Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Awww ... bummer!

One of my least favorite things about Second Life is that things that I think are way cool will suddenly disappear, and this happened again today. It looks like the Four Deuces folks have finally thrown in the towel. Now, if you're not familiar with them, they had started out with a multi-sim build that was focused on a Poker casino ... the whole sim being "Chicago themed" with stuff like the Art Institute, the Palmer House Hotel, Navy Pier, and the Chicago River with various bridges getting at least "name-checked" in it. After Linden Labs pulled the plug on in-world gambling, most of this stuff disappeared, and what was left (one sim centered around the Art Institute) had moved to some other place (or, at least when I used specific landmarks I was dropped into empty sims).

Now, aside from the fun Chicago build, Four Deuces had a fabulous radio station that not only could you hear over there, but was available on the web as well (as of today that's gone too). They seemed to have been trying to re-envision the "Four Deuces" sim as something of a "nightmare" Chicago, with meat packing plants, a morgue and funeral home, police station, and some really creepy stuff tucked away here and there ... plus two night clubs, a version of the Sears Tower, and the in-world "studio" for the radio station. The only thing was that there was never anybody there, except sometimes a lone builder fixing up details on things like the loading docks outside of Chiapetti meats. I kept waiting to hear something about them opening ... but nada ... which is too bad because they'd obviously spent a TON of time on making a very fascinating and detailed build.



Here's what's on the other side of the landmark today ... the name's been changed to "Carthage", and there's one stockade (with several people dancing in it ... go figure) and one Gothy-looking tower that had a bunch of "oooh, spooky" stuff for sale inside. As you can see from the inset, the S.L. map hasn't updated, and it still shows the lay-out from it's most recent Chicago manifestation.

I suppose if the same folks are involved, this will end up being as cool as the various "Four Deuces" builds were (and the audio stream was still pretty good), but it's awfully sad to have a "favorite place" (no matter how empty of other avatars) just up and disappear like this!

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