Belfast Meet, Details at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ belfastmeet/ - come along, you know you wan...
Belfast Meet, Details at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ belfastmeet/ - come along, you know you want to.
Member since:22.01.2001
Reviews:172
Members who trust:145
I´m a talker I am, its true, thats one of the benefits I´ve found of going onto the internet, when there are days like this where my voice threatens to completely disappear, I always need a spare outlet for my ramblings, and dagnammit if I can´t speak to people with my voice, I may as well type to them, and thats where places like Habbo Hotel come to hand.
I´d tried some of the UK specific chat-rooms, but for a lazy student with too much time on his hands like myself they were always way too empty during the daytime as well as in the early hours of the morning, so it was time to find a worldwide chat-room where you didn´t get pestered just because of your sex, I´d tried the Yahoo rooms, but if I got asked A/S/L? one more time (A/S/L = Age?/Sex?/Location? to which they always get the reply from me - 56/Both/Behind You) I would have screamed, then whilst clicking around, I found out about Habbo Hotel.
The 2 big attractions of Habbo Hotel are that a. its an internationally renowned site so there´s always quite a few people available to chat to, and on top of that its not just your plain text-based chat, you get to create your own character and actually walk around the room rather than just being
another name in the chatters list.
On first visit as with any web-site you visit for the first time it all looks just a little bit strange, however there is a registration procedure that you go through - its the basic information to give out - i.e. real name, e-mail address, selected user name and password plus if you give them your mobile number for a small fee (10p) people from your friends list can send you a text message without ever knowing your mobile number. After registering its time to build yourself a habbo, you get to choose your habbos hair/hat, his/her skin colour, their shirt type and colour, trousers type and colour and finally shoe type/colour - alas its hard to find a weird combination, and no matter what you throw together you end up with a little character which isn´t unlike a lego-man.
Now you´re finally ready to chat, but lookie here!, we have a list of rooms to choose from, generally they´re all the same, some of them have a dance-floor, some have a virtual bar, but all the chatters are the same no matter what room you go in, however there is one room where you get a little bit of a different kind of interaction, the Games room, there´s a total of 4 games you can play in - Chess, Battleships, Poker (I see your penny and raise you by 2p!) and some kind of noughts and crosses game, now these games is where you will first experience the trouble causers, especially on battleship - what people will do is walk in, get you into a false sense of security by sitting down ready to play a game with you, then as soon as both of you have taken one move getting up and legging it, hence ruining all the time you spent setting up your game.
But what sort of chat can you expect when walking around?, well I´ve encountered quite a few different types, there are the people who just want to sit there and be filthy with you, but then you´ll find people like that in almost any chat-room, and there is a way of avoiding these kinds of people that I´ll go into later, there are people in there who are genuinely there to make new friends, however I did have meet one person there - she was 17 and had only been on the internet in general for a total of 3 weeks, and although there was nothing there within 3 hours of speaking to her, I knew her real name, had a photo, had a mobile number, knew which college she studied at and what course she studied, now I don´t know about everyone else, but finding out that kind of information I could have done a lot with it, but luckily I´m not a `weirdo´ and have since gotten this person onto my Yahoo Messenger and generally `taken her under my wing´, however this isn´t the first time something like this has happened in habbo apparently.
However I did say I'd give you a way to avoid abusive/nasty chatters - well its simple, just walk away, the further away from the person you are the less of their words you see, before long you `won´t be able to hear them´ and most people do get the message if you do that.
Now then - site reliability, its not great, there´ll be plenty of times the shockwave applet simply won´t work, or it´ll be so slow loading that you´ll be sat waiting upwards of 20 minutes for the actual chat program to load, Habbo claim this is due to a high usage, but they also say on the front page that there will never be more than 750 people on Habbo at one time, so that this won´t happen, but it still does.
Of Course I have e-mailed habbo about this myself on many occasions along with asking for the rules of their noughts and crosses game, but still we´re waiting for them to get back to me, and the first e-mail was sent over a month ago, so if you were to ask me about support from the staff - well its a simple reply, what support?
Finally you can set up a private chat room where you can style the room yourself, it can be an empty room if you like, which believe me I do, as to get anything put in your own private room you have to bring out the un-flexible friend costing at the most 15p per item and at the least 5p per item, and again I don´t know about anybody else, but just to decorate a chat-room I really don´t see the point in paying out.
But I still use Habbo, why? I here you ask (stop shouting!), well although there are the `bad-guys´ there, there´s also a lot of `good-guys´ to balance it all out, and the whole idea that the place is full of youngsters out to cause trouble is if you go in there completely unfounded.
Plus when you do find the `good-guys´ and you believe them to be someone you´d like to talk to again, then just open up a little tool called the Habbo Communicator, and with a couple of clicks you´ll have added them as a friend - the whole Communicator actually works very much like a Yahoo Messenger for Habbo members, you can leave off-line messages, if your friends are online you can chat to them, plus there are a couple of added extras, if they´re off-line and you don´t want to leave them a message for them to get the next time they log onto habbo, you can send an e-mail via the Communicator, or if you´re prepared to pay 10p and they´ve given their mobile number then you can send them a text-message without ever seeing their mobile number, both of these work extremely quickly, and also with having this facility it means you never have to give your e-mail address or mobile number out to people yet still be able to receive e-mails and text-messages from them.
If you ever do visit though, be sure to do a search for Tripley - thats me that is!!
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
great op - my little brother visits habbo a lot since being referred by a boy he met in greece!!
I shall get him to read your op, and hope he takes heed of it!
mbmb11 x
student 18.08.2001 11:51
Habbo's a fantastic idea (I wish I'd thought of it), but it took so long to load I got bored and I haven't been back since.
minxette 17.08.2001 14:29
Great op, Hubby's well into this (when he's got time to play anyway!!) so if you see a BeakerFM on there, give him a shout and ask how Minxette...that should freak him out nicely!!! Must have a look myself! Kez x
Advantages: addictive, free, fun, endless possibillities, lots of rooms Disadvantages: can get boring, some people ruin your fun, can be laggy, repitive
doubleheman 02.09.2009 (04.11.2009)
·
Read review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of habbohotel.com
Advantages: Something A Bit Different, Possibilities Are Endless, Quite A Small Community At The Moment Disadvantages: Language Barrier, Full Rooms, Potential Misuse, Still In The Beta Stages
innocent 13.05.2001 (28.10.2001)
·
Read review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of habbohotel.com
Aug 16th, 2001
very helpful by (100%):
