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Comment by Eddy_Viscosity2

2 days ago

I just spent 10 minutes being told that the name I chose was not usable. Am I being pranked, is this the whole game?

5 comments

Eddy_Viscosity2

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shevy-java  2 days ago

Depends on the name. Imagine people would use insult-names in a roleplay MUD.

10 minutes sounds excessive though. Was the prompt not informing you that the name xyz can not be used and you'd have to pick another one? It also depends on the MUD of course - how many names did you try?

I never had a problem picking a proper name for one of my characters, but indeed I hated it when MUDs would want to make me wait for name-approval manually. Most MUDs allowed instant-creation and resume gameplay on the spot though. Weird that the name-choice barrier took you 10 minutes. What was the MUD?

macintux  2 days ago

I’m reminded of the time, probably 20 years ago, when some viral game was making the rounds. It was designed such that the controls, even the goals, weren’t obvious, but as it turned out, it didn’t respond to my Mac’s trackpad because I used tap to click and the game didn’t recognize my taps.

So, as far as I could tell, the game was utterly pointless. The developer replied to me apologetically on Twitter but I never went back to give it another shot.

  • Terr_  2 days ago

    Chiming in with another "bad input ruins a game" story: Alpha Protocol (2010), PC port.

    There was a "hacking" minigame, and it was mandatory to solve it as part of the introductory tutorial levels. I think the original console version used left+right thumbsticks, and on PC that meant a half-keyboard half-mouse setup. There were some serious sensitivity/dead-zone issues, but that wasn't the main blocker.

    IIRC the problem was that if you had remapped any keys in the options (as I had before starting) the new choices didn't apply during the minigame... except they still influenced the on-screen instructions! So I was stuck constantly failing this minigame because it was waiting for me to press some arbitrary (stock) key to progress, while telling me I needed to press a different (remapped) key that kept having no effect.

    Anywho, I think I realized it some other week/month after wiping/reinstalling in frustration. Thereafter I prioritized tools/upgrades that let me skip the badly ported minigame.