Keeping You Abreast of Evony
by Matt McCormick ~ July 29th, 2009. Filed under: Game Review.
In my own defense, it wasn’t the breasts that piqued my interest. OK, maybe a little bit. If you’re a gamer who browses the web at all, you’ve surely come across the salacious banner ads for Evony, a free-to-play . . . um . . . game. They don’t tell you much more beyond that, so you’re left to imagine what kind of game Evony is based on a couple of cryptic images.
It certainly makes a nice pair, but what to make of the disparate scenes? Is it a centuries-spanning tale of time travel where Ye Olde Elven Princesse transforms into a New Jersey stripper? Are they both wet nurses? What is that lady smelling? These questions troubled me enough to go sign up for an account and find out.
The signup process was fairly simple, and after providing some minor personal information and probably letting them install a Trojan on my laptop, I was in the game. And I have to say, I was completely unprepared for the lusty tableau that unfurled before me:
Yep, that’s some totally hot cottage-building action that I blurred out for you there in case your boss is around. So Evony is essentially an Age of Empires clone with all the latest graphics technology from 1996. And, at least for the 15 minutes I played around with it, a distinct lack of fair top-heavy maidens. After I thrust my cottage into nubile farmland, I watched the all-caps comments scroll by: ”DUDE WUT THE F*** DO U DO IN HEAR…WARE R THE LADEEZ…ANY LADEEZ WANT 2 CHAT,” and so on. I could sympathize with these lonely souls who had been duped into playing a crappy strategy game, and I found their naivete touching. I like to imagine that Evony is actually an internet waypoint for well-endowed babes, that they see the ads and think “Wow, I also have enormous breasts. This must be the place for me to meet other like-mammaried ladies.” Such is the silicone of which sweaty dreams are made.
Rating: 2.65 La Leche League flyers
July 29th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
You should do more banner ad reviews.
July 29th, 2009 at 10:41 pm
Play Now! my Lord, hahaha. And here I just thought it would be an internet dating sim.
July 30th, 2009 at 3:15 am
Now PopCap are ridiculing the Evony advertisements: http://www.bruceongames.com/2009/07/29/evony-advert-ridiculed-by-popcap/
July 30th, 2009 at 4:45 am
I don’t think I would have even recognized those as being ads for a game…
July 30th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Hahaha This was the perfect start to my day. Well done.
July 30th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Nicely done, Matt. Nicely done.
July 31st, 2009 at 2:22 am
And there was the Queen of Evony competition!
http://www.bruceongames.com/2009/07/31/queen-of-evony-competition/
October 29th, 2009 at 10:23 am
I am a student studying computer games design at uni and decided to investigate Evony.com.
Just to see what some of these games are like etc. etc.
The game is actually kind of cool (found myself addicted and even spent a little money on it).
But I started to notice HUGE bandwidth use by the site as I played.
I am not the only one either, there are comments on the evony forums about this.
This is odd because all of the client info, the animations etc. are all downloaded in one big download at the start.
There is no streaming media so I began to wonder what was going on.
To cut a long story short I decided to break the law and reverse engineer Evony’s client.
Not to cheat. Not to rip them off or even to use even a scrap of the code.
But just to poke about a bit and find out what was going on, maybe even offer them some ways to improve things.
Aside from the fact that the whole thing is very poorly constructed (it is really very beginner coder level stuff. Reminds me of a lot of
what the first year students produce for assignments) it contained some very interesting information.
Included with the client are 2 peices of tracking software that monitor your web use and which applications you have open while the client is running.
These do not install independently on the machine though due to the limitations of flash and do not actually damage anything.
But they harvest massive volumes of information. My firewall was blocking a lot of outgoing transmissions and it turns out that these
were the data trying to be sent out. So they know nothing about me. lol.
However there is a LOT of data coming IN over the ports the client uses. In otherwords it is downloading something into my cache for use later.
I have bandiwdth restriction which slows these types of tricks down and I completely clear my cache every couple of hours if I am heavily using the net.
I also noticed that all the varanbles etc. are named Civony still and that there are multiple references to UMGE.
Even a couple of folders are simply called UMGE, one of these folders contains one of the spyware programs.
So I can only guess at where the data would end up if I didnt have a good firewall.
There are also commented out sections in the code which contain references to UMGE and Lam himself, though low on details.
Thank you for reading this.
Lee
October 29th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Thanks for the info, Lee.
January 16th, 2010 at 3:52 am
google