Second Life Detourist

Definitely not for the faint of heart. INSILICO is a very detailed cyberpunk sim (certainly the most intricate I’ve seen), like something out of Blade Runner or Neuromancer… only not as gloomy. As dark as it may seem, the place is entirely alive with animated neon, holo-vids and green laser sights that follow you until you make a wrong move and tempt the gun turrets to start firing on you. Ok, not really… but would have been cool!

The lights are tantalizing to say the least, and they drew me to just about every nook of the place. There are many little spots to discover, but if you do look around for a while expect SL to slow down some. Completely worth it though.

As you can probably tell, the shops are geared more toward cyberpunks, but the high quality items are definitely not to miss out on. You’ll find everything from mobile suits to tech weapons to neko gear. Aside from shops, there are several hangouts, most notably the Blue Ant Bar, the Red Strip Club and Club Aftermath (the last of which has disappeared for construction since my previous visit I think). While the area is new and continually growing in appearance, you can expect to find a good amount of traffic here. There may even be more as INSILICO owners/builders/visionaries Skills Hak and Cinndreia Messmer have intended it to be a RP sim.

In an interview with REZ Magazine last month, Skills notes that it all simply started with a place where she wanted to sell her products. She had so much fun building it, that she bought her own sim and made everything that is currently INSILICO from the ground up. You can tell from the moment you TP in that there’s a lot of soul behind the project, with innovations like the interactive web browser view-screen. Skills seems to always be building, and the city is yet young, so you can probably look forward to much more in the coming months.

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