Review: The Forge (By Thewingless.com)

I've been playing around with this guy for a while now, and I have to say I'm not very impressed. The site and it's layout are gorgeous- well-designed and minimalist with a color scheme that doesn't make me want to claw my eyes out. I was so happy looking at the design that I thought about adding  design element to my grading scheme. However, using the actual generator interface was such a downer, as you'll see based on my grade.

Usefulness: 2 out of 5

Oh dear. The Forge is a really interesting concept. It's actually 4 generators, The Forge, the Landforge, the Spellforge and the Beastforge. It's a pop-up, kind of like a flash game, which lost it points right off the bat, because I do NOT want to have to deal with pop-up blockers when I'm trying to generate. The naming generator, the Forge, is shitty. No other words for it. Some of my suggestions were "Stone Slayer", "Sprite Dust" and "Maiden Form", yes, Maiden Form, like the bra. The Beastforge creates stereotypical beasts, the Spellforge stereotypical spells and the Landforge, you guessed it, stereotypical realm names. With a non-traditional interface and such uncreative suggestions, I'd skip the Forge all together and just head to Chaotic Shiny or the Sanctum.

Fun: 1 out of 5

Learning a new generator interface is not fun. Especially when generators are as simple as they can get to begin with. It's not fun to get shitty suggestions. If the Forge generated interesting names/beasts/spells/realms, it might actually be fun to figure out how everything works, play around with retaining bits here and changing bits there. However, this is not the case. It's boring. Honest truth.

Hipster: 5 out of 5

This is a sort of biased answer. I had never heard of this site before trolling through the NaNo forums. It comes from what looks like a personal site, something called thewingless.com, that leads to a scifi-esque layout. The Forge itself stinks of hipster, with an "About" and "History" page, explaining how the generator has a "stunning, streamlined user interface" and how "names have power".