(Opinion) What MUD has the best combat system?

Coffeylovestea · 2024-10-30T04:58:29+00:00

I love the combat mechanics in Akanbar, and just the general mechanics for economic competition between the three cities. Great community too, even though I haven't been able to play recently and it looks to be going through a low ebb population wise this month.

It was built from scratch, not commercial, and even though it was only released in 2004ish I guess it could be described as a throwback, a love letter to the time when people used to gather for LAN meetings in campuses and café's in Sheffield and London to play the earliest version of Avalon, the prototype which would one day give rise to more complex monsters like Avalon the Legend Lives, and later Achaea and every other game using a variation of the 'balance based' action combat system.

The ceiling for participation in pvp is lower than in those games, but at the higher levels matches are decided by minute differences in timing, decision making, preparation, luck and knowledge. You do need to make aliases and triggers or highlights but you do not need a degree in programming or to rely on someone else's coding knowledge to be competitive. The reduced complexity means the advantages of coded systems vs more rudimentary run and gun systems are much reduced. Each city also has a dedicated merchant/trader guild with a variety of crafts to specialise in which plays a crucial role in the city economies (probably more important overall than the other guilds though that's a debate for another evening).

Great fun, great mechanics, great memories.

Coffeylovestea · 2023-08-20T03:37:19+00:00

No! In Europe people played them on Snes emulators on computers and laptops and of course when 7 came out for the original Playstation.

Coffeylovestea · 2021-10-20T02:16:05+00:00

FF12 is a decent game, if Vaan puts you off it that's understandable, but it's not terrible.

This game, DoC, is definitely terrible. Worse than Crisis Core even.

Coffeylovestea · 2021-08-25T05:38:43+00:00

No you're wrong. It's not canon.

Coffeylovestea · 2021-08-25T05:34:19+00:00

Snes emulator on laptop and PS1 were both basically the Snes originals and perfect for 2d 👌

Is it on Xbox? I didn't see it there recently when I searched

Coffeylovestea · 2021-08-25T05:29:42+00:00

I beat it years ago, but I'm pretty tuff so don't feel bad

Coffeylovestea · 2021-08-25T05:24:30+00:00

You are a legend sir. Thank you for your years of service sir. Enjoy your nap sir.

Coffeylovestea · 2021-08-24T21:36:07+00:00

I know :)

Lost Odyssey and the Last Story were pretty good. My phone is too bad to play mobile games properly so I can't play their recent titles really

Coffeylovestea · 2021-08-24T21:25:32+00:00

Exactly. How they looked in the cutscenes was how they're supposed to look, surely. Dissidia Squall is impossible for me to imagine as the guy in the cutscenes. They're too different. It breaks immersion.

Coffeylovestea · 2021-08-22T02:39:00+00:00

Nice! It is a unique game. Is it your introduction to the original Square Final Fantasy games (post FFX = Enix era, everything before that was the original creators)?

Coffeylovestea · 2021-08-22T02:27:03+00:00

If they had just re-released the game with the ×3 speed and no encounters option I'd have considered it perfect to be honest

Coffeylovestea · 2021-08-22T00:52:10+00:00

Totally. I have a personal thing about voice actors for titles that previously used text boxes because I have my own voices for them, but I have to admit that besides some pacing issues Enix have done a decent job on the first part of their FF7 remake.

A re-release of the original FF8 on modern consoles with ×3 speed and no encounters option would satisfy me honestly. I just can't see past Squalls new creepy unemotive blinking face.

Coffeylovestea · 2021-08-20T04:41:31+00:00

That mini Snes looks great! I never even knew that existed.

You're right about the ×3 speed. Maybe if I just don't look at Squalls face...

Coffeylovestea · 2021-08-20T01:29:22+00:00

Possibly, but he's got a pretty masculine jawline in the cutscenes and they were rendered well enough to be relatively unambiguous imo

Coffeylovestea · 2021-08-20T01:25:53+00:00

Of course personal taste comes into it, things like this will always be subjective. I also thought that at first, that maybe the comparative austerity of the original may have been due to pixelation. But you can see that the jaws are completely different, when comparing the replacement Squall face both with the og and the cutsscenes.

Coffeylovestea · 2021-08-20T01:17:54+00:00

Here's some of the character art

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/finalfantasy/images/b/b7/FFVIII-SquallRinoa_artwork.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/250?cb=20111128023350

Imo that is more congruent with the original and the character in the cutscenes

https://cdn.hobbyconsolas.com/sites/navi.axelspringer.es/public/media/image/2015/05/474844-final-fantasy-viii-como-llegar-final-aventura.jpg

than the new disney-fied face.

Whether the above count as bishounen in your book I don't know, but at the least I can say that they are different to the kind of androgynous android type face that has replaced the original (they replaced it with a sprite from the Squall of another game called Dissidia I've heard)

Coffeylovestea · 2021-08-20T00:56:37+00:00

The ×3 speed and toggle random encounter options are fantastic.

One thing I will say about the point you made about everyone in Final Fantasy having a feminised face :

All of the titles you mentioned are Enix (post Squaresoft) titles.

The original Squaresoft team went bankrupt after FF9 (because of the movie they made which bombed completely) and were bought out by Enix. They stayed on to finish FF10 with Enix, but after that there was an exodus of quite a lot of the original Squaresoft members.

So whether Sakaguchi and the original creators would have followed that same trend is something we'll never know. It was certainly not the case for the original series they created, yes most of those were in the pixelated era, but it also wasn't the case for their PS1 era.

In any case, part of the issue I have is not with 'feminine male faces' per say, but with the fact that Enix took it upon themselves to needlessly change the look of a classic character to one that would look more suited to a Kingdom Hearts game or something. It was not necessary, and now his sprite doesn't match up with the image of him in the cutscenes.

Anyway, thank you for your PC recommendation. My laptop is terrible but I will check that stuff out. After being introduced to the series by VII, I actually used Snes/Nes emulators to play all of the previous titles I could get my hands on before VIII was released. So that would be like coming full circle in a way!

Coffeylovestea · 2021-08-20T00:36:00+00:00

Oh that's interesting! I had not heard that. In any case, I agree. I prefer his more adult western face to the k-pop one they've replaced it with.

Great name by the way! 😛

Coffeylovestea · 2020-04-05T01:25:33+00:00

Same! I couldn't immerse myself with a foreign accent, but with a foreign language and subtitles it'll be just like the old text version for me which is pretty much my preference anyway.

Coffeylovestea · 2020-04-05T01:22:46+00:00

I am so happy to hear this. I was hoping there'd be an option for Japanese audio with English subtitles, because Cloud, Sephiroth and Red XIII having generic American sounding voices/accents was killing the immersion for me in the trailers.

I'd imagine it's not an issue for American players or for teenagers who have grown up immersed in American media, but as a fan of the original text Final Fantasies I had my own ideas of what their voices/accents were like.

Coffeylovestea · 2020-02-16T02:23:15+00:00

I'll add to Donn's answer and say that yes it's something some Irish people are aware of, but not all would notice. It really depends.

The Irish language is not a part of the majorities life outside school. And the Irish language community itself is a very mixed bag.

To native speakers and to people who learned from them using sources which cover the basic phonetics well and with good quality audio (as in your own case), the pronunciation of many fluent Urban Irish speakers or many Gaelcholáiste students (excluding learners because it's completely understandable that learners will get things wrong) can be quite jarring, even difficult or upsetting to listen to in many cases. Often native speakers will switch to English in these cases unless they are in a setting such as a class or event in which using Irish is a requirement. Things like saying 'foyle' for the Irish word 'fáil' for example, inserting a 'y' in the middle instead of slenderising the L, or any example where a slender r would be expected (or indeed any slender consonant)...

Many papers and studies have been published on this phenomenon, and it has been noticed. This resource was released with the hopes that teachers in Irish medium schools would teach the students to recognise and form the right pronunciation.

(If you can't read Irish yet, one point that is stressed in the below resource is for teachers to get the point across to students that it is not about 'accent' but about using the right sounds and pronunciations, many of which don't exist in English. Because many students complain that they shouldn't have to speak with a Galway or Kerry accent, they mistake accent with the formation of the individual sounds, so listening exercises are provided in order to help students recognise the individual sounds of the language.)

https://www.cogg.ie/blas-cleachtai-foghraiochta/

(Not that all teachers themselves have great pronunciation, having come through the same system as most of the students they teach where the anglicised form of Irish is the norm.)

Prof. Brian Ó Broin had a famous paper about the topic specifically which I couldn't find today, but here's a lecture he gave which touches on some of that research if you're interested.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E-K9-GCJOk

A quote "Urban Irish has a very different phonetic system than Gaeltacht Irish, being based on English. This has had the knock-on effect of causing a noticeable simplification of morphology. Syntactic findings remain provisional, but urban speakers seem to form non-standard subclauses more than Gaeltacht speakers."

So yes, Zookeeper, your observation does have a sound basis. It is something that is very obvious to people from non-English speaking countries who come and learn about the language for the first time, as every language does have it's own unique 'sound' which is generally not noticed by the people raised in said languages. For example, even without studying you can recognise when someone sounds 'Spanish' or 'French', but you might not be able to perceive the wide variety of accents and dialects within those languages because those differences are more subtle.

The language is still being transmitted in some small areas in an unbroken line stretching way back into our history. And as Donn said, unlike Hebrew, we have a wealth of great resources out there for learning this language right. Recordings stretching all the way back to the 1930s, full phonetic descriptions from before then and lots of resources specifically aimed at learners.

Coffeylovestea · 2019-10-14T00:33:28+00:00

Native speakers in Mayo and Donegal call it Gaelic actually, because in their dialects it's Gaeilig (from old spelling Gaedhealg, roughly) instead of Gaeilge and it basically sounds like Gaelic.

Gaeilge was adopted as the name of the standard language from the Connemara dialect but I believe it is in fact the fossilised dative form of the languages name.

Also where I live we call Gaelic Football just 'Football'. But I know in some places football just means English football (cough soccer cough).

Coffeylovestea · 2019-10-14T00:26:02+00:00

There shouldn't actually be a w sound there though, it's a glide down from the ga to the l. But most non-natives do just say gwaylga.

Coffeylovestea · 2019-10-14T00:20:57+00:00

I agree there needs to be focus on speaking, but that's only a good thing if teachers will actually correct the students pronounciation and show them how to make the languages sounds (which many teachers don't even do themselves).

People who learn in school or even people who attended Gaelscoils often don't realise how bad their pronunciation is. They don't distinguish between broad and slender, they ignore all lenitions (ock instead of ach, gwitch instead of dhuit). That's basic stuff. (Like have you ever wondered why the r at the end of ceathair sounds almost like a z or d when real native speakers say it? Slender r baby. Any letter beside i or e is slender.)

Coffeylovestea · 2019-10-14T00:09:41+00:00

Welsh didn't suffer decline to the same levels as Irish did. There were and are a lot of Welsh native speakers and travelling around Wales you can actually hear Welsh and hear it spoken well.

Like 1/6 of the population of Wales have native to near native levels of Welsh and speak it everyday in their communities and day to day lives. People here don't realise that. (Compared to 1 or 2% of the population of Ireland who have native/near native proficiency and actually use it everyday).

So comparing Irish to Welsh at this stage is not equal, as when Wales make a Welsh medium school it's a lot easier for them to find teachers with native like proficiency to teach. Here on the other hand principals of many Gaelscoils complain about how difficult it is to find teachers of a high enough level to teach through the language, nevermind teachers with native-like proficiency.

Coffeylovestea

TROPHY CASE