I found this conversation in a recent movie and painstakingly transcribed it. It’s by one of my favorite directors, and I’d put off watching this film for a long time. I think far more people will recognize the game than they will the movie. Can you name the film?
“I conquered Thebes.”
“When?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“How’d you do it?”
“Well I got a little more than that actually…I ruled this land for 97 years and uh…and uh…I had like…I had all the sanctuaries built and then the uh…this hot lava leaked out of a volcano and half destroyed one of the my sanctuary to uh Demeter I guess it was and uh…but I didn’t have the marble to rebuild like the sculptures and to fix the sanctuary. But I already had all these um docks to like Calydon and Argos and I had everything…I was trading to like twelve cities. And uh I had a I had a really good army but um the river the river had just flooded and it flooded out like four of my docks and I couldn’t import the marble to rebuild the sanctuary and she got Demeter got really pissed off and so she made my fields infertile and so I couldn’t grow the grass I couldn’t grow the wheat to feed the horses and there was nowhere for the sheep to graze and the goats, and then the people were getting hungry and restless, and I couldn’t trade because the rivers had flooded. So Knossos, one of my vassals, got really upset with me and turned against me and they uh attacked me and because I couldn’t train any sheep because I didn’t have the wheat, I didn’t have the uh, I didn’t have a uh…”
“You couldn’t train any sheep?”
“I couldn’t train any horses because I didn’t have the wheat…and so when they attacked me I just got they just dogged me, and I actually went to send my army out to defend the city, and like you can only send them out if you have twelve trained horses and I had eleven. So I was one horse shy of saving the city.”
“So then you didn’t really…”
“Well I had conquered—I had just conquered Thebes when that happened.”
By the way, I really, really, really liked this movie. A few days after watching it, it’s still with me.
Is this Ceasar? Or Civ?
I’m pretty sure the game is Master of Olympus. I initially thought it was Age of Empires, because I had misheard and mistranscribed “marble” as “Marvel” (which I’d mistaken for AoE’s “Wonder”). Master of Olympus features everything described here, including a destructive lava flow.
I believe the film is …………… Gerry, by Gus Van Sant? If that’s right, I must confess that I’ve never seen it, I used my friend Mr. Google. (I’m a sucker for unsolved puzzles.) It seems to be a mildly famous speech (search for “I conquered thebes” with quotes.)
Yeah, these puzzles are no fun in the age of Google. The WELL used to (for all I know still do) have literature puzzles, where someone would post an obscure passage from a book, and the person who guessed what book it was from would get to post the next puzzle. I ran a paragraph about inflating a turkey with a bicycle pump and had people stumped for a couple days. I’m sure those contests don’t last more than a few minutes now, with pretty much everything searchable online.
Heh, well you like to stump people don’t you? Come on, I read “Jane”. Actually we did some pondering about Jane over on Adam Foster’s blog awhile ago. If you have any desire to read some comically unenlightened discussion of it (btw, everyone really liked it and the other one on scifi.com “flight risk”), feel free to check it out: (Ace there is me)
http://www.hylobatidae.org/minerva/blogsheep.php?action=articleinfo&id=58#comment_id_3006
(discussion goes on below, and a bit above. It took me 2 or 3 read throughs to get that meager bit of comprehension.) Not quite as prestigious as the WELL, but what we lack in intelligence and insight we make up for in … um, … well I guess we don’t make up for it. Anyway, ..no wait, I’ve got it, we make up for it with politeness! Right then.
Wow, that is some breakdown of “Jane.” I’m glad you’re polite. I’d hate to see what you could do as an angry mob.
I did ask Adam Foster if he’d ever been to Gloucester in a shower of rain, btw.
I suspect Adam has had similar worries about us.
Gloucester has deep puddles I hear,
Waist deep, or somewhere near.
Oh my.
Now that the puzzle (both puzzles) has (have) been solved, I’ve added some visual matter. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it eye candy.