Dear Old People: Old Game Talk

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TheLordThyGod
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Post by TheLordThyGod »

What communities/forums/sites/whatever has the OHR been based around over the years, if not always Slime Salad? What's the deal with Castle Paradox? I haven't signed up over there. Is that still a thing? What's the relation to Slime Salad? Can I bum a cigarette?
Last edited by TheLordThyGod on Sat Jun 17, 2017 5:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
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FnrrfYgmSchnish
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Post by FnrrfYgmSchnish »

Castle Paradox was the main or possibly only active OHR forum for years before Slime Salad came around. Seems like it's been pretty slow lately (as in the last few years), bordering on dead. I seem to remember that the last time I checked up on what had been posted over there, a lot of new threads were answered with something along the lines of "go to Slime Salad, nobody's here anymore."

I want to say CP got started in... 2003? I know it had to be after the 2001-2002 timeframe since neither of the games I was working on back then that got to "playable but still incomplete demo" state (Staff of Parupoo, Spuduf Splorchers) or my ridiculously awful 48-hour contest game from 2001 (Xutt's Tournament) ever got uploaded there, only to the crappy old Angelfire site I had back then.
Last edited by FnrrfYgmSchnish on Sat Jun 17, 2017 6:03 am, edited 1 time in total.
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TMC
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Post by TMC »

Rinku wrote an excellent summary of every significant OHR website back in 2007 (before Slime Salad was launched). Hist-OHR-y Part 1. (Sadly there is no part 2, and some of the archive.org links are dead.) It does leave out a couple other watering holes, such as the Livejournal community (which still exists, but hasn't seen a post in years), and more recent sites such as SS and The Hamster Wheel.

Although it was before my time, in the early days the OHR community was not highly centralised as it is today. There was a webring and it was common or even the norm for people to put up personal websites for their games, unlike today, because there weren't any big gamelists. It requires some searching, but I found quite a lot of those old sites on archive.org. Some are still up.

Zantetsuken was the central forum of the community from some point (2000?) until it suddenly was shut down one day because the admin, PK-Fortis (now just Fortis), was sick of running a forum full of immature 13-year-olds such as myself making life hard. I would guess that happened in Jan 2003. Zant didn't have a gamelist, but the forums were highly active and there was plenty of great stuff posted there too, lost to the ages. After it closed down there was a huge drop in activity; a lot of people were never seen again or only came back years later.

Castle Paradox opened soon after that (a week or two?) in Feb 2003. CP took a while to get going, but I think the quality of discussion was a bit better (there was no forum dedicated to spamming nonsense, as on Zant). In the early years (say 2003-2006) it also became pretty active, though not to the same level as Zant. CP was the one and only OHR community website of note for many years. Not only does it have the huge game list, a music list, but it hosts Operation: OHR, OHR Monthly, OHR Septaweekly and many other websites and also personal and game journals too. However it also had a lot of immaturity, flame wars, inconsistent and sometimes harsh moderation, a very public spat between founders Chaos Nyte and Inferior Minion, a couple of takeovers by script kiddies, forum database loss or accidental deletion, and sometimes bad downtime because it was hosted by IM at his house. I think there was a point in ~2007 when it went down for about two months, which I think was the main impetus for the creation of Slime Salad.
IM sunk a huge amount of time into CP and it went through a few overhauls of the forums and website, but the final one was never finished.

Slime Salad opened in late 2007, and it was a completely different atmosphere to CP, night and day. There's never been any immaturity or flame wars here. I think it overtook CP in activity after a couple years; CP has been dormant since 2010 or so.
CP gets quieter every year. There seem to be a number of people who (very) occasionally check that site who never moved here. IM has said that he still intends to continue hosting it for the forseeable future despite the inactivity, but he now spends zero time on it, never checking it unless alerted to a problem by email.
FyreWulff wrote:Doghero became Dogero which was a retroactive reference to the word "daguerrotype" which is a strained homage to Link in that Dogero is a daguerrotype of the player, ideally. (BTW, you'd be surprised how many people miss that Adlez is Zelda backwards)
Wow, none of it occurred to me. (I don't think I'd even played any Zelda back then)
FyreWulff wrote:But that's also why Jade just sort of "jumps in" to Dogero mid-life. It was always meant to. There's an entire game that was planned that exists after the "play time dream" in the intro but before the Proem, and that game was always going to come after Jade. And it's sequel was outlined so that's why the game has the ending that it does.
That explains it. The game does strongly hint at there existing a prequel.
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The download link is sadly dead.
Last edited by TMC on Sat Jun 17, 2017 11:22 am, edited 2 times in total.
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TheLordThyGod
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Post by TheLordThyGod »

Wow, great info. I'm going to have to go read that article. I like knowing the history.

I'm another old person. I don't have gamemaking or programming experience, but I've always kinda wanted to do it so now I'm actually trying to learn how. I've been considering trying to teach myself C, C++, or C#, but we'll see how well I get along with HamsterSpeak and Inform...

Once in high school I stayed at a friend's house and he had just gotten RPG Maker for PlayStation, and we made some very basic NPC and dialog stuff but never got very far with it.

My first year of college (2002-03) I had some version of RPG Maker and made a really busted unfinished mess of a game. I can't recall the name, but it featured a character called Stote I used a lot back then. Stote was excited that Rejected was going to come on Adult Swim, but he couldn't find the remote for his TV and thus had to go on a quest to find it. The idea was that you can do this, but it won't lead to finding the remote (which is in the couch). And finding the remote just lets you tune in to Adult Swim, only to find that for some unexplained reason they aren't airing Rejected. Which I'm pretty sure must have happened to me approximately 6 seconds prior to conceiving of that game. Anyway, it was a total mess and the best strategy was to avoid combat like the plague. The airship was the Magical Mystery Tour bus, and whenever you were in it the track "Flying" played and the landscape changed colors. I don't remember how I did that.

A few years ago I started messing around in Inform, but got sidetracked by OHRRPGCE, which appealed to me because of my brief history with RPG Maker. At the time I was on here as AnalogousGumdropDecoder. Then I had some computer calamities, and am now back on it. Trying to learn to script.
Last edited by TheLordThyGod on Sat Jun 17, 2017 9:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
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The Wobbler
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Post by The Wobbler »

Man oh man does Hamsterspeak look bad on a phone. That wasn't a concern back when I was making it, but it's kind of funny now.
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Post by FyreWulff »

I miss the era of everyone making their own little websites. It felt more like exploring the internet. I used to check Byyako's website for Edo updates, read Fortis' comics on Zantetsuken, and check the various forums each day for new game sites and authors and check out their sites too . And they were all unique. And depending on how long you've been around, a lot of them also had midi background music.

Funnily enough OHRRPGCE Help Me (and the sister PSHelp board) was about the only OHR forum that never had any drama. They both just died out from Boardhost nuking everyone. And then EZboard started dying/nuking off boards soon after that so that took out some satellite creator forums too :(

Probably didn't help that about the thousands of free user page sites all died off and then Facebook took over and pretty much killed off the idea of internet homesteading.
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TheLordThyGod
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Post by TheLordThyGod »

I was going to say Slime Salad actually reminds me of those old weird internet days when everyone was anonymous and yet could talk at length and in a civil way about some really nerdy subjects. Then I saw an old Castle Paradox thread full of drama and remembered, "oh yeah, the internet was always overflowing with trolls and angsty teens, wasn't it?"
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FyreWulff
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Post by FyreWulff »

it probably helped that the average age of the community went from ~17 to ~30

the flamewars we had in the pre-CastleP days (like the RPGBoard software era) would probably get us all on a watchlist today

edit: found the engine at age 14, now 33. Back then there were a couple of people that were 12 years old that were making games with it.
Last edited by FyreWulff on Sun Jun 18, 2017 2:57 am, edited 3 times in total.
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TheLordThyGod
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Post by TheLordThyGod »

Yeah it took a minute for me to remember what being in middle school felt like.
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The Wobbler
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Post by The Wobbler »

FyreWulff wrote:I miss the era of everyone making their own little websites.
I fully agree even if my own site is kind of an obsolete mess.
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Post by FyreWulff »

The Wobbler wrote:
FyreWulff wrote:I miss the era of everyone making their own little websites.
I fully agree even if my own site is kind of an obsolete mess.
mine just eventually devolved into a logo splash page and that's it
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Post by TMC »

At least it's your own logo. I haven't had a website since I was about 11-12.

Aside from the fact that there are probably less than ten, why don't we have a list of personal OHR sites on the wiki? I was even contemplating putting up archive.org links to old sites with interesting and significant content like reviews... definitely not every site (most of them are mostly missing anyway, and Surlaw's going to complain if I link to his angelfire).

The change in ages is definitely the main thing that's changed. But not the only thing. When CP and SS were both active there was a huge difference between the two sites. Civil and polite debate about Obama vs McCain on one site and people enjoying flame wars on the other. Mods and users set what the norm is, and people largely follow it. CN liked to insult authors of bad games in his reviews. On Zant I was 13, I imitated what the 14-year-olds were doing, and don't remember the mods ever telling me to stop; instead they opened a Duhh forum for my like! Hurrah!
Last edited by TMC on Sun Jun 18, 2017 2:52 pm, edited 13 times in total.
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Post by Fortis »

As a pile of it myself, I love old crap.

Time Flies: I was thinking this morning about how dumb the main character's outfit was. There were some good ideas in TF and I have successfully transplanted them into BSF, so I am glad I made it, even if it contains pointless japanese names and overwrought drama.

The Zantetsuken Forums were bad because it was run by teenagers. Teenagers are very rude, this is a science fact. I would say I could have handled it better but to be honest in addition to being rude, teenagers are dumb as hell so honestly I don't think I could have. The forums are nice now because adults run them.

I'm amazed Castle Paradox still exists, although less amazed that it appears to not have been updated in a year.

Good grief, I wiped the Zantetsuken Forums out 15 years ago.
Please read Blasphemous Saga Fantasy okay thanks
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Post by TMC »

Well, CP hasn't been updated (by its admins/mods) in most of a decade. Few people are even aware/remember that they're allowed to post their own announcements on the news page (Soapbox), and noone uses it for that anymore.

I probably said it before, but because I missed the first four years of the OHR's history, when things were quite different to later years, I still don't feel like one of the old-timers.
Last edited by TMC on Thu Jul 20, 2017 4:48 am, edited 2 times in total.
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