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Messages - nidoking

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16
Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: The greatest movies of all time?
« on: October 23, 2013, 07:25:00 PM »
I've had to accept that my taste in almost any form of media simply doesn't mesh with most other people's, but I've got my favorites and I'll happily defend them. Up until earlier this year, my favorite movie was Sling Blade, a movie about a man with a learning disability who's served his time in an asylum for a childhood crime and is cast out into the world to try to establish a new life while surrounded by a situation that reminds him of his past. I think my deep connection to the movie comes from the fact that when I first watched it, my home life was highly reminiscent of the situation in the movie, but even aside from that, it's got enough humor to be entertaining and raises a number of very significant moral questions.

However, I saw a movie called Ghosts With Shit Jobs at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in April and fell in love with it. Obviously, it's an art movie with a low budget and volunteer actors, so the quality isn't great, but the film uses that to its advantage in interesting ways - it's a documentary set in 2040 or so, after China has bought out the Internet and become the world's economic superpower. The documentary follows four groups of Canadian citizens (the "ghosts" in the title is a racist term in Chinese for white people) as they perform the jobs that no self-respecting Chinese person will do. The thing that really draws me into this movie is the level of detail - every object or person you see has a purpose and is part of the futuristic world. I've seen it about five times now, and I notice something new about it every time. It's a bit gritty, it's a bit unpleasant, and it builds to a surprising and amazing climax that goes well beyond the boundary of its own format, and it can be a little scary because of how much it fails to be a completely impossible picture of the future. I know it won't be for everyone, but you can check out the first twenty minutes for free at http://ghostswithshitjobs.com/, and it's available on region-free DVD and several streaming services. I'm shilling, but it fits the movie (trust me) and I think it deserves more exposure. If nothing else, you have to love the title.

17
Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: Worst adventure game you've ever played
« on: October 23, 2013, 07:05:19 PM »
Yep. We call them "people with good taste".

18
Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: Worst adventure game you've ever played
« on: October 23, 2013, 05:52:23 AM »
4.5 was awesome, why don't people take it?  People need to just relax and enjoy all the humor of it.

Did people really expect a QFG VGA 2-style game from one single dude?

David P. Gray managed to turn out the Hugo's House of Horror series, which while by no means a masterpiece, was pretty playable and offered generally interesting gameplay, passable humor, decent puzzles, and in the case of the first one, a chance to self-educate. The fact that people managed to put up with things like the stupid mummy, the stupid Venus flytraps, and the incredibly, incredibly stupid bridge shows how much appeal the parts that didn't suck had.

I think you just need to get used to the fact that your opinions aren't going to be very widely shared. You seem to revel in the type of things that would upset or offend most other people. There's some enjoyment to be had in that for the open-minded, but it's unreasonable to expect the average person to agree with you.

19
Banter and Chit-Chat! / Worst adventure game you've ever played
« on: October 21, 2013, 09:29:05 AM »
Looking to spur a bit of discussion here... so what's the worst adventure game you've ever played? I've heard a lot about Limbo of the Lost, of course, but it's hard to consider a game so plagiarized an honest effort. I have to nominate a little-known late 90s title called Fable, which was so obscure that most people think I must be talking about the Peter Molyneux RPG of the same name. No, Fable was a near-complete wreck of an adventure game that tried its best to be funny, but ruined most of its gags with terrible delivery, ruined most of its gameplay with a terrible interface, and ruined most of its puzzles with terrible puzzles. The fact that the main character's name is Quickthorpe should tell you something. (It told me that they desperately wanted to be like Monkey Island, anyway.) Even the original ending was so bad that they made a new one for the American re-release - and it's not much better, but at least it fits the story.

It's a pretty relevant topic for me because I'm slowly doing a Let's Play of the game for the Something Awful forums, and with each update, I'm writing a mini-essay about what makes an adventure game good or bad, in my opinion, and how Fable falls foul of almost every criterion. Here's the playlist if you want to follow along and compare your own least favorite to mine.

I have to give Jack Keane at least an honorable mention, though. I gave up on it pretty quickly when the strategy of "hold Tab to see what objects I can interact with" failed to give me any clues to progress. At least I can't remember any particularly cringe-worthy attempts at humor.

20
Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: Pinkerton Road's Mystery Game X is...
« on: October 10, 2013, 08:15:46 PM »
I think we're all just upset for the days when the Walk cursor was a holdover from the text parser-based games and navigating around obstacles required a separate Travel cursor, which was later renamed to Walk when Sierra cruelly decided to remove the so-called "antiquated" function that nobody actually used unless they wanted to relive their experiences of climbing the narrow mountain ledges in King's Quest III and IV in V, a.k.a. the real way to play any Sierra adventure game. Altered Destiny recognized that. Why couldn't SCI 1.000.1000?

21
Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: Differences in English/Slang
« on: October 09, 2013, 10:10:19 PM »
I think any discussion of linguistic differences must include the following video:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88FuCiac8IE" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88FuCiac8IE</a>

22
Quest for Infamy / Re: The Concept Art Thread
« on: September 08, 2013, 04:44:16 PM »
Isn't that first one from King's Quest VI? Just stick a rotting boat to the left side of the dock, and "Hey mister! Come on in! The water's fine, and I can show you the way to the next island!"

23
IQ Chat / Re: Interested in helping us test Quest For Infamy?
« on: September 04, 2013, 11:04:50 PM »
I've been doing it for a short while - just playing the game when I have time and entering bug reports. It's neat to see them get fixed and acknowledged. Then again, I manage a bug report database at my day job, so it's pretty much just an extension of that where I'm not in charge of anything.

24
inFAMOUS and its sequel for the PS3 are pretty fun in general - the good/evil stuff basically comes down to choosing one of two sets of powers and then playing through the same story with inconsequential variations, but you can tell they're trying. Second Son might add some much-needed actual morality to the formula. I haven't paid much attention to the news about it, so I don't know what they're planning.

25
Quest for Infamy / Re: Quest For Gory 4.5 inspired this?
« on: August 17, 2013, 08:56:01 PM »
I recently got Fable running on a modern-ish computer. Let's just say that sometimes, "sadly" isn't the word to associate with failure to run a game.

26
Quest for Infamy / Re: Separated at birth?
« on: July 30, 2013, 02:52:54 PM »
The inevitable backer reward at the $2M level for QFI 2...

27
IQ Chat / Re: Why.... Blackthorne?
« on: July 28, 2013, 05:19:27 PM »
The name "Kickstarter" came about because once you've started, you can't stop until someone kicks you.

28
IQ Chat / Re: Why.... Blackthorne?
« on: July 28, 2013, 11:30:16 AM »
The funny thing is that I don't even really like Pokemon all that much anymore. Wait, maybe that should be the punchline.

I actually went by MATHMan or some similar capitalization when I started using the Internet when I got to college, after everyone else had already settled in and was ICQing and E-mailing circles around me, but that was the time when I started getting into anime and some of the video games that I'd missed during my time overseas. (Long story that gets longer the more tangents I bring up.) One of my friends pointed me to Pokemon Blue on the Game Boy, back when Blue and Red were the only versions there were. It turned out that he just wanted to get my take on it before he bought a copy, but I enjoyed it. The problem was that there were so many mechanics I didn't understand, and lots of machines that went by numbers and didn't tell you what technique they contained until you bought one and used it. I went hunting for information and stumbled into my first fan site, with a forum and fanfiction and everything. Most of the regulars had Pokemon names, so I decided to pick one - Nidoking was the most appealing of the ones that weren't already in use. When I started branching out to other areas of the Internet, I discovered that there were billions of Mathmans out there, but not many Nidokings, so I started using the name regularly to stand out a bit more. Nowadays, I don't even really like Pokemon that much anymore, but the name is enough a part of my online identity that I still use it. I can't imagine what other name I'd change to and how I'd be able to convince anyone that I'm the same person who did all the stuff Nidoking did.

29
Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: Help proxy-banning some trolls
« on: July 26, 2013, 11:03:20 AM »
I'd say go to moderated membership and call it done - if there's some application process for joining the forum, she can at least prevent undesirables from posting in public.

30
IQ Chat / Re: New Quest For Infamy Update on Kickstarter
« on: July 09, 2013, 06:44:51 AM »
Will this be the first full length game that isn't a remake released by kickstarter project?

Pandora: Purge of Pride came out not too long ago. Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams was one of the earliest I know of to release, and I think that's different enough from the original Mario clone-ish game to count as a non-remake, but it was almost complete when they ran the Kickstarter and just needed the funds to get over the last hurdle.

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