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Classic BBS 'Door Games' Reborn
digirave writes "Most multiplayer strategy/RPG 'door games' didn't survive the change from the BBS scene to the Internet. The few that did mostly stayed dialup and telnet only. Here are three BBS door games that were quite popular at the time, remade as open-source games for the Web using PHP and MySQL. First of all, there's the Tradewars 2002-inspired game Blacknova, and secondly the LORD (Legend Of The Red Dragon) remake, Legend Of The Green Dragon. Finally, there's a game similar to Solar Realms Elite, QM Promisance, which itself is a modified version of the original Promisance source."
Could anyone give a comparison between Tradewars 2002 and Seth Able's less known great door game Planets: The Exploration of Space (or TEOS). I've never played Tradewars and Blacknova traders seemed a little... complicated last time I tried it. I'd really like to relive some of those memories but Blacknova just didn't seem as good for me with a brief attempt at playing it.
;)
I'd like to see something else than web-based, maybe something like freeciv with separate server and client so we could get cool graphical clients and ones that would look like the old text-based door games. One of the coolest things was the real-time interaction with players simultaneously online and that doesn't work well in a web-based version. Even just a remake that'd work like a mud on the net would be great.
Oh well, maybe I'll just need to use lynx to play.
Anyone here ever play Lords of Cyberspace? If I recall correctly, it was only available for MajorBBS/WorldNet systems, and so I have found very few BBSs that still carry it (one, in fact, but it is extremely lagged).
It was a simple door game, with a small 30x10 text window in the upper left that you navigated around, and some stats on the right. Your mission was to hack as many systems as possible, get your level up to 30, and find the ?three? keys to let you try to get into Valhalla and destroy the Divine Document. You get money and experience through hacking into systems, destroying programs, selling/destroying sensitive documents, and going on special hacking missions. It was kind of a Gibson novel meets a text MUD.
I would love to see this game revived, and I have even managed to find a demo copy floating around the internet, but I have never been able to find the company or the author of it. It was distributed by Adept Communications, and made by Muinet. I believe they also created a game called Sword of Chaos, but I never played it.
It always sucked to find your fighters destroyed, your planetary defenses overrun, and someone squatting on your planet.
...especially when that someone was supposed to be an ally. Not that I didn't do the same thing. Always fun to build up positive karma and then burn it on betraying everyone. Maybe slashdot should base their karma on the tradewars system. Keep trolling and end up with interesting ranks like "master troll" or something like that... =)