Web Fed Award-winning Planets

Reviewed on April 4, 2004

The orbit of Ascii took me quite by surprised – instead of the usual sign telling me there was a link here and an orbit there and thank you for coming to this planet don't dump a whole bunch of stuff here yada yada, there were directions. I mean real arrow type directions. I wasn't quite ready for that, and after staring dumbly at these funny symbols floating in space I finally had to turn off the artificial gravity in my ship so I could float around and view them from all angles.

That didn't work too well, when you look at an arrow upside-down it points the wrong way.

Needless to say I stumbled around for quite a while before I got the hang of things and found my way to the orbit. On the landing pad there was another curious absence of paragraphs of text, and I had to stare dumbly at that a while before I finally figured out I needed to look at the planet in a whole new way – this was a place of pictures, not lines of text and paragraphs of misspellings to wade through!

The cyber-café off the landing pad was a photograph of my desk – complete with coffee but without the coffee spills and food that's wedged in my keyboard. I even finally got to see Hazed's signature frothy drink, and got so excited about it I found a pink crayon and filled in the contents by coloring my screen.

The hospital was an interesting place, but watch out – there's a guy with really big feet you have to walk around every time you enter or leave. Shopping and ship repairs were also readily available, and the shopping experience here is definitely different from what you'll find in other Fed shops. Best of all there's some really neat bribes for yours truly including my own personal ASCII art Fifi.

Ascii isn't a planet that can really be described – it needs to be seen. The planet is done almost entirely using ASCII art. There's castles, bridges, pictures of players, balloon rides and lovely lake areas. There's also a few disturbing places: Art considering what to do with her workthingies, a rather evil-tempered looking dragon and a few mountainsides that looked too steep for this canine to maneuver.

If text planets have typos, then there's some equivalent in ASCII planets. On Ascii I found that – the dolphins. I stared at those dolphins for a long time and I don't think they're dolphins. I think they're baby sharks and there's probably a big mama shark lurking out there somewhere. I'd ask your opinion of them but I just couldn't resist fixing it – I just planted a big old Walrus over all those little dolphins.

Congratulations, Art on a job very well done! I urge everyone to go take a look at Ascii, I'm so glad my last exploration was of a planet worthy of a Walrus!