Too popular for his own good, the effeminate Sailor has been retired.

AC does not allow me to create a proper mime.  This is the character I dreamed I was playing.

Almost as bad as showing up at the Oscars wearing the same dress as Brad Pitt, this AC monster stole my look.

The Effeminate Sailor was great, but he quickly became too popular.  At left is a photograph of a toy based on my character and released by Hasbro during the height of Effeminate Sailor mania.  My game sessions as Effeminate Sailor were soon dominated by signing virtual autographs in virtual autograph books.  Since AC included no autograph stat, I felt this was getting me nowhere.   Note that the missing autograph stat has not been fixed in the retail version.

For this review I needed to start a new character - a persona that would not get me in trouble with the gamemasters or my fellow players.  Basically I needed a character that would keep me from chatting my way into virtual danger.

I'm still pretty new to RPG's.  All I know about role playing is that you have to be a character that you could find at a Renaissance Faire.  My first choice, fat guy on a horse, is not possible in AC.  The world may be huge, but there are no pack animals or dirtbikes to shorten travel times.   My second favorite guy (met while attending a Renaissance Faire for research purposes) is the mime.  He was the only employee or volunteer or whatever these freaks are who kept his invisible pie hole shut and didn't ask me if I'd been enjoying  "thine mead", and then tell me how I should maybe cut back on "thine mead".  I thought that while the heavy rouge, lipstick, and foundation were significant in the potential-fruit sense, the mime's stoic silence was all-man and might help me last longer in Asheron's Call.  My previous attempts at playing AC came to abrupt halts every time I opened my big mouth and started asking the other players for "favors" and "shows" and sex.

How can you role play as a mime?  It's hard.  When it comes down to it, I was Tommy from Pinball Wizard minus the pinball machine plus a couple more Elton Johns.   Oh and I could see - I think the pinball wizard was blind.  My handicap?  I'm sorry - my handicapability?  Mimes are mute.  Which is just a fancy way of saying they can't talk because their chest rigging is slack and if they open their mouths, their hearts will pop out.  Furthermore, mimes are the Orcs of the real world - reviled, misunderstood, prone to violence, weak, and totally, completely clichéd in their debasement to the point that the relentlessly awful Robin Williams has even made fun of them.  So the mime works on a lot of levels.

I started in the major city of Gharu'ndim.  The city's name is very appropriate to AC's unearthly atmosphere in that you'd have to have a magical mouth to pronounce it.  Nothing says 'fantasy!' like the arbitrary placement of an apostrophe.  Bravo Turbine!  The first few hours of play consisted of me trying to practice my silent craft in front of anyone who would hold still for a second.  Most people responded by telling me to get the hell out of their way, or role playing their character pretending to ignore me.   I found it difficult to perform the "trapped in a box" classic with the clunky AC controls.  Points off there.

With no sign asking for payments (nor any support for sign making - more points off), both my money and interest were beginning to wane.  I needed to evolve.  Just like when the Europeans created the modern fork by adding some pointy ends to the sticks the Chinese used like a skills-testing crazy crane to pick food out of a bowl, I added a big red nose to the mime and created a clown (I mean jester).