I’m not going to lie. I gave it a try.  I’ve been a big proponent of virtual worlds and social interaction via applications such as Second Life, There, and to some extent WoW and old school Virtual Places chat rooms.  So, when I realized that MTV was offering a similar experience to fans of the shows, I decided to give it a go.

VLB, as it has been refered to at times, was created for MTV by the people that brought you There, a virtual world much like that of Second Life. It has been designed so that all of us who lust to dwell in Orange County, California, can live vicariously through this virtual world.

At least, that is the theory.

In reality, this is the most painfully slow, awfully composed pile of shit I’ve ever seen.

I really want it to be cool. I mean Second Life was a blast. I wasted a lot of US$ in there buying shit, building shit, etc. It still sorta catered to your general PC crowd. VLB had the chance to change the space a little. Bring in actual popular kids to the online space. They’d hang out. Us geeks would come in. We’d hang out too. We’d all have nice conversations about Lauren’s dress, the rock band that was playing, or the nice pool down on the beach, rather than what was usually brought up in Second Life, programmer talk, builder talk, or trying to find the nearest Free Money farm or pron sim.

I initally tried this back in November and had horrible luck. Granted, I used my laptop which isn’t top-notch, so I didn’t think too much of it.  After listening to the 1UP Yours podcast for 3-9 (The one with N’Gai) and hearing Shane mention his secret desires to try it out, I decided “Hey, what the hell, right?”

Wrong.  Shane. Stay away. Stay far the fuck away.

I installed it on my desktop. My desktop is a nice dual core machine with a modern graphics card and 2 gigs of RAM. Should be no big deal, I think. I’ve even upgraded my tubes to a 10Mb connection. No big deal.

Aside from the interface being horrid and relying heavily on Internet Explorer for menus and dialog boxes, the worst thing was the fact that after 10 minutes of sitting still - not moving at all - all of the geometry and textures still hadn’t loaded for my area. Once you move around, it all goes to hell.

So, honestly, I don’t have much more to say about it.  Why? Because I can’t get the fucker to run reliably enough to actually test out any of the features. 

Shane, if you are hoping that this could be something to tide you over until PS Home (like I was), you’ll be disappointed. Actually, don’t even install it. Seriously.