My personal wish for the "Ransome uncensored" update

[ZakPhoenixMcKracken]

Should I include his testimony in the trial?

[milanfahrnholz]

I don´t give a * beep *

[Caven]

[quote=“milanfahrnholz, post:100, topic:838, full:true”]
Thanks for confirming! My point was however that refering to them in-game as Mindbenders would have given them too much credit because where would they be without their fancy machines? I also rechecked the recorded message in the face on mars and at one point the Skloarian refers to their race as “the ancient ones”. This game is even more Lovecraftian than I thought! [/quote]
Where would computer programmers be without their fancy machines?

[milanfahrnholz]

Ask Ada Lovelace!

[ZakPhoenixMcKracken]

Thanks Ransome, your contribution is always appreciated.

[Nor_Treblig]

@Caven

Where would computer programmers be without their fancy machines?

They would be finally free, roaming the world… oh-oh.

[milanfahrnholz]

Could you imagine a world without computer programmers?

[nihilquest]

Plan 9 From Outer Space (obviously). Outside of Ed’s movie, that’s another weird adventure game.

[David]

@Someone

Does anyone know how the word ZLORFIK was created? Was/is it an acronym? @David?

I was pretty sure Matthew Kane, my co-designer and co-coder on Zak (and composer), invented the word. I just heard back from him, “I’m pretty sure that if I came up with it there is no hidden meaning at all. I have made up quite a number of words that are all just nonsense sounds. It’s probably a similar brain function to my piano improvs :)”

[milanfahrnholz]

Cool, I always wanted to know what his contributions where next to the outstanding music! But it seems you two collaborated so closly, it´s hard to differentiate now after all these years.

@David

I’m pretty sure that if I came up with it there is no hidden meaning at all. I have made up quite a number of words that are all just nonsense sounds.

I would never be so sure about it. Remember:

[ZakPhoenixMcKracken]

If his name were Neil ArmKIFROLZ…

[milanfahrnholz]

@ZakPhoenixMcKracken

ArmKIFROLZ.

When you say it like that it sounds a lot like Kifflom! the greeting of the cannibalistic cult members from GTA5!

[ZakPhoenixMcKracken]

I finished GTA V, but never joined them
I remember that guy, thought.

[milanfahrnholz]

You cannot really join them just feed innocent hitchhikers to them, and then you can raid their grounds they have a lot of money, of course!

[ZakPhoenixMcKracken]

Oh, I got it! $1,000 each, right?
In italian was called “The altruistic sect”

[milanfahrnholz]

@ZakPhoenixMcKracken

Oh, I got it! $1,000 each, right?

I don´t remember might have been different each time. But eventually you had to deliver 5 of the hitchhikers to the sects headquarters. After the fifth you could enter their grounds, fight them and take quite a bunch of money cases from them, it´s enterable but empty after that.

@ZakPhoenixMcKracken

In italian was called “The altruistic sect”

I think they were inofficially called that anywhere, but TV and Radio ads identified them as the Epsilon Program which already had been mentioned in passing in San Andreas.

[ZakPhoenixMcKracken]

@milanfahrnholz

you had to deliver 5 of the hitchhikers to the sects headquarters.

Oh, I hijacked only two passengers. Good, thanks I’ll give it a try!

[David]

@milanfahrnholz

Cool, I always wanted to know what his contributions where next to the outstanding music! But it seems you two collaborated so closly, it´s hard to differentiate now after all these years.

True. Hard to remember who did which part of the game. Especially after 29 years…

[Caven]

@milanfahrnholz

Yeah still, in the game the aliens are called caponians and the mindbender is the name of the machine that makes the hum that makes you stupid. mindbender is definitly a noun and not an adjective.

This creature is an alien (noun)
This feels very alien to me (adjective)
This guy is probably a caponian (noun)
This man dresses in the caponian style (adjective)

Mindbender is not probably the only one of those that cannot be an adjective. The adjective of bend would be bending. And if you would want to call the guy the mindbending the sentence would be incomplete, maybe the mindbending alien (or caponian) would work. I know I´m saying this as one non native to another but I don´t think you´re right in this case.

No, “bending” is a verb, not an adjective. “Bent” is the adjective used to describe an object after someone has finished bending it. A pipe that is bent(verb) has a bend(noun) in it.

@milanfahrnholz

Other way around for me. I´m better at practice than in theory. I´ve always been much better at imitating others than I was at school, you know more like a little child does than a good student.

Anyway, I think we can agree on the fact that the confusion comes less from a grammatical point. But rather more from the way it is used in the title. Of course technically the caponians are mindbenders because they “bend minds” with their mind bending machine. But this was just the first time I´ve heard somebody refer to the guys in the noseglasses and sombreros as such. When I read that the mindbender teleports into the cave, I pictured that big machine suddenly appearing.

And you know where we would be without mistakes? Somewhere where we don´t have a “Mansion mansion”!

There are common real-world examples of the mindbender/mindbender scenario, conveniently involving people and machines:

If I need to have two pieces of steel permanently fused together, I might hire a welder, a person who welds metal. Of course, he isn’t going to weld the metal with his bare hands–he is going to use a welder, a machine that welds metal. But the person I might hire–the welder–is more than just a welder. He’s likely to be American, and his nationality doesn’t evaporate just because I called him a welder. He also has a name. Perhaps it’s Julio Barrientos. The fact that I called him a welder doesn’t mean I’m using it as a stand-in for his name or nationality. I just don’t know yet that he’s the welder I’m hiring, or more likely in my case I’m so horrible with names that I forgot it seconds after he told it to me. He’s a welder, and I hired him specifically to do welding, and if I tell people about it after the fact, I’m going to let them know he is a welder, so it’s just easier to refer to him as a welder.

To bring this back around to Zak McKracken, it is an underappreciated game that has gotten relatively little attention compared to other Lucasfilm/Lucasarts games. I remember playing and completing Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, but it was so long ago that next time I play the game it will legitimately feel like a first-time playthrough. If it weren’t for recent discussion at this forum, I’d have never remembered that the alien mindbenders were Caponians. I probably would have called them alien mindbenders, simply because I can at least remember the name of the game’s title without having to do research, even if I’ve forgotten nearly everything else. Plus, there’s no guarantee there’d be information to find, such as trying to find Bernard’s or Dr. Fred’s last name prior to Day of the Tentacle. And sometimes, despite knowing the proper name, it’s useful to use a different description. For instance, even if I had played the game 50 times and remembered exactly that the alien mindbenders were called Caponians, I might still just call them alien mindbenders because if I’m telling someone about the game who only knew the title, they’re more likely to remember a descriptive name that describes the aliens’ role in the story than they are to remember yet another made up name that carries no inherent meaning.

[milanfahrnholz]

@Caven

No, “bending” is a verb, not an adjective. “Bent” is the adjective used to describe an object after someone has finished bending it. A pipe that is bent(verb) has a bend(noun) in it.

Right, what did I say? Never mind then!

@Caven

If I need to have two pieces of steel permanently fused together, I might hire a welder, a person who welds metal. Of course, he isn’t going to weld the metal with his bare hands–he is going to use a welder, a machine that welds metal. But the person I might hire–the welder–is more than just a welder. He’s likely to be American, and his nationality doesn’t evaporate just because I called him a welder. He also has a name. Perhaps it’s Julio Barrientos. The fact that I called him a welder doesn’t mean I’m using it as a stand-in for his name or nationality. I just don’t know yet that he’s the welder I’m hiring, or more likely in my case I’m so horrible with names that I forgot it seconds after he told it to me. He’s a welder, and I hired him specifically to do welding, and if I tell people about it after the fact, I’m going to let them know he is a welder, so it’s just easier to refer to him as a welder.

All of that is correct, but again you´re disregarding that we´re talking about aliens and the way we talk about aliens. The example I´ve already used was that in Star Trek everybody calls the Klingons by their race and not by their occupation. Most of them are Warriors so they´d call them Warriors instead with this logic but they don´t, bringing human people into the argument doesn´t fly for me, it has to do with SciFi tradition. Hey have I mentioned already I´m tired of this argument? Yes I think I have!

@Caven

To bring this back around to Zak McKracken, it is an underappreciated game that has gotten relatively little attention compared to other Lucasfilm/Lucasarts games. I remember playing and completing Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, but it was so long ago that next time I play the game it will legitimately feel like a first-time playthrough. If it weren’t for recent discussion at this forum, I’d have never remembered that the alien mindbenders were Caponians. I probably would have called them alien mindbenders, simply because I can at least remember the name of the game’s title without having to do research, even if I’ve forgotten nearly everything else. Plus, there’s no guarantee there’d be information to find, such as trying to find Bernard’s or Dr. Fred’s last name prior to Day of the Tentacle. And sometimes, despite knowing the proper name, it’s useful to use a different description. For instance, even if I had played the game 50 times and remembered exactly that the alien mindbenders were called Caponians, I might still just call them alien mindbenders because if I’m telling someone about the game who only knew the title, they’re more likely to remember a descriptive name that describes the aliens’ role in the story than they are to remember yet another made up name that carries no inherent meaning.

I already posted a picture of the scene where the caponians are refered to in game. But I´m really really sure that is not the only part where they are called that, maybe somewhere in the games documention, manual, paper, whatever. The problem I´m having with that that very early in the game the name Mindbender is used in regards to the machine that they use. It´s not called the mindbending machine it´s called The Mindbender ™. It would be like calling your carpenter Mr Black & Decker.

And if that caponian name is so obscure I guess those wikipedia guys have taken the same drugs as me: Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders - Wikipedia

Anyway feel free to call the Stormtroopers the “Star Wars Empire Soldiers”, I don´t really care.

Status of Counter of times I already mentioned how tired I am of this discussion: just exploded due to severe overheat…