It's never felt so good to be insane

One word can describe the essence of Lunatix Online, Insanity. Lunatix Online is one of the best browser based games I, personally, have ever played. Who wouldn't want to be a deranged mental patient trying to escape from the wackiest mental institute in the world!

Gameplay is surprising. With hundreds of places to go and interact, this game takes you from the Cafeteria to battling evil shadows in your cell's closet. I very much enjoyed hitting on my hallway's nurse (you can invite her into your room eventually to . . . uh . . . "fool around") and trying to win cash by beating the computer at Tic-Tac-Toe. Very few online games have the originality and humor that Lunatix does. When you sign up, you choose whether your character will be a Homicidal Mania, a Paranoid Schizophrenic, or a Maniac Depressive. After logging in, you find yourself in a padded cell room where you can attack shadows in your closet, be healed by shadow puppets, hire the guard outside your door to keep people from attacking you, stash cash under your mattress, and lots of other fun things. Once you leave your room, the real fun starts. You can write romantic notes to other patients, or maybe make a potion in the Laboratory. If all else fails, visit the elevator, which opens the door to over thirty mini-games/quests that all help you toward your main goal: ESCAPING!

One thing I like about Lunatix Online is the fact that you can win, yet you can still play the game. Some other games (Dark Galaxy for example) end once someone wins. Then, the entire game starts over and everything you worked for is mass deleted. However, in Lunatix, once you win you can keep on playing. You can even win again! Also unlike many online games, Lunatix offers prizes for winning its gaming - a great incentive to at least try. Winning, however, is not easily accomplished and takes hours of gameplay.

One of the draw-backs of Lunatix is the fact that it is a "pay-to-play" game. It allows up to two weeks of trial play, and then you must pay five dollars a month or twenty-five dollars for six months to play. This, obviously, makes the game less popular and a little more unattractive. In my opinion, though, it's worth the cash.

The stability of Lunatix Online is remarkable. Not only did its graphics load incredibly quick (I'll talk about this later) but its server is very fast. I could go to any page on the site faster than I could at sites like AltaVista and Yahoo!. I was impressed by the amount of people all using the server at once and still keeping the site moving as quickly as it would if I was the only person on it. One of the reasons for this, though, is the fact that Lunatix Online is part of the online game creating company, Prowler Productions. Prowler has a powerful server setup to keep all of its web-browser based game free of lag.

There are nice 3D still-images on every page. Normally, this would create lag like no other and slow down its server. However, Lunatix offers the graphics in a 1.54 MB file which, when downloaded and unzipped to your computer, loads those graphics quickly. The smoothness and roundness of the graphics are very nice to look at after staring at the normally choppy graphics of the average website. I will say, though, that Lunatix's layout could use some improvements. The links are centered on the page. There is no menu or side link bar (except for links about FAQs and Subscription Info). It's not a pretty layout. That is the biggest problem for it though. The content of the site is great, but its layout could really use a make over.

Finally one of the best things about Lunatix Online was its astounding community interaction. I mean, sure, it has the forum and the chat, but what really overtook me was the fact that the chat was on every page. It's at the bottom of every page. That way, you can play the game and talk to your friends in the game chat. Another really cool feature of Lunatix's chat was the ability to put actions into chat. I had seen this before but not like this. You could kiss people and smack people around in chat just by clicking a button. Also, to Lunatix's benefit, the people in the chat rooms and forums are friendly. That's something I always look for when reviewing a game. Are the people playing the game friendly? Without friendly people, the game loses its appeal very quickly. Especially in a game like Lunatix, where interaction and communication with other players is almost unavoidable. I was pleased to see people helping out other people and just showing the spirit of a community.

Lunatix Online is a game that not only exhibits great community features and gameplay, but beautiful graphics and great server stability. Please believe me when I say that the fact that this game makes you pay won't keep me from playing it awhile longer. It's definitely got me hooked and, personally, I never want to escape . . .