Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures launched ten days ago to moderate fanfare from the media (IE: Me), a factor that can mostly be attributed to the idea that the game is for kids. This isn’t to say that Clone Wars Adventures is a low quality game, simply that many kids are likely to just jump right into the game, rather than research it beforehand. Any research being done will most probably be by the parents, and as a direct result many of the articles are directed towards that group.
Now, I do the occasional review of Nintendo DS and Wii games over at Giantbomb.com, but I can honestly say I have never played Imagine: Party Time Babyz nor do I have any inclination towards the title. I’m sure by my standards it is a sloppily put together low budget shovelware title that copies every other mini-game framework on the market and sticks it on the shelf for fifty bucks, knowing that little girls will see the photographs of babies on the front and beg and scream at their mothers to buy it, but to each his own. What you also don’t see me doing is buying the game and reviewing it, from the perspective of a twenty-one year old with a mustache, and talking about how easy it is. I have the reasoning ability to know that Party Babyz is not directed towards my age group. Luckily, however, Party Babyz costs money, meaning no one except the target demographic is going to buy it, making such badly aimed reviews nonexistent.
So it baffles me when I read a news article on Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures hitting one million registered users just a week after launch, and the threads are populated with claims that the figure must be a lie, that nine hundred thousand of them must have quit, that it is essentially a lobby with mini-games, Free Realms is much better, etc.
News flash to Sony Trolls: Clone Wars Adventures is a lobby-centered mini-game-based social activity center for children. It incorporates a wide variety of fairly short mini-games with a difficulty setting that ranges from extremely easy to quite difficult, even for many adults, and foregos grinding mobs for grinding mini-games. CWA is also not Free Realms, it has been designed with a 100% different outlook in mind, as a lobby based game, where Free Realms is closer to your more traditional open world approach.
Granted, most of this frothing rage is coming from your usual Sony trolls of whom, if Sony had made the aforementioned Party Babyz, would buy the game for full price and then complain about how Sony screwed up once again. One million users may mean absolutely nothing in terms of activity, but a lot of the feedback towards this news isn’t directed at the one million figure, but rather your usual nerd rage coming from a group of people who still haven’t grown up from the Star Wars Galaxies Combat Upgrade, or who still hold ire towards Sony for Vanguard’s botched launch.
More on Clone Wars Adventures as it appears.
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