Time of Transition

Hello everyone!

Well, it's been a pretty exciting week for me. Lots of things have happened, and a lot of them are related to what I am about to say in this post.

So, when I came back to WCC after my few months of absence, one of the first things I did was to put up a poll, which ten readers voted on (plus me, since I always vote on my own polls, since I'm cheap, so that I don't have to keep clicking "View Results" over and over... XD). The results were as follows:

Look for a new game to try!	6 (54%)
Party!	4 (36%)
Start a community story!	0 (0%)
You just go back to doing your update thing now! :D	1 (9%)

Minus my vote on the last choice, that's six out of ten (60%) that wanted to look for a new game to check out.

(As for the four of you that wanted to party, I'm still trying to find a place in my schedule that'll work. It might be a belated Fourth of July party on the 5th or something :D)

So you know what I did?
I looked for games, new and old, to check out.

And guess what I found?
Two really good ones.

One an old favorite...
 ...and one that's famous.

Let's get down to business.


The reason WCC was called WCC was that when it first started, it was intended to be about all kinds of games. I had started off with three, and quickly dropped the other two after the Fuzzy Crisis. Several months later in August of 2011, I did reviews of the three games I had originally started with: Animal Jam, Free Realms, and Wizard101. Out of those three, Free Realms, on the scale of 1-5 stars that I rated them, got a five.

It's been about two years now since I last played Free Realms.

With all of the stuff they've added and changed, today I would give ten stars out of five.

Why? Multiple reasons.

Thing one is that, even though I'm not a member on either game, Free Realm's membership is much less expensive than Animal Jam's (for their yearly membership prices, Animal Jam is $49.95... and Free Realms is $39.60, ten dollars cheaper per year) AND you can do much more with a Free Realms membership than you can with an Animal Jam one.
(Yes, Animal Jam is giving some percentage of membership money to a charity to help big cats, it isn't stated anywhere what percentage of it is going to the charity. For all we know, .5% of the money is going to the charity and the remaining 99.5% is going to overhead expenses and profit.)
With an Animal Jam membership you get to beta-test a lot of the cool new features, get extra animal characters, pets, etc., but you can do all that on Free Realms as well, along with doing members-only quests, buy pets that do multiple tricks, unlock all of the jobs, get a premium house for free, get item discounts and monthly reward packs, and get double coins for the first hour you log on every day.

If I haven't sold you yet on getting even just a Free Realms account, just wait. THERE'S MORE.

Within the past two years since I've last played, they've added a whole new expansion and new combat modes, as well as a huge new questline. The best part about all of this change, though? They gave their non-members more freedom in the process.
While you used to be able to only go up to level 5 on any job except Adventurer, now a non-member can go up to level 20 (the maximum level) on Adventurer and Brawler (one of the combat jobs). I'm not sure how many other jobs you can go this far with; I'm still leveling up my character.
Plus, that huge new questline I mentioned? Non-members can go all the way to the current end without having to pay a single cent.

Other pros for Free Realms include that it's got a massive playerbase (it's had over ten million players since it's first year, I'm pretty sure, while Animal Jam only just hit that mark a few months ago) and a massive world to match, with lots of neat areas to explore and secret things to find. It's so big that even I don't think I've explored all of it.

If I haven't sold you on Free Realms, you're almost a hopeless case. XD


And now, on to the second game. It's one I know a few of you know and love, and that I've used my brother's account on for a long time. Just last night, however, I was finally able to convince my mom to use her credit card to pay $26.95 to get my own account (I paid her back right afterward, and she got five extra cents to boot, because it's cheap to just count out 95 cents when you can fork over another dollar XP).

What is this game?

Minecraft.

For those of you that don't know, Minecraft is an insanely addicting block-based game where you can build anything you can imagine. Literally anything. If I wanted to build a giant sheep, I could build a giant sheep. If I wanted to make a huge castle with all sorts of secret entrances, I could do that, too.

The best part is that there's a large community that is determined to make the best of your experience. Minecraft supports the option for custom skins (infinite possibilities on what you can make your player look like), texture packs (to change what blocks, items, and mobs look like), and mods (to add or change functionality of different things). Also, Minecraft has thousands of multiplayer servers to play on, and on the Downloads page (where you can download Minecraft), you can get software to set up a server of your own. In fact, if we do choose to move our focus to Minecraft, I could even set up an official WCC server for us! :D

The thing that's both good and bad about this game, however, is that you have to pay for it. It's a one-time payment of $26.95 (far more affordable than having to pay for Animal Jam's or Free Realms' memberships for several years), and you get to keep the game and all of its updates forever. However, there is no free-to-play option for this game (well, there's Minecraft Classic; it's ancient and way out-of-date, but it's free).

So, my friends. We have now reached a point of decision.

Do we stick with Animal Jam, spread our focus over any combination of these three games, or move our focus to another game?

I'll put up a poll. Go vote!

Bye for now!