We’ve covered a variety of casual gaming sites before on TechCrunch. It’s a hot vertical, particular since the rise of the Nintendo’s Wii console proved that there was a huge willing market for games that don’t need a 4 hour long instruction session from a gaming geek.
South Korean company NHN comes with strong credentials. The company is claimed to be the be “the leading internet company” in its home market and has a huge gaming presence in Japan and China, with the company claiming 170 million registered gamers in China. Its US arm NHN USA Inc launched the ijji.com gaming portal in 2006, and since this time its grown to high levels, with Alexa counting the site at 580, but notably 256th spot in the US (yes yes, Alexa cant be trusted etc.., but sites don’t get this high on Alexa without some traffic).
Ijji.com offers a variety of games including traditional titles such as Poker and Chess, and then site specific games including a warfare game by the name of Soldier Front, a shooter called Gunz and a couple of other games. I’d read about their driving game “Drift City” on Something Awful this weekend so this was my starting point.
Casual Gaming
Most people would presume that casual gaming would equate to quick to play, but with Drift City the word casual is someone’s idea of a joke. First up was the site telling me that I needed to be using IE 7 to play the game (no mention of Windows, but that’s a given), so I switched across to a virtual machine running Windows to get started.
The next hurdle: a 700mb + download. Why you need IE7 when the game runs on its own software is beyond me. Ijji.com also scrimps on a decent server to handle downloads; I may only have a 2mb cable connection but the 700mb took nearly 4 hours to download via a Windows installer program that gave no indication of download speeds or how long it would take. The only option on the download was to turn off P2P sharing, which warns you that if you turn it off your download will be slower, how wasn’t explained but it never takes me that long to download something off BitTorrent for example so perhaps others weren’t using this option.
Then there is a number of screens during installation, and it attempts to install something called XFire, a gamers communication device that isn’t necessary for the game, I hit cancel on this one and finally got to the game itself.
Game play
This is a free game so you wouldn’t expect top level graphics, and you don’t get them. It feels a little bit like the classic arcade game Outrun, which if you’re old enough to remember the game isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
You start with a standard car which you can drive around a city scape which is apparently on some sort of mining focused island in the North Pacific (I tuned out during the intro screens). Like say Second Life or similar virtual worlds you can communicate with other members. Driving itself is as hard as using your arrow keys, and all cars are automatic so there’s no gear shifting. Control gives your car “boost” powered which as the name suggests makes the car go faster, and SHIFT allows you to drift around corners ala The Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift.
Beginners are presented with tasks that involve driving to one point, picking up an item (by driving over the target area) then returning to base. You do this in an environment which is rich with other users and computer controlled cars as well. Half the fun is driving into other users and things, although you lose “boost” power by doing so.
After getting past a certain point, users can upgrade their cars, change colors and take on new tasks such as special deliveries, goals that earn you money for upgrades etc..
At this point you also have the ability to race other members. The social side of the game allows you to join with other members in teams and participate together. Races offer a variety of challenges other different courses.
Overall
It took me soo long to actually get to the point of having Drift City running that I was prepared to rip shreds into the game and NHN for it, but having eventually got online and played Drift City for a while I actually enjoyed it. It’s not going to appeal to a generation raised on cutting edge computer gaming but for those a little older (and the installation process aside) it’s a bit of casual fun.
Is it however the future of casual gaming? Ijji.com’s offering are a step above the true online casual gaming offered by startups such as Kongregate, but they’re got a much lower barrier to entry than say Second Life or Project Entropia. Many of the low graphics (mostly 2D) virtual worlds such as Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel target kids (and usually girls) where as Ijji.com has an older masculine target audience and offer games that don’t require an ongoing presence or commitment to succeed. If Alexa can be believed this isn’t the future of casual gaming, it’s the now of casual online gaming, and it will likely find a growing audience.
The following video was put together by Something Awful (who rated the game -27), it doesn’t give the full gist of the game but like any Something Awful video it has its moments.
(second screen shot credit: Something Awful)
First…
so essentially this is Grand Theft Auto San Andreas with the multiplayer mod installed?
p.s. I didn’t know Techcrunch became gamespot
Hmm – that logo makes me believe the company name is Gijji not ijji – they might consider fixing that or buy that domain if open.
Casual games are, were and will continue to be hot. In 2001-2003, my studies with thousands of women/mothers, showed that this group plays more than any other in the casual games sector. We created branded games that they played for HOURS with great ingame marketing messages.
I feel like I want to punch Duncan’s arm. who drives yellow punch car?
Kinda jumppy, lots of lag, even using T1 and Vista!
Yellow Punch Car #4
WTF? The car I was driving was green.
Andrew #2
This is more Second Life with cars
They need to upgrade their servers *grins*
Since, I can’t punch. I guess I can cuss here.
Punch buggy, Yellow.
Fuck you all techcrunchers.
No punching back. Hehehe
Punch buggy, green
Fuck you duncan. Get driver licenses!
hehehe.
Hey, duncan don’t forget to punch Mike Arrington.
One of their more popular games (at least in my experience) is Gunbound, which is a lot like Worms, but with that same Second Life element thrown in. Lots of fun, and since its a turn based thing, the lag isn’t (usually) a huge deal. Check it out if you want to play some more of their games.
I’d like to see a company profile though…Agree with Andrew: When did this become gamespot?
Casual gaming indeed…
full -fledged pc games just totally blows this free online crap out of the water – in terms of graphics, sound, interactivity, etc etc
Beware US search companies – NHN usually introduces casual gaming service to “open the door” for foreign markets, so they can introduce their superb search service. (Already #5 in the world now, after Google, Yahoo, MSN, Baidu) That’s the strategy they are using in China and Japan as well..
http://www.web20asia.com/107
The 700MB download is not as bad as it looks. South Korea, is, after all, one of the countries with the fastest broadband speeds in the world. Even at a (relatively snail paced) rate of 3.6 megabits/s, that download won’t take 30 minutes to complete.
http://news.bbc....stm#southkorea
700MB download? Meh… The future of casual multiplayer gaming for above 30s will be Coobico, LOL…
http://coobico.com
Cheers,
Lutz
Linking People
andrew- this is still tech news and i think its interesting cause game sites make good money like grab.com and its internet news,
Duncan- it is your week, normally i don’t like your posts or arguments in them and this week i seem to be backing you up.
CAR
thx
xfire is a pretty decent tool.
gr8 article, not sure though that a 700meg download can still be classified as casual gaming.
duncan, take a look at doof.com, they make claims about being the web 20 casual gaming site
As a former member of the ijji gaming community, I was able to feed my addiction to puzzle games, spending countless hours playing the puzzles solo as well as in the multiplayer modes. This was, however, until ijji “Upgraded” their services. This so called Upgrade removed several of the puzzle games that I (and so many others) had grown to love. Instead ijji introduced several new Action/RPG games.
The move was astounding to many of us. While petitions were sent to get a few of the puzzle games reinstated, our words were lost. Ijji decided that Action/RPG was the now and they couldn’t be bothered to support the puzzle gaming community any longer.
Hundreds of people canceled their memberships due to this lack loyalty, I, being one of them. I love gaming sites just as much as the next person, but how can I be expected to support a site that disregards such a large portion of their gaming base?
Well the last info i have about Ijji was that they have around 4 million accounts created and around 200.000 active users per month…. but those figures are a bit old.
I’m from France and in Europe those kind of games are just arriving. First portal to launch last may was http://www.goa.com with Gunbound (same version as Ijji); Pangya (called Albatross18 in th USA) and Kart N Crazy who should be on open béta in december or next january. This last game is only available in Korea and Europe for the time being.
so the game is basically a knockoff of GTA
I’ve been playing ijji for a while now…it’s ok for casual gaming, but tends to give me a lot of errors XD Maybe it’s just me
Flash has become a new standard for enjoying games online. At ‘Armor Games’ we’ve been funding Indie development for the last 2 and 1/2 years and it’s exciting to see that people are now making a living off the money we pay for their games.
It certainly looks fun, but I can imagine getting bored after a few hours, especially with buildings you can drive through, and really weird physics emulation!
Watching the video by Something Awful makes me think “…maybe if I get reeaal bored one day…”
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check out http://www.planetcazmo.com !!!
HI THERE THE FUTURE GAMING SHOULD BE FAST LIKE USEING BORG TECHNOLGIES LIKE INSTANT UNAVERSAL MULTI PLAYER GAMES THERE SHOULD BE MORE DIVERSE THEN CASUAL GAMES WE NEED ALSO GAMES LIKE HALO 8 ON OUR CELLPHONES IN THE FUTURE FOR HARD CORE GAMERS TOO.
ballz sucker
alot has changed sense then even the target audience has changed. Drift City is for teenagers mainly now cos the cars and features they implement are more like 2fast2furious like.
The controls r easy to use lol I joined tht game bck in sep 2007 and i picked up the game easily in a week. So really any person could pick up this game and play for hours.
I hv played this so much tht i hv played it for about 10 hours each day or more. If you guys quit eariler in the developement stages u really need to check it out now.
Honestly as a person with ijji from the very first launch day… I would not recommend the service, its really difficult to deal with them because many of their games they do not actually develop rather they just host them and the original developers still create fixes for the games and such so delays of new updates and such are very prevalent and bugs and glitches in the games can go without being dealt with for quite a while.
Also as I have seen with “Gunbound Revolution”, one of the launch games that they took on the Game Masters lack a significant knowledge of how the games work, the players or history of the game, how people manipulate and or cheat in the games. In fact some old players know better how the game operates more so than the people that run it. Hacking in games and abuse is pretty common and either ijji game masters have no clue as to the obvious of what is going on, or they simply don’t care.
The customer service is not helpful whatsoever either in fact I have encountered CSR’s directly lying to me in the past and trying to ignore my issues with a general response that was not anywhere near the subject of my problem.
Account security is lacking and recovery is near impossible if you are hacked. Many people have basically in the past been told to call the police and make a report because their website is invincible to hackers and thus not their problem.
The forum is really the place where most communication can go on between the players and administration. Unfortunately since all moderators are paid by ijji there is no night shift or weekend mods so the forums often go un-moderated and often get flooded with spam, childish behavior and not to mention various postings of pornography that can be left up for significant periods of time.
Much more but really not worth the time to write about, overall the games they have can be fun for a while if you are able to get them to run and work properly but the fun doesn’t last long and in many of the games you will not get far being overpowered by paid items and bonuses.
Its not too much to ask to help support a game that you want to excel and play long term but with their lack of security, customer service, and don’t care attitude I would not give them money because its not worth the risk or the enjoyment
try solder front the online fps game free with over 30 maps and 986 gears and 16muit player online with over 500,000 ever day log in is at
ijji.com thats ijji.com try ijji.com now ijji.com
you are good.but there have a good site