Day 1 of Party Parrot World: The Closed Beta Experience!

 

Hello to all my Penguin Pals out there! Welcome back to another blog post pertaining to - you guessed it - Party Parrot World!

You might've caught my last blog post, where I went over the teaser trailer put out by the Party Parrot crew. If you happen to have not seen it, don't you worry! You can check it out HERE!

With how amazing that trailer was - the trailer itself made by Businessmoose and the music made by Screenhog - I knew I wanted in. Before I was even invited to write that post, the moment I saw the teaser, I raced over and I submitted an application to be a part of closed beta testing before you could even say "Wow, Bunny's excited for this!"

Prologue to Day 1: The Invitation

A couple weeks later, I was away doing something. I don't even remember what I was doing - I was probably taking a nap or something, because I'm a sleepy gal. But when I come back and check Twitter, suddenly I'm seeing people are getting accepted into Party Parrot World! And, naturally, I go freaking NUTS.

I think I refreshed my email about 50 gazillion times in the span of 10 minutes. I was a mix of both excited and anxious - excited because "oh my gosh, the beta is here!" - and anxious because, "oh my gosh, what if I don't get in?"

I reckon it was about 2 hours later when I almost completely gave up. People were getting in and I was essentially doom-scrolling Twitter, wishing I was in the world like everyone else. I sighed - maybe I won't be a part of the first wave of testers, after all. Maybe, perhaps, it was already too late?

I left to go eat dinner, it seemed like my adventure in the closed beta ended before it even started.

ANYWAYS, I got the invitation email while I was eating dinner and I COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY choked with excitement.

I ate the rest of my beloved Subway sandwich with glee, and then raced to my room, and downloaded the client. And thus, the adventure begins!

Day 1: The Fun Begins

The first thing I did was change my name - I didn't want to be known as Player887, after all! That would be even harder of a username to remember than Imabunny156.

The Town Square was absolutely packed - everyone was online at once! And, luckily, that meant I could ask for help pretty easily. That's how I learned that you needed to buy your colors, rather than just changing them on the fly like you would in Club Penguin Island.

The first place I went was the Clothing Shop, because I wanted to be something other than the default green parrot. So, the first item I bought was the polar bear costume! That was an obvious pick. I mean, come on! Helloooo? Biggest Herbert P. Bear fangirl of all time over here! Couldn't pass up the chance to cosplay!

And boy, did I absolutely look crazy good in it!

After that, I started to explore a little bit. One thing I took note of is, WOW. This place... is HUUUGE!

I was already quite impressed. There was more to explore in Party Parrot's beta than there was on Club Penguin Island's LAUNCH! Already a fantastic start, and I wanted to see everything the world had to offer. That was my goal!

Of course, it wouldn't be Bunny attempting to accomplish her goals without tons of distractions - and distractions aplenty there were!

I spent a lot of that night mingling with my fellow Parrot Pals. I couldn't help it, I'm an extrovert! I wanted to say hi to absolutely everyone, but I also wanted to check out actual bits of the game, so the entire time I kind of felt overwhelmed jumping between gameplay and socializing! It's that weird good kind of overwhelmed, though. It was a fun rush of events!

I saw Moose was online at the time as well, and most of the players were following him around. Just about when everyone had left the Town Square, I got back to exploring. I knew that if this was absolutely anything like Club Penguin or Club Penguin Island, there were going to be minigames. And I knew that if I wanted to be the most decked out parrot on the island, I needed to get to work!

So I started taking a look around. Luckily, two minigames were sitting right next to Town Square, in the Breakfast shop. I didn't actually know how to trigger them at first - but after messing around for a couple of minutes, I realized I needed to click on one of the two NPCs placed in the building in order to hop straight into a minigame.

The first minigame I played was Chez Sandi's. Chez Sandi is a really hungry parrot, and they need you to help feed them the chef's dishes. Easy enough, right?

Launching up the game, it reveals the name of the minigame is Algebrunch.

Oh no.

I'll be completely real and say that I absolutely didn't read the name before I started the game for the first time. I just tapped to start, and was immediately shocked when I saw numbers.

For those unaware, I have always struggled with mental math, especially when it comes to adding up numbers higher than 20. This game essentially gives you a number, and you have to add up the numbers on the plates as they pass by in order to add up to that number.

And I'll be completely honest when I say that I suck at it.

I fail quite a lot in this game, so I normally don't walk away with any coins at all. But hey, that's not my fault! I'm sorry, I didn't know I accidentally booted up Sonic's Schoolhouse within my funny parrot game! I wasn't prepared to do math, I had already shut my brain off for the day!

Props to those who can do Algebrunch well. I will never get to that level, and I don't feel the need to. So let's move on to our next minigame, shall we?

The next minigame is hosted by the NPC known as Freddie - and judging by the name and the fact that there is a stage in this establishment, I can only assume that this will be some sort of riff on the hit classic horror game, Five Nights at Freddy's.

No, actually. It's called Jar Jam! Eh... Jar Jam at Freddie's, it works. Same amount of syllables.

Jar Jam reminds me an awful lot of a generic mobile game - it's definitely not a bad thing, but it's nothing that really sticks out. It's more playable for me than Algebrunch.

The game has you click at the top of the screen to drop down fruits into a jar, with obstacles in your way. You can only get your fruit hit by these obstacles 5 times before you game over, and trust me, you're not gonna know that until it's happened to you too many times.

I spent a good while trying to figure out exactly what I was supposed to do - but when I figured it out, it was pretty alright! Again, just very generic and basic gameplay, but I'm sure it would be fun if we got an actual instruction page telling us what an obstacle looks like and how we're meant to avoid them.

Side note, I had Jar Jam just on the main menu in the background whilst typing, and when I exited out, it gave me 20 coins. My guy, I didn't even do anything! I was sitting idle! I think the coins are being determined by how long you spend in the game, not how well you do. That would explain why I got coins for literally no reason whatsoever.

Anywho, I played this game for a while, and it gave me a fair amount of coins for playing it, so I was happy with that. I didn't discover the final singleplayer minigame until later on in the night, when I went to the Pizza Dojo.

I had heard from a moderator - I believe it was Chilly0ne - that this next minigame was in SUPER beta. And after playing it, I can definitely tell that's the case. I look forward to seeing this minigame improving with the coming updates, because I actually really liked it! But it had some major drawbacks, as you'll see in a moment.

Welcome... to Slice 'n Spice!

Okay, already one major issue - there's a scroll bar. On the game. A scroll bar on the game!

If you can't already tell, this is essentially Fruit Ninja. Which I think is great! Fruit Ninja is very fun and addictive, and while the inspiration is quite obvious, I think it makes for a great minigame! It's literally just Fruit Ninja but with the drawback of having a scroll bar.

Why does it have a scroll bar? My guess is that this is simply an issue for the Windows client. You see, I think Party Parrot is mainly being designed for mobile right now. There's nothing wrong with that, no siree! But that does mean that while the Slice 'n Spice game window may fit into the screen of a mobile device, it seems like it won't fit as well on a PC monitor. I wouldn't know how any of this is on mobile, by the way - I don't have an Android.

Another weird thing I found while placing Slice 'n Spice is that the calibration of the slicer is very... off. When playing Fruit Ninja, the slicer is always right where your cursor or finger is. However, with this, it seems like the calibration is making it so that it slices slightly to the left of where you're click-swiping. And with this gameplay style, it's very noticeable, and it's a huge drawback.

I reckon all of these issues will be fixed very soon, and I genuinely look forward to it! There's a lot of potential here, and I simply want to see this promising game grow into something very special. The Party Parrot team is working extremely hard to make this virtual world the safest and most fun it can be, and I commend them greatly for their efforts. They've already created something so genuinely enjoyable, even if it's in a very unfinished state.

Having experienced all the minigames there are to play, I went back to the Town Square in order to meet up with everybody, in hopes of wrapping up my day by socializing with the awesome community. Ironically, I found everyone hanging out in the Breakfast shop, which I had just left. I hung out there for quite a while, talking to everyone and all that jazz.

And then, I was approached by none other than Moose himself! We had a talk about my blog - apparently he had seen my previous blog post! I was extremely flattered, and nothing could've prepared me for what was about to happen next...

STAY TUNED FOR NEXT TIME!

We'll be covering the multiplayer minigames, and day 2-3 events too!

Keep on waddling, my friends!

- imabunny156, aka Nhexis