Runescape Review Intro 02

Reaching new levels of reviewing meta

01Index03

Why I played it:

Fuck you.

How it works:

Contrary to popular belief, and by which I mean a belief held by one person, that person being me, I don't create long reviews because I have a lot to say about a particular property. Sorry, I wrote that wrong. I completely and utterly have a lot to say about a particular property. But when writing these reviews, I never know how long they're going to be, beyond the mandatory thousand and fifty cents that I have arbitrarily imposed onto myself out of the glib idea that writing more words somehow makes more content, without regard for the actual impact of the words, to the point where it's impossible to summarise the messages into one clean, concise, fuck, because of all the shit I have to say. No I ain't shit but I like that, and so long as I ain't shit, I might as well spread the shit onto you. Yes, you!

I think it was Picasso who said, and if it wasn't actually Picasso you can ride him until his corpse bleeds, that it took him a heck of a long time to learn how to paint like an artist, but even longer to learn how to paint like a child. Speaking as a former child, children are shit artists. Don't get me wrong, the potential is there, but give me a notepad and some crayons and I'll kick your son's ass way before anybody kicks mine - though not that it matters, given how I kick my own ass every single day by throwing myself at the Internet and having people reject my begging for Bitcoin. I'm looking at you, Abraham.

But children, for all their grace, for all their hell, do things out of impulse and without any forethought whatsoever, consequences being damned in an inefficent way to live their life. Yes, you're very smart for sneaking into the toilet paper and individually unrolling each and every strand from its tube, but now you're going to have to roll them back. I don't care if you don't want to, you were the one who did the mess. You know how you can get out of having to roll them back up? By not rolling them out in the first place you twat!

The point of this message isn't that children are twats, or that it's in my uninformed and ignorant opinion that children are twats, but rest assured that they are, mandatory joke disclaimer in case my employer sees this and fires me for thinking I'm "abusive" for being an angry guy on the Internet. The point is that Picasso is like a child, and even ignoring the diaper fetish, he painted on impulse, painting what he wanted about any subject that came to his mind, being the artist equivalent of "first though, best thought". Granted, some thoughts are awful, and I'm not one to care with any effort of the mind about "proper art", but given those philosophies towards my writing, I have found it much more liberating to simply throw some words at a page and bang out an article within a few hours, giving me much more time to have an alcohol and sex the cabbits.

"What the bloody hell does this have to do with Runescape," you ask, barely washed. "All you're doing is padding out the word count with irrelevant bullshit that doesn't matter. I understand it's your blog, but given that you have at least some obligation to give your audience what they expect within a reasonable amount of time, it seems to me incredibly immature to say that you will cover one subject, and then waste our time with another entirely, as if every word that came out of your mouth was so important that it had to be shared, without any regard for content filtering or basic editorial practices. How are you going to justify your work in the arts when you disrespect your patrons by not giving them what they expect?"

You're right, your question is irrelevant!

Three points: One, treating all art like it has an obligation to meet an endgoal rather than create a pleasurable journey creates an atmosphere where practicality trumps imagination, and though practicality is good when doing work (which is why I only write one draft of everything - more practical to create a lot of great pieces than try to make one perfect one), when it comes to an audience reading it, focusing on what's practical creates a greater disservice to them than if you focus on giving them a good experience. If you enjoy what I'm talking about, no matter what it is I'm talking about, then it should be irrelevant whether or not I diverge from the main path along the way.

Two, I am fully aware that I often diverge from the subject matter, and as such I will often take a portion that I have written for one article (just as a natural consequence of the things that I am talking about, and the things that I end up talking about, like a fork in the road that you wander through, turn back, and then go to the other) and then shove it into another document if I feel that it doesn't do a service to that article, or is otherwise more appropiate for another day, rather than shoving it all under one header. While I understand that it's important to give my audience a unique experience and not make them feel shoehorned into one particular subject, I also understand that there is a limit to how much they are willing to be diverged!

Three, everything that I say has a point to it, and if it doesn't, then I split it as per above. Even if at some outset it appears that this prose has nothing to do with Runescape, I will invariably bring it to the main point, and if there is no point to the diatribe, then I will split it somewhere else. I suppose it would also be inconsistent of me to barrage you with a bunch of random articles that were cut off of more focused ones like a laser brought to a genital wart (or whatever you use lasers for), but given that my headline is "Web cult for cool cunts", and everything I talk about has something to do with our culture, or something that I feel has so much value to it that it would be a disservice to not have it published on the glib hope that it inspires somebody to be a better person, well, I think that everything that I say does deserve to be shared.

So how does this relate to Runescape? All I'm saying is that the time it took to write all of the above words is the same amount of time it took me to get Runescape running on Linux. You're welcome.

How it continues to work:

How does it work? Barely! You see, it's funny because I already said this joke in my Bojack Horseman Episode 12 review, and that's a bit of a... a bit of a treat. For my audience. Who were reading thus far and bothered to bone up on that... good old... blog. Jokes. Just a joke.

Just a joke.

A joke...

Anyway, I popped over to the Runescape download page, and it said to me "hey, you neckbeard fuck, get Runescape on Linux. Suck a dick and tell your parents why you can't be normal. Come on, faggot, do it already, paste the commands". And you know what? I actually did paste the commands. I pasted them and I pasted them and I pasted them some more. All of them! And by the end of it all, it didn't work. I don't remember how it didn't work, maybe because it needed some dependencies or something I don't bloody know what, but when you offer up a download link on your webpage, do you think it would be wise to try it out on multiple operating systems to make sure it works?

It turns out that Jagex didn't actually develop the Linux client, but it was some other asshole that did it, choosing to make the world's oldest game run on the world's oldest (blatant ignorance of history) operating system, which Jagex then said "screw it, good enough", and pasted it onto their download page. Which I don't mind - if the thing works, use it. What I do mind is when the thing doesn't work and Jagex doesn't have any incentive to make the thing actually, you know, work, choosing to let somebody else do it despite directly endorsing it.

So I ended up going to the client Github page, and because I absolutely 100% have no incentive whatsoever to download Git, I ended up using an automatic installed - and thank you for that, because fussing around with a command line where you have no idea what the commands actually do, is asking for trouble. I sure am glad that I'm using an installer where I have absolutely no idea what it does, so that I can make an operating system where you can wipe out your entire life's progress in eight bytes slightly more idiot-proof than it needs to be.

So I boot up the game... and what's this? Funorb? Ah, the good old days, where game developers were more experimental, where they could just create a Web game site and nobody would bat an eye - or maybe it's just Jagex and their weird insistence on doing things that nobody ever asked for, yet somehow works out for them in the end, kind of like the video game version of Forrest Gump. Featuring intuitive, perfectly-functional, and well-design (and sometimes even fun!) games that strangely insist on using Java (which nowadays is about as relevant as "3DFX compatible") as opposed to something sensible like a fucked-up interpretation of HTML and CSS, I spent many a month wasting time on these online games, and even looking back on them now, I can still say they're a cut above the rest - even if some of them are truly uninspired.

It seems to me that Funorb was just a way for the developers to try out new ideas in a risk-free environment, where they can't fuck up Runescape, or somebody else's franchise (Ace of Spades blatant cough), and instead can create a bunch of different games in different art styles, even if it's all in... Java. For some godawful reason. I realise that your original name was the "Java Gaming Experts", but given that this was in 2000 where people thought it would turn out to be a decent programming language, you don't have to stick to that name.

There's several very good reasons why nobody makes games in Java, which academia calls "a hot pile of piss", but the biggest one would be that, for even very simple games, it requires more resources for worst performance than if you chose something sensible. For proof of this, look at Minecraft - a game that by all rights should function on your 1999 laptop without struggle, but is currently suffering from a bad case of the cancer. It's a good thing that a group of hackers are making a C++ port - what's that? Mojang threatened a lawsuit? Thanks, Mojang!

I guess all of this is irrelevant, though, because when TheRealGhostSuccers tried to join a game of Arcanists, their "most popular game of all time!" (not an actual quote), there were only three people in the lobby, and they were all talking about their careers - kind of like how the blokes in Counter Strike aren't playing for competitive purposes, but for social ones. It's a damn shame, considering how I was keen on getting my shit beaten up by paid players, or perhaps beating their shit up with my default spellbook combined with novel, worms-style gameplay. But I guess not, considering how you couldn't pay me to try to wrangle up two complete strangers and have them play a round with poor old degenerate me.

I'm sure the Runescape client say this failing of Funorb, considering how when I tried to launch the Funorb client, it didn't launch dick. It also didn't launch the Funorb client - sorry, dick. Am I going to have to navigate to the Funorb page to sneak in a quick round of chess with myself, just like old times? I warn you, though, I'm fucking awful at chess. If only there was a way to make my blog more popular so I could have more fans to play with... I know! Beg for loans! It worked so well for the college students, and they're getting rich off their hard-earned degrees.

But then again, this was never about Funorb, and was more about a poorly-concealed attempt to draw words out of what is essentially some guy on the Internet whining about an issue that he solved in a half-hour, talking about something that would have been much better suited to another article, but writing another article takes time that I decided to spend reviewing a game that is essentially the same few minutes of combat stretched to a frankly absurd degree, so I guess this is my life now. Reviewing nothing at all for the sake of reviewing nothing at all.

Well, it's not that cyncial, contradiction alert keep padding out the runtime fellas. I did talk a great deal about the nostalgia in my first intro, and I am interested in playing the thing to see just how much has changed since I last picked it up about a year ago, and then put it back down because there's only so many chickens I can slaughter while listening to the same five vaporwave songs under the vain assumption that I'd be appreciating the music more if I was hunting for fucking feathers, too... but let's give it a shot. I only have so much time in this world, and I might as well spend it doing something spot-on.

The Funorb Banishment

After goofing off by fucking off to the Funorb website and playing a game where a little dwarf gets melted by very hot lava (dwarf lives matter), I ended up... in the game. Miraculously. Because of Jagex's absurd policy against letting users paste in a password, I had to manually type in both parts of my randomly-generated password, where I learned that one letter did not appear to be that one letter, but was actually a different letter thanks to the manager's non-distinctive typeface. So that wasted ten minutes of my life I would have liked to renew for porn.

But it was all worth it in the end, because my dream of being BigMoistTiddyTowel would finally come alive! Once the game would load. Once it loads. Any second now. Yep, still loading. Still loading. I'm going to repeat this joke a bunch of times so that you develop an appreciation for how long it was from the time it took me to enter my username and password, to the time where I could customise Discount_Jack_Black. Because even then... it was still loading. And I'm also using a bunch of ellipses to demonstate the length; advanced literary techniques right here.

After I determined that it was due to my open-source graphics drivers shitting the bed, I committed the cardinal sin of instead installing the proprietary ones, and as you know from the last time I did the deed, it took me eight hours to fix it on the dusk of that day and the dawn afterwards (boy, I was pissed off then!), so I decided "what the heck, might as well try it again" and it broke! After an hour playing with the BIOS settings and almost bricking my hardware because I had the gall to remove a motherboard battery, I developed the stark intuition that some shit wasn't as it seemed. So I typed up my encryption password on the blank screen, and poof - everything went back to normal. Thanks, NVIDIA. A simple "type your fucking password" would have saved me the trouble.

And after all of this, after the long, and hard, and very hard struggles, the game would finally load faster than it takes for a child to grow into a man (citation NOT needed). As to how well it worked out after that? Stay tuned, for the SCARY conclusion! Spoilers: pretty jank.

01Index03

So we may play this game at Froghand.

Today's page was updated on 2016-12-01 and created on 2016-11-30!

Linux is easy if you have a decade of computer experience.