I decided to be adventurous today and check out Ameba Pigg, the Japanese-language social avatar community that Pico is based on.
Not knowing any Japanese whatsoever I relied on the built-in Google Translate function of my Google Chrome browser to decipher enough of the site's content to be able to register. It wasn't great the greatest.
Adding to the ease of registering is the visual consistency (e.g. the tutorial at first login) between the Japanese- and English-language versions.
After an hour or so of browsing around I sincerely hope that Pico developers eventually grow the community to be as content-filled as Pigg.
Pigg is like Pico on weed sprinkled with steroids and dipped in formaldehyde, then aged for 12 years and smoked slowly while throwing back tequila shots.
Simply put, it's f*cking awesome!
Here's how I see it ...
Pros:
- User accounts come with blogs.
- User accounts come with a music player (embeds to user blog; plays a single song). Not sure how this works. The translation wasn't the greatest.
- Other actions (paper, rock, scissors )
- More travel venues.
- More time travel venues.
- Way More clothing options. Pages and pages more, in fact
- BAPE Store. 'Nuff said.
- The selection of avatar skins tone is severely (and understandably) limited to pale to suntanned options.
- Less hair options for male and female avatars.
- Less eye options for male and female avatars.
- Same commands, different triggers. A follow-up post about the Pigg commands is in the works.
Note: The giant avatars are part of a April Fool's Day command perk. By typing /big into the chat line, you can grow your Pigg avatar to Godzilla-like proportions on April 1 only. Similarly, /min will shrink you down to the size of a mouse. Careful where you step!
