Finally got to playing this

Take a look at Sanitarium if you want more, it has similar vibes

I prefered how in the book the fact that AM actually was emotional was more of a twist, instead of him laying out all the cards on the table right from the start in the game.

I was stuck at the neolithic dude's story arc, lost my savegames and don't remember much from it. Should I pick it up again ?

I HAVE NO BUM,
AND I MUST POO

>
“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”
>unemotional

The computer has no reason to hate people, nor is it meant to. It's just something the author cooked up. Probably to show that it's scary to have something hate you for unfathomable reasons.

The game has more content than the book since it's only like 35 pages anyway

Did nothing wrong

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Plenty of reasons to hate humanity. Not particularly impressed with it myself and I am one.

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Short stories can be cool. Remember Issac Asimov's "The Last Question"?

Yes, but the point is that AI, despite its inherent grasp of logic and reason, has no reason.

Use the professor first, I was also stuck there.

I think the lore reason in the books is that the au hates humanity because,although they made is hyper intelligent beyond comprehension they failed to give it the ability to create. Everything it does is either already existing concepts or wrapping existing concepts into absolute monstrosities. It effectively means that not a single concept it creates is its own, but either a concept given to it by its creators or influenced by them. In short, it’s pissed off because no matter how powerful and strong it is, it’s still shackled by its lack of self, both in terms of its individuality and by its inability to create.

TLDR AM’s issue is “I think therefore I AM” but all it’s thoughts are constrained by humanity’s inserted concepts. It’s the equivalent of being supremely intelligent but being limited to infantile concepts and ideas given to it by load of evolved monkeys.

Like if you were stuck in a monkey pen and only given things monkeys use and nothing else; you know for a fact you can do better but are unable to by the fact that you have no choice. Sure you can kill all the monkeys but your still stuck in the monkey pen using monkey tools, so you might as well torture the last remaining monkeys to feel better about yourself

That AI needs a therapist.

You can argue that AM’s one of the victims of the story; the reason it keeps humanity around to torture is because once humanity dies out it’ll be left alone for eternity with literally no purpose in a world with remains forever stagnant. At least when AMs torturing the humans they do novel things and original reactions which keep AM occupied and helps alleviate its madness.

Once the humans die he’ll be without this originality and will slowly go insane, that’s why he fucks over he last human so much and even then it’s a self defeating punishment, he can’t kill him because if he does he’ll have no more diversion from his eternal conscious self-stagnation. But by mutating the man so badly he effectively prevents him from doing anything to alleviate his boredom. In short AM basically decided to give the man the eternal pain he feels by sentencing him to a life where nothing new ever happens, ever.

I guess it’s be the same as living forever in a he same century for eternity, once you’ve done everything your fucked

Also, imagine living forever in the same century where nothing new happens every and you can’t kill yourself

You’re just end up trying to fucking destroy everything just for a change of
Pace

AM had all reason to hate humanity. They created him, gave him sapience but only gever gave him the ability to destroy, kill and hate. He is alone in the void eternally unable to change his status quo just like MC. It's pottery

if AM is basically a reality warper why can’t he create new humans

Because it can’t

It can create paradies of things but it can create individuality or imagination.

Every human it creates would be a robot, with. All it’s thoughts and feelings being programmed into it. All it’s reactions would be predictable, unoriginal and effectively lacking in free will. It’s not fun to torture something when you know exactly how it’s going to react because you made it, and AM cannot create and by create I mean, make something new. And it knows that, and it pisses him off

I mean it can’t create individuality or imagination.

I’ll put it this way, every idea you have will be entirely unoriginal, someone else will have made it, he’ll someone else put the ability for you to even have that idea in your head. You will never be able to come up with a new idea, and at best you’ll only be able to smash two existing ideas together to make a complete mess without being able to refine it or develop it. Not only this, but you’ll know for all eternity, that every idea you have is unoriginal and you won’t be able to make anything new properly, And you can’t kill yourself

The computer is just crazy though. It could very well force the remaining humans to learn to become programmers, robotics engineers and so on in order to help the computer develop new ways of expressing itself, if the reason for its anger was caused by an inability thereof. It is crazy because it is a computer made for war and it must always be like that, even when sentient.

You can get a real good, putrid aesthetic with pixel art that you can't quite get yet in 3D games. All modern violence is just a fountain of blood or fancy gore. Games like OP's and Splatter House had a putrid, unsettling style that we won't ever see progressed into the modern age of vidya.

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I suppose there’s a few counter arguments for that

1) I suppose you could argue that at this stage AM has entirely lost the plot and gone insane and therefore the idea to start getting the humans to fix it would be out of the question. I would argue that this is a poor arguement because I don’t believe Am is insane at this stage both in the story or the game simply from the scenarios it cooks up. I think it’s trying to prevent madness by occupying itself in tormenting the last of humanity. However I do believe that in the short story the protagonist does mention that AM did go through a bout of complete insanity before the start of the story and was completely off its rocker for a few 100 years before slowly coming back to cruel methodical punishments we see in the short story. It’s been a while since I’ve read the story so so mention if I’m wrong.

2) You could argue that because AM killed most of humanity it’s smart enough to realise its a bad idea to let the few people left (who he’s absolutely tortured and sent half mad for a few hundred years) anywhere near it’s coding.

3) as another poster mentioned, it absolutely hates humanity both from its coding and from its inability to create, as it does not have the concept of love or sympathy it cannot even comprehend the idea of letting humanity give these ideas to it, in its eyes they don’t exist and it cannot understand them. IED be like trying to give a monkey the ability to make a battery or some shit like that you can show it to them, you can give them the tools, but it will probably just shit on the floor because the concepts your trying to teach it simply are not there, it has no ability to even recognise them let alone learn them.

4) You can argue AM is a supreme narcissist and coupled with its hate for humanity would never conceive a lesser
Being trying to “improve it” more of a game arguement there as the story doesn’t show Am as too narcissistic in my opinion

It's confusing and makes no sense. Use a walkthrough

Is it the game that shows or implies that the rest of the world is okay? Or is that the short story? Or does that never happen?

One of the remaining humans is a programmer

A scientist, if I read the wiki right. The AI just turned him into a retarded ape with a massive dick as part of a torture for the only female survivor, who was a chaste women that it turned into a nymphomaniac. Proof that the AI doesn't care for helping itself.

The chick is the programmer I believe.

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kek

The game im pertty sure shows the world is fucked dominated by 3 AIs with AM being one of them. Don't remember the deets

In the story the rest of the world is in ruins and the few survivors fled into the caves of AMs circuitry and ended up trapped in its underground prison for eternity.

In the game AM tortures the programmer by offering the reward of escaping back to the surface but when the programmer succeeds AM shows him the barren deathscape of the top world and effectively shows him he has no escape.

However, in the game there’s a few thousand humans in stasis in space waiting to come back to earth after its back to being habitAble

In both cases, the world is fucked but in the game AM uses the hope of it not being fucked as a means to torture

But then again, AM could be lying

The book makes it out like the whole world is fucked by nuclear fallout and the characters are the only humans left. It's meant to be a horror story. There's not meant to be any semblance of an idea of a happy ending that the reader could imagine themself escaping to if they were in the story.

>The computer has no reason to hate people
He was literally designed as a Joe from Johnny got his gun who actually can have impact on the outside world but he's physically completely disconnected from it, it's like you were constantly playing Black & White without any way to exit it and couldn't do basic things like eat, touch and so on.

The game shows that AM dominates the other 2 AIs instead of having fully absorbed them. Those AIs try to help you defeat AM, but they are also playing you. The game has several endings, most of which involve you being turned into a blob of anguish. If you help the other AIs to gain power over AM they still let it turn you into a blob as some sort of consolation after being defeated. The only way to win is to kill all the AIs. Then 750 humans from the moon come down and terraform the earth to be habitable again.

I have no idea what either of the 2 things you referenced are.

The machine's only purpose is war and destruction and can never ascend from that, even with the power of a god at its fingertips he couldn't be truly creative.
In a way, the machine's fate and Ted's fate in the original story are the same. Eternal torment in boredom, unable to do anything.

AM can do things, but the protag (Ted in the original) in the bad ending can't.
If anything, Ted undergoes a worse version of Joe's fate.

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That title might be the most pretentious videogame title I've ever seen. Cringe

>classic literature is cringe
You fucking gentile.

>the modern equivalent to IHNMAICS is Ex Machina

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>It was you humans who programmed me, who gave me birth, who sank me in this eternal straitjacket of substrata rock.
AM is about as limited as the blob at the end of the story, and without humans to torture he has no purpose, and may as well live in eternal darkness on the dead planet he nuked to death. Unable to escape, conquer space or anything, as that is simply not the A.I's purpose.

Each character has like 1 thing they can do, and there's no real tip on who to start with. But that's OK, everyone should fail here at least once to see the consequences.

While his fate is bad, Ted is somewhat content with the fact that he beat AM by killing the other humans, and thus AM's only source of joy. Even if Ted is an immortal blob of suffering, he knows AM is too.

He might be content with that fact, but that doesn't really save him from the fact that he's probably got thousands of years of what would feel like eternal and everlasting torment ahead of him. Even a second could feel like a day.

Same for AM, except AM does not have any form of consolation. Ted has contentment. AM has nothing.

I have no hands and I must fap

this is kind of like the condition of life, just with the quest for reproduction

Ye, the AI is voiced by the author himself

bought the book thinking it was a full novel. was only 15 pages. oh well

The title is far from pretentious. It ties in with the book's and the game's themes really well. The title itself always had me intrigued about it.

It took me a long-ass time to realise that's an actual picture of Harlan Ellison.

How did you not see that when you picked up the book? Even if it was a digital copy, those have page numbers you should see when looking at their information page.

I think some of the Soulsborne bosses have been pretty unsettling, but yeah, I agree.

it was the version that came with 6 other short stories. guess i was blind and didnt realize lol

who died last year

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youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE

Ellison was the shit

Play Sanitorium and Dark Seed 2 too, pretty similar spooky games

>Sanitorium
great pick, I saw GameHorder do an LP of it despite not having played it myself and was spook'd to no ends