Stalking Venus

If you’ve ever hacked-and-slashed your way through the mind-numbing tedium of an online roleplaying game, even one as good as World of Warcraft, you’ll like this. Greg Costikyan, has designed and developed a parody of WoW that fondly takes the piss out of the entire genre.

He’s created a flash-based side-scrolling game with his tongue placed firmly in his cheek and a satirical glitter in his eye.

So say the experts anyway… I can’t get the thing to work. I don’t know if it’s because the site has recently been BoingBoinged or if it’s just because I live in South Africa where anything remotely first-world in the way of technology is hoarded by the corporate whores the same way as KY at a gay frat-house slumber party.

But I digress…

If it were satire alone, it would probably quickly grow boring and old, but the storyline is (supposedly) enough to keep most people interested until the end. As Greg says:

It’s a World of Warcraft screenshot, right? Well, no — it’s a screenshot from WTF?!, a Flash-based sidescroller parodying WoW. And it’s note-perfect, too — every interface element and the backgrounds and characters look like they’re ripped straight from Azeroth.

The gameplay is pretty similar, too, for all that this is a sidescroller — the same tedious level-grind, based on the same sort of tedious quests (”go kill seven sheep”). But the satirical way it treats that level-grind is priceless, a telling commentary on the common tropes of the MMO.

Oh, and it’s FREE! Here’s the link.

Source: Play This Thing via BoingBoing

(Update: The game works, but not in Firefox 3 beta. I haven’t tried other versions of Firefox, but it works in Internet Explorer 7.)