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[loose nut]

This:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XNL9F2Urqs&feature=youtu.be&t=2m30s

I want a game where you're a peregrine falcon.

Actually, I want to BE a peregrine falcon, but I will grudgingly settle for being one in a video game.

[Xantalos]

You know what video game I want? I want a video game where you can be or combat The Thing (John Carpenter version). Not the really, REALLY bad games that make no sense and have been christened 'Piss, Vomit and Panels', but something that's actually GOOD and stuff. It'd be like Spore but infinitely more complex and badass. It would be a pain in the ass to change out of th blue without having to design every 5 seconds, but maybe you could design a bunch of limbs/bodies/etc and then pull them up in a tab ingame (the game would pause as you do this), put the part that YOU desgined on wherever you needed it on the Thing, and unpause, watch it transform, and proceed to wreck shit. Hell, you could even build spacecraft if you went far enough! It would be an absolute bitch to do, though, because to do it right you'd need DF levels of procedural generation and attention to detail, combined with at least moderate graphics so we can see how the wings we put on our curent form flap as we fly, or the way people spasm as you impale them on the end of your giant spike thing growing out of your arm.
If anyone ends up making that, I will do great things for that person. Great things.

[cathartic rooster]

Oh, lord, how I want a open world MMO with dinosaurs. Just imagine, 15 or so different types of dinosaur. Herbivores and carnivores and all that. think about starting as a hatchling and aging up to adult, having to lay eggs to respawn and such? I think it would be awesome.

[Parsely]

You know what video game I want? I want a video game where you can be or combat The Thing (John Carpenter version). Not the really, REALLY bad games that make no sense and have been christened 'Piss, Vomit and Panels', but something that's actually GOOD and stuff. It'd be like Spore but infinitely more complex and badass. It would be a pain in the ass to change out of th blue without having to design every 5 seconds, but maybe you could design a bunch of limbs/bodies/etc and then pull them up in a tab ingame (the game would pause as you do this), put the part that YOU desgined on wherever you needed it on the Thing, and unpause, watch it transform, and proceed to wreck shit. Hell, you could even build spacecraft if you went far enough! It would be an absolute bitch to do, though, because to do it right you'd need DF levels of procedural generation and attention to detail, combined with at least moderate graphics so we can see how the wings we put on our curent form flap as we fly, or the way people spasm as you impale them on the end of your giant spike thing growing out of your arm.
If anyone ends up making that, I will do great things for that person. Great things.

This, so much, but the focus should be on who is The Thing, and who isn't?

[Xantalos]

You know what video game I want? I want a video game where you can be or combat The Thing (John Carpenter version). Not the really, REALLY bad games that make no sense and have been christened 'Piss, Vomit and Panels', but something that's actually GOOD and stuff. It'd be like Spore but infinitely more complex and badass. It would be a pain in the ass to change out of th blue without having to design every 5 seconds, but maybe you could design a bunch of limbs/bodies/etc and then pull them up in a tab ingame (the game would pause as you do this), put the part that YOU desgined on wherever you needed it on the Thing, and unpause, watch it transform, and proceed to wreck shit. Hell, you could even build spacecraft if you went far enough! It would be an absolute bitch to do, though, because to do it right you'd need DF levels of procedural generation and attention to detail, combined with at least moderate graphics so we can see how the wings we put on our curent form flap as we fly, or the way people spasm as you impale them on the end of your giant spike thing growing out of your arm.
If anyone ends up making that, I will do great things for that person. Great things.

This, so much, but the focus should be on who is The Thing, and who isn't?

True, that would probably be a big part of it, but at least in my interpretation and from what I've read, the Thing isn't so much a natural imitator as every single piece of fiction seems to portray it as so much as what Ash said in the first Alien movie - the perfect biological organism. It can literally do anything with biomass, and the imitation was not so much a natural hunting behavior as a reaction to the humans burning a few of it's forms to death. It knows that the humans trust and thus won't burn to death other humans, so it imitates them in an attempt to survive. Presumably in the movies it doesn't have the time and/or resources to develop a fireproof coating, or it doesn't have the appropraite gene for it and doesn't have time to manufacture it on the fly. In reality, the Thing doesn't have any special vulnerability to fire any more than a naked man does. Setting both of them on fire will result in intense pain for both of them and presumably shock and/or death in the case of the human. However, if you test a flamethrower against a Thing actually trying to kill you? The bugger's going to be more deadly than a Xenomorph.
Anyhow, yeah, any game that properly emulates the Thing would have to be REALLY complex.
[/infodump]

[Sirus]

I remember hearing that the Thing was sorta vulnerable to electricity, in that it will instinctively attack whatever zaps it even if it would be in it's best interest to remain undetected. In the movie, they attempt to use a defibrillator on some dude who turns out to be a/the Thing. If it had just played dead, or pretended to "get better", it would have been fine. Instead it sprouts a set of jaws from it's ribcage and reveals itself only to get roasted.

So perhaps that's the Thing's major weakness. That and enough fire or acid will destroy anything made of organic matter.

[Mech#4]

Didn't they use a heated piece of wire on blood samples to tell whether someone was the Thing?

[Sirus]

Didn't they use a heated piece of wire on blood samples to tell whether someone was the Thing?

They did. The blood screamed, IIRC.

[Xantalos]

I remember hearing that the Thing was sorta vulnerable to electricity, in that it will instinctively attack whatever zaps it even if it would be in it's best interest to remain undetected. In the movie, they attempt to use a defibrillator on some dude who turns out to be a/the Thing. If it had just played dead, or pretended to "get better", it would have been fine. Instead it sprouts a set of jaws from it's ribcage and reveals itself only to get roasted.

So perhaps that's the Thing's major weakness. That and enough fire or acid will destroy anything made of organic matter.

True, for fire/acid resistance I was thinking of carapaces/exoskeletons and the like. I think that Norris-Thing was kinda fucked up from having a heart attack and was having trouble coordinating or something - a Thing's brain is its body, not just the brain, so a malfunctioning organ would screw the thought process over and leave it to it's instincts. That mainly came about because it never expected to have a body part that was broken, considering that that's impossible for it.

Didn't they use a heated piece of wire on blood samples to tell whether someone was the Thing?

They did. The blood screamed, IIRC.

It also jumped out of the container and later flowed away, which I'm not even sure how that's possible. It's CELLS can jump!

[Parsely]

True, that would probably be a big part of it, but at least in my interpretation and from what I've read, the Thing isn't so much a natural imitator as every single piece of fiction seems to portray it as so much as what Ash said in the first Alien movie - the perfect biological organism. It can literally do anything with biomass, and the imitation was not so much a natural hunting behavior as a reaction to the humans burning a few of it's forms to death. It knows that the humans trust and thus won't burn to death other humans, so it imitates them in an attempt to survive. Presumably in the movies it doesn't have the time and/or resources to develop a fireproof coating, or it doesn't have the appropraite gene for it and doesn't have time to manufacture it on the fly. In reality, the Thing doesn't have any special vulnerability to fire any more than a naked man does. Setting both of them on fire will result in intense pain for both of them and presumably shock and/or death in the case of the human. However, if you test a flamethrower against a Thing actually trying to kill you? The bugger's going to be more deadly than a Xenomorph.
Anyhow, yeah, any game that properly emulates the Thing would have to be REALLY complex.
[/infodump]

It can't do anything with biomass. It can only imitate the organisms it had absorbed (otherwise it would just be a shapeshifter, not an animal that mimics its prey perfectly). BUT. It can, in layman's terms, mix around the parts he has already absorbed. Either that or The Thing is really dumb, or single-minded, in the sense that he only can do two things: mimic the living stuff around me perfectly, or attach as many pointy objects and limbs as I can to myself in the hope that I can a) kill everything nearby, or b) escape to try again.

If any of that is true, then the Thing is not reactive. He is not human. His intelligence would be rudimentary in the sense that he would only be as smart as he needs to be. The only reason he would demonstrate forethought when building the spaceship (since he KNOWS he is unstoppable once he has reached a populated area) is because it means he will propagate himself more quickly.

But thats all speculation, and most of it is extremely self-contradictory and nonsensical in hindsight anyway.

TBH I think you're going a bit overboard with how hard you're thinking about this Xant. The best (and probably only) way to make The Thing a game would be to reenact the movie, with a lot of randomisation and different ways to interact with the environment. The fun would have to stem from the fact that there would be so many potential factors that it would be like reliving the movie, in a different way, every single time. The outpost would have more facilities and NPCs (if any) instead of fewer, there would be a snowcat and a helicopter instead of two snowmobiles, the armoury would have shotguns instead of hunting rifles, etc.

[Parsely]

I remember hearing that the Thing was sorta vulnerable to electricity, in that it will instinctively attack whatever zaps it even if it would be in it's best interest to remain undetected. In the movie, they attempt to use a defibrillator on some dude who turns out to be a/the Thing. If it had just played dead, or pretended to "get better", it would have been fine. Instead it sprouts a set of jaws from it's ribcage and reveals itself only to get roasted.

So perhaps that's the Thing's major weakness. That and enough fire or acid will destroy anything made of organic matter.

In the original book that the film is based off of they kill The Thing using makeshift zappers that they wore on their backs. It was pretty much just jumper cables, batteries and metal rods with some insulation (not literally but somewhere along those lines. in the first movie (there was a 40's one) they tricked it into walking onto a puddle on the floor that they had electrified, but before they tried to shoot it).

[Sirus]

A carapace or exoskeleton wouldn't do much to defend against fire. Hell, even modern battle tanks can only take so much of it before the heat starts melting the insides. A fleshy Thing would simply cook in it's own shell.

But we're getting off-track (again). There was a Thing game on the PS2, but it wasn't all that great. Had some good ideas though.

[Xantalos]

True, that would probably be a big part of it, but at least in my interpretation and from what I've read, the Thing isn't so much a natural imitator as every single piece of fiction seems to portray it as so much as what Ash said in the first Alien movie - the perfect biological organism. It can literally do anything with biomass, and the imitation was not so much a natural hunting behavior as a reaction to the humans burning a few of it's forms to death. It knows that the humans trust and thus won't burn to death other humans, so it imitates them in an attempt to survive. Presumably in the movies it doesn't have the time and/or resources to develop a fireproof coating, or it doesn't have the appropraite gene for it and doesn't have time to manufacture it on the fly. In reality, the Thing doesn't have any special vulnerability to fire any more than a naked man does. Setting both of them on fire will result in intense pain for both of them and presumably shock and/or death in the case of the human. However, if you test a flamethrower against a Thing actually trying to kill you? The bugger's going to be more deadly than a Xenomorph.
Anyhow, yeah, any game that properly emulates the Thing would have to be REALLY complex.
[/infodump]

It can't do anything with biomass. It can only imitate the organisms it had absorbed (otherwise it would just be a shapeshifter, not an animal that mimics its prey perfectly). BUT. It can, in layman's terms, mix around the parts he has already absorbed. Either that or The Thing is really dumb, or single-minded, in the sense that he only can do two things: mimic the living stuff around me perfectly, or attach as many pointy objects and limbs as I can to myself in the hope that I can a) kill everything nearby, or b) escape to try again.

If any of that is true, then the Thing is not reactive. He is not human. His intelligence would be rudimentary in the sense that he would only be as smart as he needs to be. The only reason he would demonstrate forethought when building the spaceship (since he KNOWS he is unstoppable once he has reached a populated area) is because it means he will propagate himself more quickly.

But thats all speculation, and most of it is extremely self-contradictory and nonsensical in hindsight anyway.

TBH I think you're going a bit overboard with how hard you're thinking about this Xant. The best (and probably only) way to make The Thing a game would be to reenact the movie, with a lot of randomisation and different ways to interact with the environment. The fun would have to stem from the fact that there would be so many potential factors that it would be like reliving the movie, in a different way, every single time. The outpost would have more facilities and NPCs (if any) instead of fewer, there would be a snowcat and a helicopter instead of two snowmobiles, the armoury would have shotguns instead of hunting rifles, etc.

Yeah I tend to do that. Sorry if I WMG'd a bit too wildly.

[Parsely]

-snip-

The Thing is afraid of fire. He fears fire. It is his weakness because it puts the entire body in danger, and thus all the cells stop working together, because they want to escape. If you blasted a Thing with a flamethrower, no matter what he is dressed up as every part of him will immediately bail, because 'fuck fire it hurts.'

[Xantalos]

-snip-

The Thing is afraid of fire. He fears fire. It is his weakness because it puts the entire body in danger, and thus all the cells stop working together, because they want to escape. If you blasted a Thing with a flamethrower, no matter what he is dressed up as every part of him will immediately bail, because 'fuck fire it hurts.'

That didn't always happen as it did in the movies, but I see your point.