With the original Neopets founders talking up their new company and their new game, I decided to go back and check out how my Xweetok was doing in the older game.

Hungry and dying. Poor Spitefur. I’d been ignoring her since I won Shapeshifter last April. That triumph was my final goal in Neopets, and I had no reason to go on… and yet this morning found me walking through Neopia again, looking at the sights, browsing the games, and oh dear, who IS that Ixi in the corner? With that game of hers?

Sigh. So I started up Shapeshifter again. I always feel a little like Ragle Gumm as I set up the scripts and programs that solve the puzzles for me. I tore through the first 19, where I had to stop, as I’d reached the maximum number of Neopoints I could earn from that game in a day.

81 more puzzles to go… and they are about to get quite a bit harder.

Meteor Games, the new company, is hiring, by the way. A nice variety of jobs… but you have to work in West Hollywood. LA? Thanks, but no thanks.

It’s no secret I’m a big fan of Neopets, but it’s just come so close to being a fully fledged virtual world, it was just a matter of time before they took the step and made it one. I just happened to be browsing the post-mortem of Virtual Worlds 08 (about which I made some posts on Massively), that Raph pointed to and saw this crumb about Nickelodeon making World of Neopia — finally! Pet-raising, minigame-playing action in 3D!

Some have asked how I can like games like Neopets and yet have few good things to say about upcoming titles such as Free Realms. Well, for one thing, being as it is (currently) just web pages, they can and do many surprising things. Neopets in particular has a very deep stock trading simulation, full auction house with lots of means of arbitrage, hidden quests, many many combat arenas with a surprising depth to their combat… since their barrier to innovation is set so incredibly low, nothing gets in their way. They have built-in blogging, guilds, player houses (which you can make *however you like* — mine is three stories tall with a tower at each corner, a courtyard, and landscaping I designed myself). Player stores with shopkeepers you can script — plus hundreds of great minigames. And more LOTS more.

Because there is so MUCH there, you can find yourself in little areas where you can make your own challenges — like solving the Shapeshifter puzzle to 100, a challenge that requires you to create a very involved program and teach yourself efficient tree-search and pruning algorithms. I met some fascinating people along the way to solving it; it took me about nine months (with breaks).

All I can be certain of with Free Realms is that SOE will have decided everything I can do before I even make my character. There won’t be any puzzles that require months to solve. There won’t be things to do that a kid would find hard or impossible to do — and so there won’t be anything that a kid could be challenged by. Like, I dunno, maybe a part of the game where a kid would need to know how to read and write in French, just a little. And if you moved deeper, you needed to know more French — and native speakers would be comfortable there, giving kids opportunities to speak to other kids all over the world in their native tongues.

There is so much opportunity in MMOs to not only socialize, but to learn and enrich people. If people can learn incredibly complex raids or how to fight in arenas in WoW, then they can learn other things as well.

If I’m going to let my kid play an MMO, I’m going to want to know what the tangible benefits of it are, or they won’t be playing. Learning how to shop — not a tangible benefit. Advertising a vendor’s products — also not a tangible benefit. Marketing does not usually benefit the target.

I guess what I’m saying is, what justifies a new MMO? It can’t be its own justification. WoW was an iterative collection of MMOs to that point, but has now matured and taken its own path. Lord of the Rings Online, to take advantage of the movie buzz to let you roam a famous world. EQ2, to remake EQ with better tech. Why Free Realms? (or Playstation Home, for that matter?)

Some of you might remember a little bit of Neopets mania last summer. There was this one puzzle that just seemed so hard, that I had to write a program to solve it. It took over my life for months. I finally gave up trying to solve it entirely. In February, I took it up again, and given some algorithmic help by a past champion, finally beat Shapeshifter.

It’s all very Karate-kid-ish.

I only played Neopets to solve this one puzzle, and now that it’s done, I won’t ever play again. I’ll put my Neopets up for adoption. But for the entire month of April, my name will live at the top of the high scores, and if I die tonight, I’ll die knowing that I died a bona fide champion.

This wasn’t the final puzzle, but it was close. Surprisingly, this is one of the easier puzzles.

Yeah, I’m back on Shapeshifter again, that amazingly difficult puzzle game on Neopets.

I’ve been thinking about getting back in that race again. I burned out on the puzzle back in September, but I have been getting encouraging notes from people urging me not to give up. There’s a strange community of solvers out there. People get up to about 25 on their own, then get stumped and either give up or try to write a solver.

Anyway, I somehow acquired a mentor who is going to give me encouragement and algorithmic help on my road to level 100. I’ve just done levels 80 and 81 without any significant code changes, though I did download the Python-C compiler onto my dual core machine so I could pump up the performance of my current, Python-based solver.

Now I want to translate it all into Java and multithread it, see what happens there…

It’s still a long distance to 100.