RATING:
Overall: NR
Pro: Excellent to meet new friends. Great for chat-lovers.
Con: As in real-life, some people are crazy.
With those of us who were already into online games between 1996 and 2001, Mplayer.com will probably ring a bell. Besides being an open chat room service, this PC gaming community also allowed users to build and host a wealth of different games that were pretty popular during that period of time. Until being purchased by GameSpy, the service had 20 million visitors at its peak. Our personal internet experience began with Ultima Online around the year 1998, followed by Aliens versus Predator a bit later. This title also functioned via the Mplayer client, allowing us to socialise with others via the service, where we could also create an online identity and chat rooms as well as forming clans. Those days, we actually spent lots of our time without gaming at all but just hitting up the chat rooms and perhaps joining a chat for twens in order to meet a couple of those cool American kids that were older than us and that Englishmen like us would only see in the cinema, or alternatively flipping between being intrigued and annoyed by older users in a 40s chat as they were giving their point of views on life. As regards features, the system was pretty basic, although having VoIP, but nevertheless, we had a fun time growing up to enter the chat rooms and meet the same familiar faces.
So when checking out Club Cooee, we were eager and pretty marvelled to learn what a long road chat rooms had travelled, as this is what this title essentially is. In contrast to our other profile and review content on this site, Club Cooee isn’t a game in the stricter sense of the term but plainly an interactive 3-D chat room, with the added core feature of enabling players to create and decorate their personal rooms, in this regard not differing that much from the likes of The Sims, but more in that later.
When entering the game, we didn’t know exactly what awaited and were directly faced with the character creation screen where we had a sufficiently wide selection of hairstyles and facial features to choose from in order to customise our avatar (which as the look as well as the feel of a Wii Mii). Thanks to the anonymity of the online world, the game enables players to create their characters as similar to themselves as they want, or to invent them the way they actually like to be. As far as we were concerned, we opted for a guy with persistently wide-opened eyes and a wacky grin, who, although not being truly scary, was at least particularly fun for us. The game also provided us with a limited selection of clothes to pick from; however, the shop was instantly accessible via our menu bar (instead of having to visit a physical place in the game) and offered an enormous choice of purchasable items, including roses, wings, crowns, hats, vests, jackets, hoodies, boots, gloves, and so on to only mention a few things of the nearly infinite list. As we were kindly provided with the regular in-game money as well as a bit of the premium currency, most of the shop items were available to us. One of the best items, however, couldn’t be bought due to the restrictions imposed on us for not having VIP status.
Once the personalisation of our character was done, we felt like looking for a room, of which there are currently 3 types: standard (typically player-made) rooms, DJ rooms and quiz rooms, although players are also able to put a DJ station into the rooms they created on their own. Although all the available rooms were listed, it initially was indeed rather difficult for us to discover other rooms, since the layout had advertisings at the top followed by a massive gap before the list of rooms actually began, and due to the fact that we didn’t notice the availability of a scrollbar at first, it took us quite a bit before being able to even check the list out (in fact, we suppose that there wasn’t anyone online…). After working out where to find the rooms, we were pleasantly surprised how well-organised those were: next to the room name users can see how many others are inside, which is the primary language (though it’s a mix of languages for the most part wherever you look, for the UK rooms at least) and if there’s a dress code (as players are able to strip down to their underwear, for instance).
Entering one of the DJ rooms was kind of eye-opening, the room is equipped with one or multiple DJ booths players are able to interact, uploading music from their PC and essentially entertaining the rest of the people in the rooms by playing music (you are evidently able to mute the room if you like to), or instead searching for clips on YouTube to play them over the speaker and put them on a large screen for all to see. Being the DJ, it’s possible to promise the best choice of songs or something from artist X at least. The wall-less room soars in a huge vibrant void of nothing and users line its edges, showing off their latest gear and using the action emotes they bought to perform a number of amazing dancing moves. With the currency we had acquired, we thought it was a nice moment to make a statement and fully dressed in evening wear, complete with a top hat, then proceeding to do sit-ups in front of the present ladies (just like we usually try to flirt with women when being in a club).
The chat in the room is pretty standard: people exchange a lot of pleasantries and spend several minutes welcoming familiar faces when they enter a room, do banal conversations or join in the middle of discussions. We even witnessed a female teenager debating with the mods because of writing some rebellious statement or sort of an insult, which they wanted her to delete. The moderators were extremely tolerant and the entire debate carried on for several minutes (being power-thirsty tyrants, we would have banned the girl right after her first back chat).
As we headed from one room to another, we now noticed DJ booths in most of them, which is a quite cool addition in our opinion. One of our favourite rooms was a… well… it was very much a lap dance bar, nearly complete with cages and poles, if only the naked dancers weren’t missing… in the beginning. We unluckily had to realise that after testing the dress code in several other rooms, we were now entering this one without being dressed in anything, which resulted in being greeted as the finally arriving stripper by the screaming people inside. This incited us to head to a cage straightaway to begin to dance to what the DJ was playing, which surreally happened to be a never-ending list of Disney themes – we obviously entered the wrong room.
Afterwards, we decided to check out one of the quiz rooms, which undeniably required the return of our top hat and the rest of our evening wear in order to not only prove ourselves as superior in regards to the other users’ fashion but to their intellect as well. There are multiple podiums players are able to jump on to reply to random questions of general knowledge in order to earn in-game currency and experience points. Having answered right to a few questions, we got kicked off the podium for not being VIP, which felt kind of useless given that we were able to change to another podium or even enter a different room if needs be, but hey ho. There isn’t much more to mention on this type of room, they’re filled with a large amount of seats for people to come and sit down as the audience; however, the rooms are quite silent while users concentrate on replying to questions, unless the community or individual players are running quiz competitions.
In order to round off our Club Cooee experience, we also opted for checking out the opportunity to create our personal room, which could be either public or private if you don’t like the idea of lots of people randomly walking in. Just by playing and rising in level, it’s possible to get access to a variety of free items, which can be placed in your default starter room, in order to decorate it with an entire complement of furniture, decorations and accessories. You may also place down doors that, when editing the details, will link to other locations and rooms. The tools for moving around furniture are pretty great, giving a full movement and 360 rotation on all three axis and also allowing users to choose the vertical height of where the item will sit. For our room, we decided to litter it with creepy rusty metal doors and then, dressed in our finery, we waited for someone to enter to then walk over with our wide-eyed face (seriously, our face was creepy as hell) and stand about an inch away from them saying nothing until they left. Brilliant.
It was definitely an interesting experience, absolutely recommended for people who like chat rooms; they will love a few extra features to create their own identity and locations/rooms. If this had been round back when we were still using Mplayer.com, it would have without a doubt been our go to location for fun, chat and pranks and even a little matchmaking if that is what you are looking for!
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