Remember when

[Dragonlady]

Ahh, got to share this. If you don't want to watch it all, go to 1:30 when he goes on to the text adventures. It's hilarious!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oe3ZSMz ... re=related

Get ye flask!

Now that was funny! The whole thing.

[Jude]

Arrgh, I hated those text adventure games! I used to throw the key in the pond and quit! I used to play pretty cool RPGs and strategy games on the mainframes at college (I think the computer club hackers used to put them on). Anyone remember when your character was a D and the monsters were Xs, and you could get treasures which were other letters, and the map was made of dashes and slashes? Technically, I guess they were text-based games, but the text was used to create the game area and characters/monsters. I think I ruined my eyes with the green on black!

Jude

[realmzmaster]

Jude,

What font color are you using? I see green on light blue and not very well! You are almost unreadable!

[Jude]

Jude,

What font color are you using? I see green on light blue and not very well! You are almost unreadable!

Sorry, I was trying to be clever by making it look like the text on the old mainframe monitors, green on black, but then there was a problem where the boards changed color (now fixed) due to BW trying to give us the OPTION to change board colors. Anyway, I fixed it so it should be readable, now.

Jude

[realmzmaster]

Now I can read it Jude! The original Rogue was pure ASCII. The father of NetHack and other roguelikes!

The problem with most text adventures was finding the proper word combinations that the program understood to get it to do what you wanted. Usually it was a two word combination. Infocom expand upon the number of words that you could use to say what you wanted to do. You could imagine in your head what you wanted to do but getting the right combination of words was almost as challenging as the adventure!

[Randomizer]

I played the father of all text games, Adventure in the Clossal Cave, on a Digital Equipment Corp. main frame in college. Then there was on the University of Illinois' PLATO system, Avatar that is now out as Mordor and/or Demise.

I still spent hours playing Eamon and Ultima III on an Apple II+.

[realmzmaster]

Randomizer,

Did you go to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign? I was there between 1976 and 1982. I remember PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operation) . Funny, I was there for six years and never played a computer game on their machines. I wrote a lot of programs in Fortran, Basic and COBOL COBOL was and is a very unforgiving language. (How dare you miss that period!).

[Randomizer]

No, the University of Arizona had a link to the network. One of the students that wrote teaching lessons used his accounts so he could have some friends to run with him while he built up his characters.

Ah, the good old days when you had to understand how to program yourself. I had to write mostly in FORTRAN and learn on my own COBOL and assembly languages.

[Zorlac]

The only RPG I can remember playing on cassette tape was Telengard. I'd go to a buddy's house and we'd spend all night playing that game.

I can remember more than a few times, we accidently overwrote our characters on the cassette. This would lead to a lot of four letter words.

Ahh, the memories...

[5thElement]

I first started with a C64 and its cassette drive. I remember waiting for ages for a game to load, hoping against hope to see a start screen after the load screen (if there even was one), only to be greeted with a clank as the tape player stopped when the cassette had run till the end and the game had failed to start. Okay, sigh, start over. Sometimes it took 3 or 4 tries before it worked and I got to play the game. Saving? Uhh, don't want to go there. Writing down tape tracker numbers and such. Ouch. Heh. You can imagine my joy, when I finally got a floppy drive!

I had a Vic20 and a C64 with a cassette drive. What a pain they were. Saving was the worst, ugg. Thanks for the memories.

[Mongolian]

my fav fav fav game was a board game: Talisman. Then, last year I bought a new version of it. Really a disapointment to see a PG version graphics version of it. And overall just seemed like a PG version.