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Mel Mudkiper posted:Oh no not an important figure in Oklahoma Big civil-rights hero. Which does make calling your liberator of the nerds Wade Watts faintly suspect.
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Mar 13, 2018 13:18
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Well, that was some perfect post timing right there.
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Mar 13, 2018 13:39
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chitoryu12 posted:Well, I'd argue that the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie is still crap. Mind you, Ultimate Showdown does end on a punchline that points out how silly the whole concept of ’famous pop-culture figures gruesomely murder each other because reasons’ is. I’m not sure RPO ever manages the same.
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Mar 14, 2018 16:21
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Then again, I can totally see the antimatter bomb stunt happening in EVE. Well, except that the first few eBay sales would be hilariously obvious scams.
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Mar 19, 2018 15:55
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Mel Mudkiper posted:the whole pvp zone thing is weird from a narrative perspective because its the author is arbitrarily removing a sense of danger from his own story In a competent story, I’d assume it’s setup for an ‘oh poo poo’ moment when the bad guys get partial access to OASIS’s systems and start turning safe zones into PVP zones. Here, it’s... less guaranteed. SerialKilldeer posted:Sorry if I missed something, but is it ever explained how the Sixers get away with all this crap? Besides the multiple/shared accounts, it seems that using antimatter bombs and force fields to restrict other players' access to the Tomb should violate terms of service. I mean, people trading high-end in-game items for shitloads of real-world money is hardly new.
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Mar 19, 2018 16:06
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BobHoward posted:You just reminded me of one of my favorite novel series, in which such a twist is pulled off amazingly well. Thinking about those books is so much better than thinking about RPO. Thanks! C’mon now. Share.
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Mar 20, 2018 03:32
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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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chitoryu12 posted:I’m still hitting a roadblock on making RPO better: redoing the WarGames section without just tossing it altogether. Simple - create a fiendishly complex War Games-based challenge where the only winning move is not to play.
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Mar 26, 2018 19:57
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Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:Load him into a war sim like Edge of Tomorrow that autopopulates with other players. He has to actually work together with other people and fights to the end to get some sort of doomsday weapon. The game suggests that using the weapon will kill the bad guys, win the game and wipe the other PCs in the challenge. Depends how sympathetic you want to make Halliday, of course. Do you want him to be a wise mentor who communicates important moral lessons through Eighties pop-culture, or do you want him to be a broken soul who can only interact with the world through Eighties pop-culture? Mind you, if the former, you can make that some cool foreshadowing for the winner turns off OASIS ending. Or the latter, I guess, if you want to make the message subconscious on Halliday’s part and turn the whole thing into a nightmare delve into a broken, self-hating mind.
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Mar 26, 2018 20:58
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Nipponophile posted:Obviously those mercs needed deliverables that they could present to their management team during year-end performance reviews if they're ever hoping to move up to a higher pay band. Zanzibar Ham posted:I can actually believe that. Real live people who are rich and powerful keep the craziest criminal things on record.
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Mar 27, 2018 18:08
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Leofish posted:I'm genuinely curious how many people who aren't weird internet nerds like us know what Gamergate is. This book sold very well and presumably a lot of people who are only on the periphery of the geek world Cline idolizes read it and maybe even enjoyed it, but did Gamergate really resonate that much outside of the online gamer bubbles? I wonder what people who read it in 2011 who never paid any attention to gg would think about RPO today. I did think that making Tyler less of a pathetic fuckup was a bad adaptation choice. That bit where his bombs don’t work because he’s poo poo at chemistry was a fantastic punchline.
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Mar 30, 2018 01:12
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Paingod556 posted:I like AC/DC. It's mandatory for anyone who is an Australian citizen. I also really like Dirty Deeds. Isn’t it more that D4C sounds like it’s about gay prostitution for most of the song, then turns out to be about contract killing?
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Apr 2, 2018 18:20
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Eh, I can’t judge Wade too hard for wanting to punk Sorrento. Delivering petty humiliation to rich, murderous assholes is a time-honoured tradition. Consider, for example, all the people lining up to gently caress with Trump (and if you think ‘murderous’ is an exaggeration there, consider Puerto Rico).
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Apr 2, 2018 20:36
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Orthodox Rabbit posted:The Ultraman sequence isn't even very interesting (even if it was well written) because just a few chapters ago we already got an Ultraman fight scene. That scene was also somehow more interesting despite it just being Daito fighting off some random sixer nobodies instead of the big bad guy in a giant robot. I think that one big problem is that it’s so depersonalised. It’s not a final ‘gently caress you’ from the hero to the villain, it’s one big monster fighting another big monster. There’s no interplay. It may get (quite understandably) mocked, but there’s a reason heroes and villains in mecha shows tend to start yelling at each other during their final battles.
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Apr 2, 2018 21:01
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I wasn’t too fussed about Shoto’s e-death because it was mostly framed as what it was - not a tragic loss, but an ‘oh poo poo’ moment as the heroes lose their most powerful military asset right at the crisis point. Shoto‘s fine, but he can’t help them any more while the bad guys are minutes away from solidifying their control of the world. Give the final battle a little more of a sense of urgency (maybe a global announcement that players have started the final challenge, with a bunch of Sixer usernames in it), and it could work pretty reasonably. Maybe have Sorrento quip after downing Raideen that Shoto’s moved to the top of his kill-list for scratching his paint or something. Show that now he’s almost running the OASIS, he doesn’t care about hiding his crimes from puny mortal governments.
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Apr 2, 2018 21:34
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chitoryu12 posted:Or have Shoto be smuggled out of Japan in secret because Og knows they're all being watched (except for Aech, who's kept her identity secret enough that they don't know anything about her other than that she stays mobile), so Sorrento starts trying to taunt Shoto during their battle by telling him that they know where he lives and that they're waiting to Maybe, but I was thinking about ways to ratchet the tension up, not dial it down. This is the final battle against a gigantic, ruthless megacorp. It should be at least somewhat scary.
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Apr 3, 2018 00:39
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if he doesn't surrender.
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Option B for ramping up the tension, since we’d thought about going the ‘hallucinogenic descent into pop culture hell’ route - whatever Halliday left in the OASIS system freaks out at Sixers and mercenaries getting so close to the end-goal rather than the True Fans he wanted, and everyone suddenly has to deal with a lunatic replica of a broken mind that has vastly more control of the system than IOI ever managed to attain. Bank accounts get wiped, people get booted from OASIS at random, and the digital infrastructure that most of the world depends upon goes haywire, leaving Wade and his crew to talk down Halliday’s ghost before he burns everything down.
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Apr 3, 2018 01:04
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loquacius posted:Yeah Wade gets other, far more incomprehensible hints than that all the time ("say these three words backward and it's almost a line from a Schoolhouse Rock song I guess it kind of fits if you take it as a sign of Wade being a horrible dweeb who’s laser-focused in the Eighties, while Art3mis has a better-rounded understanding of art as a whole. Wade being totally clueless about Shakespeare but being able to recite the Leopardon activation sequence by heart is entirely appropriate to his character.
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Apr 3, 2018 16:29
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"), this is just lazy bad inconsistent characterization and/or an excuse to give Art3mis something to do
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TBH, Leopardon being Wade’s signature ride feels like it would be easy to make work, too. It’s basically his ultimate embrace of all that is cheesy, kitschy, and charmingly lame about Halliday’s preferred media. If you’re writing him as someone who starts out just doing this as a job and gradually falls in love with the media he’s immersed in, having him go ‘holy poo poo yes, forget the stats, forget the metagame, I’m going to win this dumb game with loving Leopardon and nobody’s going to stop me’ and then master using it because mecha combat in the OASIS is really goddamned fun would be a great little turning point. It could be a cool setup for the final battle, too. Sorrento’s just taken out Shoto and Raideen, and is turning towards them, and Wade knows they won’t make it to the Third Gate without being incinerated. The IOI’s CEO is riding this insane beast of a machine that’s been minmaxed as hard as the game will allow, while Wade’s still in his crappy little mecha from a crappy low-budget toku, but he knows that someone needs to get to the Gate before IOI takes over the world, and it doesn’t really matter who it is. So he turns back and faces Sorrento to buy his friends time... and finds that he’s having a far easier time than he should be. Sorrento isn’t a gamer. He hasn’t mastered the OASIS, because that would require him, on some level, to enjoy it. He’s just using high-end gear and a horde of loyal goons to brute-force his way through so he can claim his prize. Wade may be hilariously under-equipped, but he’s not on a suicide run like he thought. He can actually win this. Cue the epic battle scene.
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Apr 3, 2018 19:35
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If y’all are interested in  about dumb nerdlore, I might do an effortpost on the main characters’ choice of giant robots and how they might be used to enrich the story, with a few suggestions on alternative rides.
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Apr 4, 2018 16:56
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Sounds like a cue for me to get on that list of giant robot suggestions. This might take a little while, but then again, I've got a lot of material to work with.
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Apr 5, 2018 08:26
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OK, let's run down dem robutts. First off, though, we should talk about the narrative purpose of giant robots, which is something that cheaper, lazier fiction can ignore or gloss over (Cline does show a small measure of awareness in RPO, but not much). Piloted mecha were actually a relatively late development - the earliest giant robots, like Tetsujin 28 and Ambassador Magma, were either remote-controlled or fully sapient in their own right. They were outsized characters in the same vein as superheroes, living gods whose drama derived from their interactions with us puny mortals. Or, to look at this from another perspective (since these were pretty much universally kids' shows) they were your super-cool big buddy in a world where you were very small. Their wild appearances were all about making them seem superhuman and unearthly. The more intimate relationship created by a robot's master piloting it, though, introduced a host of intriguing possibilities. It's not a coincidence that the mecha in Gundam, one of the genre's most famous and successful franchises, are called 'mobile suits' - piloted mecha are costumes, and any good creator knows that there are few better ways to convey a character's personality than their clothes. Mecha shows let you take that to a whole new level, creating truly titanic clashes of personality, ideals, and aesthetics. They also open up exciting possibilities when you look at them from the other direction - a fight with the weight and power of a tank battle or battleship duel that now has the fluid interplay and body language of hand-to-hand combat. A particularly famous example of this is the Macross series, which brings the wild adrenaline of Top Gun-style aerial dogfights while letting those ginormous fighter pilot egos beat the poo poo out of each other with giant metal fists. They're incredibly versatile storytelling tools. With that in mind, let's talk RPO. Parzival Current ride: Leopardon from Japanese Spider-Man.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1PePr8hAsc The more I read up on Leopardon, the more genuinely fascinating it is. From one perspective, it's emblematic of all that's weird and dumb about geekery. It looks kind of lame standing still and really lame in motion, it's born out of a memetically bizarre fusion between Western superhero comics and Japanese 'tokusatsu' (a term literally meaning 'special filming', effects-heavy live-action TV, that, in common parlance, is generally used to refer to dudes in rubber suits beating the poo poo out of each other), it was obviously just shoehorned in at the last minute to broaden the show's appeal (a spider-leopard? The gently caress?), and it's got a hilarious backstory to it. The costume they used for its action scenes - such as they were - was so clunky that it was widely hated by the cast, and was stolen halfway through the show, requiring them to rely entirely on stock footage for its appearances and finishing moves. That's not the whole story, though, because the big dumb spider-leopard was actually a pivotal player in the history of giant robots. It was only the second live-action giant robot with a mechanically-viable transformation in history, after Daitetsujin-1-7, and the first one to be piloted (I'll get round to why that's a big deal in the Raideen section) and both it and the show itself were critical and commercial successes - the die-cast Leopardon toy broke sale records, and the TV show was well-received for its mixture of goofy action and surprisingly affecting drama (ironically, the problems the Leopardon suit gave the staff meant that they had to invest much more in characterisation and plotting in order to cut down on the amount of time that damned robot was on-screen). All this gave the execs at Toei a brainwave for how they'd make their new home-brewed tokusatsu franchise, Super Sentai, stand out from its commercial rival, Kamen Rider - by giving the heroes a giant robot. It worked like a charm, and now Super Sentai is a juggernaut of a franchise (41 series and counting - yes, you read that right) and the single biggest mecha show on live-action TV. You folks probably recognise it better as the franchise Power Rangers took all its action scenes from. So Leopardon isn't just a hilarious piece of crap - it's a hilarious piece of crap that was nevertheless good enough for its day to single-handedly revitalise an entire genre. It's a genuinely great pick for a character who's wavering between ironic detachment from and sincere appreciation of all the ancient, nerdy crap that's been shovelled into his mouth. You don't really need to change much here. If, on the other hand, you want to go for straight-up 'oh my god this is poo poo and I want to bathe in it', though, then I do have an alternative suggestion. Alternative ride: Jet Jaguar, Godzilla vs. Megalon.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOMzdWllsEM The thing about Leopardon is that, if you want to embrace all that is crummy about nerd stuff, it's honestly slightly too cool. Its show was a commercial success, its design was well-received, it set an important historical precedent, and it was presented as an unstoppable avatar of destruction within its own story. No, if we want something poo poo that everyone hated, we need to go deeper. Jet Jaguar is not, technically, a piloted robot - he's a size-shifting android superhero, and if you think that and his appearance make him seem like a blatant rip-off of Ultraman, you're absolutely right. He was originally intended to helm his own movie, but the execs decided he couldn't carry a franchise (gee, I wonder why?), and instead made him Godzilla's sidekick in an effort to shake up a flagging franchise. Yep, he was Godzilla's Poochie, and was about as well-received - GVM was the first significant flop in the history of the franchise, and Jet Jaguar only reappeared twenty-four years later as a prominent character in the Monster Island TV show. Now, to be totally fair, there were plenty of other reasons why GVM got panned - it relied heavily on stock footage, had a widely-despised child character, and marked the endpoint of Zilla's evolution from a walking nuclear bomb metaphor into a cuddly, child-friendly superhero - but Jet Jaguar did not help. The only question is whether someone who saw him in the reward tables would stop laughing long enough to push the button. Daito Current ride: Ultraman, from Ultraman.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqRKLS-hl98 Yeah, this is a lazy pick. Ultraman is... adequate for his narrative role, in that he's a big, famous, and powerful Japanese character used by a Japanese guy, but he's no more than that. He doesn't tell us anything about Daito's personality, because Daito doesn't have one, and there's nothing about him that indicates why he is the baddest motherfucker in the OASIS, able to chump even Sorrento's hellbeast with ease. He certainly wasn't a force of nature like Leopardon in his own show (yes, that is a phrase I just typed) - he was often evenly-matched with his foes, and had a serious, exploitable weakness in he form of his time limit. I mean, I guess he was the first and most famous fusion of the superhero and kaiju (giant monster) genres, so he should be good for punching big stuff, but that's still pretty weak. Plus, I'd been contemplating giving Wade Jet Jaguar when I thought about this, and thought there might be a bit too much overlap. If you're wondering why I'm focusing on power, it's because I like the idea of Daito stumbling across some unholy superweapon in an obscure sidequest. There's a reason why game designers make sidequest loot better than main quest loot - it's to incentivise exploration, and Halliday's egg quest is all about encouraging players to live his life in as much detail as they can. It makes perfect sense for there to be little bits and pieces scattered about that aren't explicitly linked to the keys and gates, but make proceeding through them far easier if found. Wade's spare quarter is one, so why shouldn't Daito's special super-artefact be one as well? If that's the case, we're going to have to scale up. Like, way up. Alternative ride: Ideon, from Space Runaway Ideon.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0MAY-8oo5U When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the galaxy, accept no substitutes. The Ideon is one of the most infamous mecha of the Eighties, star of a show (and sequel movie) that went a big way to earning maverick director Yoshiyuki Tomino his nickname of 'Kill 'em All'. The core premise is that human colonists travel to a far-flung planet and discover the three parts of a giant, combining robot as well as a hostile alien race who are just as curious about said robot as they are. The colonists load up the Ideon, as it's called, with weapons, and begin the long trip back to earth, pursued by the alien empire, only to eventually discover (after an escalating cycle of violence with appalling war crimes on both sides) that their new toy is in fact inhabited by a possibly-divine force called the Ide, which manipulated humanity and the aliens of the Buff Clan into making contact, and is none too happy about their choice to fight each other. This causes the Ideon to manifest ever-more-devastating weaponry until eventually, the Ide has enough and either wipes out the Buff Clan and humanity (TV version) or drives both sides into an apocalyptic endgame that leads to them wiping each other out, finishing off with the Ideon itself being destroyed and generating an explosion that scours all life from the galaxy to be reborn anew (film version). It's a walking, hundred-metre-tall fortress bristling with guns and missiles that also has superweapons like the Ideon Swords (laser blades extending from the emitters on its wrists that can cut a planet in half), the Black Hole Gun (a weapon mounted in its chest that can rip apart entire fleets with gravitational anomalies) and the Ideon Gun (its only hand-held weapon, which amplifies and focuses the Black Hole Gun and can take bites out of solar systems). Giving Daito the Ideon would completely explain why IOI had to kill him - an experienced gunter with intimate knowledge of the show it was based on would be as near to unstoppable in-game as makes no difference, and now that he knew how to get it, they simply could not risk him sharing that information with anyone else. Distracting him in-game with a zerg rush so they can break into his high-security apartment without scaring him off would be pretty much the only way to bring him down. I considered the other heavy hitter of the Eighties, the Gunbuster, but that's all about the bond between its two pilots. The Ideon is a multi-seater, but that's a little less narratively important - it's plausible that someone could use it solo with a crew of NPCs. There are other reasons for picking the Ideon, too, but we'll get to those. Shoto Current ride: Raideen, from Brave Raideen  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SloHs5O4S48 The Raideen is an OK pick. It's a solid mix of goofy and awe-inspiring for the gunters' ultimate weapon, a literal ancient god-machine with a whole host of weird-but-impressive gadgets. It also has the kind of historical significance that would appeal to any mecha nerd worth their salt - it's the first ever mechanically-viable transforming robot. That meant that it could be accurately rendered as a toy, which was a really big deal because kids' cartoons make their money through toys. In other words, you could now make lots of money by including transforming robots in your stories. No Raideen, no Transformers, no Power Rangers, no Robotech. My only gripe is that it doesn't really say much specific about Shoto as a character - at least one of our Japanese nerds should have a glimmer of personality. Alternative ride: RahXephon  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1_35xiub4 One interesting thing that I think Cline was trying to do with Shoto after Daito's death (but failing at because racism) was having him drop his LARPer persona and be his normal self because gently caress playing around, his friend's dead and he wants revenge. With that in mind, I can see him ignoring the Eighties theme and just whipping out the most powerful weapon in his arsenal to melt some Sixer faces with and claim the Third Gate. RahXephon is a 2001-2002 reimagining of Brave Raideen that also took heavy inspiration from the smash hit Neon Genesis Evangelion, an eerie, mystical show centring around quasi-mechanical clay statues called Dolems that have the power to reshape reality with their songs. The RahXephon itself is the Raideen with all the goofiness stripped away, a sleek, terrifying avatar of divine wrath that can liquefy entire fleets by yelling at them. It's not quite Ideon-powerful, but it's up there. Daito's death is consistently treated as one of the darkest, most serious parts of the story, so I think it'd be OK to let his best buddy's reaction to it be similarly serious. Art3mis Current ride: Minerva-X, from Mazinger Z.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR7xA2JbNCQ Another lazy one. Minerva-X is mainly significant for being the budget female knockoff of Mazinger Z, the first piloted giant robot (although she's not piloted herself, which makes things awkward when she develops a crush on Mazinger). Cline appears to have picked this entirely because Art3mis is a girl with a username from classical mythology. We can do way better. You want a girl robot, Cline? Then let's do the single coolest girl robot of the Eighties. Alternative ride: AMX-004 Qubeley, from Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam/Mobile Suit ZZ Gundam  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqsDKGQ0HoE To me, Art3mis tends to come across as the most together of the gang (give or take that awkward body image issue). She's not just a gifted player - she's a businesswoman who knows how to manage and use her image to maximum effect, she's politically aware, and she has the broadest education of any of the protagonists. It's actually why giving her a secret weakness to bring her down to Wade's level so they can be together is so disturbing. The Qubeley fits that. It's the personal machine of Haman Karn, a strong contender for the most memorable and badass villain in the Gundam franchise. She uses it to waltz in and kick the asses of the hero, the villain, and recurring series cool dude Char Aznable at the end of Zeta Gundam, before taking over the solar system once they all kill/incapacitate each other, and only gets defeated in the sequel, ZZ Gundam, after an absolutely astounding fight against one of the most powerful machines in the show because she deliberately held back out of fondness and respect for her enemy. It's stylish, elegant, and utterly deadly, especially if the pilot gets Haman's considerable psychic powers when piloting (and there are items that turn players into cyborgs and aliens, so why wouldn't they?). At eighteen metres, it's one of the smaller giant robots in play, but its hard-hitting beam weapons and swarm of attack drones make it useful against enemies of any size, and it even fits with the whole classical-mythology thing - it's named after Cybele, the Phrygian goddess of nature, who later became part of the Greek pantheon. Aech Current ride: RX-78-2 Gundam. from Mobile Suit Gundam.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFaUaCrbFLM I see what Cline was going for here. The Gundam was the pioneer of a genre that fans eventually dubbed 'real robot' - mecha as weapons of war rather than superheroes. It fits with Aech's butch aesthetic for her to be toting a big loving laser-gun while everyone else is lugging around swords, energy bows, and... uhh... microwave-boobs, but it's kind of basic and shallow. Aech is Wade's turbonerd buddy, the experienced gunter who loves the world she's immersed in. She'd go for a deeper cut, and that opens up some interesting storytelling possibilities. Alternative ride: 040 RX-79 [G] Gundam Ground Type (Karen Joshua Custom), from Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTFXpDtgg2M The 08th MS Team is an OVA series (original video animation - typically a direct-to-video series with quality somewhere between a TV show and a film) from the mid-nineties that serves as a side-story to the original Mobile Suit Gundam. It's most notable for bringing a gritty, realistic aesthetic to a franchise that has always had one foot in the fantastical - it's less Star Wars, more Platoon (plus a little Romeo and Juliet, but that's Gundam for you). Karen is the hero's tough-as-nails second-in-command and close (platonic) friend, and spends quite a bit of time clearing up his messes. I can see Aech identifying with her a lot, and she seems like the sort who'd recognise the inherent appeal of Gundam gone Rambo. It'd also be quite sweetly fitting if she decides to do an avatar-switch at the end and fight the final battle as herself, on the grounds that if they win, she can tell her parents and IOI to gently caress off, and if they lose, they'll all be too dead to care. Bringing along a mech that's big, tough, battle-scarred, and specifically piloted by a woman would work well with that. I do recognise that this gives her the least powerful mech in the lineup, but somebody's got to run anti-personnel work so the big boys don't get swarmed, and she seems practically-minded enough to volunteer for that. I assume that she spends most of the final battle kicking DeLoreans into Space Marine Terminators while giggling. Nolan Sorrento Current ride: MFS-3 Mechagodzilla (Kiryu), from Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkJ_n9ygZRw Not an awful choice. It's big, scary, powerful, and responsible for repeatedly handing the King of Monsters his scaly rear end, and carries the additional subtext of being piloted by someone who believes himself to be the hero despite doing monstrous things. In the movies it appeared in, Kiryu is an undead cyborg abomination that's technically the hero because it's (reluctantly and unreliably) protecting humanity against Godzilla, and successfully drives him off twice. I do think, though, that with the firepower getting thrown around, it's maybe a bit weedy - the Evangelions alone would rip it a new one. Plus, we can maybe double down on using it to reveal Sorrento's character. I considered a couple of options here, like the Big Fau from The Big O and an Imperator-class Titan from Warhammer 40,000, but none of them fitted. Both are a bit short to be properly intimidating (the Big Fau only tops out at thirty metres), the Imperator is a barely-mobile artillery emplacement that wouldn't provide an interesting fight scene, and both indicate an appreciation for storytelling and going into character that Sorrento lacks. So I thought we needed something huge and immensely destructive (but still mobile enough to provide an entertaining fight) that fits Sorrento's character, but not to the point where he would have chosen it because it fits his character. Then I realised the obvious answer. Alternative ride: Ideon, from Space Runaway Ideon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0MAY-8oo5U Of course Sorrento would take the Ideon after killing Daito. How could he not? It's exactly the kind of destructive power he needs as his ultimate trump card, and despite his lack of interest in Halliday's fantasyland, I can see him taking some grim enjoyment in using a weapon with a theme of rebirth and cleansing through destruction and bloodshed. Plus, it makes the final battle incredibly personal for our heroes, especially after the ghastly irony of their most powerful fighter getting taken out by his dead friend's machine. Its walking-fortress nature also works well with the military might of IOI - there aren't NPCs manning its turrets any more, but trained human gunners. It also has huge, obvious weaknesses that make it actually fightable despite its immense power, unlike, say, the Gunbuster. Its most powerful attacks drain enormous amounts of energy (likely represented in-game by glacial cooldowns), and it takes many episodes of the TV series for the Ide to unlock its full strength, which might be represented by a meter system that requires specific inputs in specific circumstance. It would turn the battle into a race against time as the unenthusiastic, inexperienced Sorrento tries to figure out how to bring out his weapon's true power, and our heroes have to get determined and creative to bring the titan down before he does. Bringing in the Ideon would also provide an obvious setup for the spare quarter coming into play - a defeated Sorrento simply blows up his own mech, killing everyone in a vast swathe of the OASIS. He knows that IOI's vast resources mean they can gear up for another run at the Gate far faster than even the most elite gunters can, and he knows that the massive disruption will mask any unfortunate revelations during the battle until he reaches the Gate and they no longer become relevant. So, hope that was interesting. Anyone else got any other thoughts and suggestions?
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Apr 5, 2018 22:29
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chitoryu12 posted:As a Gundam fan, I am all about that Karen Joshua Custom. It may not be a super robot, but I can see Aech not giving a single gently caress as she pulls a "Get some!" on a bunch of IOI foot soldiers and tanks with a beam rifle and the chest Gatling. An army of Mocks would be funny as hell. Annoyingly inappropriate to Halliday’s Eighties wonderland, too. That would require someone at IOI to have a sense of humour, though, so they probably use a generic grab-bag of basic mooks from Gundam, Macross, BattleTech, whatever, plus some heavy hitter line-breakers like Psyco Gundams (or worse, Queen Mansas) and Evangelions.
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Apr 6, 2018 01:07
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chitoryu12 posted:I think a good way to do the finale would be for Wade and Sorrento to be the only ones who make it to the Third Gate and are directly competing with one another on Tempest and Adventure, including being able to use items brought inside to kill each other. Instead of just completing the challenge alone before anyone else, Wade has to fight Sorrento with everything he’s got. Maybe make Wade’s plan to infiltrate IOI by getting captured by them a double-edged sword? Have the Sixers snatch some of his data, retrace his steps, and get another spare quarter, realise its significance, and give it to Sorrento?
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Apr 6, 2018 18:36
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Zerilan posted:Sorrento loses the robot fight, and vanishes for awhile afterwards so the protagonist crew thinks he's gone, and the catalyst happens as in the book. When Wade goes in alone for the final challenge after using the quarter, he sees Sorrento a step ahead, and realizes that he had another quarter, but knew the catalyst was coming so he delayed his respawn until after the bomb. Or just cut out an unnecessary moving part and have Sorrento blow up the Ideon (or whatever superweapon we pick) and use his spare quarter to bypass the blast just like Wade. Maybe have him stay hidden and follow Wade in so his rival will solve the challenges for him before finally showing up to claim the Egg.
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Apr 7, 2018 01:06
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chitoryu12 posted:The rewrite thread is now fully updated with the first draft of everything: outline, canon bible, and characters. It's now totally ready for discussion on which way to take it. One little thing - what did Wade infiltrate IOI for, if not to bypass the shield? Was he just looking for incriminating evidence?
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Apr 7, 2018 01:12
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Roach Warehouse posted:I binged this thread over the past few days. Thanks for it, Chitoryu. The main purpose it serves is in showing that he’s worthy of Halliday’s throne because he goes that extra mile to experience the world he left behind. It’s the standard logic for sidequests offering really good rewards - because it encourages exploration and player investment - which is made creepy in the same way the rest of the book is creepy. It makes consumption of entertainment a moral imperative in and of itself. A revised version could lean into that as a sign of Halliday’s psychosis or (if you want to make him more benevolent/sympathetic) tweak it a little to convey a moral lesson that’s important to Halliday through the medium of Eighties pop-culture. Show that he wants to convey meaning through art, even derivative art, and that simply consuming what he’s tried to preserve without paying attention to the values and messages it communicates makes you unworthy of his legacy. Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Apr 12, 2018 |
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Apr 12, 2018 16:50
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loquacius posted:It would also be extremely lucrative to be basically an OASIS serial killer, just sort of hiding out in alleyways waiting to gank people from ambush all day, if that could literally pay your rent I mean, that would be a pretty cool idea to show how the world outside is decaying around the game.
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Apr 12, 2018 20:11
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