WTF?! is WOW

World of Warcraft Flash gameFrom Play This Thing!

"It's a World of Warcraft screenshot, right? Well, no -- it's a screenshot from WTF?!, a Flash-based sidescroller parodying WoW. And it's note-perfect, too -- every interface element and the backgrounds and characters look like they're ripped straight from Azeroth.

The gameplay is pretty similar, too, for all that this is a sidescroller -- the same tedious level-grind, based on the same sort of tedious quests ("go kill seven sheep"). But the satirical way it treats that level-grind is priceless, a telling commentary on the common tropes of the MMO. The quests get increasingly weird -- your newbie quest giver asks you to go cast a spell on sheep that have been transformed by the evil mage Karl Marx into communist brain-slaves to restore them to their rightful ovine form, and then tells you to go kill Marx himself. But Marx shows you that your previous quest-giver is simply a tool of capitalist oppression, and becomes your new quest giver. Sigmund Freud also makes an appearance.

Thus, the quirkiness of the story is enough to draw you in the for the full duration. WoW players, in particular, will enjoy the mostly-loving way WTF?! mocks the game.

This is an impressive piece of ActionScript coding, too -- reproducing the complexities of the WoW interface in Flash is no trivial task."

For some reason the program named me "lumpen" when i logged in to play. which made me feel special.