{sidebar id=3}{sidebar id=1}Faunasphere is one of those games the denies a great many MMORPG stereotypes:

1) You must have a game driven mostly by combat.

2) You must have an expensive computer to play it.

3) Players will not take a "cartoony" MMORPG seriously.

Well, the game does not have heavy combat, you can run it on a Netbook (I play it on mine) and the community, while still having lots of fun, takes the game and their experience seriously. Essentially, you start by choosing a "fauna", or creature, that you control by simply clicking on the landscape.

You run around and fry "pollution" using a giant electrical flashlight that resides on your Fauna's back. Your Fauna is your pet, essentially, and you can grow/customize fauna's into a huge variety of miniature dogs, bigheaded horses or tiny pink elephants with one eye.

Make sense so far?

Good.

I love how the game can be controlled using just a mouse, and I enjoy the smoothness at which it runs. Many flash games take time to load the next screen or area, while Faunasphere moves seamlessly, the landscape flashing beneath you as you click. You can really move fast if you want. On-screen keyboards work with the game, allowing chat, but everything else is primarily mouse-driven.

Good accessibility, unless you are color-blind

The one glaring issue would be for color-blind players. Everything is done in green and red. Names, objects, and even useable/unuseable items are indicated by highlighting the item in green or red. There is no difference in the size of the outline around the item, or the shape of the outline; two things that might help distinguish the items. Perhaps even a unique font or icon above the item would help to see the difference. Standard names are green outlined by more green.

The landscape is green, the lines that show the direction you are going are green, and the map is a series of red upon green, green upon green upon green. It works well for effect, unless of course you cannot see the green, or distinguish it from the reds. We asked about adding something like a toggle switch to the game, and Big Fish answered, "Currently, it is not in our immediate scope of work, but we are always looking to make the game accessible."

With around 10 percent of the male population being color-blind in the US, this issue could potentially affect many players. Alternatively, of course, keep players away from the game.

Building a community

As you destroy pollution, you gain experience in the form of "lux" which you can use as payment to build your "Faunasphere" (think of a giant customizable landscape that is all yours.)

In fact, many players spend a great deal of energy and time on making their Faunasphere beautiful places to explore, and I even spent one evening looking at friends of friends Faunasphere, marveling at some of the designs.

This is definitely a game worth travelling with on your Netbook, or something that you could easily widdle away hours with on your desktop. There are the standard goals/missions and marketplace in the game, but done with a twist that fits the atmosphere of the game. You quickly get used to collecting roots and dinosaur bones, or other strange items.

There are also community projects, which are essentially an opportunity for players to help the whole community by donating items to a "Canopy Column," earning prizes and raffle tickets

Essentially, thank of it as a giant donation drive, but instead of canned foods, the project needs "Solar Cells" and "Loam Clods." I asked if more projects would be coming in the future, and it looks as though community projects have been a huge success, and "...We will definitely be looking for ways to expand the ‘totem economy' moving forward."

The "totem economy" is referring to a system of player-owned "totems" which are placed inside one's Faunasphere. The totem produces a certain item (in my case, "clay bricks") which other players can buy for use in the community project. As players buy my bricks, they can donate them to the Canopy Project and earn more raffle tickets and prizes. This is a nice, gentle way to encourage players to trade amongst themselves, to visit each other's creative homes, and to talk to one another; social interactions spurred on by personal wants.

The game is mostly female players, between the ages of 25-50, but I think the paradigm might have something to do with the high percentage of players that take part in the community projects, and that is reflected in some of the amazing Faunaspheres throughout the game. I am not saying an all-male population could not participate in this type of economy or game.  However, the correlations between a female-dominate audience and how the game is played must be noted.

Do not let that fool you, though. Faunasphere has as deep of an experience as many "standard" MMORPG's I have played. Many players talk of the "steep learning curve" and the only other game that uses that term more is EVE Online. At the time of this writing, I know that I have barely scratched the surface of the game. If there is one thing I admire about any game, it is the number of "things to do" in the game. Many MMORPG's are mostly combat based games with some crafting, but they stop there. Faunasphere has something for the collector, the decorator, the artist, the socializer and the destroyer.

The Future for One-Eyed Elephants

Games like Faunasphere excite me, being that they are driving attention to games that require no download and that can be played in small chunks if you want. The game can be obsessed over, like any other, but it gives you the choice. Choices are what the MMORPG community needs right now, not more of the same.

And choosing whether or not to buy a brand new state-of-art machine to run the game is important to those that cannot afford it due to health care costs. Games should be accessible to players physically, but they need to consider the financial state of the player as well.

Faunasphere works out well in that department. There are memberships that can be paid for in exchange for more Fauna slots and for virtual cash, but I have not seen any need for it yet. I have a feeling that the more I play, though, the more that membership and its rewards will look shiny.

So, what is in store for Faunasphere? "Faunasphere is a service," said Big Fish "and as such, all the original developers continue to work on supporting and improving the game. We have months of content planned, and will be rolling this out on an ongoing basis. "

It will be interesting to see where the game goes with their ideas. The sky it the limit, it seems, especially considering that they do not follow the standard rules of MMORPG's. Let's hope some fixes come for color-blind players, as well.