January 8, 2010

IoTM Review: Really? A Diaper? Really?

Woah, hey, look, an IoTM review that isn’t on like… the last day of the month. Shocking.

But seriously, I have some reservations about this thing. KoL is the home of all kind of ridiculous shit. I can attack people with a butt tuba for crying out loud. This is not a very serious game. At the same time, I dunno. Nothing has quite disturbed me before than this month’s IoTM, the Stinky Cheese Ball. This is frustrating, because at the same time, it’s got a mechanic that I really like, and some really good effects on it. It’s an issue.

Why do I kind of hate this item? Well, it’s mostly because of the Stinky Cheese Diaper. The idea of equipping a diaper just… doesn’t sit right with me. Perhaps I’ve seen too many scary furry images in my day, but it just brings up associations I’d rather not bring up! (As per usual, though, if that’s your thing, have fun! As long as nobody is being hurt, fun is of the most importance. I’m just completely definitely against that particular fetish for myself.) Add that to the fact that it’s a diaper made of cheese? Well, uh, yeah. It just really unsettles me.
The kicker, though, is that this diaper is pretty seriously optimal. Unless you have Time Trousers, it is pretty well the easiest and best way to get +Rollover Adventures in the pants slot, a rare benefit. It’s also trivially easy to get them more effective than the Time Trousers, using the neat mechanic that I’ll get to in a second. Not only do I not like the idea of these things, but I’ll have to equip them every time I log off? Yeah, unfortunate.

Still, the mechanics of the Stinky Cheese Ball are actually really neat. It gets more pungent as you use it, and that increases the benefits of the items you can make out of it. It maxes out at 100 turns, but it’s still a very cool little mechanic. If I want the full benefit of the Diaper, which is +10 adventures, then I need to run a 100 turns of another item. Thankfully, they’re all pretty good, and can squeeze into your equipment somewhere. The “equippable at level 1” shield that is the Stinky Cheese Wheel seems like an overall good choice for many characters (I understand that most optimal players use Shieldbutt all the time, so having a good early game shield seems key, though I guess most would rather have the Pilgrim Shield.) and the sword and chefstaff are similarly useful to, at the very least, early-game characters. Probably the most useful way to charge up that diaper, though, is the Stinky Cheese Eye. Not only does it give you +item, which is, of course, what you want, but it also gives you one free Harold’s Bell a day in the skill it grants, called “Give Your Opponent the Stinkeye” This isn’t something I use very often? But I understand how it would be extremely useful, so it’s nice to have around.

Yeah, I think the Stinky Cheese Ball is a winner. While disgusting, I think every one of the items it can morph into has some very strong use. Obviously, the Diaper was the power item, but I can see me using all of them, unlike with, say, the Spooky Putty, which had several items of questionable use attached to the obscenely useful Sheet. This is probably an item you should pick up. Just don’t think too hard about the diaper, okay? Just… really. Don’t think too hard about the diaper.

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