Question of the Week: BBS Door Game Memories

[Blackwolf]

Didn't realize I forgot to post it here...

...A new portion of the show will ask a question of its listeners about a memory or an opinion. This week, we delve back into the early days of online gaming.

Do you have any memories of playing BBS Door Games (such as Tradewars and Legend of the Red Dragon) and do you still play any via telnet today?

You can either email them to me at blackwolf@allgames.com or leave a voicemail on our Skypeline at bobbyblackwolfshow. Or you can post them in this thread.

Responses will be read (or played) on the September 18th show. Selected responses will also receive a free activation key courtesy of Funcom (http://www.funcom.com/) to download the basic free Anarchy Online (http://www.anarchyonline.com/) client as well as it's award winning expansions Shadowlands and Alien Invasion, 30 days free, and the preorder bonus "leet".

[Arandar]

Does that include Java and Browser based games as well? Or is it just telnet, even though its just about the same.

If it does include those though then I play/used to play a ton of them. First I started off with what used to be Monarchy which is now changed to Canon from Evernight Games. I also played Netropolis. And really fun back in the day was Vagabond's Quest. And Dragon Court. There were some others, but I lost interest in them so those four are/were my main ones.

Recently I have started playing Adventure Quest which I found from the advertisement off of this site. And I just tried to sign up for Star Wars Combine, but apparently they think MSN isn't a pay email address, so I have to sort that out first.

BTW, if you need/want URLs to these then just let me know.

[Burr]

I have a question. Does anyone else remember the graphical version of LORD? It used some special BBS client software I believe. It was pretty neat for the time, but now I only vaguely remember it. Anyway I managed to slay the dragon once but that was in the dying days of the BBS when nobody else seemed to be playing any more (which also made it easy to kill them and take all their stuff, LOL). It was cool to finally see what happened though instead of always getting beaten to the end. I played some TradeWars but never long enough to really make any progress. Another door game I liked to play I think was called MechWar. It was pretty detailed and had some of the best ANSI graphics/interface I have ever seen. Still LORD was the real standard setter. I remember when they added inter-BBS capability along with all the other expansions in features and gameplay. Man that was when I really started to realize the potential of these multiplayer RPGs.

[Blackwolf]

BBS's were generally text only. (Graphics, except for what I detail in the next paragraph, were made from colored text.) Java and Browser based games are NOT BBS door games in terms of what I'm asking.

Burr, I BELIEVE you're thinking of RIPscript. It was a vector-based graphical language that was introduced near the end of the BBS days. Hell, I used to do RIPscript graphics back in the day. They allowed for hotspots (like Flash) to have graphical menus and such that you could use your mouse on. And I do remember LORD coming out with a RIPscript version (instead of ANSI.)

[Burr]

Yeah! RIPscript! I remember now.. I was amazed they were even able to do that to begin with. The ANSI version was still much easier and faster to play though.

[Arandar]

Do you have any links to games that are still running to give an example then? I think I might know what you are talking about since you said they are script only, but I just want to make sure. But I imagine you mean just script like if you want to move North you type in move North, or something to that effect, instead of hitting an up arrow in a Browser based game.

[Blackwolf]

Oops, I didn't link to them in the forum post. My bad.

Legend of the Red Dragon (http://lord.mpcode.com/)
Tradewars (http://www.eisonline.com/tradewars/)

EDITED TO ADD: And Arandar, just to make it clear, I am not looking for JAVA or browser based game stories in this thread because they were not played on BBS's, which is what I was looking for. To make an analogy with console gaming terms, if I was asking for people's favorite SNES games, you're listing for me GBA games you enjoy and are saying they're the "same thing" because the graphics and the gameplay are similar.

I'll have less-complicated questions of the week in the future.