Category: Guest Posts

Guest posts are blog posts that are written by Poptropicans who are not staff writers on the PHB team at the time of writing. Interested in contributing? Check out our “Write for the PHB” guide under the Contact tab up top.

Arabian Nights Island, Guest Posts, Jade Scarab Island

Comparing Dream Islands: Jade Scarab VS Arabian Nights 🪲🧞

LJ

Hey Poptropicans, this is a guest post by Invisible Ring. Enjoy!

If you could have one wish, what would it be?

A)  More Invisible Ring guest posts?
B) The second half of my pirate movie?
C) Poptropica to be revived in all its former glory: Monkey Wrench, Realms, classic common rooms, etc.

I wish! Don’t we all…

Unfortunately, I’m not a genie, so wish C is beyond my power to grant. I AM a poptropican with a magical craft table though! So, while I keep concocting the difficult spell of wish B, I shall now grant to you wish A.

From the scribe that brought you my comparison of the dream islands Fairytale Island and Goofball Island, comes the final dream island post, Jade Scarab vs. Arabian Nights– which are the first and last dream islands in Poptropica’s history!

Comparisons

Both of these islands are absolutely ✨magical✨, filled with magical secrets and deep-rooted legends from different parts of the world. They’re also both full of rich culture and beauty while also being challenging and exciting like most popular Poptropica islands. They even share some of the same musical soundtracks!

There were only four episodic adventures ever made, and Arabian Nights is the last of its kind. Similarly, there were only four Dream Islands ever made, and Jade Scarab is also the last of its kind! Talk about a coincidence.

Contrasts

Jade Scarab was one of the three 2020 Dream Island winners that eventually launched in 2022, while Arabian Nights was the 2013 Dream Island winner that launched in 2014. While Jade Scarab is one complete island, Arabian Nights is an episodic adventure that is split between three parts.

Fun fact: Arabian Nights is the only dream Island with any common rooms in it! 🤓 Jade Scarab doesn’t have one, however.

The medals are all different too! All of the dream islands have a different medallion and a different story to tell. 

The Fairytale medallion has a royal purple strap and an etching of the mysterious villain Rumpelstiltskin, which leads me to believe Rumpelstiltskin himself dropped the medallion when he turned into smoke and escaped the fairytale castle.

The Goofball medallion has an indigo strap and a picture of a piñata. With a dull color and a fun picture, this medallion embodies the balance of goofiness and dullness that is ultimately delivered on Goofball Island.

The Jade Scarab medallion has a jade green strap and an etching of the island’s magical mascot, the Scarab. Need I say more?

The Arabian Nights medallion shows up at the end of each of the three island episodes. Three medallions? That’s as many as the rest of the dream islands put together! All three Arabian Nights medallions all look exactly alike too. They each have a blood-red strap and a sword. Surely these bold and deadly medals were either worn by thieves, made for thieves, or even made BY thieves! Heck, they could’ve even been stolen by thieves too!

But enough about fun facts and medallions. How do the actual quests compare and contrast?

Each quest revolves around an expedition to find a special treasure; an archeological expedition to find the Jade Scarab and an infiltration expedition to finding the Arabian Nights genie lamp. Each treasure has its decoy, but only the one on Arabian Nights has a dangerous curse if you don’t find the real treasure.

There’s a curse on Jade Scarab Island, too, but it only happens to the bad guys who try to stage fake curses and lock people in caves. It’s really just the supernatural Jade Scarab guardian protecting the treasure and punishing the thieves for their shenanigans.

Arabian Nights has a supernatural being too, Samhal the genie. But he was no guardian. He was a dangerous trickster, granting wishes with cruel twists everywhere he went.

But what made the Arabian Nights quest even MORE dangerous were the villains. While Jade Scarab had one or two thieves, Arabian Nights had 40 of them! Among the thieves was the most ruthless one of all, Scheherazade: leader of the thieves and the infamous genie of destruction. Yes, Arabian Nights was one among many of the scary and suspenseful islands that were coming out from 2013-2015.

Jade Scarab, however, stayed true to the traditions of the first dozen or so islands from the early days of Poptropica. It’s a lighthearted, humorous, and not too serious island that has a fun quest and a museum where you can learn lots of cool stuff in the process!

So why is one island so serious and the other is not?  In my opinion, it all comes back to the two treasures, the lamp and the Jade Scarab. 

As you play these quests, you learn that the Jade Scarab is good and must be protected in the museum. But no good came from the Arabian Nights lamp. That treasure wasn’t going to any museum. It had to be eliminated.

And that brings us to the biggest (and best) comparison. There are happy endings to both islands! Curses are broken, towns are restored, amends are made, and all peoples have a chance to get a new start and a chance to be prosperous again.

Aww, what nice stories for both islands! Which one do you like better? Better yet, which of the four dream islands is your favorite one of all?

Feel free to leave a comment below, and if you want more dream island comparison posts, then you are welcome to share with me your own dream island adventures from the dream island contests of long ago. (If I receive readers’ entries, I will try to be as fair as I was in my comparisons of the official dream island winners.)

Thank you for reading, and I hope to pop to you all again real soon!

Hope you enjoyed this guest post by Invisible Ring. If you did, you might also enjoy watching her full-length Poptropica fan movie, Battle Morale!

The Poptropica Help Blog welcomes interesting Poptropica insights from anyone in the Poptropica community with thoughts to share. Interested in writing for the PHB? We’d love to hear from you!

Guest Posts, Popspiracy Theories

Popspiracy: Mystery of the Mini Blimps

Slanted Fish

Hey Poptropicans, this is a guest post by Invisible Ring. Enjoy!

For years, I’ve wondered who shrunk the yellow blimp I was riding on, and I have returned once again to share my air-headed thoughts on such a small mystery.

For example, the first mini-blimp like this was on Shrink Ray Island, which leads me to believe that the culprit was armed with a shrink ray. After all, those ray-guns certainly flooded the market back in the day…

…But if this is true, then who put those shrink rays to such a devious use? Some may automatically blame the classic ray-gun villains, like Dr. Hare or Director D. But I think that the most likely suspect would be Dr. Blandston, zapper of blimps! After all, I saw the doctor from Goofball Island with my own eyes; firing that blandston-ray at my blimp. Who’s to say they didn’t fire a shrink ray too?

However, the blimp mystery may not be as simple as all that. For back on Home Island, I found not one, but TWO mini-blimps!  Almost as if someone used “Twin Power” on them!

…Either that, OR somebody might’ve found a way to split a large classic blimp into two smaller blimps! That doesn’t explain where the “Poptropica” logo disappeared to, though. (Unless those blimp vandals took the logo off first!)

But this isn’t too much of a problem, because there are still plenty of classic blimps to go around, thanks to the Monkey Wrench Island monkeys.

…Although, there are a few islands that don’t have blimps at all! And those islands are the episodic adventures. Survival Island: Episode 1 is surely to blame for that. After that blimp destruction, there’s no blimp on that island, nor on any OTHER episodic adventure! 

Thank goodness for the Monkey Wrench monkeys, to have built us new blimps for the islands that came after those multi-part islands, like this one on Pelican Rock!

Of course, we can’t forget the most common blimp Popspiracy out there: The mini-blimps are only on the newest islands, from 2021-now. Fairytale, Goofball, Jade Scarab, and the newest Home Island have the small blimps, and the rest of the islands have classic blimps.

Maybe Glowbhax shrunk the blimps! …haha, just kidding! I’m sure you all would rather say that the 2021 mini-blimp is just a modern design that’s only big enough for stuffed bunnies… but what if that modern design was ALSO done by the monkeys? Perhaps the Monkey Wrench monkeys were trying to keep up with the times, so they made big blimps for the old islands and small blimps for the new ones!

But one small catch… What if you travel from old islands to new islands, or vice-versa?

…Well, THAT answer is probably as wild and crazy as all the Poptropica storms we fly through! Imagine crossing over a modern island like Fairytale, when a shrink ray hits you and turns your classic blimp miniature! Then when you fly on outta there and exit that atmospheric layer of shrink ray waves, your blimp turns back to normal! …Either that, or Rumplestiltskin’s magic is at hand. Who knows?

One thing I do know is that it’s lots of fun to formulate all these deductions like a detective from Mystery Train Island. The sky is literally the limit!  But regardless of whether you’re on a train, in a blimp, on foot, or in the real world, my advice to you is to keep on adventuring, and keep your eyes to the skies. And keep asking questions and making guesses, too, because that is exactly how we all learn!

(This Popspiracy—Poptropica conspiracy—was brought to you by my early Blimpy Trance posts from Pop Fan Kids.)

Hope you enjoyed this guest post by Invisible Ring. If you did, you might also enjoy watching her full-length Poptropica fan movie, Battle Morale!

The Poptropica Help Blog welcomes interesting Poptropica insights from anyone in the Poptropica community with thoughts to share. Interested in writing for the PHB? We’d love to hear from you!

Fanfiction, Guest Posts

Fanfic: The Black Hare, Part 2

Slanted Fish

Hey Poptropicans, this is a guest post by Pink Star. Enjoy!

High on the Hog: Eat, drink, and be merry.

THE BLACK HARE, Part 2

(Continued from Part 1 here)

I combed my hair. (Which is a near impossible task, since I have Mom (Black Widow)’s hair.) I looked into the mirror and said, “I can do this… I can do this… I can do-”

I heard Dad (Dr. Hare) calling me. “COMING!!!”

I trudged to the kitchen. Mom and Dad started singing the birthday song. I thought about my wish for a while. ‘Mom and Dad will understand that I’m good, right?’ I thought. ‘Or should I not trust them…? After all, they ARE villains… Should I wish for them to understand? But I also wanna be more than good, I wanna be a hero! So should I wish to become a hero?’

“Hurry up, sweetie!”

‘Iwishtobecomeahero!’ I thought quickly. I blew out all 13 candles.

“Good job sweetie!” Mom said. “Now it’s time to eat the cake before the pizza! Just like you asked!” (I know. Only little kids eat cake before pizza. But it’s my birthday, and who doesn’t want cake before pizza?!) 

Mom and Dad talked about what my first crime would be now that I was an official villain. I bit my tongue at first, but finally blurted, “I DON’T WANNA BE A VILLAIN!”

Continue reading “Fanfic: The Black Hare, Part 2” →
Astro-Knights Island, Guest Posts

Bringing Mighty Action Force cards to life: 4-Player Edition 💥🃏

Slanted Fish

Hey Poptropicans, this is a guest post by Invisible Ring. Enjoy!

It’s a bird? It’s a plane?  No, it’s me! Invisible Ring, creator of the REAL-LIFE Mighty Action Force card game, has RETURNED!

That’s right, readers! This Poptropican was but a fellow Mighty Action Force fan, who emerged from PoptropiCon Island and forged her OWN Mighty Action Force card game that she could play in real life, anytime and anywhere she wanted… then shared it with the PHB online, so that EVERYONE can print out and play their own Mighty Action Force game, too. (There’s also an Astro-Knights edition!)

But she had not yet shared ALL of her Mighty Action Force games, which brings us to the here and now. If you’re already acquainted with these games, then you may be looking for a bigger challenge. Heck, you may even be itching to play this game with more than one player at a time. And that is where the 4-PLAYER Mighty Action Force game comes in! Download below:

Ultimate Mighty Action Force 4-Player KitDownload

Packed with new cards, new rules, and new game variations, this third and final edition of my real-live MAF series not only provides a new mighty challenge but brings all other Mighty Action Force games together — perfect for parties and family fun!

Some assembly required. This offer is invalid where prohibited, some restrictions may apply, batteries not included.

Check out the demo of the multiplayer game in action:

If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comment section below. Otherwise, enjoy the Mighty Action Force games!

Hope you enjoyed this guest post by Invisible Ring. If you did, you might also enjoy the previous posts for the games in this series: Bringing Mighty Action Force to life and the Astro-Knights edition.

The Poptropica Help Blog welcomes interesting Poptropica insights from anyone in the Poptropica community with thoughts to share. Interested in writing for the PHB? We’d love to hear from you!

Fanfiction, Guest Posts

Fanfic: The Black Hare, Part 1

Slanted Fish

Hey Poptropicans, this is a guest post by Pink Star. Enjoy!

High on the Hog: Eat, drink, and be merry.

THE BLACK HARE
A Poptropica Fanfiction Story

Hello fellow Poptropican, my name is the Black Hare. But most people call me Harrie. You probably know my parents, Dr. Hare and the Black Widow. Yeah. The villains. But don’t worry, I’m not gonna kidnap you and mind control you. I’m not gonna steal your art either. Much to my parents’ disgust, I’m all about doing good. That’s where my story starts. But before I get to that, let me give you a brief backstory.

Fifteen years ago, you and Amelia made a potion then you gave it to the villains as a drink. They drank it, but little did they know, if they ever had children, the potion would make them good. Fortunately, all the villains kids were born after the potion was made so they were all good!

Unfortunately, the villains found out about the potion, and made a new one to turn their kids evil. None of the kids knew about the potion, so everyone drank it. Everyone… except… me. I heard Mom and Dad talking about it. (Villains talk VERY loud.)

I loved being nice. I held the door for others at school, fed the birds, and did my chores. So I didn’t drink anything unless I was sure I knew what it was for the whole month. I acted all nasty in front of Mom and Dad, and my ‘friends’ (that turned evil overnight, so I wasn’t quite friends with them. But with other people and when by myself, I was nice. It was hard living like that.

That was when I was seven. Now that I’ve turned 13, I’m an official villain, and it has been 15 years since my parents drank that potion.

For six years, I never had the courage to tell them I was good. But now that I’m a teenager, I feel ready. After all, I am their daughter… what’s the worst they can say?  

TO BE CONTINUED

Hope you enjoyed this guest post by Pink Star. If you did, you might also enjoy more fanfictions on our site.

The Poptropica Help Blog welcomes interesting Poptropica insights from anyone in the Poptropica community with thoughts to share. Interested in writing for the PHB? We’d love to hear from you!