” feel would be gone. (Also I am reminded that the New Super Mario Bros. was quite a nice game and it too was a side scroller.)

The second potential issue I see is the difficulty of the controls. Maybe it’s just because Jimmy Fallon is a bad gamer or he’s just getting acclimated to the Wii that this looks like a problem. But having to stop and thrash the Wiimotes around to break a crate open or beat up on an enemy seems distracting and difficult and like another enemy could easily come up and kick your tail because you’re not moving when you’re shaking the remote. I dunno. I’ve not actually gotten to play it myself. And then again, I guess that’s what we get for it being on the Wii—the interactive gaming system. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a whole lot of point to this reboot, other than cooperative playing and better graphics, I suppose.

…one more. You took the Kremlings away? Nintendo! I shake my fist at you. Bowser’s been around for sixty trillion years. How dare you axe another beloved villain of the reptilian persuasion?

In the end, I’m sure this is going to end up on my Christmas list and that when I do get my hands on it, it will be the cause of some extreme nostalgia.