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halfway through the book and we haven't actually seen any combat more complicated than "someone else released a spell and everyone blew up". Despite it being an MMO. In my head, OASIS sword combat works the same as in any other MMO. You just stand there and face tank the enemy and smack em with your sword for a bit.
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Mar 23, 2018 16:10
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I engaged the mountain troll in hand-to-hand combat and defeated him after a long and arduous battle. Then I drank some e-mountain dew and got my HPs back.
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Mar 23, 2018 16:12
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Actually that raises a question If you can level up, but all your actions and concurrent with things your real body is doing, what does levelling up do? You can't actually be smarter or more dexterous because those things are determined by your real life limitations
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Mar 23, 2018 16:46
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Gorilla Salad posted: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 16:47
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lol why is he trying to portray a characters death in an sad/ominous way when people just respawn
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Mar 23, 2018 16:51
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nerdz posted:lol why is he trying to portray a characters death in an sad/ominous way when people just respawn When you die in Japan you die for real.
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Mar 23, 2018 17:11
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Gorilla Salad posted: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. There's a short bit that I summarized in the "Wade is a hairless pale automaton who lives in a haptic suit now" chapter, where he says that he and Aech got paranoid about revealing any info to each other and finally got into a shouting match where Wade was like "Bitch you wouldn't have even found the first key without me". Then he couldn't decide if it was too early or too late to apologize and had just not said a word since. Mel Mudkiper posted:Actually that raises a question As I warned at the beginning, Cline's writing gets really ambiguous about just how "reality" the virtual reality is. Ostensibly it's a typical video game where you have stats that restrict your equipment and make you do more damage and have more HP, but any time actual combat or actions are described it comes off as a holodeck kind of thing. It actually makes it more jarring when Wade does stuff like view his avatar in third person or open his inventory as a menu (especially since he puts items in his pocket to add them to his inventory and sometimes pulls them out like physical items, but other times he just clicks on them in the menu). And at the beginning he just used an autorun feature, but now his rig has a treadmill to run for real. Does he still get the option of autorun, hand gestures, and voice commands like he used to?
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Mar 23, 2018 17:15
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It's interesting how sci-fi writers at the beginning of the 20th century could write about more complex futuristic technological scenarios with much more consistency and Cline can't even write a thing that should exist 5-10 years from now.
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Mar 23, 2018 17:34
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nerdz posted:lol why is he trying to portray a characters death in an sad/ominous way when people just respawn Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:When you die in Japan you die for real. Maybe it's the other way: Daito got offed in the real-world, the same way that they tried to go after Wade the first time. You'd expect Shoto to reach out and warn his friends, but I guess the samurai's life is fleeting and always close to death or something, and everyone in this world is as emotionally crippled as the author's prose.
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Mar 23, 2018 17:42
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This reminds me of stories I wrote as a teenager ("his trench coat billowed in the wind as he coolly donned his sunglasses") Combined with drawings of awesome characters, vehicles and 'bases' I did as an even younger child I'm amazed he doesn't have Wolverine claws
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Mar 23, 2018 17:56
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Yond Cassius posted:Maybe it's the other way: Daito got offed in the real-world, the same way that they tried to go after Wade the first time. You'd expect Shoto to reach out and warn his friends, but I guess the samurai's life is fleeting and always close to death or something, and everyone in this world is as emotionally crippled as the author's prose. Daito accidentally used a skip glitch to get the key and had to commit harakiri to atone for his lack of honor
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Mar 23, 2018 18:10
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nerdz posted:Daito accidentally used a skip glitch to get the key and had to commit harakiri to atone for his lack of honor
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Mar 23, 2018 18:39
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You know what would be a way better challenge: If Halliday had created an original, never beaten before text adventure inspired by Zork so people couldn't just gamefaqs it, but I'm not the nostalgia purist firing people for not getting references. And lol if you think Cline would have the skills to portray an original text adventure game.
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Mar 23, 2018 18:55
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Ready Player One posted:My avatar now stood in that open field, just west of the white house. The front door of the old Victorian mansion was boarded up, and there was a mailbox just a few yards away from me, at the end of the walkway leading to the house. Hang on, that doesn't sound right... (clicks on the Zork link provided above) Zork posted:>examine house EDIT: To be fair, even the later graphical Zork games didn't portray the house as "beautiful colonial"...  Return to Zork  Zork Grand Inquisitor ...but where Cline gets "Victorian mansion" is a mystery to me. Dave Syndrome fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Mar 23, 2018 |
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Mar 23, 2018 19:07
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Rereading this vicariously, I keep thinking "wait, I remember the Oasis made a lot more sense at the time." Each time, I've been thinking of REAMDE.
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Mar 23, 2018 19:09
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I've brought dishonor upon my family by using gamefaqs walkthroughs to defeat this challenge *commits seppuku* *respawns 2 feet away*
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Mar 23, 2018 19:10
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Crap, now I have to level up again. *pulls out walkthrough*
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Mar 23, 2018 19:17
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It didn't actually sound like dying was that big of a deal when Wade described it earlier? You go back down to level 1. But Wade power leveling to level 99 was so trivial he barely mentioned it in a throw-away line. And even if you lose all the stuff you have on you, every gunter seems to have entire bases full of extra poo poo.
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Mar 23, 2018 19:21
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quote:There was only one possible explanation: Daito had just been killed. Or, you know Maybe he was just banned
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Mar 23, 2018 19:24
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I'm surprised with the vast network of accounts the sixers wield, they don't just report-spam people they don't like until all the gunthers get auto-banned.
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Mar 23, 2018 19:25
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Orthodox Rabbit posted:It didn't actually sound like dying was that big of a deal when Wade described it earlier? You go back down to level 1. But Wade power leveling to level 99 was so trivial he barely mentioned it in a throw-away line. And even if you lose all the stuff you have on you, every gunter seems to have entire bases full of extra poo poo. They make it look like leveling is gated more by resources than time. If you're rich enough, you can boost yourself to the max level extremely quickly due to being able to quickly traveling between quests and finishing them as fast as possible. But here's the huge plothole: if the game currency is the highest valued currency of them all, can't you just get rich by poopsocking the poo poo out of OASIS? They even mention respawning instances, like the joust cave! Why is everyone so poor then? If you can farm raids and get infinite money, why is the currency so valued?
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Mar 23, 2018 19:26
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Renegret posted:Or, you know AIMBOT on a Katana, the ultimate shame.
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Mar 23, 2018 19:28
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nerdz posted:They make it look like leveling is gated more by resources than time. If you're rich enough, you can boost yourself to the max level extremely quickly due to being able to quickly traveling between quests and finishing them as fast as possible. But here's the huge plothole: if the game currency is the highest valued currency of them all, can't you just get rich by poopsocking the poo poo out of OASIS? They even mention respawning instances, like the joust cave! Why is everyone so poor then? If you can farm raids and get infinite money, why is the currency so valued? yeah, OASIS being the primo currency of the entire world wouldn't make any sense because there's literally mounds of money just lying around all over the place that respawns every day. It should be trivial for anyone to make themselves near infinite money by using strategy guides to beat the toughest content (since Wade has shown us that its how he beats everything multiple times now). Really OASIS currency should be so insanely devalued from the massive amounts of it floating around in the system that it should be worth next to nothing in the real world. OASIS is just a virtual reality bitcoin mining machine
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Mar 23, 2018 19:53
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Dave Syndrome posted:...but where Cline gets "Victorian mansion" is a mystery to me. IIRC there's a line in Snow Crash about Victorian houses on tank treads, but I don't think it's a reference to that.
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Mar 23, 2018 20:01
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Maybe I missed it, because --- like probably a lot of folks here --- I'm paying way more attention to chitoryu's commentary than the eye-glazing contents of the book itself, but why are the IOI guys called Sixers? Gods, this poo poo is terrible. Really? You had to tell me that your Firefly-class ship was based on the one used in the show FIrefly? drat, never would've figured that oh so obscure reference out! That hammered home what's really been driving me nuts: the whole point is the Easter egg hunt. And Cline could've been dropping eggs all through this book that only old farts like me would get. That would've made for a fun read that would ping my nostalgia meter. Have a guy show up and say "Trust me, I know what I'm doing", and I'd chuckle and think, "nice, a Sledgehammer! reference". No, it's all Deloreans and x-wings and pop music that even my 20-something coworkers know, with our narrator explaining where these common cultural touchstones come from. Fun fact: the word "nostalgia" at its roots means roughly "a painful return home". This poo poo is painful, all right.
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Mar 23, 2018 20:06
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Maybe I missed it, because --- like probably a lot of folks here --- I'm paying way more attention to chitoryu's commentary than the eye-glazing contents of the book itself, but why are the IOI guys called Sixers? They all have six-number employee ID numbers that start with a 6.
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Mar 23, 2018 20:07
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chitoryu12 posted:They all have six-number employee ID numbers that start with a 6.
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Mar 23, 2018 20:14
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quote:Most of Parzival-TV’s regular viewers were gunters who monitored my vidfeed with the hope that I’d inadvertently reveal some key piece of information about the Jade Key or the egg itself. I never did, of course. At the moment, Parzival-TV was wrapping up a nonstop two-day Kikaider marathon. Kikaider was a late-’70s Japanese action show about a red-and-blue android who beat the crap out of rubber-suited monsters in each episode. I had a weakness for vintage kaiju and tokusatsu, shows like Spectreman, The Space Giants, and Supaidaman. I imagine he specifically picked those series because they all either had English dubs that aired on American television (Spectreman, Space Giants) or were probably popular among tape traders in the 80s. (Kikaider apparently had an English following in Hawaii, and I guess the Japanese Spiderman got passed around because it's Spiderman with a giant robot. If you're a Marvel fan, why wouldn't you want to take a look?) But I'm still shaking my head that he mentions those but not Kamen Rider or any of the earlier Super Sentai. (Cline would have been 20ish when the original Power Rangers aired. So older than the target audience, but that doesn't stop a ton of other nerds that age from watching it or its Japanese counterpart.) Or mentioning having any Ultraman in his toku show rotation. chitoryu12 posted:Despite his tumultuous relationship with Aech, Wade has formed a loose and wary friendship with Daito and Shoto after they did a quest on planet Tokusatsu that involved completing all 39 episodes of Ultraman as the protagonists. The quest was implemented several years after Halliday's death (so Wade knew it couldn't be part of the Hunt) and was entirely in Japanese (which Wade doesn't understand without the imperfect OASIS translator software), so to extend an olive branch he asked Daito and Shoto to team up with him. They spent a whole week, playing as many as 16 hours a day, swapping characters until they completed everything. There is an English translation for Phantasy Star Online 2, a Japanese MMO that is still running that doesn't have an official English release. Someone would have gotten around that crappy machine translator (which probably wouldn't be that crappy) and translated those quests. Hell, if they're just reciting the dialogue and actions from the show, someone could just copy/paste a translation group's fansubs for the show. That would probably be most of the work there. chitoryu12 posted: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. It kind of is. It's the title of the wizard of said place. He's the antagonist of Zork 2.
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Mar 23, 2018 20:23
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quote:Over the next twelve hours, chaos continued to reign on Frobozz as every gunter in the OASIS scrambled to reach the planet and join the fray. The Scoreboard quickly ends up 5000 names long. Wade checks the gunter message boards, but nobody has any idea how Daito died. Most assume he was killed during the fighting in the Battle of Frobozz. Wade sends Shoto a few chat requests, but all of them go unanswered. He begins obsessing over the clue on the Jade Key like a mantra. quote:Yes, but what test? What test was I supposed to take? The Kobayashi Maru? The Pepsi Challenge? Could the clue have been any more vague? Who the gently caress put the Pepsi Challenge in OASIS. The only clue Wade can figure out is that the wrapper from the key stayed in his inventory, which suggests that it has some kind of meaning. Suddenly at 6:12 AM, Wade is jolted awake in his chair by the Scoreboard alert. Sorrento has completed the Second Gate and has the clue to the Crystal Key, putting him at the top of the board and the closest to winning control of GSS. It only gets worse, and eventually all other gunters are kicked off the top ten until the board is full of Sixer numbers. quote:I suddenly felt ill, and I was also having a difficult time breathing. I realized I must be having some sort of panic attack. A total and complete freak-out. A massive mental meltdown. Whatever you want to call it. I went a little nuts. I think you went nuts when you shaved all your hair off and began living entirely in a virtual world, buddy. quote:I sat there in my stronghold, staring at the monitors, watching all of this unfold in stunned horror. There was no denying it. The end of the contest was at hand. And it wasn’t going to end like I’d always thought it would, with some noble, worthy gunter finding the egg and winning the prize. I’d been kidding myself for the past five and a half years. We all had. This story was not going to have a happy ending. The bad guys were going to win. If you had any desires for Wade to become more normal, here he is spending an entire day staring at a single computer screen in horror. quote:I’d already decided what I was going to do when it happened. First, I would choose one of the kids in my official fan club, someone with no money and a first-level newbie avatar, and give her every item I owned. Then I would activate the self-destruct sequence on my stronghold and sit in my command center while the whole place went up in a massive thermonuclear explosion. My avatar would die and GAME OVER would appear in the center of my display. Then I would rip off my visor and leave my apartment for the first time in six months. I would ride the elevator up to the roof. Or maybe I would even take the stairs. Get a little exercise. Wade is shaken from his suicidal thoughts at the idea of his favorite game becoming monetized by a message from Shoto, telling him that Daito left something for Wade in his will. Wade calls him back confused, saying that Daito can just make a new avatar while Shoto holds onto his stuff. Shoto is a teary wreck who says that Daito won't be making a new avatar, now or ever. Somehow Wade doesn't clue in, so he agrees to the meeting. quote:Max alerted me when Shoto arrived an hour or so later. I granted his ship clearance to enter Falco’s airspace and told him to park in my hangar. In case you were hoping Daito and Shoto would be portrayed in a less racist way, I have bad news for you. Wade leads Shoto to one of his rarely used sitting rooms (a recreation of the Family Ties living room) for their meeting. Please keep in mind that all the gravitas of this scene takes place between a guy in body armor and a samurai in this living room:  quote:“The Sixers killed my brother last night,” he said, almost whispering. While Daito and Shoto called themselves "brothers", they weren't actually related. Toshiro and Akihide met 6 years ago as part of an OASIS support group for hikikomori, as this phenomenon (young Japanese people withdrawing from society) had only become worse with the advent of Halliday's Hunt. Bonding over their mutual love of samurai movies, they created a samurai persona and bonded as brothers over their quests through OASIS. After clearing the First Gate, they became instant celebrities in Japan with their own live action and animated TV shows but kept their identities a secret. Shoto suggested to Daito that they meet in person for the first time, but Daito flew into a rage and he never brought it up again. Shoto explains how everything happened. They had planted microscopic tracking devices on a large number of Sixer gunships, knowing that they'd use Fyndoro's Tablet of Finding to converge on whoever found the Jade Key first, and used it to trace them to Frobozz. Landing the Kurosawa on the planet, Shoto completed Zork while Daito stood guard. While they successfully completed the quest, the Sixers converged on them and made killing them a priority. Shoto brings up a video feed of what happened for Wade to watch: quote:Daito didn’t hesitate to use the ace up his sleeve. He pulled out the Beta Capsule, held it aloft in his right hand, and activated it. His avatar instantly changed into Ultraman, a glowing-eyed red-and-silver alien superhero. As his avatar transformed, he also grew to a height of 156 feet. As his avatar froze, the Sixers poured fire into Ultraman. He finally toppled over (nearly crushing Shoto) and turned back into his human avatar, slowly disappearing and leaving a pile of spinning items on the ground. Shoto grabbed everything and jumped back in the ship, barely making a lightspeed escape. quote:Shoto removed the Beta Capsule from his inventory and held it out to me. “Daito would have wanted you to have this.” 
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Mar 23, 2018 20:49
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Adnachiel posted:It kind of is. It's the title of the wizard of said place. He's the antagonist of Zork 2. Yeah but he's the Wizard of Frobozz. It's as accurate as saying "the planet Da Vinci, named after the family."
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Mar 23, 2018 20:51
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Spark That Bled posted:On the other hand, this is pretty much Sword Art Online's premise.
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Mar 23, 2018 21:44
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Ready Player One posted:“No,” Shoto said. “Daito did not commit seppuku. I’m sure of it." Mainly because seppuku is a certain form of ritual suicide, not just your usual everyday suicide.
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Mar 23, 2018 23:16
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It would be loving rad if he had though
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Mar 23, 2018 23:27
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 Oh, here's a fun tidbit: wikipedia posted:Aech is based partly on Cline's friend Harry Knowles as well as himself and other geeks, both men and women.  Chef Boyardeez Nuts fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Mar 23, 2018 |
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Mar 23, 2018 23:28
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Spark That Bled posted:Mainly because seppuku is a certain form of ritual suicide, not just your usual everyday suicide. And honestly even someone obsessed with samurai is going to know that seppuku is a specific type of suicide, even if they were a white dude from Oregon or something.
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Mar 23, 2018 23:46
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PetraCore posted:The only wait Daito and Shoto's characters work is if they were actually not Japanese people who still fell into the whole 'emulate the samurai' thing bc this is basic knowledge.
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Mar 23, 2018 23:47
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Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:
WHERE ARE HIS EYELASHES
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Mar 23, 2018 23:58
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Didn’t Knowles turn out to be a serial groper?
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Mar 24, 2018 00:08
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Proteus Jones posted:WHERE ARE HIS EYELASHES At a guess, they've been devoured by the tiny singularity between his eyes that's pulling all his facial features so close together or maybe it just appears that way compared to his ever-expanding furry throat sack
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Mar 24, 2018 00:13
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Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:
quote:Harry Jay Knowles (born December 11, 1971) is a film critic and writer known for his website called Ain't It Cool News. Knowles was a member of the Austin Film Critics Association, from which he was removed in September 2017 "by a substantial majority vote" of the organization following allegations of sexual assault.[1][2] but of course SatansOnion posted:At a guess, they've been devoured by the tiny singularity between his eyes that's pulling all his facial features so close together I know a guy that looks a lot like him. Maybe some congenital defect?
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Mar 24, 2018 00:20
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