Let's Read Ready Player One - The Ultimate Showdown as a book

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Let's Read Ready Player One - The Ultimate Showdown as a book

roomforthetuna: Mar 22, 2005; I don't need to know anything about virii! My CUSTOM PROGRAM keeps me protected! It's not like they'll try to come in through the Internet or something!

Zamboni_Rodeo posted:

I've read Neuromancer. Neuromancer is an exceptionally good book. RPO, sir, is no Neuromancer.

It's easy to make this an appropriate insult if you read only the first ~5 pages of Neuromancer, which are comprised of 100% virtually unreadable author-masturbatory jargon. (The rest of the book is a fine book, but the beginning is loving atrocious.)

# ¿ Mar 13, 2018 06:37

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 15:34

roomforthetuna: Mar 22, 2005; I don't need to know anything about virii! My CUSTOM PROGRAM keeps me protected! It's not like they'll try to come in through the Internet or something!

I wrote a simulator for a universe with those dimensions, it was easy. You can even play in it. But it's single player, first-person view, and the universe is completely empty other than the player. You can play it by turning off your monitor.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2018 05:36

roomforthetuna: Mar 22, 2005; I don't need to know anything about virii! My CUSTOM PROGRAM keeps me protected! It's not like they'll try to come in through the Internet or something!

It seems weird to me that people in this thread are like "this book is poo poo and stupid, how did it get so popular?!"
The answer is pretty much in the question. Large numbers of people are poo poo and stupid, and like poo poo, stupid things.
For example, Captain America: Civil War made more money than Watchmen. Cap isn't a badly made movie, but it is a very well-made stupid poo poo movie for the masses.
Cline managed to tap into this market by being, himself, a poo poo, stupid person, and writing what he knows. A book for people who wouldn't normally read a book.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2018 02:02

roomforthetuna: Mar 22, 2005; I don't need to know anything about virii! My CUSTOM PROGRAM keeps me protected! It's not like they'll try to come in through the Internet or something!

iospace posted:

"MTFBWYA"?

See this is what happens when Cline doesn't explicitly explain every loving reference. He misses just one, and now it's all "what is this I don't get it" from the audience. :colbert:

Edit: If he'd done this in the style of the rest of the book it would have been like
MTFBWYA - this is an acronym for "may the force be with you, always" which Obi Wan Kenobi says in a Star War. I was confident that Art3m1s would understand the reference because it is a good one for people who know eighties things.

roomforthetuna fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Mar 17, 2018

# ¿ Mar 17, 2018 18:57

roomforthetuna: Mar 22, 2005; I don't need to know anything about virii! My CUSTOM PROGRAM keeps me protected! It's not like they'll try to come in through the Internet or something!

Hyrax Attack! posted:

The idea of reciting every line was so painful it derailed everything and it never got back on track.

The horrifying thing to me about that Wargames thing is that I can absolutely believe that there would be a market for that poo poo as a game. It's essentially what Guitar Hero and its ilk were doing - the game is "mimic exactly what you're told to mimic, in time with a song you're familiar with, and have perfect timing", but now applied to movies. Easy mode get the subtitles in advance of your lines karaoke style, hard mode do it from memory. Play with friends! Everyone do as friend computer says!

quote:

culminating in the game demanding Wade murder Halliday�s ex business partner

That's brilliant. Also, "The One Game", a miniseries on British TV years ago, was pretty close to being this.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2018 00:44

roomforthetuna: Mar 22, 2005; I don't need to know anything about virii! My CUSTOM PROGRAM keeps me protected! It's not like they'll try to come in through the Internet or something!

Angry Salami posted:

One of the many weirdly terrible things about the book, though, is that he doesn't seem to know which are the obscure references that people won't get and which aren't. Like, at one point, he explains who Luke Skywalker is. Dude! People know that one!

I almost have some sympathy for that, in that it kind of establishes that the narrator character is from a future and is writing towards an audience who might not know the things. But then I realize that "narrator character is a douche" kind of excuses the entire writing style, and I don't want that, so let's just stick with the Cline is terrible interpretation.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2018 07:02

roomforthetuna: Mar 22, 2005; I don't need to know anything about virii! My CUSTOM PROGRAM keeps me protected! It's not like they'll try to come in through the Internet or something!

Memento posted:

Portal came out in 2007 and was completely dead as a meme by early 2009.

So you're saying the accuracy would be on par with RPO's.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2018 16:10

roomforthetuna: Mar 22, 2005; I don't need to know anything about virii! My CUSTOM PROGRAM keeps me protected! It's not like they'll try to come in through the Internet or something!

Young Freud posted:

It would have been hilarious if that got brought up in the ending: technically, Wade was working for GSS as a contractor and thus invalidated himself from the prize.

Luckily it was under a false identity that he also subsequently deleted all record of, so it would be more of a thing Aech or Artemis could blackmail him with later.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2018 01:58

roomforthetuna: Mar 22, 2005; I don't need to know anything about virii! My CUSTOM PROGRAM keeps me protected! It's not like they'll try to come in through the Internet or something!

quote:

I grabbed the sword and used it to slay all three of the dragons.

This is the perfect microcosm of Cline-style.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2018 00:50

roomforthetuna: Mar 22, 2005; I don't need to know anything about virii! My CUSTOM PROGRAM keeps me protected! It's not like they'll try to come in through the Internet or something!

chitoryu12 posted:

(which does the Terminator's thumbs up as it sinks into lava).

That was a vastly better handled reference than anything in the book.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2018 06:43

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 15:34

roomforthetuna: Mar 22, 2005; I don't need to know anything about virii! My CUSTOM PROGRAM keeps me protected! It's not like they'll try to come in through the Internet or something!

SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:

King Kong: millions of players yet no one ever considered how to fool King Kong by distraction, or ditched a vehicle for King Kong himself and rode the giant ape to glory, or even somehow mucked with the code to invoke 1986�s King Kong Lives and fell old banana breath with a literal broken heart!

I'm curious how, in this story, Kong couldn't be defeated by a big stream of cars all making it that far in the same race. He can't pick them up and fling them that fast, the animation we saw doesn't have the speed for that. Does he just stick his hand on the track blocking the entire track? And then also stick his rear end on there when some of the cars in the stream start jumping higher than a Kong-hand?

At some point the unfairness of the Kong-blocking would become so obvious that nobody would be trying anything but shenanigans.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2018 03:19

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Let's Read Ready Player One - The Ultimate Showdown as a book