However, the superficial verisimilitude to "internet 1.0" is a distant second to the personalities that fill the hallowed digital halls of Hypnospace. Cyberbullyin'? On MY turf? Not on your very cool life, Zane_Rocks_14! gifs and visitor trackers to the more subtle stuff like how backdrop patterns would vanish 90% the way down a page because the website's creator neglected to consider that they would be eventually add more text than the image template they'd used (probably without permission) could hold. The developers must've scoured hundreds of sites on the Wayback Machine (or just had very good memories) to get the details right on a lot of these webpages, from the expected spinning skull. Mixed in with all the user stuff are the (slightly) slicker looking domains attributed to in-universe companies and the more net-savvy amateurs who will often lend their support to their fellow struggling Hypnospace neighbors, though they're all still beholden to a very '90s aesthetic: that sort of all-too-busy brutalism that made it hard to discern where anything was. The pages in question are often a cross between the poorly formatted Geocities/Angelfire sites that might cover any number of hobbyist topics of the creator's interest and the slightly more contemporary MySpace domains we used to pour all our social details into before Facebook made it apparent how foolish an idea that was - the latter is felt strongest in how every page has an integrated music file that auto-plays the moment you log in (more on the game's great soundtrack later, but it's almost worth looking up completely devoid of context). I'll have to admit to not being a huge part of the homegrown internet culture this game is steeped in while it was still active, though I was certainly a visitor to many such pages (mostly for video game codes and, later, edgy internet humor and scrappy Flash cartoons) so there was some small wave of nostalgia in seeing that '90s-ass web design on every page. Beyond these moderation tasks Hypnospace has something of a multi-part story arc behind it also, one that makes itself known after a few assignments and continues to be a growing, ominous presence throughout the remainder. It's not necessarily a game that requires you to be all up on your HTML, VRML, and ActionScript, though some basic web-design knowhow goes a long way. Upon completing the assignments that Merchantsoft - the developers of the hardware and of Hypnospace itself - sends the player's way, they'll get harder assignments that require a little more digging and investigative work. The player is a community member that has recently volunteered to be an Enforcer - a moderator that essentially performs hard graft for free, but what else is new - whose task it is to scour the various webzones and dark web pockets to find undesirable materials, ranging from harassment and copyright infringement to malicious software. Tendershoot's Hypnospace Outlaw is a game set at the end of the last millennium on an internet browser that operates while the user is asleep via a special headset. That's right, I played that Cursed GeoCities game finally.
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