(Get used to the puns..I have lots of them..)

Well, I’m not in SL at the moment, I’m exploring Kaneva again.  Boy is it strange…like I said before you really won’t complain about SL if you go in Kaneva. I’ve upgraded to a condo and placing furniture in it is a relatively easy but tedious process. Furniture seems to be available from only a few shops in the mall at the moment, so you are exceptionally limited into what you can use,  but you can apply textures to shapes (cubes cylinders etc) yourself and that allows for a certain amount of creativity.

You can have a TV in your apartment that plays videos which is sort of cool, but this is no ROX media Center set up! There are various selections including an 80’s and 90’s channel but they seem to be playing the same videos on rotation which gets extremely annoying. (Mind you there are  videos by The Smiths, The Cure and Depeche Mode so that’s a plus point…*BUT* there’s also a really shitty Thompson Twins live track too and that spoils it somewhat.) I’ll come back to this in a moment…

You are limited to how much you can store in your inventory so you can bank items in a central repository in the mall.  Oh how I love that idea..imagine how easy it would be if we could do that in SL? Obviously there’s no prim limits but don’t get excited by that; you are limited to what is currently available to buy from the existing stores, and it is slim pickings indeed.  However, you can make your place look nice with the kit on offer.  I was  ITCHING to buy new hair etc for Kaneva Kitty but you can’t-although there is a shop that appears to be a hairdressers there’s nothing for sale yet.  There are a lot of stores that look like they will be opening soon, including a pet shop that could be fun, but it’s a far cry from the shopping malls of SL.

It is extremely well policed though..perhaps a little excessively.  Like I wrote before it’s obviously the tweens that inhabit the neighbourhood, and in the mall I happened across a brief conversation which wouldn’t be out of place in SL at all:

Male Avatar: So are we going back to your place then?

Female Avatar: Haha! You wouldn’t know what to do!

Male Avatar: Ooh just you wait and see!

Within a *nanosecond* of that sentence hitting the screen there was a message displayed to say he had been booted out of Kaneva. I kid you not.  Now, I can understand being cautious and everything *BUT* I thought it a tad over-zealous. (Especially when some of the videos looped over and over on the music channels are George Michael’s ‘I want your sex’ and Depeche Modes ‘Stripped’!)

So what else have I learned on my fact finding missions?  Movement is a right pain in the arse, and interacting with objects or furniture borders on the farcical. You have to load up a menu to be able to sit or lay down for example and even that doesn’t guarantee you will be perfectly aligned with whatever you were aiming for.  You’re as likely to be sat in mid-air as you are on a chair, and this leads me to share with you an astounding fact:this actually makes the pose balls in SL  look like the best thing since sliced bread! (If you’ve just fainted I know..I was gob-smacked too)

One of the ways to earn in Kaneva is to play a dancing game in a club.  It’s basically like playing a dance mat game, but you use your fingers on your keys to make your avatar dance, and you score points which I presume will accumulate into credits. after the mall the club is the busiest place, with avvies dancing away frantically.  I had a boogy and it was fun for a bit..but I yearned to walk outside and cross the street and do something else like in SL…alas, you can’t do that here.

Incidentally I purchased an access pass that allows me to visit restricted areas. The pass is to prove that you are over 18, so once I’d gotten mine I went to the over 18’s club and there was no one else there.  (They were probably all very sensibly in SL!) My pass came with a free leather catsuit (which is about as outrageous as it gets) but I had another problem in that I cannot wear the bloody thing! For some reason I cannot disrobe my avatar and change her outfit to that particular one (Although she can wear anything else in her inventory just fine) It’s not even a great catsuit either, I’ve got about 8 in my SL wardrobe that wouldn’t piss on this one it if it were on fire but I want to take some pictures of it and share them with you and I have my reputation to think of!

So my Kaneva verdict so far is that it’s just being used by teenagers like an enhanced Facebook or Beebo utility.  They get to invite their mates round to their virtual living spaces for parties, but that’s as far as it goes ( Great for RL parents though who don’t have to return home to thousands of pounds worth of damage!) There were plenty of shout outs in the mall along the lines of  ‘Party at so and so’s place in five minutes!’, but unless I’ve yet to unlock some amazing features then that is pretty much your lot.  So far there’s certainly nothing especially newsworthy to report on for ‘The Avastar’ and it looks like you have to be really careful what you say in open chat or the sphincter police will boot you out as quick as a flash.  I just don’t see the point in bothering with it, if I was a teen I’d be more inclined towards the Teen SL grid than this….