I’m an avid Second Life loyalist.

This could largely be due to the fact that it took me long enough to learn to walk in a straight line in Second Life and therefore, learning all over again elsewhere holds little appeal to me.

My first experience of any type of virtual world was Second Life. I did not, like many of the people I have met in Second Life, come from either There.com or from World of Warcraft. After a year or so in Second Life, I was persuaded by a friend to try out There.com and I hated it. It was so…. primitive…. by comparison.

But I am open to trying new virtual worlds. I signed up for Twinity when it was closed Beta (and used it like twice before uninstalling), I signed up for Entropia Universe and spent several hours trying to decipher how the hell it worked before logging out, uninstalling and never going back and I have tried a number of, what I like to call, the ‘Second Life copies’. Those hold slightly more appeal for me because I am so used to the operation of Second Life and these work just the same, though are generally all very unpopulated.

But in terms of the virtual worlds that are nothing like Second Life in operation or technicals, I have been hearing a lot about Blue Mars. So a few days ago I signed up for the closed beta. I got access yesterday and here’s my first impressions….

COMPLICATED BUT PRETTY.

Ok, so bear in mind that it is in the beta testing stage at the moment. But Blue Mars requires a monster of a machine. Second Life runs like a dream on my machine… it really does. I run all my graphics on uber high settings and rarely experience any lag. This is also assisted by a super fast broadband connection. But Blue Mars made my PC want to hurt me. In fact, even as I loaded it up I could hear my laptop crying a little… “No, don’t do this to me, it hurts!”

I won’t go into full details about this…it would make little sense to those who had not yet been in and would bore those who have no intention. I will say that you can sign up for the closed beta by clicking here. And I will sum up the good, the bad and the ugly from my couple of hours in there.

The Good

It is absolutely beautiful, like really beautiful. The graphics are stunning. They have dynamic shadows, which Second Life has not yet incorporated into its own viewer (though they are available on alternative viewers).

Venice in Blue Mars

Blue Mars

There is entertainment provided by the developers of the game actually in world too (Avatar Reality). This takes the form of a golf game, which, when I had learnt houe to do it was actually a lot of fun and like a vehicle based game that I absolutely could not work out and so I gave up. The other good thing I note was that, despite only being in beta at the moment, everything functions pretty much as it should. The Blue Mars equivalent of teleportation works a treat every time, for example. Also… it’s free. There is (as yet, at least) no paid option and there is no mention of incorporating one. Of course, this could all change when Blue Mars comes out of beta.

The Bad

Ok… the terrible thing about this is just how high its requirements are. Such massively high minimum system requirements mean that a LOT of people are going to be alienated from playing this unless they can improve on that. In fact, even downloading and installing was system heavy by comparison of some other virtual worlds. The setup file is 1.2Gb and I had to try three times to download it before I got a setup file that would actually run. I have an amazing gaming laptop which runs every other virtual world I have tried like an absolute dream. It was in pain in Blue Mars. Like really in pain. Those amazing graphics come at a cost, you see. But, unlike Second Life, you cannot adjust your settings here. At least, not yet. So you have to have all the shadows and pretty things on. I also think that the bubble chat thing (yes, everything people type appears over their heads in bubble form) is annoying. But that’s just a personal preference of mine. One big negative, in my opinion, in Blue Mars, is that there is no built in building tools. You can create content by joining their Developer’s Programme. But, they claim to support external content creation tools, such as Daz 3D for the creation of content. That, for me, is what leaves so many of these virtual worlds ‘lagging’ behind (pardon the poor pun) Second Life. I really believe that in order for a virtual world to experience anywhere near the success that Second Life has, there has to be that in place in order to futher the possibility of developing a real economy.

The Ugly

Ok, so call me vain, but Josue Habana is much prettier in Second Life. I don’t like him so much in Blue Mars. He has frequent bad hair days and wears bad clothes.

Josue was having another bad hair day....

I would say this is one worth visiting if you are a virtual world enthusiast. For me, I don’t think I will go back until I find out that it’s a little easier on the machine. I am impatient. I don’t like lag. And I don’t like waiting for things. But I do think that the virtual world of Blue Mars certainly has huge potential.