WTF?!, a Flash-based World of Warcraft parody
Over on Play This Thing, game designer/writer Greg Costikyan has word of a sweet and funny World of Warcraft parody:Link to Play This Thing review, Link to WTF?It's a World of Warcraft screenshot, right? Well, no -- it's a screenshot from WTF?!, a Flash-based sidescroller parodying WoW. And it's note-perfect, too -- every interface element and the backgrounds and characters look like they're ripped straight from Azeroth.
The gameplay is pretty similar, too, for all that this is a sidescroller -- the same tedious level-grind, based on the same sort of tedious quests ("go kill seven sheep"). But the satirical way it treats that level-grind is priceless, a telling commentary on the common tropes of the MMO. The quests get increasingly weird -- your newbie quest giver asks you to go cast a spell on sheep that have been transformed by the evil mage Karl Marx into communist brain-slaves to restore them to their rightful ovine form, and then tells you to go kill Marx himself. But Marx shows you that your previous quest-giver is simply a tool of capitalist oppression, and becomes your new quest giver. Sigmund Freud also makes an appearance.
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