I've said it about other MMOs, and I'll say it about this one too -- I'm not the intended market! Obvious, really, but I state it again as don't want hide my status (as very definitely not a preteen girl) and otherwise color your feelings on my opinions.

Especially as I feel that Barbie Girls just isn't very good. First of all, technically, it's flaky. I'm not sure if it's specifically to do with using B Chat, as I mentioned last entry, but after I use Barbie Girls' chat method, Firefox (my preferred browser) tends to lock up as a result of a script that causes the flash player to slow down. I've experienced an unacceptable number of these crashes playing Barbie Girls, for reasons I can't quite work out.

Of course, perhaps it's my PC (it could be -- the crashes are hard to replicate!) but a further problem with Barbie Girls is the content. Now, I'm not particularly bothered by the heaps of pink, or the emphasis on shopping and looking pretty (few MMOs emphasize anything else) just that there really isn't very much to it. Barbie Girls world is small (certainly smaller than something like Build-A-Bearville) and quite boring. Navigation is stilted thanks to very clunky movement and poor animation, and the interface is nothing to write home about.

Probably Barbie Girls most egregious crime however is its decision to be essentially pointless in its free-to-play incarnation. All play featured in Barbie Girls centers around raising B Bucks to purchase clothes and furniture, and in the free-to-play mode you can't spend B Bucks! It's a transparent way to force players to subscribe to the V.I.P. service, and while there's obviously no problem with being a subscription title, Barbie Girls offers very poor value at even $5.99 a month.

I tried to talk to the other users of Barbie Girls to see if they enjoyed the world, but thanks to crashes and the general silence of the community it was, frankly, impossible to gage. But to be honest, I have to compare Barbie Girls with Build-A-Bearville. If Build-A-Bearville is an example of how to make a browser MMO based around a brand aimed at children, Barbie Girls is an example of how not to do it. People often criticize Barbie's world as pink, plastic and empty, and it's a shame to find her virtual world is exactly that.