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What's better: a fresh new MMO server, or Viscera Cleanup Detail's Sniffer tool?

Vote now as we continue deciding the single best thing in games

A Harvester robot bumbles around Westfall in a World of Warcraft Classic screenshot.
Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment

Last year (wahey), you narrowly decided that giving items to other players is better than throwing grenades back. I feel glad for your family and friends, who doubtless received wonderful gifts for Christmas rather than regifted junk. You're a little sweetie. Well, 55% of you are little sweeties. The rest... best not to dwell. Let's open this new year with a question of beginnings. What's better: a fresh new MMO server, or Viscera Cleanup Detail's Sniffer tool?

A fresh new MMO server

My Cracked Leather Boots
crunch the Coldridge Valley snow
I join your party

Viscera Cleanup Detail's Sniffer tool

This is a time of year to talk about fresh starts, and new beginnings, and manifesting long-held dreams, and grand schemes for self-improvement, but first you need to know what to work on. There's little need to practice your putting every week, for example, if you have no intent to play golf. In the burgeoning genre of cleaning games, this is where you need the Sniffer.

A floating corpse in a Viscera Cleanup Detail screenshot.
In my defence, it's an easy bit of mess to miss | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/RuneStorm

Playing PowerWash Simulator with Pip recently, we had almost finished cleaning Santa's disgusting Workshop but oh, the list on our tablet says one of these 17 lanterns is still unclean, and some stepladder somewhere, and four presents, and so on, and so we begin the slow hunt for the remaining filth. We bemoaned the absence of the Sniffer from our Viscera Cleanup Detail days. The excellent PowerWash precursor has a tool dedicated to locating mess, taking the form of a big green plastic nose on a stick with a readout screen. The Sniffer's readouts will spike as you draw closer to mess and its beeper will beep faste, letting you know you should jump up and down jabbing that vent with a mop in the hope of dislodging the guts you know are in there somewhere.

The Sniffer even has settings for organic and inorganic. Some might tell you it's sensible to clean all the organic mess before even touching the inorganic, that it'll all be so much easier if you mop and burn anything that might leave bloody imprints (which you might then step in to leave a trail of bloody footprints) but those people are cowards. Save the Sniffer until you've bumbled your way to a mostly clean facility, and then use the Sniffer to polish off messes (some of which you made yourself).

At this time of year, whomst among us couldn't use the equivalent of a nose on a stick?

But which is better?

Right now, I'm so mired in mess that the Sniffer would be overwhelmed and a fresh new MMO server would be welcome freshness. But the Sniffer could help me prioritise, remove the mess which makes other mess, rather than drag all those emotions onto my new server. Ah, I can't decide. What do you think, reader dear?

Pick your winner, vote in the poll below, and make your case in the comments to convince others. We'll reconvene next week to see which thing stands triumphant—and continue the great contest.

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