[List] In-Jokes, Third-Party References, etc.

Reminds me of a Lister quote. "Hol, all his mates were French."

 

The Magic Training capstone ability, "Master of Magic" was also the name of an old strategy game.

 

Nice one, Bohandas. Even Sir Nicholas liked your post for that, which is quite an achievement.

 

And an even older RPG back on the Commodore 64.

 

Master of Magic is one of my all-time favorite 4X strategy games -- you can still get it from GOG.COM. It's certainly a flawed game, but it has a lot of richness to it, with all of the spells and heroes and different kinds of units. It's one of those games that made a huge mark for itself in gaming history such that now, so many new fantasy 4X games try to compare themselves to it.

I still play the game on and off -- it actually holds up pretty well. Don't get me wrong, it has bugs, and it can be severely unbalanced depending on your choices or just the luck of getting a bad (or good starting location. The AI is nothing special, and diplomacy is kind of rote. Yet even today, it's still a great game. How strange is that?

 

I think the lutefisk is another Dwarf Fortress reference. Toady One has mentioned lutefisk several times in his blog (on 12/24/2009, 12/22/2011, and 12/21/2013)

 

That's probably because lutefisk is an actual real life thing?

 

Yes, but not a real-life thing that is very popular or widespread, or that is at all likely to come up in the average person's conversations or life.

 

All I remember from that movie was Christopher Lee and the guy from "The Equalizer" TV series. And I remember thinking it was a very strange, very '60s sort of low-budget film. Don't remember any reference to bees or a bee book, but it's been many years since I saw it.

 

Many of us do, but I'll have you know that—at least translated into the language I read it in—none of the books had that which the game referenced. If I read it in the original I would have probably noticed it being there, but well ...

 

"Metaphor for the Atomic Bomb" is apparently a reference to the videogame "Braid"

 

I think it's more of a jab at Cloud from Final Fantasy 7, since he spends a good deal of the game angsting his brains out.

 

I think there was a remake that had bees in it.

 

The original, I know, is considered a classic. But in spite of that, I wasn't really crazy about it. So when the remake came out, I didn't bother seeing it. I've only heard bad things about it.

 

Portal stole Android Hell from Futurama who stole it from Red Dwarf. They probably stole it from someone else in turn but I don't know who.

 

Is the robe of the beige warlock a reference to anything?

 

To be honest, I'm not sure.

I do want to say that it probably is, and that there are a few things (like Discworld) that it might be referencing; but on the other hand, the description of the item does turn mockery of the general fashion-blindness of wizardly characters into quite a plausible option.