Moments of Permanence - Post a comment

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I am awesome	Dec. 16th, 2009 @ 09:08 pm

So the thing about Demon's Souls is that it's an odd kind of semi-multiplayer game that is very very cool.

Other players appear in your game, as phantoms - you can't interact at all, BUT you can see them, which can give you tips about what's ahead. You can see them fight, you might see them run into side-passages.

And when they die, they leave behind a bloodstain. Touching the bloodstain lets you see the last few seconds of their life - so you can take a guess at what killed them, and perhaps avoid the same fate yourself.

You can also leave messages for other players, composed from a list of set phrases. The messages show as glowing glyphs on the ground, which subsequent players can read.

If a message was helpful to you, you can Recommend it. A recommendation on a message heals the player who left it, if they're online, and much-recommended messages persist longer in the world than overlooked ones.

Earlier I was playing, and I left a couple of messages around. One of them, a little distance before I got jumped by three skeletons, was: "Beware the enemy's ambush."

I stopped playing for a while earlier, and housemate.Dave is playing. I cooked and ate dinner, then came back to the couch, where I'm watching Dave play. (I was cooking for a while, because Dean is sick, and I cooked her dinner, but I cooked her something somewhat different from what I cooked for me.)

I saw him fight those same skeletons, then call up and Recommend the message - the one I left.

Obviously I'm not playing right now, since Dave is using my game on my PS3, so I don't get healed, but I still find myself having a little moment of squeeful delight that my message was recommended, after being helpful.

And he didn't even know it was my message. It was just a PATENTLY GOOD MESSAGE.