"WASN'T THAT AMAZING?!" shrieks the presenter, his wide-eyed enthusiasm a stark contrast to your own inert lumpitude, encased in an armchair that has become almost lethally comfortable.
You agree with the ridiculous man - that was amazing. The War on Improbability has been televised, of course. It's too bizarre and compelling not to. The soldiers are contestants on some kind of sick reality TV show - it's kind of like Big Brother, but instead of petty interpersonal drama, it's got chainsaw-chuks, and instead of the second law of thermodynamics, it's got lions.
The presenter's face fills the screen, cocaine-fueled, manic, veins popping on his forehead. He paints his skin bright orange and bleaches the enamel of his teeth to a blinding white, because he's fucking crazy. He screams that there's going to be a recap. The highlights reel starts - sub-second shots of people fighting nightmarish monsters, downing pints of beer with twigs in it, riding a naked old man around like a horse, making out behind a bush, cat people, robots, mutants, all too quick to focus on.
"And here, once again, the footage we caught earlier - this is a real historic moment, folks, the first time a Joker has been caught on camera -" you swear, and reach for the remote.
Improbable Island is an old-school text adventure that's been on the internet and under constant development since dial-up days. When something's been kept alive for that long, it can either be a polished masterpiece with nothing unnecessary added, or it can be a huge, sprawling clattering kaleidoscope of interlocking cogs and gears that leaps out at unsuspecting newbies and swallows them whole into its oily, confusing mess. Guess which way we went.
Quantum physics, robots, time travel, love, death, lions in disguise, if you don't understand a fucking word of it then consider yourself lucky. This shit is absolutely labyrithine and it'll suck you in and grind your brain into a fine paste. One day you'll try to explain it to someone and ten minutes in they'll just get up and leave.
Dull but weirdly comforting at first, but scratch the surface and you'll find impenetrable and frustrating layers of interlocking complexity that will make "dull but weirdly comforting" seem like heaven itself. A hacked-together collection of gameplay styles from retro to ultramodern, each interacting with the other in increasingly unlikely ways, assembled over the course of decades by a professional sadist.
We'll delete the things you love and replace them with confusing modern shit to make you feel old.
Build your own shrine to your awful obsessions and then bring it to life with drag-and-drop programming. Some Places are more complex and fascinating than anything the actual game programmer could come up with, others are absolutely horrendous, some are both. Figuring out which is which is part of the alleged "fun."
Warm, comforting, and occasionally horrifying, our roleplaying and chat community is thousands strong and only a little bit culty. Some of these poor sods have been stuck in this dump for ten years or more, writing doorstop-novel's worth of plot.
I can't believe I'm typing this, but enough weirdos think this game is fun that we've never been quiet since the late 2000's; 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, we haven't been empty for even one second in over a decade. That's
Anyway, if even after reading all that shit you absolutely insist on carrying on with this foolishness.