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Hm. Uh... USE TALISMAN?
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Jul 19, 2018 19:54
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 07:29 |
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The Blue was fantastic and not at all where I expected that to be going at that point. 
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Jul 19, 2018 20:08
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The only hint I remember about this is "The fruits add." Add how, or add to what, I don't know. If they added colors, then we'd just need the lime to convert black to green, but that seems overly simplistic. We smell alternating bananas and strawberries, so maybe we're meant to add those two together. Assuming the items represent a number line, that'd make bananas 1 and strawberries 3, so our choice should be 4, the peach.
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Jul 19, 2018 20:27
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That is a crazy brutal conclusion! Wonder if anyone who ever got it replayed the game... surely not. I'm truly awful with memory and puzzles but does the fruit hint apply to us yet?
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Jul 19, 2018 23:35
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I cannot believe it actually does that. I love it.
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Jul 19, 2018 23:48
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Granted, you could use the cipher to at least warp to the start of Act 3. Or, you know, reload your savefile that you ought to have made before entering the Stuff of Madness. Sordas Volantyr fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Jul 20, 2018 |
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Jul 20, 2018 00:02
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Sordas Volantyr posted:Granted, you could use the cipher to at least warp to the start of Act 3. A small hint with respect to the fruit puzzle: We must select two of the items, just in case that wasn't clear.
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Jul 20, 2018 00:37
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Oh, oh, we learned that something isn't a fruit. What was it... Edit: nothing! Nothing is not a fruit. So the hambone and...nothing. Domus fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Jul 20, 2018 |
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Jul 20, 2018 01:14
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We never actually used the Lady's 9-7-1 combo, did we? If the six options are numbers arranged in ascending order starting with zero ("nothing is not a fruit" and a ham bone definitely is not a fruit), then peach + lime would be 9... This also potentially meshes with Persephone's cryptic fruit hints... she says "base six" (again suggesting numbers 0-5) and then "sweet fruit, vile fruit, base fruit." Unless there are more fruit based puzzles ahead, peach and lime seem to correspond best with "sweet fruit" and "vile fruit" (or so some people say; limes are fuckin delicious.)
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Jul 20, 2018 01:48
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What you do with limes is make lime curd. And then mix that with plain yogurt.
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Jul 20, 2018 01:52
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:What you do with limes is eat the limes
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Jul 20, 2018 01:58
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You're all wrong. You put the lime in the coconut and you drink 'em both together.
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Jul 20, 2018 02:03
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Okay, let's see what we can do with these clues. The "base six" clue implies that each fruit corresponds to a number from 0-5, and "nothing is not a fruit" implies that the bone is 0. I don't recall any other hints to do with ordering fruit, but hopefully the fact that they're "in a definite order" means that we can just assign them from left to right - ham bone = 0, banana = 1, apple = 2, strawberry = 3, peach = 4, and lime = 5. If we add the alternating fruits we get 4, but that would just be a peach and we're selecting two fruits. The fact that the first fruit is 1 makes me suspect that we're instead meant to take it as a two-digit number - banana-strawberry = 13 (base 6), or 9 in decimal. There are several ways to add two numbers to get 9, but just one which uses only single-digit base 6 numbers - 4 + 5. Any other sum would use 6 or above. So hopefully all we need to do is take the peach and lime.
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Jul 20, 2018 10:58
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Level Four: The Stuff Of Madness, Never Meet Your Heroes In which, at last and unfortunately, we encounter the Wizard Moraziel. Zandar posted:Okay, let's see what we can do with these clues.
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Jul 20, 2018 20:27
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Poor Moraziel. He's just a well meaning sap doing his best in an impossible situation. We really should have been nicer.
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Jul 20, 2018 20:55
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So the Staff gives us power of the Lady, which is growing things, life, earth, etc, but only a mage can turn that power into a weapon. ...we've used elemental magic before, let's do this. Also, the High Priest is...surprised? that we didn't talk to Moraziel first. But the only way to talk to him is with the Staff. There's definitely some kind of Eternal Return/Recurrence happening here. Andyzero fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Jul 20, 2018 |
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Jul 20, 2018 20:59
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I bet we're the Mad One.
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Jul 20, 2018 21:10
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Weren't we a simple peasant lad/ladette from a flyspeck village originally? How the gently caress have we even heard of base six, let alone know how to figure stuff out in it? ...how do we know what bananas smell like, come to that? Was Weith or wherever known for its plantations? I suppose we've been through various exotic markets etc., but even so. ...and chocolate cake. And I'll shut up now. my immersion! truly we are all mad
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Jul 20, 2018 21:26
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Black Robe posted:Weren't we a simple peasant lad/ladette from a flyspeck village originally? How the gently caress have we even heard of base six, let alone know how to figure stuff out in it? Exactly! It's craaaaaazy!
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Jul 20, 2018 21:27
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I'm betting the end result is we use the staff to cure the high priest of his semi-madness. Or we become the high priest after fighting him in a time warp situation.
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Jul 20, 2018 22:56
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Am I reading that correctly, that part of Moraziel's deal is that Weith Village is kept safe so long as it keeps feeding likely young heroes to the maze? Persephone has merely been imprisoned; either she wasn't appropriate for the High Priest's needs for whatever reason, or what he does with Weith's heroes takes some time, or it'd already been done when we talked to her but wasn't obvious. Considering that she lacks our various accouterments of power (and presumably reached the moon by stealth and trickery instead of raw power), I suppose it's possible she just wasn't considered powerful enough for the High Priest's requirements. The simplest "use" I can think of for a powerful hero here is to turn them mad and use them to extend the Mad One's dominion. One possible defense against that would be to rely on the Lady's protection, and hope that the High Priest, in channeling the Mad One's power, burns himself out (and goes mad in turn) before he can affect us. I suppose it's also possible that the High Priest wants to use the Mad One to take on the other gods. Why rule the Earth when you can rule the Heavens? In which case we should be prepared for an attack against the Lady. What we'd do about that, I don't know.
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Jul 20, 2018 23:20
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Persephone has merely been imprisoned; either she wasn't appropriate for the High Priest's needs for whatever reason, or what he does with Weith's heroes takes some time, or it'd already been done when we talked to her but wasn't obvious. Considering that she lacks our various accouterments of power (and presumably reached the moon by stealth and trickery instead of raw power), I suppose it's possible she just wasn't considered powerful enough for the High Priest's requirements. I think it's the last one. The bridge seemed really bummed to tell us about Persephone and although it seemed like a pretty nice bridge it was laying it on a bit thick for someone who's just stuck in prison.
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Jul 20, 2018 23:32
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Nakar posted:Level Four: The Stuff Of Madness, Never Meet Your Heroes It's me, I'm the Mad One. The main reason I guessed at a two-digit number was the "base six" clue, actually - there's no point in specifying a base if you're not going to go past single-digit numbers. I guess the Archpriest's influence is why the Moon is a mad bureaucracy rather than full-on chaos. It also looks like we're probably not going to be taking the Mad One's influence out entirely, just dispersing it. The question is whether the MadMaze is also because of the Archpriest's influence.
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Jul 21, 2018 07:10
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Zandar posted:It's me, I'm the Mad One. y u mad tho
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Jul 21, 2018 10:53
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Level Four: The Stuff Of Madness, A Sacrifice For Sanity In which our final confrontation with the Archpriest can go one of two ways. Well, one of two ways where we actually get out of it alive, anyhow. NEXT TIME: Is MadMaze a good or bad game? A good game with bad game design, or a bad game with good game design? Is it even really an "online" game? What genre is it anyway? How can a game that an alleged million people played be so non-influential? And who is its biggest hater?
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Jul 21, 2018 20:38
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Hanging out in Rivendell forever seems like a pretty okay ending for our heroes. Good job, main character!
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Jul 21, 2018 20:50
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Nakar posted:And who is its biggest hater? Plot twist, it was you all along!  Good ending, though it's a shame the obvious sequel hook was never followed up. Thanks for a great LP, I'll look forward to the final thoughts.
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Jul 21, 2018 20:52
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Huh, I would have thought there would have been a bigger payoff for Iggy. I thought it was cool when we got a companion but he doesn't really... do anything. I guess his hints during the final confrontation are kind of useful? Oh well.
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Jul 21, 2018 21:00
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I didn't quite get "use the Staff to turn the High Priest's attack back against himself", but I feel like my other wild speculations earlier came pretty close to the mark.  Has there been anything previous to this suggesting that the Lady's power is associated with Earth? I had her pegged as a nature/plants-and-animals goddess, while our Earth magic has consistently been elemental earth. So that association in the final puzzle surprised me.Thanks for showing off this game! It was a fun ride, and definitely the kind of thing that, if it weren't for the LP format, could easily be lost to history. I wonder how much money Prodigy made off of MadMaze...and how much it cost them to produce?
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Jul 21, 2018 21:29
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I guess Iggy would've been a bigger presence in the undeveloped sequel.
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Jul 21, 2018 21:41
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thanks for walking us through that game, i enjoyed it. this kind of LP is good history writing pretty cool from iggy's perspective that he gets taken on a wild ride and now he gets to hang out in Witness Protection Heaven for... ever?
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Jul 21, 2018 21:41
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Finally, Earth has a use  Thanks for this great LP, super looking forward to the next update. It's been fascinating seeing this.
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Jul 21, 2018 21:48
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Nakar posted:How can a game that an alleged million people played be so non-influential? Either that or that's just the number of subscribers to Progidy and they didn't actually track how many people specifically played MadMaze.
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Jul 21, 2018 22:03
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I really like that ending, to be honest. It's not a total victory, but it's a victory.
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Jul 21, 2018 23:08
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My theory for its biggest hater is that it is Costikyan himself. By the definition credited to him, MadMaze isn't a game at all, as his definition of game is that it is a participatory form of artquote:in which the participants, termed Players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in pursuit of a goal No tokens, no resources, and in a very real sense, no decisions. With no state tracked, MadMaze is a puzzlebook, not a game. That seems pretty narrow—I've actually just wrapped up a replay of The Fool's Errand and 3 in Three, which are also very much in the puzzlebook vein, but some of the individual puzzles would count as games by this definition and the presentation of the game-spanning puzzles is a refreshing counterpoint to the horrifically arbitrary nature of a lot of the integrate-stuff-from-a-dozen-PoP puzzles posed here.
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Jul 21, 2018 23:49
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I don't like sequel hook endings in general, and I especially don't like a sequel hook that will never be followed up on. But this alone doesn't make a bad game bad. Like ManxomeBromide said, this is a fine puzzlebook, (with the exception of the primes puzzle and the library card puzzle) but not a good video game. It has pointless filler, it doesn't use any network feature that might be interesting (Chat rooms, encountering other players in the maze, maybe user designed content), and I think the game's biggest flaw is that it doesn't store any state at all, which makes me wonder why this is on a computer at all, and it's not just an actual puzzlebook. I can understand the service not coming up with the network features, because it's easy for me in 2018 to point to things that networking enables you to do. Having said that, the first and the last points feel to me like deliberate padding to rack up that connection bill (waste your time in the mazes for the first; and if you don't have all the hints you just don't pass what amounts to inventory checks). I can forgive the first point, but wasting people's time and money are definitively marks of a bad game. I did enjoy most of the writing and the art, especially in the third chapter, before the MoM.
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Jul 22, 2018 00:20
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Thanks for the run of MadMaze! It's a cool look back at early videogame history. Did the creators ever go on to make any other games?
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Jul 22, 2018 00:23
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We've basically left out half the "fun" and 95% of the interactivity in that we didn't, as a thread, navigate and chart the maze itself. Arguably there is a state which is tracked and of great importance -- your actual location within the labyrinth. You may consider that filler, and certainly that is true to some extent, but mapping a dungeon is part of a time-honored tradition in gaming of this era. Around the same time you might be wandering out of Weith, you could be wandering around in Phantasy Star's first person maze, or mapping Destard in Ultima V, or the sewer in Eye of the Beholder. Even if there's no combat, the game play of being completely lost in a twisty passage, all alike (okay, not really twisty) would have been familiar and a reasonable part of a gamer's play time. You can certainly take it or leave it, but in the broader context of the time it's hardly out of place to have it make up a major element of the experience. The act of exploration is surely something that needs to be part of the accounting of whether this was a "good" game or even a "game."
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Jul 22, 2018 00:48
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Bad game design is still bad game design if players from the era are used to it, and of the games you listed, MadMaze has the dubious distinction of charging you for the minute for the privilege of getting lost in it, which is a really lovely thing to do. Edit: Though I don't know if that was specifically designed to be that way, but I don't think the maze gameplay was an accident. Or the developers could just have been lazy and copied the gameplay of those other games, and lazy devs are also a mark of bad games. Space Kablooey fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Jul 22, 2018 |
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Jul 22, 2018 01:06
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 07:29 |
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 That being said, it's not like "hey, this is a maze, you're gonna get lost in it, also we're charging you per the minute" is something which is hidden from the customer. I'm glad the industry moved on, but context is important, this is still a time when a lot of a person's experience with a video game may be from an arcade, which if nothing else is a study in finding ways to monetize time spent in ways that make EA lootboxes look like they're not trying hard enough to squeeze the customer. No one's gonna claim this needs to be put on the same plinth as Chrono Trigger or anything but to call it not a game seems a little unfair.
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Jul 22, 2018 01:12
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