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Ugh. Wade just meandering into and "mastering" all of this bullshit is just so irritating. Life isn't a loving MMORPG, you don't get "Level 100 playing Pong" and then keep your mastery forever. People develop skills and get lovely at other things at the same time! This perfect ubernerd fantasy is just getting more and more ludicrous as things go on. And thank god that Wade just HAPPENED to stumble upon the McGuffin that will inevitably turn the tables in his favor in the next chapter, or maybe even the finale. Just pure, dumb luck. Ugh.
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Mar 22, 2018 22:09
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quote:Helpful Helpdesk Inc. took millions of calls a day, from all over the world. Twenty-four seven, three sixty-five. One angry, befuddled cretin after another. There was no downtime between calls, because there were always several hundred morons in the call queue, all of them willing to wait on hold for hours to have a tech rep hold their hand and fix their problem. Reminder, this is a post-apocalyptic world where everything outside the cities is full-blown Mad Max and cities getting nuked happens often enough that it was mentioned almost offhandedly.
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Mar 22, 2018 22:18
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quote:I rode down four levels to my armory, a massive vault filled with storage shelves, display cases, and weapon racks. I was just about to roll my eyes when I remembered that just a few short years ago in Fallout 4 I had built a huge virtual museum to house all my trophies and special weapons I'd never need or use.  You can't say Cline doesn't know his clientele.Incidentally, I've never read the novel, but I listened to the audio version last summer during a week of getting my overgrown backyard into shape. I realize now that seeing all of it written down as text is a lot worse than listening to Wil Wheaton read it. His Wade was a lot more bearable, maybe because of his inflection. Whenever Wade lists his achievements, you could hear pride rather than seeing a shopping list of references. When Wade was criticizing himself or putting himself down, I remember him sounding suitably ashamed rather than just matter-of-fact. Or maybe I'm misremembering it because I was delirious from yardwork in the summer heat. At any rate the audio book is worth a listen for one scene alone, which will come up later and which I won't spoil yet. It's another "movie dialogue sync" quest, and Wil Wheaton does a spot-on impression of the main character.
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Mar 22, 2018 22:25
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While I haven't seen it yet, Wikipedia has updated with the synopsis of the film adaptation. Having read it, there's quite a few differences that seem to fix up parts of the book and remove the creepiest aspects. First, the first two challenges have been completely redone. The first key is earned by completing the massive race seen in the trailer, which Wade wins by finding a shortcut. The second requires them to find a recreation of Kira (who Halliday dated before she dumped him for Morrow, rather than just pining after her from afar) in the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, which honestly sounds really cool. The third challenge I won't post here, as it's basically the same as in the book. In the book, Art3mis and Aech's real identities remain a mystery to Wade for most of the book and Art3mis keeps insisting that she's really hideously deformed. In the film, Wade is rescued and taken to a gunter hideout after his attempted murder in the stacks and meets Art3mis face-to-face. It takes a bit longer to meet Aech. Wade thus works together with her from practically the beginning of the book and they know each other in real life, without him turning himself into a hairless vampire humping a robot because she stopped talking to him. The finale is basically the same, with one big change: a bigger part of the movie is about breaking down Halliday as an idol and showing both his imperfections and his desires to remedy them. It also seems like it's meant to make him less of a creepy autistic dude, what with him actually dating Kira for a while. While the book allows the winner to complete the Hunt and earn everything by completing a relatively simple task, the movie requires them to read a contract the AI Halliday asks them to sign and reject it after recognizing it to be the one the real Halliday made Ogden Morrow sign to resign from GSS. There's a few other changes. The best part of the book never occurs, though I'm not sure if that's quite a loss since the movie seems to be structured better. One major character doesn't appear to die, unless that's just left out of the synopsis. Another Sixer, Zandor, is added as a real world threat. As a less spoilery change, it looks like they made failing challenges actually meaningful. Rather than simply dropping them back to Level 1 and making them try again, these challenges can "zero out" their avatar and delete them from the OASIS. The film has still received early criticism for focusing on spectacle over character and plot, but I think that's a little more excusable since we can actually see these cool things instead of having Cline just dryly explain how to hide Pac-Man so you can take a bathroom break during a 6 hour marathon. I think I'll go see it when it comes out and determine how much better it is than the book.
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Mar 22, 2018 22:30
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Dave Syndrome posted:I was just about to roll my eyes when I remembered that just a few short years ago in Fallout 4 I had built a huge virtual museum to house all my trophies and special weapons I'd never need or use. Oh yeah, this is how I'm playing New Vegas. I always use either the Lucky 38 Suite Reloaded or Lombard Station as my player home because these are full of everything I need for a home base, and I try to collect at least one of every weapon so I can fill the weapon walls. I'd include trophies but that game is a bitch to move stuff around in.
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Mar 22, 2018 22:33
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So what you're saying is the movie might actually be serviceable as a popcorn flick?
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Mar 22, 2018 22:39
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iospace posted:So what you're saying is the movie might actually be serviceable as a popcorn flick? Certainly more serviceable than the book is. It sounds like Spielberg excised all the creepiest poo poo Cline slipped in.
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Mar 22, 2018 23:02
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Spielberg is a master, I'm not surprised he'd make something passable out of this material still not gonna see it because ew at the thought of giving Ernest Cline money in some shape or form
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Mar 22, 2018 23:33
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chitoryu12 posted:Certainly more serviceable than the book is. It sounds like Spielberg excised all the creepiest poo poo Cline slipped in. As bad as the book is, there's been a ton of stuff where a good writer could fix it to be more interesting, and this thread has surprisingly made me more interested in the movie adaptation. Cline's plot framework here isn't bad, and there's some interesting worldbuilding inside OASIS. He just cannot write scenes or characters, and is too lazy to have his world be robust
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Mar 22, 2018 23:53
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theflyingorc posted:As bad as the book is, there's been a ton of stuff where a good writer could fix it to be more interesting, and this thread has surprisingly made me more interested in the movie adaptation. I would really love to see something like Archaide in film, where the entire planet outdoors is rough 1980s vector graphics while Wade and his ship look like modern film CGI. Or have the Pac-Man scene look more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTZHI6TxD5A
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Mar 23, 2018 00:06
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So basically it could have been a good book if someone else wrote it. I could get behind that. Going back to something else, we're told IOI getting control of the Oasis would be bad because they would charge lots of money for everything, as opposed to the current situation where everything costs lots of money... ?
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Mar 23, 2018 00:18
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And I thought TORG gave little thought to how the different realities interacted. Cline again shows he hasn't played a MMO in the past decade. Or even been online. There is no way that the Firefly ship wouldn't be a vanity skin overlaid on a stock ship. Or the X-Wing for that matter. The pissing match that would occur between different license holders over stats and representation would be mind boggling. Honestly, all of the licensed material existing is weird. The idea that it is all materially different is bizarre. And the idea that the uhaul of space* that was the Firefly class is the flagship of Wade's fleet is ridiculous. Though now I am imagining the gatchapon Final Fantasy (record keeper?) with a tiny pixelated Firefly class ship as a banner character and I won't lie it is making me smile. *I like Firefly, but brown coats are weird.
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Mar 23, 2018 00:30
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Poulpe posted:Ugh. the stupid part is that pacman is a purely deterministic game so you could totally just TAS it
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Mar 23, 2018 00:37
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Gnome de plume posted:So basically it could have been a good book if someone else wrote it. I could get behind that. Yeah, basically. There's a seed of a fun idea in the world. But you need to toss the core conceit where he's mostly justifying his own pop culture gobbling as being worthy of praise. And every once in a while there's a really fun, imaginative detail. Playing a Lich in Joust is extremely funny IF DONE WELL. But he has no idea how to execute that, he just talks about how he's smart for being good at arcade games. Having a second arcade game challenge shows that he's out of ideas in his story where there are effectively no rules and he can do anything! Have him in a simulation of Wrath of Khan where he has to beat the Kobayashi Maru or something, anything but a second arcade game.
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Mar 23, 2018 00:47
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Poulpe posted:Wade just meandering into and "mastering" all of this bullshit is just so irritating. Life isn't a loving MMORPG, you don't get "Level 100 playing Pong" and then keep your mastery forever. People develop skills and get lovely at other things at the same time! I've been on an emulator kick lately, I got a Raspberry Pi that was way too underpowered for a media server and turned it into a game console instead. Games that I absolutely destroyed when I was 10 are currently kicking my rear end; you don't just retain poo poo without practice, it turns out.
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Mar 23, 2018 00:49
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Gnome de plume posted:So basically it could have been a good book if someone else wrote it. I could get behind that. I think it’s the difference between a FTP (or a very cheap BTP), where you need to either spend time leveling up/farming or joining a clan/guild to get bussed to other zones. Transport seems to be the only real barrier in game cost wise to playing well. IOI wants to make everything PTW.
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Mar 23, 2018 00:52
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theflyingorc posted:And every once in a while there's a really fun, imaginative detail. Playing a Lich in Joust is extremely funny IF DONE WELL. But he has no idea how to execute that, he just talks about how he's smart for being good at arcade games. Having a second arcade game challenge shows that he's out of ideas in his story where there are effectively no rules and he can do anything! Have him in a simulation of Wrath of Khan where he has to beat the Kobayashi Maru or something, anything but a second arcade game. I don't remember exactly where it is, but Wade at one point mentions the Kobayashi Maru simulation as one of the quests you can play in OASIS. So all the fun stuff that he could be doing is there. Cline/Halliday just based all the plot stuff around beating 80s computer games.
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Mar 23, 2018 01:07
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I just found this thread, so back on page 4 we have:chitoryu12 posted:Wade trades his books for his armor, shield, and sword at his locker and sprints out of the school. As he crosses the boundaries that indicate he's leaving the school zone, he turns off his floating nametag to keep from being identified. The transport terminal is a large domed pavilion supported by a dozen ivory pillars, each emblazoned with a T in a blue hexagon. Wade steps into the first booth (which he says reminds him of the TARDIS because it's a blue booth) and inserts the voucher, invoicing his school 103 credits for 462 kilometers of travel. Memento posted:30 light hours/side, a light hour is about 1.1 billion km in length, so (30*1,100,000,000km)*(30*1,100,000,000km)*(30*1,100,000,000km)=2.97e+13km3, or 29,700,000,000,000 cubic kilometers. I'm no big-city mathamagician, but if it costs 0.22 credits per km teleported, that seems like transport costs of 245,238,095 credits per sector crossed, one-way, seems rather excessive.
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Mar 23, 2018 04:34
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Evilreaver posted:I just found this thread, so back on page 4 we have: Lol, look at this noob, expecting RPO to be consistent. This is a story that lost it's coherence IN THE FIRST CHAPTER.
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Mar 23, 2018 05:57
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anonumos posted:Lol, look at this noob, expecting RPO to be consistent. This is a story that lost it's coherence IN THE FIRST CHAPTER. Yeah, I'm amazed that that old joke Libertopia fanfiction short story was more coherent and had better pacing.
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Mar 23, 2018 06:05
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If he had included public portals you'd avoid most of the problems. Each sector would have a single main hub world with a single public portal. Boom, now you can go offworld. A game lightyears across and no fast travel without microtransactions. Except they're not micro at all. It's taking Gillette's "Given them the razor, but sell them the blades" to a ridiculous degree. Megillah Gorilla fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Mar 23, 2018 |
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Mar 23, 2018 06:23
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Gorilla Salad posted:If he had included public portals you'd avoid most of the problems.
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Mar 23, 2018 06:32
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Zanzibar Ham posted:Yeah, I'm amazed that that old joke Libertopia fanfiction short story was more coherent and had better pacing. Oh good that was good. I'm going to have to reread it. I still have the Independence USA eBook on my Google drive. drat. My bookmark to Libertopia is broken http://welp.gs/~harik/libertopia.html anonumos fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Mar 23, 2018 |
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Mar 23, 2018 06:47
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after catching up with this thread, the most infuriating part of the book for me was this one:quote:I spent most of my time in Advanced OASIS Studies class annoying our teacher, Mr. Ciders, by pointing out errors in our textbook and raising my hand to interject some relevant bit of Halliday trivia that I (and I alone) thought was interesting. After the first few weeks of class, Mr. Ciders had stopped calling on me unless no one else knew the answer to his question. There's always one fucker like this in every classroom even willingly I wouldn't be able to write such a dislikeable character
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Mar 23, 2018 06:48
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It's been said elsewhere I think, but in a VR system where your most basic level of interaction is with a helmet and gloves, making the player traverse distances by walking is a loving terrible idea.
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Mar 23, 2018 06:50
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Gnome de plume posted:It's been said elsewhere I think, but in a VR system where your most basic level of interaction is with a helmet and gloves, making the player traverse distances by walking is a loving terrible idea. How about the headset beaming the visuals directly onto the retinas? Works great right up until your eye twitches [constantly] you attempt to look around naturally [per eons of evolution] or attempt to balance yourself [reflex], etc. A brainjack is a thousand times better, as is a regular Vive-type headset. A needless complication. You might not be able to tell by text alone, but this book straight infuriates me for reasons I'll probably get into once I'm not typing on a phone.
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Mar 23, 2018 07:18
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iospace posted:FORTRAN is still being used today, believe it or not. It has some very niche roles and is still getting updates to the actual language itself (and a lot of legacy code being maintained). One of the old salts I used to work with was fluent in it. He'd still take occasional contract gigs for high five digits for a week of work on some arcane production system that nothing else would work in and which was impossible to replace.
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Mar 23, 2018 08:09
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I think the reason Wade's failures in the challenges are glossed over is a result of the lack of negative consequences for failure (besides a waste of time). I mean why bother detailing them if nothing happens as a result besides Wade taking a bathroom break and coming back? Not to mention that since these are old very deterministic games there'd barely be a difference between the details of the failed run (before the failure) and the successful one, so it would just result in repeated paragraphs. Another reason "maybe" is that Cline didn't really care about the story and just wanted to cram as much of his nostalgia into a book as he could. I find it kind of suspicious/funny that the novel came out 4 years after Ruben Bolling drew his 'Scientific Discovery: The Height of Popular Culture Was When You (The Person Reading This) Were 12 Years Old' comic.
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Mar 23, 2018 08:18
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Zanzibar Ham posted:Cline didn't really care about the story and just wanted to cram as much of his nostalgia into a book as he could. that's_a_bingo.gif
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Mar 23, 2018 09:02
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Evilreaver posted:I just found this thread, so back on page 4 we have: I'm impressed that it only took halfway through the book before everyone realized that the villains could do a better job with this virtual libertarian utopia than the protagonist.
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Mar 23, 2018 14:11
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Tunicate posted:the stupid part is that pacman is a purely deterministic game so you could totally just TAS it It was really surprising to me that Wade actually spent 6 hours beating pacman on his own instead of downloading a cheat for it like he does for every other single activity.
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Mar 23, 2018 14:25
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As if Cline even knows what a TAS is. I bet if you showed him one he'd be all 'b-b-but that's cheating!' while wearing a 'Honest Gamers' shirt.
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Mar 23, 2018 14:30
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quote:Frobozz was located in a group of several hundred rarely visited worlds known as the XYZZY Cluster. These planets all dated back to the early days of the OASIS, and each one re-created the environment of some classic text adventure game or MUD (multi-user dungeon). Each of these worlds was a kind of shrine—an interactive tribute to the OASIS’s earliest ancestors. If you would like to play along with this chapter, you can play Zork in your browser here. One thing you'll quickly notice is that Cline seems to have not actually bothered playing the game before describing it: Zork actually has quite a robust text parser, and trying to use simple commands like "climb tree" or "attack troll" can easily result in the game refusing input until you're more specific. You'll also note that the game is hard as balls because it gives basically no hints about what you're supposed to do and you have no map, so you'll probably spend a long time trying to work out exactly where you are and what you have to do to progress. Oh, and Frobozz is a place and corporation that appears in the Zork games. As far as I can see, it's not the name of a character. Because he can't risk even the 15 minutes it'll take him to travel to Frobozz in the Vonnegut, Wade pulls out one of his plot devices: a Ring of Teleportation that he can use once a month to instantly teleport anywhere in OASIS. He sets his ship to autopilot to activate its cloaking device and land on Frobozz undetected by any Sixers converging on the planet, then teleports in. quote:My ring emitted a blinding flash of light,and a split second later my avatar was there, standing on the surface of Frobozz. Yes, just like the game. How many times can you remind us of that? More importantly, there's things in the house that aren't mentioned in the text, like a fridge and microwave. Wade goes through them, finding practically fossilized old food, and all the way in the back of a cabinet full of cereal boxes is a box of Cap'n Crunch. Wade dumps the cereal on the counter and pulls out a bosun whistle:  He puts it to his mouth and puffs just to see what happens, but it doesn't make a sound. Like the Quatrain says, he needs to get all the trophies first. Gathering the battery-powered lantern and glowing Elven sword, he descends the staircase through the trap door under the Oriental rug. quote:I continued to refer to the Zork notes in my grail diary, which reminded me exactly how to make my way through the game’s labyrinth of rooms, passageways, and puzzles. I collected all nineteen of the game’s treasures as I went, returning repeatedly to the living room in the white house to place them in the trophy case, a few at a time. Along the way, I had to do battle with several NPCs: a troll, a Cyclops, and a really annoying thief. As for the legendary grue, lurking in the dark, waiting to dine on my flesh—I simply avoided him. This wasn't even a challenge! He doesn't have anything restricting him from keeping his walkthrough and maps up in the corner of his vision. All he has to do is GameFAQs his way through a 1980 adventure game for less than half an hour and he's got the Jade Key. quote:I ran back to the living room of the white house one last time and placed the final treasure inside the trophy case. Just as in the original game, a map appeared inside the case, directing me to a hidden barrow that marked the end of the game. But I wasn’t concerned with the map or with finishing the game. All of the “trophies” were now “collected” in the case, so I took out the Cap’n Crunch whistle. It had three holes across the top, and I covered the third one to generate the 2600-hertz tone that had made this whistle famous in the annals of hacker history. Then I blew one clear, shrill note. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugTKmveF2G4 Wade panics a little, seeing that the key is silver rather than milky green jade. But he quickly calms himself when he realizes that it's wrapped in silver foil like a stick of chewing gum. Etched into the surface is another clue: Continue your quest by taking the test. There's a muffled roar outside, and Wade runs outside to see thousands of Sixer gunships descending and blanketing the surface of the planet. They have no way to block all 512 instances of Zork on the planet, but the planet is a PvP zone and there will inevitably be gunters descending on the planet and starting a gigantic war with the Sixers once they find out where to go. quote:As I continued running across the field and up the ramp of my ship, I spotted a large squadron of gunships, about a hundred or so, descending from the sky directly above my location. They appeared to be headed straight for me. Oh poo poo, Wade's actually gonna have to get into an exciting action scene and show off all his cool stuff and his ship and-- quote:Max had already powered up the Vonnegut’s engines, so I shouted for him to lift off as soon as I was aboard. When I reached the cockpit controls, I threw the throttle wide open, and the descending swarm of Sixer gunships banked hard to follow me. As my ship blasted its way skyward,I began to take heavy fire from several directions. But I was lucky. My ship was fast, and my shields were top-of-the-line, so they managed to holdup long enough for me to reach orbit. But they failed a few seconds later, and the Vonnegut's hull suffered an alarming amount of damage in the handful of seconds it took me to make the jump to light speed. Oh no he's just going to run away and nothing happens. That's cool too. Wade takes the damaged Vonnegut to Joe's Garage, an NPC establishment. Before returning to Falco, he sends Aech an email thanking him and begging for forgiveness. He checks the news as he flies back, seeing live coverage of the massive battle across Frobozz's surface as thousands of gunters arrive every minute to acquire the Jade Key as the Sixers try to stop them. quote:Now that the Sixers knew exactly where and how to obtain the Jade Key, I expected to see their other avatars’ scores begin to jump as Sorrento’s underlings followed his lead. But to my surprise, the next avatar to snag the Jade Key was none other than Shoto. He did it less than twenty minutes after Sorrento.
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Mar 23, 2018 14:37
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Careful with that Colossal Cave bit there Cline, you almost started explaining why something was good instead of just listing it...
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Mar 23, 2018 14:47
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chitoryu12 posted:One thing you'll quickly notice is that Cline seems to have not actually bothered playing the game before describing it: Zork actually has quite a robust text parser, and trying to use simple commands like "climb tree" or "attack troll" can easily result in the game refusing input until you're more specific. That seems to be a pretty consistent occurrence in this book. If describing a thing requires more knowledge than a quick google search can tell you then Cline gets the reference wrong.
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Mar 23, 2018 15:26
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Orthodox Rabbit posted:That seems to be a pretty consistent occurrence in this book. If describing a thing requires more knowledge than a quick google search can tell you then Cline gets the reference wrong. One of the many ways the book would been improved would have been if Halliday weren’t dead, and was instead running the contest as a power mad GM. An egotisical demand to be remembered would explain why the schools offer classes about his life, and there could be a scene where he permabans someone for pointing out he got a reference wrong.
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Mar 23, 2018 15:42
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chitoryu12 posted:To solve this immersive three-dimensional version of Zork, I simply had to perform the exact same actions required to solve the original text-based game. "perform the exact same actions" Wow! Just like the D&D map! And the Joust game! And the Wargames re-enactment. And the Pacman Game! What an incredible puzzle Halliday has created. Truly worth a gazillion billion dollars. quote:Before returning to Falco, he sends Aech an email thanking him and begging for forgiveness Why did Aech hate him again? I know, there's been like two bits of personal drama in the whole book so I should remember, but all I can remember about final meeting in the school dungeon was the "mystery" of the falling magazines.
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Mar 23, 2018 15:54
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Hyrax Attack! posted:One of the many ways the book would been improved would have been if Halliday weren’t dead, and was instead running the contest as a power mad GM. An egotisical demand to be remembered would explain why the schools offer classes about his life, and there could be a scene where he permabans someone for pointing out he got a reference wrong. And when they get permabanned the game fries their real life brain or something. Boom now suddenly there's actually something at stake in playing these terrible challenges instead of the only consequence being that your entire life is a wasteland of 1980s bar trivia answers
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Mar 23, 2018 16:01
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But that would ruin the novel's amazing tagline of 'If you die in the game, Try Again?'
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Mar 23, 2018 16:04
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Orthodox Rabbit posted:And when they get permabanned the game fries their real life brain or something. Boom now suddenly there's actually something at stake in playing these terrible challenges instead of the only consequence being that your entire life is a wasteland of 1980s bar trivia answers On the other hand, this is pretty much Sword Art Online's premise.
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Mar 23, 2018 16:04
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