I am Barrel O'Nukes here with my pet Sno Abyss, and today's my first day trying out Marapets. I thought I'd keep a blog exploring what I discover on the site as I go along.
(No clue if this is the sort of thing people usually do with blogs or not, but it's here and so am I, so why not?)
Back in the olden days when Neopets dominated the
virtualonline pet world
(Tamagotchi ran the virtual pet world, don't know what I was thinking using virtual instead of online...) most of my time was spent tending to my three Neopets - playing games, yelling at myself when they looked sad and told me they were dying, etc etc. Recently I went back to Neopets only to find the site was a LOT more confusing and many of the games were completely broken - whether on their end or mine - so I started shopping around for a new site to scratch my mid-life crisis itch.
...and yes, I did also buy a bunch of new Tamagotchis.
Anyway. Day one! After mulling over a name for my little fox-wolf guy whose species name I can't quite remember yet, I finally landed on Sno Abyss, which is the name of a character in a paranormal novel I wrote ages ago. Everything else I tried was taken
(Mouka was taken! Who took Mouka?!) and it was the first thing that said available.
The first thing I did was change my avatar from a male to female, because apparently it just defaults to male body if you don't feel like choosing either gender. Or maybe it's random, who knows? After messing around with colors and hairstyles, I was very disappointed to realize you needed something called tickets to change pretty much anything about your features. Including skin color. Kinda strange about the skin color one, but okay I sorta understood the reasoning behind the rest of the stuff. After messing around with the various rewards I saw I could get the tanning ticket very early on and aimed for that, then changed some of the default colors of my clothes for 100MP. A nice reasonable fee for someone with a beginner's bankroll!
The second thing I did was check out the Get Started challenges at the top of the screen and blazed through the first two tiers. Checking out the games was a lot of fun, and there were many classics like triple pyramid and mahjong. Both of which I played all three of my free plays for the day. Suddenly I had more MP! And also a few mummy plushies from the pyramid game to raise Sno's happiness with. Score!
I used my new MP to buy some food and drink for Sno, because I wasn't sure how quickly their hunger/thirst depletes in this game so having some ready to go was a smart idea. Some of the MP went to buying some blue hair dye for my avatar after exploring the dress up interface a little more. With still a good amount of MP left
(a good amount for a beginner anyway) I went to check out the quests. My question was would these be like Neopets quests, where you needed some ridiculously expensive item to complete? At first... yes... it seemed so. I accepted many quests that asked for things over 50,000MP. WAAAAY out of my price range, ouch. After a bit of creative googling, which said to try the snowman, I was finally able to complete some quests. Yay!
On to stats... boy. I STILL can't quite figure out the raising stats easily thing. It seems like you need those ridiculously high priced items for some of those quests. I tried the haunted house quest, which is supposed to give whatever item is needed for the gym, and was able to stretch my budget a bit to get one done. Success! An energy crystal!
...however when I accepted the gym training, it now wanted a specific type of crystal. Digital crystal. Ooooh boo... feeling a bit discouraged, I left a post on the newbie forums asking how to raise stats and got a lot of great responses. Apparently certain games can raise stats, and some dailies. The dailies, I did not know existed and wound up spending a good hour or so exploring all of them. Some were very familiar from Neopets, like the tombala and the fruit machine, and some were new. There were a LOT of tombala dailies?! Not a bad thing, more like a pleasant surprise! But the dailies left me with a lot more MP than I thought I'd have gained otherwise. Never neglect your dailies! ...except that headless daily... really REALLY don't want a headless pet, even if it does kinda jive with Sno's whole schtick in my story. There was also a glowing egg that dropped from a rubber duckie game. It's supposed to hatch and give me clothes colors, but it's kind of confusing describing how to hatch the egg? Maybe soon!
With my newfound "fortune", I did a few more haunted house quests and got the digital crystal on the third try. After that, Sno went back to school to learn some art - training that is fortunately very cheap and only requires some random school supplies from the school shop. University... a bit more expensive. The MP for the diploma thing was still out of my budget.
Tomorrow my pet should have +1 strength and maaaaybe I'll be able to hatch some eggs. Maybe have a battle?!
Find out next time, on Dragon Ball Z! Looking forward to exploring a bit more tomorrow, and trying out the suggestions on stat-raising games that people gave to me in the forums.
