Bubble

Original dream dated 01/21/2006:

So I had a dream... something about giraffes... I don't really remember. Or video games. Giraffes in video games? I know it was really weird, but I didn't write it down right away, I just though "Hey, that's a weird dream, even for me". Usually if I forget what a dream was, and I just sort of think about trying to remember it for a while, the memory will come back to me later (usually at an odd/inconvenient time). Something about World of Warcraft, with giraffes, maybe it's that the new race was a giraffe, I don't know.

LATER EDIT:
Ok, I finally remembered my dream, and it had nothing to do with giraffes.

I dreamed that I was playing this video game based off of "Inspector Gadget". It wasn't an MMORPG but it had social elements (somehow?). Anyway, it was a VR game for a full virtual reality system that had just debuted, and in the dream, I was one of the main people who developed it. It was REALLY good game, too, not lame like a lot of games based off of animated series' are. Good graphics and special effects, kickass soundtrack, and the sheer gameplay itself was awesome.

I was basically playtesting the game I helped create in the dream, the particular level I was in involved chasing this one badguy down mineshafts, he kept using explosives on me, it was pissing me off. You didn't play as Gadget, but switched between Penny or Brain. You generally didn't get to choose whom you would be playing as, it depended on what point in the story you were at. In this case, the story was forcing you to play Brain at this point in the game. I think that in this level the Chief was hidden inside of a barrel of explosives (TNT?).
Basically, you (Brain) were following Gadget, who was chasing the bad guy, and your main objective was to keep Gadget from getting killed by all of the explosives, collapsing mineshafts, falling rocks, and machinery. It was a very tough level - one of the toughest.

Basically, how 'levels' were completed was, each level had Objectives. As you fulfilled them, your Objective bar lit up and filled. You had to fulfill all of the Objectives to pass the mission. Once you'd fulfilled all of the Objectives for that stage in the mission, the difficulty level went up, and you got another Objective bar. Your objectives changed depending on what you did and what happened, so you might wind up with different objectives every time you played a level. I dunno, it was a system that made sense in my dream... in any case, I had fulfilled objective bar #1, which had been hard as fuck to begin with, and bar #2 was pretty insanely difficult. You could technically beat the level if you fulfilled only the objectives in the first objective bar, but you wouldn't get the best outcome once you had completed it. If you managed to fulfill all of the objectives in objective bar #3, you got the best possible outcome for the mission/level. So basically, objective bar #1 was Necessary, bar #2 was second priorities, bar #3 was going above and beyond what you technically "needed" to do. i.e. bar #1 would be preventing Gadget from generally being blown to bits, bar #2 would be actually harming the badguy he was chasing, bar #3 would be collapsing the mine shaft on top of the bad guy.

Most of the levels revolved around preventing Gadget from killing himself, or else playing as Penny and sneaking around/hacking into computer systems. So the Brain levels were puzzle levels, and the Penny levels were sneak/recon levels, although they revolved as much around not being seen by Gadget as not being seen by the enemies. And of course, what you did as one character affected your next mission as the other character.

All in all, not a bad dream. I think the giraffes idea came from Gadget having a stretchy neck... who knows?