Adventures in Habbo Hotel begin in the usual way-- by signing up via email and choosing an avatar. The Habbo population resembles little Lego folk, and you can customize yours by choosing different hair, faces, torsos, legs and feet, and by picking different colors for each. There's no verification by email required to get started-- Habbo does send an email to make sure you're signing up to its newsletter, though.

Play always begins in the "Hotel View" screen, and travel to anywhere is done with the "Navigator" pop-up menu, which allows you to choose from a broad list of rooms. Be prepared to wait a bit, though-- loading screens between rooms in Habbo are rather excruciating, with waits of anywhere from 30 seconds to a full minute any time you want to make a transition. Many of the rooms are for members only, and the top tier, the VIP rooms, are only for those paying the 30 credits monthly to be part of the Habbo Club.

Your avatar can hang out in clubs, lounges, lobbies and even tea gardens, most of which are usually fairly well-populated. As a portion of Habbo's revenue comes from advertising, many of the rooms are furnished with some kind of corporate branding; there's the Alloy Lounge, the Sunkist Soda VIP Lounge, and the Target Red Sky Lounge-- the latter featured a promo for the Transformers film on its wall. Ads are shown during the protracted loading screens about half the time.

While there are often so many conversations going on in a room it's hard to follow who's speaking, it's not the friendliest crowd-- while I received a few friend invites immediately, groups in most rooms wasted no time in mocking the bunny hat I'd chosen for my avatar. The social scene consists mostly of text message-style shorthand and fairly typical teen antics-- they've developed well-crafted mudslinging tactics to insult one another around the word filters. Plenty don't mind the filters at all; "Bobba you," is a common exchange.

One kinda neat factor is that many of the lounges and restaurant areas are staffed by a kind of auto-bot manning the counter, who seems to recognize certain key words and can make basic conversation, and even hand your avatar a cola, which you'll hold and sip from for a few minutes.

There are four free games available in the "Cunning Fox Gamehall", but the popular games, where users can earn rankings and win prizes, are members-only. Free users can play against others in Poker, Battleship, Chess and Tic Tac Toe-- and they're clearly lower-tier leavings. The clumsy interface tends to freeze during games, and you're never sure whether it's frozen or your opponent is simply taking his time to make a move-- that is, until they begin to complain. Seated at a game station across from another avatar, the game is played in a pop-up window-- and in a few instances, the game's title bar and peripherals were still in what I assume must be Finnish.

There's more to do-- decorate your home page (which is what users will see when they click your avatar), buy furni to decorate your room, and read some of the journal-style Habbo stories in the newsletter-- but the hotel runs primarily on chat energy. You can leave Habbo simply by closing the pop-up window in which it operates; you'll have to log back in when you want to return.