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Jake

Idle Thumbs 117: Sir! Sir!

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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.

 

 

On the MUD that I used to play a heap (Discworld MUD), there was definitely at least one prominent player that was blind IRL.

 

I think the key advantage that MUDs had over MMOs is the same advantage books have over visual media; anything that is describable could exist in the world, and easily. Roleplaying in particular was really endemic to the process of playing the game, as you could just free-write a description of yourself, including what you looked like, what clothes you wore and so forth. Then people would usually find in-world items and abilities to match their descriptions of themselves.

 

DW MUD is still going I think; you can play it off the site here: http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/ .

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Talking about Terminators and video games. Terminator: Future Shock, Bethesda should make a true sequel of that game. Or Skyrim with HK-Aerials rather than dragons, and HK-Tanks instead of giants.

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I think this may be the only thread on the internet in which the significance of human hands from popular movies from the years 1990-1999 is being discussed in so much detail. Well done guys, well done. 

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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

 

91bcTRGfjwL._AA1500_.jpg

 

True this was a sub par teen horror that ripped off the best part of The Evil Dead for its main gimmick, but i feel on name alone it needs a mention

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The opening scene of the Kevin Costner Robin Hood movie takes place in some dungeon where dudes are getting their hands chopped off. I've only seen that movie once, when I was a kid and my parents rented it, but for some reason that hand scene is burned into my brain. I could tell you absolutely nothing else about that movie.

 

Video Game P.S. Hotline Miami's soundtrack makes that game.

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God dammit now I want to play Dragonrealms. Y'all are jerks.

 

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/05/19/rise-and-shiny-dragonrealms/

 

Looks like this dude plays DR on Twitch for about an hour with GM Solomon, who's been producer since basically I started playing. If you're interested then yeah watch the whole thing. Key points that people sort of mentioned - at ~10 minutes you can see room descriptions. At ~16 minutes the guy looks at a decked out player with a bunch of titles, descriptions, items so you can see what that stuff looks like.

 

 

Ok I'm done, gonna fidgit in this corner over here.

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Man, The Sarah Connor Chronicles was really fun, even when it was ridiculous (Terminator in 1920s, in a Newsreel scene). I wish that show stuck around.

 

Also, my earliest web/game memories was posting on some kind of forum thing called HAWKEYES BAR & GRILL on Prodigy in 1993/94. 

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I remember playing games on Prodigy. I'm still not exactly sure what Prodigy was. I don't remember actually surfing the web with it. It was more of a portal to select parts of the web, right?

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The web didn't exist until maybe halfway through prodigys life, same with aol and compuserve. Everything was basically closed systems besides email

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Whoa, there was a Terminator 4?

 

Not only was there a Terminator 4, they nuked San Francisco!

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In MUDs, is it possible for a player to write a description (I guess that would be making an object) and then link it to existing objects? I'm wondering if an internet forum could take the form of a MUD. Threads would be rooms and posts would be objects in those rooms. Maybe the posts could actually take the form of a dialogue among characters, ghosts. It would be separate from real-time chat. So when you walk in a room, you would read a description (in some way simar to a thread title) and then the posts are delivered as a dialogue by the player-characters of the players who write them. Quoting would take chronological precedence over time posted. So if Tracy quotes Charles, Tracy's ghost would respond before a non-quoting post by Evan even though Evan wrote her post before Tracy. So when you walk into a room, you see all that dialogue play out and then you have the option to add to it. Real-time chat would be a completely separate system.

Players would have to be able to arrange rooms in a variety of ways.

Inside-jokes could be commodified. Unique objects could be created by admins and programmed by people with exchangable permissions. So Jake could create an object called "Big Dog" and then give permission to program it to Lacabra (like an ability to bust through doors after carefully placing a key in the lock and turning it) and that permission to program would be exchangeable, but limited to one person at a time. Then it just wanders around the MUD/forum.

I wonder if that would add to the forum experience, or just obscure it.

I love conflation; lets me feel productive without having to produce.

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miles dyson's death scene is one that sticks with me  -_- if you are going to play Dwarf Fortress maybe you should watch a few tutorial videos before you play, and use lazy newb pack 

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In MUDs, is it possible for a player to write a description (I guess that would be making an object) and then link it to existing objects?

 

In MUDs proper, often not for your run of the mill player. But in the weird taxonomic jumble of MUSH/MUSE/MUCK/MOO etc etc. there's some where that is the case.

On the other hand, it is worth noting that privileged, moderator/admin accounts could do this in more places.

Users with such permissions are sometimes referred to as...WIZARDS.

 

:getmecoat

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Ok one more thing then. The Simutronics front end is called the Wizard. I apologize for that not being the first thing I mentioned.

 

"Select "Wizard" as your client on the play page and the Launcher will download the software automatically for you. You only need to install the Launcher once for it to work!"

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Has anyone mentioned Metal Gear Solid 2's, "But I! I live on, through this arm!"

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While talking to my wife about Sir, You Are Being Hunted, I started thinking about Jake's comments about the scarcity of events/encounters within the game. I hope the final build adds more variety in robot types for sure, but hopefully it also keeps a lower encounter rate than what's typical in a lot of games. There's a point in Halo 4 (don't remember the level name, sorry) where you're entering an ancient, cavernous building with a long tram-type thing. I think the journey across this vast space would have been a great moment in the game for me, if not for the obligatory "oh no, the grunts have turned the power off, better go kill 'em and turn it back on" fight that happened (twice?!) during the trip.

 

I get that combat-oriented games need combat by definition, so Halo really isn't the best example of a game whose experience would be enhanced by solitude. As a state of being within a world, though, I'd like to see more of it. The tension created from being alone for ten minutes in something like Day Z makes random encounters all the more terrifying. Hopefully Sir strikes a good balance.

 

I don't think that the guys were arguing for a robot-battle arena, so this isn't a rebuttal to anything.

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wtf is the second picture!?

 

It's Electrode! Its signature move is to explode, killing itself and most opponents.

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While talking to my wife about Sir, You Are Being Hunted, I started thinking about Jake's comments about the scarcity of events/encounters within the game. I hope the final build adds more variety in robot types for sure, but hopefully it also keeps a lower encounter rate than what's typical in a lot of games. There's a point in Halo 4 (don't remember the level name, sorry) where you're entering an ancient, cavernous building with a long tram-type thing. I think the journey across this vast space would have been a great moment in the game for me, if not for the obligatory "oh no, the grunts have turned the power off, better go kill 'em and turn it back on" fight that happened (twice?!) during the trip.

I get that combat-oriented games need combat by definition, so Halo really isn't the best example of a game whose experience would be enhanced by solitude. As a state of being within a world, though, I'd like to see more of it. The tension created from being alone for ten minutes in something like Day Z makes random encounters all the more terrifying. Hopefully Sir strikes a good balance.

I don't think that the guys were arguing for a robot-battle arena, so this isn't a rebuttal to anything.

I don't want a higher encounter density, and I hope I didn't say or imply that on the podcast. What I was trying to say was that I hope there is a heavier density of things to do moment to moment in the final game. Those things don't have to be enemy encounters and probably shouldn't be. They can be something tangible, they can even just be things in my head (eg time spent formulating a plan, or speculating about a long-term trap or other thing I set into motion earlier but can't see), just... anything. I don't care, I just felt emptiness of a non-deliberate-feeling type while playing the alpha.

Again, it could be that I just don't know all of the moment to moment actions that ARE available to me, but right now I run into periods of literally nothing: no threat to evade, no goal on my map or on the horizon or on my mind, no plans to make, nothing already set in motion to wait for. I don't want my time filled with robot fights, but I want them filled with SOMETHING, and with the game as early as it is its hard to tell if those things are there but aren't exposed to new players, if they aren't in but are coming soon, or if this is all there is and the game isn't as much a game for me as I'd hoped. Fortunately the jury is fully out because the game isn't.

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I don't want a higher encounter density, and I hope I didn't say or imply that on the podcast. What I was trying to say was that I hope there is a heavier density of things to do moment to moment in the final game. Those things don't have to be enemy encounters and probably shouldn't be. They can be something tangible, they can even just be things in my head (eg time spent formulating a plan, or speculating about a long-term trap or other thing I set into motion earlier but can't see), just... anything. I don't care, I just felt emptiness of a non-deliberate-feeling type while playing the alpha.

Again, it could be that I just don't know all of the moment to moment actions that ARE available to me, but right now I run into periods of literally nothing: no threat to evade, no goal on my map or on the horizon or on my mind, no plans to make, nothing already set in motion to wait for. I don't want my time filled with robot fights, but I want them filled with SOMETHING, and with the game as early as it is its hard to tell if those things are there but aren't exposed to new players, if they aren't in but are coming soon, or if this is all there is and the game isn't as much a game for me as I'd hoped. Fortunately the jury is fully out because the game isn't.

 

That makes sense. You didn't say or imply anything specifically about combat encounters, and I didn't mean to imply that you did.

 

There are hunting/cooking systems, I think? Perhaps some of the survival mechanics can fill the gaps in between collecting the stones and avoiding robots.

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