I only ever had this knockoff version (with outstanding music):
(If I listed all the C64 music that I think about a lot, I would overwhelm this thread.)
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Might I interest you in the Video Game Music thread?
CHUCK HIM INTO THE SOUP!
i just found a website that logs the deaths in gemstone
https://www.jahadeem.com/gsiv/death.php?game_code=GS3&character_name==Pookia&location_name=Any
heres all the times i died last time i played, at least half of thoes are getting destroyed by scarabs in boxes
theres SO MANY MORE BUGS NOW
ive been thinking about gemstone a lot because im playing final fantasy xiv with the same character name. so i wanna go back to gemstone but i dont think i will cuz its fucking expensive
WELL FOR ME IT WOULD BE because i spoiled myself for ONE MONTH with a premium account and its so much better i can never go back
they DO have a free to play mode now which is really neat
thats what my character is wearing, im bummed out because i cant find a screenshot of what it looks like (it was my facebook picture for a while but oops i guess that one didnt get saved when i deleted) when you LOOK at my character cuz you’d see the flourishes that the hidden stuff does haha
WHATS HIGHLIGHTED was the SNUGGIE i got made that day, im an ambushing hiding rogue wearing all pink and a fucking snuggie, it was good. i rped well becuase i just acted like myself so i got like exp awards every day for RPing and mods would PM me sometimes, i felt SPECIAL hahaha
damnit i wanted to show off my alliterative tattoo about a pegasus propelling itself with its poop
getting stuff to say what you want instead of whateverrs programmed in the game is an ALTER and they dont come easy, a lot of it is right place right time kind of thing
i eventually ended up making friends with someone level 100 and being invited to the discord of HARDCORE GEMSTONE LADIES even thoguh i wasnt close to max level, and i will never be max level it takes like fucking three years of playing all the time to hit max level
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I’ve never even heard of Gemstone, not even on this site. What a crazy thing to stumble on from this post!
i was (still am) kind of obsessed with it
i played in 1999 and 2017 but people playing today still brag about playing gemstone 2 on GEnie. they always do it! any time they possibly can!
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I’ve never really messed with MUDs but I still didn’t expect an entire series that’s been around since the 80s (and now has subscription tiers called “Premium,” “Platinum,” and “Shattered”) to have flown totally under my radar. Pretty cool.
yeah its wild. when i first started playing gemstone 3 in 1999 people were always talking about how its an old persons game and there were like 3k people on in peak hours
in 2017 people were always talking about how its an old persons game and there were about 600 people on in peak hours
its definitely being held afloat by ppl who spend 5k a month on special nonsense… its so weird. so many people who play used to work for the company. like theres such a small playerbase everyones really involved in an intimate way including throwing thousands of dollars a month at it?? even though it used to pay THEM?
whatever i hope it stays online for a little longer cuz i might go back, i miss sashaying all over the fucking place and the combat system fucking RULED. there was different stances and all sorts of weapon stats and i had different rogue powers to use to hide and ambush better
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basically every line of this
especially the tate joke
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that ogre battle/tactics ogre is based on matsuno’s perception of the bosnian genocide
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“For lunch, I ate POISON!” is one a line I think about CONSTANTLY
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I wonder sometimes about that aside, whether it wasn’t just the only armed conflict that gen Xers actually had as a formative experience, because I know it was a big deal for like jesse armstrong starting out too but you could substitute any war that happened in the 90s
The conflicts in Ogre battle/Tactics Ogre take place along explicitly ethnic lines (especially in TO, where it’s such a core feature it can lock you out of content), which I think ties it specifically to the Bosnian Genocide rather than just armed conflict in general.
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It was a big deal because the narrative was that ethnic conflict still existed in Europe in the '90s, that ‘never again’ had to be mobilized against, that people, rather then learning from the past, had begun to forget.
(or at least, that was the Western European/American (and by degrees, apparently Japanese) understanding of southeast Europe, whose ethnic divisions aren’t really understood. Heck, people have forgotten the explicit cross-national ethnic sorting that occurred in Europe after WWII in a mad attempt to consolidate nationalism’s obvious conflicts with multi-ethnic borders)
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yeah I would say it’s more prominent in ogre battle, tactics ogre definitely starts out that way in terms of how it casts the protagonists’ place in the conflict but the branching paths with vice and following orders and whatnot come across as smaller-scale than that
Max Kreminski’s zine that lays out a taxonomy for categorizing games as mining games or gardening games.
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I can already tell Outer Wilds is going to be one of these things
Ah yes, nothing colonialist about:
*Modifying the extant landscape for your purposes
*Encouraging certain groups of characters to remain a part of your town, but potentially driving away ones you don’t desire
*Collecting native flora and fauna and placing them in museums to be classified and taken out of natural context
*Constantly improving your dwelling with material goods, and having your dwelling rated by arbitrary standards
*All control for these ‘gardens’ is performed by one centralized authority, not accountable to the people the authority governs.
…look, I see a taxonomy, I must attempt to test the limits of taxonomy.
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‘Player agency’ is really the sticky bit, isn’t it?