Holy crap. I don’t know how I missed out on this one all these years. I was reading last week’s escapist issue, and came across this article. “What kind of a name is ‘The Kingdom of Loathing'”, I thought.
I checked it out. It’s awesome.
The Kingdom of Loathing is a browser based pseudo mmo. Let me clarify. By browser based, I mean it runs in your browser, but it doesn’t use flash or fancy graphics. It’s all framed html, img tags, and a bit of javascript. A very plain UI. By pseudo mmo, I mean that you are playing alongside many other people, but they may as well be in parallel universes. You can communicate with them, give each other items, and apparently PvP (i haven’t checked it out yet), but on the whole you just play it alone.
All the graphics are hand drawn stick figures, and the humour in the writing is a lot like Douglas Adams; the humor is all in how it’s written on the page. For example, in the game, one of the quests takes you to The Misspelled Cemetary, where you fight Ghuols, Skleltons, and lihces.
And since it’s free, you should check it out. No, read the article, and then check it out. The guys behind this make their living purely on the donations, and they have an interesting story.