"FusionFall: Cartoon Network's MMO" Topic

I'm mainly posting this as a tech demo for those of you interested in such things. There has been talk for a long time to unify the client end of MMOs into one piece of software and perhaps make it a browser plug in. Cartoon Network's game FusionFall does just that.

The game is a cell-shaded 3D MMO that loads levels as you go, but caches them to disk so you don't go through that on the same machine next time you run it. It's WoW dumbed-down. I know -- that seems impossible -- but that's what it is.

If you want to give this game a shot, there are three things you should know:

1) The newb area leads you around by a ring. It turns into a regular MMO after you get done with it.

2) I had 'friends' requests thrown at me faster than the ROF of the newb weapon in the game. This is either due to kids wanting friends or the more disconcerting possibility that non-kids want kids as friends.

3) I've tried three computers so far and none of them have worked for very long at a go before the browser hangs or crashes. I'll probably try it on a couple of other machines today (Vista and Ubuntu). Also, I'll probably give IE and perhaps Chrome a shot.

My son has wanted to play this game, and I have never been able to get it to even start.

I've tried different browsers, different computers, nothing has worked.

I have had two successes so far. One is an AMD XP Pro machine running IE 7 (nVidia video board) and the second one is an Intel XP Pro machine running IE 8 Beta (*old* ATI board).

I have a third machine that will run it, but not playably (frame rate was bad and I had to re-start the level download twice) which is quite similar to the first machine other than being a tad slower. My Vista machine has the same super-slow frame rate problem even though it is a faster computer.

Chrome isn't supported yet. I have not given Ubuntu a go yet, but I imagine Linux Firefox isn't supported yet either -- perhaps IE through WinE.

I have now reached the end of the free version of the game. Once you complete the time machine, an ad pops up saying, 'hey kids, go beg your parents for money to continue playing.'