It also loves how trivial much of the internet really is, and how we should both celebrate all this made-up nonsense and acknowledge how much of our time with the internet is just frittered away on garbage. It loves how the internet is really still all about weird online communities and their rivalries, feuds, and splinter groups, and how one person's ideas-both good and bad-can gather momentum and spin out of control. Hypnospace Outlaw loves the internet, warts and all.
Such updates are welcome, and remarkable given the sheer quantity of pages you're able to browse by the game's end, but you're still going to be looking at the same stuff many times over before you're done.
#Hypnospace outlaws dream update#
As you progress through the cases, weeks and months pass and you'll see the passage of time reflected as users update their pages-occasionally even in response to your moderating actions-while new pages appear and old ones close. Getting stuck and browsing through the same pages again and again rarely makes any of the jokes funnier. Where it suffers is when this sleuthing distracts from the writing. It quickly becomes a game of internet detective where you're saving documents to your virtual desktop and bookmarking pages of interest to return to later.
#Hypnospace outlaws dream crack#
You'll be plugging in search terms to track down potential leads, cross-referencing data and Hypnospace user IDs, reading blog entries to identify clues that might suggest how you could try to crack someone's password, exploring unlisted zones and installing new kinds of software. These puzzles are mostly satisfying to work through. Things soon get more complicated, and fulfilling each new task requested by your manager becomes more of a puzzle that you really need to work to solve.
#Hypnospace outlaws dream mod#
What you're being asked to do as a mod in these early cases isn't especially interesting, but that's fine, because the writing across the board is so sharp. The pages themselves are mostly spot on in terms of their portrayal of late '90s amateur internet culture and reading through each new page becomes a source of constant amusement. Initially, you're assigned specific zones to monitor, and early cases are a simple matter of browsing the pages in each zone until you encounter the relevant material. You're dispatched jobs to track down incidents of content infringement, harassment, illegal activity, and so on, removing the offending text, images, or links from the pages you find them, and issuing warnings to the users who posted them. You navigate these sites as a kind of moderator in the employ of Merchantsoft, the startup behind Hypnospace. me) nostalgic for the looser, weirder, more experimental, yet more innocent internet that we seem to have lost in the years since. There's a kind of ramshackle energy at play-whether it's in Bill Aldrin's House of Sound and his raw music reviews or Gus' Temple of Serenity and his earnest new age-isms-that will make those of a certain generation (i.e. It's 1999, the frontier era of the internet, before it was dominated by corporations, where random people stole some HTML and threw up a page dedicated to whatever random things interested them at the time.
Or rather, what people used to make websites about. The Hypnospace web portal is a walled garden, to use the modern term, split into themed zones that play host to whatever it is people make websites about. Log on to Hypnospace and you find yourself jolted back to the late '90s internet age where every page belonged to a webring, had a visitor counter, and blared tinny MIDI music on loop every 15 seconds. It's both ingenious and terrible, and serves as the all-too-horrifyingly-plausible premise of this quite clever, quite funny, simulated '90s web browsing puzzle game. Hypnospace, the titular technology of Hypnospace Outlaw, is a social network you can access while you sleep, thus solving the problem of its users failing to update their status due to having to close their eyes for eight hours a day. For those of us who already spend our entire waking life tethered to the internet, the concept of Hypnospace will seem like both the logical conclusion to our always-online existence and its literal nightmare scenario.
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