I’m just here to bring joy and melt your brain.

Not necessarily in that order. I have a lot to talk about and I just have to put it down in the blog, and I guarantee both joy and brain melting.

I’ll talk about the NFT and crypto stuff later. I know I promised I was done with it, but the world isn’t done with it so… here we are but who cares about that because FREE REALMS? IS COMING BACK???

Free Realms was gonna be the place to be, back in the day. Bands would play live there, there was exploring to do and a dozen different character classes — like Chef, Fisher, Miner, etc and everything was a minigame and everything was fun, but perhaps, not super profitable, as this late stage MMO from EverQuest devs Sony Online Entertainment was one of the many shuttered or discontinued as the company realigned itself to focus on its most profitable games.

But, maybe, it was just a little ahead of its time. Now, in a world where battle royale games like Fortnite sell skins and have dance parties in game, watch movies together and have bands play live, Free Realms doesn’t seem so out there. Maybe whomever holds the rights to the game should bring it back. But in the absence of that, there is FR Sunrise, a fan project that aims to reimplement the entirety of Free Realms from scratch and I don’t know HOW this is done either practically or legally, but here we are.

FR Sunrise is, like other fan MMO projects (for instance: EQ Online Adventures, Project: 1999, etc) just providing the server side of the game. The client side, that contains all the art assets and stuff, is not provided. The problem with this is that this was a free-to-play game that had browser integration — the game downloaded itself in the background as you played, and there never was a game disk to buy. I’m not sure where anyone would get the game client files now — I sure don’t have them?

I took a little look around the high seas and didn’t see any there so…. I imagine they’ll turn up, somehow, at some point. I did see some online petitions for Daybreak to release the assets.

Shawn Lord, ex-EQ Dev and loving robot interviewer of old EverQuest personalities is developing Monsters & Memories along with a team of retro gaming vets as a true homage to the original EverQuest, but with newer tech.

Their latest update goes over the work they’ve been doing in character and monster art and to say this reminds me of the original EverQuest’s low poly aesthetic would be an understatement. I’m down for it.

I’ve been following this game casually for some time, and it doesn’t appear to be anywhere near to release, but I like how they think about the game. It’s true that Pantheon is hitting some of the same notes, but I’m sure there’s room for more than one re-imagined EverQuest in the world. I’m sure Shards of Dalaya doesn’t mind sharing. (Bet you forgot about Shards of Dalaya — admit it 🙂

I love Atari — I really do. The things they come up with — they were way ahead on NFTs, assuming people would love to pay tens of thousands of dollars for an electronic receipt that points to a picture of a spinning game cartridge box that the buyer doesn’t actually own. They relaunched the original Atari 2600 VCS as a Linux computer that can’t play the original cartridges, though you can buy games inspired by the original home and arcade games.

And now, under the name Atari XP, they are releasing some games that have been released in various ways since the death of the original Atari in new, plastic cartridges that cannot be played on their Atari VCS, though they are also giving digital versions that CAN be played on their Atari VCS.

I looked and happened to have Saboteur as one of the hundreds of ROMs that came with the Stella Atari 2600 emulator. It’s okay. A rocket is going to blast off, and you have to stop it by killing aliens and not killing sneaker-wearing baby chickens(?). Kill enough aliens and you get to face off against the rocket, and it repeats after that.

The other two, Yars’ Return (ROM hack sequel to the famous Yars’ Revenge) and Aquaventure aren’t in that Stella library. All three were released as in volume 3 of Atari’s Flashback Classics, which are available on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. I’m looking at the store page right now. If you really need to play these games, you can play them using a modern controller that doesn’t hurt your hands, right now, for $20.

But none of them seemed to have been official cartridge releases from the Atari-That-Was, and that’s what you’re buying here. $50 gets you one of the three games delivered in time for Christmas, or you can choose to spend $150 for the limited edition with a better cartridge and some swag for sometime next year.

People who buy this aren’t buying this because they want to play the games, and likely will never even open the box (because opening boxes drops the value).

I get collectibles, I do. I even feel a lot of nostalgia for the Atari 2600, but then again, I still have them all in a box in the cellar, ready to play again if I ever bought one of those retro consoles. But I don’t really feel the need.

Crypto dipped Tuesday and was still getting back to its feet today, Wednesday. For awhile, I was down a few bucks, but it wasn’t my Bitcoin or Ethereum that was hurting me the most; it was that stupid Shiba Inu coin. I bought it as a joke with funny money when all the hype happened, but I missed the peak and it just keeps losing money. I traded it all for Tether (a coin “tethered” to the US dollar), and then while I was looking to see if I could directly trade Atari Tokens without having to figure out smart contracts, I noticed I could buy the Axie Infinity token. So I cashed in all my Tether and used it to buy Axie Infinity. I can’t afford to play the game, of course, but I’m hoping I can take money away from those people who do. Unfortunately, I look to have done another Shiba and missed the token’s peak. But I’ll keep an eye on it. I made some more funny money yesterday so it’s not costing me anything.

Okay, that was enough joy. Now, let’s melt some brains.

You can’t take a sword from World of Warcraft and bring it into Final Fantasy XIV, and that cute robe you found in Old School Runescape can’t be brought with you to Black Desert Online. But… what if it could?

The Loot Project aims to circumvent the process by allowing you to mint adventurer loot (and perhaps actual adventurers) on the block chain, and then take that loot with you to games that support the scheme. The items are given a rarity, a power level, and a name — and that’s it. How each individual game interprets those values is up to the game, but this loot is yours, and can be traded to other adventurers outside the game. Completing sets actually allows you to resurrect one of a limited number of original “Genesis” adventurers who, according to the lore, once carried the loot you now possess. Perhaps they died defending it, and you found it scattered about. Perhaps they willed it to their descendants, and you, generations removed, now set forth with the hereditary gear of your family.

It’s actually… really clever and I love it.

Here’s an example of the “free” loot — generated using my unique Ethereum wallet address as a random number seed:

It’s kind of cute, and it was free — all you need to get it is an Ethereum wallet address. What’s in the book? Why is my ring angry? What do my leather boots detect? I hope its cats, in the dark.

But, none of this stuff can be transferred to anyone. It’s tied to my wallet forever.

So, the next step up is “mLoot” — this is more-or-less free loot that is minted in their Ethereum smart contract. Each pack gives you an item for every slot. The prices on those range from 0.0003 ETH — a couple of bucks at current prices — to infinity. No, seriously. Some have priced their adventurers at all the money. I’m not sure how to get one of my own — they are supposedly able to be claimed for just the ETH gas fees (which can be cheap if you’re willing to wait a couple weeks for the transaction to go through), but I found no way of doing that.

Buying these loot bags and then trading with others to get a complete set allows you to somehow combine those to resurrect an “OG” adventurer. So this is the game, here — each item in the loot bag you buy has its own item ID, and you can use the smart contract to transfer these to other people in return for their payment or items — it’s built into the smart contract. I’m not seeing an item marketplace, but perhaps the smart contract IS the marketplace. It sits out there until someone gives it what it wants, and then it performs the transfer and dismisses itself.

So if you’re lucky, you’ll be able to collect an entire set and resurrect an OG adventurer for a hundred bucks or so. Not really sure how much in total it would cost. Could be a few hundred.

OR… you could just buy someone else’s OG resurrected adventurer and their loot — prices start at 2 ETH (call it $10,000 USD approximately) and go up from there. Either way you get an OG adventurer, you get admitted to a special club with lots of benefits if you want to dive deeply into the lore.

I’m probably getting this all wrong, but that’s the Joy and Brain Melting part of it.

This is why I can’t believe cryptogaming will ever hit the mainstream — it’s just SO EXPENSIVE. And in this case, it requires a lot of technical knowledge about Ethereum smart contracts that I don’t think too many people will really be willing to acquire without feeling like they are being ripped off in some unknowable scam.

I wrote awhile back about making sure any cryptogame I played had an exit strategy where I could get paid and get out of the game before I lost anything. This game does let you sell what you’ve got. I don’t know how many buyers are out there. If a lot of games start allowing the importing of items from the Loot Project, then I can see the value of these things going up. But right now, that is far from a thing in general, and the prices are already out of my reach — and I am a gamer with a decent job.

In the end, it’s probably going to be like every other cryptogaming project — just another Ponzi scheme favoring the early adopters. By the time I heard about it, it was already too late.

At least I can potentially make some money off the Axie Infinity players.