OOTS #1179 - The Discussion Thread

[Ruck]

I will just say one word: Ifnkovhgroghprm.

Oh, lord. I jumped into the series a little later than that, but of course that is legendary among Sierra players.

Instantum Illuminaris Abraxas.

That one I actually played on the NES.

[RatElemental]

First panel. Veldrina wants Little Whiskers to stay behind because "some of the high priests are druids and they make him self-conscious." It's a bit of a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment.

Ah wow. Score one for my reading comprehension, eh?

[Squire Doodad]

Ah wow. Score one for my reading comprehension, eh?

== +1 Reading comprehension! ==

Oh wait

[Peelee]

Wait, I misread, apologies, some are druids, though which we have no clue (first guess is Freya)

Really? My first guess would have been Fenrir's. Almost certainly Frigg's too. I'm going based partly off outfit, and partly off lack of a cleric's holy symbol. Odin doesn't have one, but she has the metal-tipped spear, so I don't know what's going on there.

[Schroeswald]

Really? My first guess would have been Fenrir's. Almost certainly Frigg's too. I'm going based partly off outfit, and partly off lack of a cleric's holy symbol. Odin doesn't have one, but she has the metal-tipped spear, so I don't know what's going on there.

Turns out our first guesses were both incorrect, they both cast from a holy symbol using the turn/bolster undead spell. The ones without a clear holy symbol are: Odin, Freyr, Frigg, Balder, Southern Representative, Iounn and Fenrir (who has a skull hidden up his sleeve). I’d say Freyr and Frigg have Druid friendly gods/outfits, Odin’s Staff is likely the holy symbol, Balder doesn’t seem all that druidy, Iounn’s bracelet could be hers (and doesn’t dress druidy), Southern Representative could be druidy but his necklace could be his holy symbol.

[The Pilgrim]

Oh, lord. I jumped into the series a little later than that, but of course that is legendary among Sierra players.

It was not that hardcore, however, because guessing it was not required to complete the game. Only to get maximum points, which gave no special reward beyond bragging rights. As a 10-years-old non-native-english speaker with just basic knowledge of english, it was a lot more frustrating to me to find out that "open door with key" was not a valid command to open a door with a key. I had to ask my primary school english teacher for that one.

[Peelee]

Yes! (Renewed for season 3!) I must have missed your post.

That's fantastic news! For the longest time I thought it was ending on Dr. Whoopsie. Time to get caught up.

[Jasdoif]

As a 10-years-old non-native-english speaker with just basic knowledge of english, it was a lot more frustrating to me to find out that "open door with key" was not a valid command to open a door with a key.

Ugh, those text parsers....I maintain that someone deciding getting to the east bank of a river in a boat should be done as

get boat
e

is what led to the creation of autocomplete.

[Ruck]

That's fantastic news! For the longest time I thought it was ending on Dr. Whoopsie. Time to get caught up.

They announced it wasn't renewed on NBC, but then NBC's new streaming service picked it up.

[Peelee]

They announced it wasn't renewed on NBC, but then NBC's new streaming service picked it up.

Spoiler

Show

[Petrocorus]

Turns out our first guesses were both incorrect, they both cast from a holy symbol using the turn/bolster undead spell. The ones without a clear holy symbol are: Odin, Freyr, Frigg, Balder, Southern Representative, Iounn and Fenrir (who has a skull hidden up his sleeve). I’d say Freyr and Frigg have Druid friendly gods/outfits, Odin’s Staff is likely the holy symbol, Balder doesn’t seem all that druidy, Iounn’s bracelet could be hers (and doesn’t dress druidy), Southern Representative could be druidy but his necklace could be his holy symbol.

I believe Balder's holy symbol is on his belt. Might be the case for Freyr too.
Fenrir is seen using Bolster undead.
I don't see Frigg using Turn Undead or casting a cleric-exclusive spell.

[F.Harr]

I'm sure there are legislators all over the world who can relate. I was only in Model U.N. and I feel their pain.

[Ruck]

Spoiler

Show

Renewed is renewed!

[Fyraltari]

Maybe some of the High Priests multiclassed as druids? They would still need their holy symbol to cast Cleric spells, right?

[skim172]

It occurs to me that if Gontor and his flock had been present, they'd have been able to create some new annexes to the cathedral for more comfortable living quarters - perhaps channeling in natural springs for bathing facilities or creating some proper bedrooms. Or maybe a bowling alley or something. Who knows what they could've created? Imagination is the limit! We could have truly seen the extent of their stone-magic craftmanship.

But since they were all vamped, the clerics are left without such comforts.

Thus, we see the true human cost of Durkula's rampage.


/i guess some people died too

[Wizard_Lizard]

It occurs to me that if Gontor and his flock had been present, they'd have been able to create some new annexes to the cathedral for more comfortable living quarters - perhaps channeling in natural springs for bathing facilities or creating some proper bedrooms. Or maybe a bowling alley or something. Who knows what they could've created? Imagination is the limit! We could have truly seen the extent of their stone-magic craftmanship.

But since they were all vamped, the clerics are left without such comforts.

Thus, we see the true human cost of Durkula's rampage.


/i guess some people died too

But tgose casualties are but potatoes of the smaller variety when in comparison to the sheer architectural skill that has been lost!

[Quebbster]

Roy Thinks all of Skadi's followers are rangers or druids. But he could of course be mistaken. Skadi's high priestess does have a holy symbol visible, but maybe it's just a decoration?

[RatElemental]

Roy Thinks all of Skadi's followers are rangers or druids. But he could of course be mistaken. Skadi's high priestess does have a holy symbol visible, but maybe it's just a decoration?

Druids actually do need a holy symbol (well, a divine focus, which for a druid might be something as simple as a sprig of mistletoe or the skull of a squirrel but could conceivably be the holy symbol item) to cast any spells on their list that require one. The difference is that while a cleric needs a divine focus for one of their other class features (turn/rebuke undead) druids do not.

[The Pilgrim]

Ugh, those text parsers....I maintain that someone deciding getting to the east bank of a river in a boat should be done as

get boat
e

is what led to the creation of autocomplete.

But that was the beauty of old text-based games. They forced you to develope your vocabulary beyond the 80 common everyday words.

This is why the genre was fundamentally transformed after the mechanics were changed to clicking on a limited number on available verb actions and the icons of objects and things. Interaction was no longer linked to your linguistic skills, and abstract thinking and puzzle-solving was substituted by "click everything until something works". They become completely diferent games. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Lucasfilm Games).

And then they had to go one step further and eliminate the verb actions altogether. Now you just point and click. No wonder verbing abuse has become such a phenomenon, it all began with verb usage being eliminated from video games. George Orwell already warned against simplification of language in the Newspeak appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In old text games you had to type something like: "board boat, row across river, jump out of boat". In the 90's it was <click "Use">, <click Boat>. Now you just click the boat. You can't be surprised when young'uns just say "dude, I, like, totally boated the river yesterday". And who is to blame for it? (Yes, I'm looking at you again, Lucasfilm Games).

[Schroeswald]

I believe Balder's holy symbol is on his belt. Might be the case for Freyr too.
Fenrir is seen using Bolster undead.
I don't see Frigg using Turn Undead or casting a cleric-exclusive spell.

I mentioned that both mine and Peelee's first choice for the druids (Fenrir and Freya) were both seen casting turn/bolster undead. Balder's holy symbol could reasonably be the belt (would tell us where his holy symbol is because I doubt he's a druid) but I would guess based on Freyr portfolio and design that he's one of the druids, I don't see Frigg casting it either, but Frigg hadn't been my first guess as the druid, she was on the top of my list after realizing Freya cast turn undead.

Druids actually do need a holy symbol (well, a divine focus, which for a druid might be something as simple as a sprig of mistletoe or the skull of a squirrel but could conceivably be the holy symbol item) to cast any spells on their list that require one. The difference is that while a cleric needs a divine focus for one of their other class features (turn/rebuke undead) druids do not.

Well dang it. That makes this so much more difficult (though I doubt any of the ones with holy symbols are druids except for Skadi, due to portfolio, design and the fact that all or most of her followers are rangers and druid).

[Arathorne]

I will just say one word: Ifnkovhgroghprm.

I just had to reply to all of this, and this post will probably date me too much.

Reading these comments on early gaming reminds me of the days we could play "Colossal Caverns" on a teletype and it was a strictly text based adventure dungeon crawl. In every sense of the word I truly believe this was the first ever "adventure" game. There was one room in the cave that had "XYZZY" on the wall. That "word" if typed in the prompt as a instruction would get you a response from the program of "Nothing Happens", except in one room it would transport you to another room.

The real oddity of this was in the 1980's there was a group of engineers who left DEC and formed Data General. They created a machine to compete with the DEC VAX. You could read about the development of this computer by reading "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder.

During the OS development the engineers used the game a lot to test the system. So much so that the command "XYZZY" was impended in the OS. When typed at the command prompt the system would respond with "Nothing Happens". Several other references to the game were also left in the OS, but this was the one that stuck with me all these years and the comments on old "games" brought back all these fond memories of old computer games of the 70's and 80's.

[bunsen_h]

During the OS development the engineers used the game a lot to test the system. So much so that the command "XYZZY" was impended in the OS. When typed at the command prompt the system would respond with "Nothing Happens". Several other references to the game were also left in the OS, but this was the one that stuck with me all these years and the comments on old "games" brought back all these fond memories of old computer games of the 70's and 80's.

I still use "XYZZY" frequently as a flag / marker / reminder-to-fix-later in my coding. For example, I label my temporary diagnostic output with it; that gives me a short flag to search for when I'm scanning through all of the messages. I gather that I'm far from being alone in this.

I seem to recall that in some versions of the "Adventure" game -- Zork, possibly? -- there was a giant boulder at one location, labelled "Y2". Using the command "Y2" at some particular other location would teleport one to that boulder room. I think that was strictly a 1-way teleport, whereas "XYZZY" was a 2-way short cut between the location where one found that magic word and the location where one was supposed to deposit one's treasure. The usefulness of "XYZZY" was fairly easy to discover, even though it only worked in those two locations, whereas "Y2" was fairly obscure.

[CriticalFailure]

I don’t play games much but I tried dinner and it’s impossibly difficult for me. Is that just because I suck at computer games ?

[Ruck]

I don’t play games much but I tried dinner and it’s impossibly difficult for me. Is that just because I suck at computer games ?

Well, on first read, it might be that you suck at cooking?

[CriticalFailure]

Oops well I do suck at cooking as well as dunnet

[NobleCuriosity]

I'm not sure I'd class familicide as homebrew. Epic spells are designed to be custom, it'd be like calling a deck someone made in magic: the gathering homebrew.

Oddly enough, “homebrew” is exactly what the online magic community calls new deck ideas using official cards, in contrast to copying somebody else’s deck idea (and possibly tuning it for the local meta), which is called “netdecking.”

Community made (unofficial) cards are generally referred to as “custom cards.”

[Jasdoif]

But that was the beauty of old text-based games. They forced you to develope your vocabulary beyond the 80 common everyday words.

This is why the genre was fundamentally transformed after the mechanics were changed to clicking on a limited number on available verb actions and the icons of objects and things. Interaction was no longer linked to your linguistic skills, and abstract thinking and puzzle-solving was substituted by "click everything until something works". They become completely diferent games. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Lucasfilm Games).

Eh...there were certainly a few games with good parsers, but with most of them it was a matter of figuring by trial and error out which small handful of verbs the parser recognized, and then having to deal with idiosyncrasies from the rest of the design (the above "get boat" example, I'm pretty sure was because the engine could only check against your inventory to veto movement to another scene; so rather than being able to enter or row or use the boat, you had to pick it up the exact same way you'd pick up a key, even though that makes little in-universe sense...which is less puzzle-solving, and more the designer forcing you to wrap your brain around the design you'd never see). And then you'd try them on the words in the scene description; because like any text medium, simply pointing out that something exists draws attention to it.

Eventually a small set of verbs were standardized by convention across text adventure games...the same ones that became buttons on early graphic adventure games. Which could take advantage of the new visual medium to have the items you can interact with not stand out purely by existing; red herrings becoming far more effective against randomly trying things as opposed to thinking through puzzles, since you didn't need to be informed about red herrings. (The previously mentioned referenced Uninvited is my favorite adventure game, in that it's full of puzzles and fully-described background elements that aren't "plot"-critical and occasional bits of reasonably-provided text entries that can't really be done randomly and multiple levels of "time" limits that work against excessive amounts of random actions....It's a fine example of what you could accomplish with a text adventure just by displacing the common weaknesses of text parsers with a graphical interface).


The kind of transformation you're talking about would happen some time after that...and it had little to do with text parsers.

[Fyraltari]

And then they had to go one step further and eliminate the verb actions altogether. Now you just point and click. No wonder verbing abuse has become such a phenomenon, it all began with verb usage being eliminated from video games. George Orwell already warned against simplification of language in the Newspeak appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In old text games you had to type something like: "board boat, row across river, jump out of boat". In the 90's it was <click "Use">, <click Boat>. Now you just click the boat. You can't be surprised when young'uns just say "dude, I, like, totally boated the river yesterday". And who is to blame for it? (Yes, I'm looking at you again, Lucasfilm Games).

I'm sad that I can't tell how serious you are being there.

[factotum]

Eh...there were certainly a few games with good parsers, but with most of them it was a matter of figuring by trial and error out which small handful of verbs the parser recognized, and then having to deal with idiosyncrasies from the rest of the design

I remember one adventure, forget the name, where the only verb that it would recognise to use with a knife you found was SACRIFICE--even though there was no indication any sort of sacrifice was taking place!

[Schroeswald]

I'm sad that I can't tell how serious you are being there.

LucasArts is Orwell's Nightmare!