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Jake

Idle Thumbs 117: Sir! Sir!

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I could probably do that. MUDs were fascinating. GemStone III stream?

Too much text, no?

Besides, talking about something is different than doing it. I can't imagine watching that, but I'm still curious about them. What is the modern day equivalent?

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Too much text, no?

Besides, talking about something is different than doing it. I can't imagine watching that, but I'm still curious about them. What is the modern day equivalent?

 

I was kidding. Mostly.

 

The modern day equivalent is just an MMO. GemStone III had like 2-4k concurrent users, as I recall. Monthly subscription rates. All the same stuff, but in a text-based world, where wild and crazy shit could happen at any time. I remember one log where some sorceror lured dozens of people to a meeting in a field somewhere and then cast "Meteor" (the most powerful spell). It was a 20 page vomit of text wherein people died one after another in gruesome ways.

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The soundtrack for Hotline Miami definitely shaped my opinion about the game. I was on the fence about it from hearing other people talk about the game, but when the title screen popped up with a song from a record that I have in my collection, it definitely switched me over to giving the game the benefit of the doubt.

 

Although there are a lot of games with excellent soundtracks, that's the only one I can think of where the actual selection of music impacted how I reacted to the game, rather than the soundtrack being an aspect of how I relate to it.

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I haven't played Dwarf Fortress since 40d in 2010;  I had plans for an amazing fort all laid out (ButteredCircles, founded by six dorfs known as The Toasts of Burning).  It was going to be so efficient - shortest pathways to everything, happiness-generating fountains and waterfalls, caged spiders for silk, a trading post that could be flooded with magma to wipe out elves, carvings of dorfs appreciating cheese... it was a labour of love inscribed neatly by hand on graph paper.  

 

I got halfway through actually making it and ran out of time because of graduate school, RSI, and working three jobs; I finally threw out the paper plans when I moved to SF earlier this year.

 

 

Also, Chris sometimes makes the best faces during streams:

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post-8532-0-03159600-1375380593_thumb.png

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The “SIR! SIIIR!” is going to haunt me. I don’t think it’s Caddyshack, it might be Blues Brothers, but I don’t know. This will eat away at me until I figure out what it is.

 

EDIT:

I think it’s the end of the fancy restaurant scene after the brothers leave.

 

EDIT 2:

Or was it Ferris Bueller?

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The “SIR! SIIIR!” is going to haunt me. I don’t think it’s Caddyshack, it might be Blues Brothers, but I don’t know. This will eat away at me until I figure out what it is.

 

EDIT:

I think it’s the end of the fancy restaurant scene after the brothers leave.

 

EDIT 2:

Or was it Ferris Bueller?

 

Look at this noob who didn't listen all the way to the end of the episode.

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D’oh. I idly paused the cast with like a minute left. I don’t think that’s the one I’m thinking of.

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Nick ID'd it from Louie but I was thinking of the end of the restaurant scene in the Blues Brothers.

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I watched the Sir! stream and it infuriated me on how Chris played it, being in plain sight constantly and obviously getting attacked. It was like the fucking up basic things in Surgeon Simulator.

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I watched the Sir! stream and it infuriated me on how Chris played it, being in plain sight constantly and obviously getting attacked. It was like the fucking up basic things in Surgeon Simulator.

I think part of that comes from playing on the stream for your first ever playthrough. It's hard to not try and just accomplish stuff quickly and explore when on a stream, especially in a new game.

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I could probably do that. MUDs were fascinating. GemStone III stream?

Nick! Nick. Nicknicknicknicknicknick you and I were apparently the same person in ~1997, because I played SimuTronics MUDs and went to weird AOL chat rooms as well.

 

http://rdi.dragonsmark.com/history.php

 

I absolutely remember going to the "Red Dragon Inn" chat room. There were definitely a bunch of teenagers or younger there, because half the people were a dark-light uncrowned vampire werewolf prince king aloof loner but with a heart of gold. The other half were the same thing but a princess. One dude was a drunk bartender. Thankfully Goku had not been invented yet.

 

There were roleplaying conventions and die rolls. I distinctly recall "dueling", where you had a set move list of like 8 moves, and you could parry/thrust/high/low attack, etc and you played against someone else. It was a really involved version of rock, paper, scissors and I don't know if it was just a guessing game or if there were dice.

 

I played GS3 briefly, but got more into Dragonrealms. I played that game for a LONG time. I believe the biggest difference was that DR obfuscated a lot of its dice rolls behind really colorful language and GSIII just showed you the numbers. It eventually got turned into GS4.

 

The modern day equivalent is an MMO. Dragonrealms just isn't the same after World of Warcraft. The population is small, the world is HUGE, death is brutal, it's actually more expensive (potentially way more expensive), and the grind is truly an incredible grind. The first person to hit Circle (level 100) had put up a guide online called "How to circle every two weeks", which was a hell of a feat. You can get a WoW character to max level in a weekend. You're an insane person, but it's possible. Dragonrealms is still by far the deepest game I've ever played. The guild, housing, transport, dueling, player-run economy aspects of all the most popular MMOs you wish they'd implement are all in Dragonrealms. It's crazy, and I love it, and I'm pretty sure I can never go back. My fingers still have the muscle memory to get from the bank to the gate in the main hub city, though. You can get 2 free weeks if you sign up if you're insane.

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When you say that it was "HUGE", what does that mean? Is it like you can keep typing "north" over and over again and getting a message like "You are in the northern Plains, you see nothing of interest."?

I am really curious about the things these games were able to impliment that MMOs have not been able to re-create.

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Amazing episode this week. I kept wanting to yell at you guys for like a quarter of it though.

 

"No! It's Dyson! Miles Dyson!"

 

"No, Danny's his son! It's Miles! Miles!"

 

"Terminator 4 came out like two years ago you guys!"

 

 

Side note: "Miles Dyson Punches Out" in the list of games discussed is probably the single best joke on the site.

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Amazing episode this week. I kept wanting to yell at you guys for like a quarter of it though.

 

"No! It's Dyson! Miles Dyson!"

 

"No, Danny's his son! It's Miles! Miles!"

 

"Terminator 4 came out like two years ago you guys!"

 

 

Side note: "Miles Dyson Punches Out" in the list of games discussed is probably the single best joke on the site.

 

I did the exact same thing.  Also Jake's discussion about how Sir, You Are Being Hunted was actually Dyson's penance for creating Skynet reminded me of an idea I once had for a short story about a man who travels back in time to kill himself in order to prevent the robot apocalypse.

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Terminator Salvation! It was terrible.

There was also a Terminator TV series a couple years ago, but that was actually way better than it had any right to be.

 

 

I wanted to hear Nick talk about Gemstone 3 for an hour. I know very little about MUDs. I'd be interested in hearing a conversation of what that type of game tended to express compared to whatever the modern day counterpart is.


I also want to second this, MUDs are a huge blindspot for me.

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Whoa, there was a Terminator 4?

 

Well, it wasn't called Terminator 4. It was like, Terminator Salvation or some shit. It was, as you might expect, pretty bad.

 

I was a MUD guy for a long time, but not Simutronics or any other paid MUDs (well, I flirted with Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands for a bit - they had some cool class mechanics but they were really roleplaying oriented, you needed to pay to advance at any sort of meaningful rate, and most of the action was PvP which I have never ever liked). We didn't have AOL and I didn't have money, being a teenager and all, and furthermore we were on a Mac. So MUDs made for a really good value proposition - many, many hours of gameplay, social interaction, platform agnostic, and in most cases free. My two core MUDs were Astaria (where I formed my hatred of PvP and made a number of very good friends that I almost universally lost touch with when WoW launched as everyone migrated to that but on servers I wasn't on), and 3Kingdoms, which had the most elaborate and varied systems of any MUD I ever played, plus a ton of totally unlicensed homages to various popculture touchstones and devious puzzle quests.

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There was also a Terminator TV series a couple years ago, but that was actually way better than it had any right to be.

 

Is that the show were a robot-man threw people into a hotel swimming pool to the sweet sweet sounds of Johnny Cash? (If so, that's the only part I saw, because my brother made me watch that scene for some reason). But yes, I hear it was good!

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I can't wait for Terminator 2: Part 2: Vengeance, where Danny Dyson goes on a gun-rampage againt NeoCyberDyne Inc. (after the company flees to a utopian colony orbiting the earth). At the climax he cuts off a guy's hand with a katana and it falls onto the self destruct button, destroying the space colony and all the Terminator data. Afterwards, wreckage of the colony crashes into New York City, and turns Danny's sister into a flaming skeleton. Judgment Day is inevitable.

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When you say that it was "HUGE", what does that mean? Is it like you can keep typing "north" over and over again and getting a message like "You are in the northern Plains, you see nothing of interest."?

I am really curious about the things these games were able to impliment that MMOs have not been able to re-create.

 

There were some places where that was a description, but honestly it was really incredibly detailed and nuanced. I'm honestly sort of tempted to sign up for a free trial just to show what some of the descriptions were, because it was anything but bare-bones.

 

There was impassable terrain, and there were islands. If there weren't mages powerful enough to gate you over to the islands, you had to take a boat. You had to be there when the boat arrived to catch it, because the ferry boats ran on a schedule. Sometimes they got attacked by pirates and delayed. To go from the mainland largest city to the furthest island could take... 6 hours? 8? There were 5 islands and I believe 5 different provinces, 3 kinds of currency all with different exchange rates.

 

You joined a profession, not a guild, and that governed some of the special perks you got, but not any of the skills you could learn. So any class that could engage in combat could learn any weapon or armor skill with no restrictions. There are a bunch of survival skills, crazy crafting, etc.

 

I actually found my old maps, linked my printout. That is a very uncomprehensive list of maps, because I don't think I ever printed a set for the new province they released. I also linked to The Crossing, which is the biggest, busiest city. So basically you can go to all those rooms, and then on the legends all of the rooms marked with buildings you can go in and they're all building-sized. Multiple rooms with different points of interest in each. And someone in the community made all these maps. The game devs didn't provide details maps like this at all. If you didn't have them you just wandered around and hopefully either got some graph paper, learned it, or gave up and quit. If I remember correctly there were 3 big mapmakers. The second picture for example, is JUST the locations that are inside the temple in the Crossing.

 

http://i.imgur.com/fBlaD6W.jpg

 

http://i.imgur.com/KzPIh6l.jpg

 

http://elanthipedia.org/w/index.php/RanikMap1

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Chris' consistent ignorance and ambivalence towards broader pop culture can be so delightful. As is any time you guys talk about weird Web 1.0 stuff (loved the chat room conversation, as well as the Kill Everyone Project discussion), so this was a pretty great episode for me.

 

Other 90's hand stuff:

 

Woody Harrelson's hand in Kingpin

Nick Cage's shaking hand in Leaving Las Vegas

Chris Tucker flapping his hand at people in The Fifth Element

Buzz's arm coming off in Toy Story

Tony Shaloub and Stanley Tucci patting all over the Timpano in Big Night

Ed Norton burning his hand with lye in Fight Club

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There were some places where that was a description, but honestly it was really incredibly detailed and nuanced. I'm honestly sort of tempted to sign up for a free trial just to show what some of the descriptions were, because it was anything but bare-bones.

 

There was impassable terrain, and there were islands. If there weren't mages powerful enough to gate you over to the islands, you had to take a boat. You had to be there when the boat arrived to catch it, because the ferry boats ran on a schedule. Sometimes they got attacked by pirates and delayed. To go from the mainland largest city to the furthest island could take... 6 hours? 8? There were 5 islands and I believe 5 different provinces, 3 kinds of currency all with different exchange rates.

 

You joined a profession, not a guild, and that governed some of the special perks you got, but not any of the skills you could learn. So any class that could engage in combat could learn any weapon or armor skill with no restrictions. There are a bunch of survival skills, crazy crafting, etc.

 

I actually found my old maps, linked my printout. That is a very uncomprehensive list of maps, because I don't think I ever printed a set for the new province they released. I also linked to The Crossing, which is the biggest, busiest city. So basically you can go to all those rooms, and then on the legends all of the rooms marked with buildings you can go in and they're all building-sized. Multiple rooms with different points of interest in each. And someone in the community made all these maps. The game devs didn't provide details maps like this at all. If you didn't have them you just wandered around and hopefully either got some graph paper, learned it, or gave up and quit. If I remember correctly there were 3 big mapmakers. The second picture for example, is JUST the locations that are inside the temple in the Crossing.

 

http://i.imgur.com/fBlaD6W.jpg

 

http://i.imgur.com/KzPIh6l.jpg

 

http://elanthipedia.org/w/index.php/RanikMap1

This is some esoteric shit!

There is a prison. Did players have the ability to incapacitate and carry other players into the prison? If so, how was it determined who could capture who?

 

"Card collector"? Please tell me that there was a collectible trading-card game that only existed in the game.

This looks rather engrossing if you have the ability to visualize these spaces. Stevie Wonder is asking developers to make games for blind people on the VGAs? Someone should tell him about this stuff.

 

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This is some esoteric shit!

There is a prison. Did players have the ability to incapacitate and carry other players into the prison? If so, how was it determined who could capture who?

 

"Card collector"? Please tell me that there was a collectible trading-card game that only existed in the game.

This looks rather engrossing if you have the ability to visualize these spaces. Stevie Wonder is asking developers to make games for blind people on the VGAs? Someone should tell him about this stuff.

 

 

 

No, but you could be imprisoned by the NPC guards for things like, you know, stealing stuff from the shopkeepers. Or using chain lightning in the city. Or brutally murdering someone in the town square.

 

Yes, there was a card system. You put them in your card book, and when you had a full set it became an item and I believe you could sell them for a decent amount of money. That was well after the migration off of AOL, so I don't remember its full implementation. Steam did not have it first!

 

The experience system is all kinds of crazy. I mentioned you could learn any skills, which is true. So if you wanted to learn a two handed weapon, you took out a claymore and tried to kill shit with it and you start accruing learning in it, and that eventually turns into ranks of Two Handed Edged weapons. But if you took out a long dirk, that's a light edged weapon and you're a klutz with that and you have to use that weapon type to learn it.

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