The latest news about entertainment artificial life, especially web-based massive multiplayer games. You can use the search feature to find games that have not yet been added to the main list.
It's a crazy morning for alife, and to add insult to injury, Blogger was even down for part of the morning!
Showdog.com's database is down; presumably the database never came back from its daily reboot (at 6am). It came back up for a very few minutes just now so we can only hope that it is very close to being fixed. (I did see that a litter of puppies was born on my account and that today's shows were judged, so processes seem to be running even though accounts cannot be accessed.) The problem appears to be with the web host and not with Showdog.com itself.
Update: Site problems have continued throughout the day. A two hour outage for database matinence will begin at midnight.VirtualPups lost its data a while back and had to revert to a September 22nd backup. Unfortunately, a lot of player data cannot be recovered, but in compensation players have been given more resources (including ten more import dogs).
This is looking like a good time to sign up for
Pawsibilities, the Canadian dog and cat game that I haven't gotten around to evaluating yet.
One dog site is thriving, though ---
Furry Paws recently celebrated its first birthday! The member limit (restricting the number of players who can log on at one time) has been lifted, but the site warns that "this probably isn't permanent," so enjoy it while it lasts.
