Wizard 101 or, Harry Potter and the Slippery Slope.Follow

You thought your children were safe from witchcraft and devilry with the passing of the fad that was Harry Potter, but you were WRONG! This MMORPG seeks to steal your children's souls through cute animations, bright colors, and large candy colored interface buttons. BEWARE!

This game isn't actually half bad. The download/install took all of 15 minutes, and I was up and roaming the Hogwartsesque hub world. There is your standard fetch, fedex, and fight quests, and a lot of running around talking to people before you really get into the open part of the game, but it's fast, and entertaining. There are different schools of magic with different strengths, fire hits hard, but has low accuracy, storm has fluctuating power, but high accuracy.

Battles take place in a Yu-gi-oh/Pokemon kind of way, teams of players and/or monsters face off on different sides of the ring, they take turns summoning beasties, casting spells, and doing other things. Your abilities come in the form of a deck of cards, customizeable like M:tG and other trading card games. You can train in different schools of magic to get ever stronger cards, lather rinse repeat, and you have a MMORPG.

It's worth a try, I'm enthralled. I imagine I won't be playing it longer than a month, or even a week, but it's a good free distraction.

Plus, my randomly generated name was Kyle Skullfist, and I though that was just the cat's pajamas until I saw the Unicorn spell, which heals you with friggin rainbows, but then it got better when I met the head of the Storm School of magic, and found him to be a ************* toad in a top hat and tails. If that isn't just awesomeness in a can, I've lived a life of lies.

I'm actually surprised at how long this game has kept my attention. The battles are a little slow, because they show the full animation for every spell, but that's a minor quibble.

I just started hitting the "You've freeloaded enough, buddy!" line. I have quests in a couple areas that I don't have access to. You can either have a monthly subscription for like 10 bucks that allows access to the whole game, or you can buy credit packages, and use credits to permanently unlock specific areas. I probably won't be playing for much longer now that I'm hitting the free ceiling.