Gaming What was the last videogame you beat?

I think people who play pickleball should incorporate a Super Breakout mode into the match, where one or both players have to periodically switch out their pickleball paddles for table tennis paddles.

 

Twin Mirror
This game is from the creators of the Life is Strange series which I just love, so when I saw it on offer I instantly picked it up. To be fair, I hadn’t even realised this game existed until I saw it in the sale The game is very much like LiS in a sense where you make choices which bare some impact on the story progression but like most path splitting games, these major choices are left to the very end. It was a fun experience, and a twist I had not guessed, so overall a good game. The only downside, like with the game Virginia, the chapter select is trash! You select a chapter to get the missing momentos or trophy, and you have to play through the whole game from there, so it is pretty pointless! My final verdict is that the game itself is good, not up there with LiS, and if you can get it on offer, definitely give it a try!

 

Dreamed I beat Life Force (Salamander) on the NES console, but alas, it turned into a nightmare IRL.

 

"X-Men" arcade, MK11 and CV:SOTN. Two of which are on the Super Console X Pro.

 

Rogue1-and-a-half Plays Through the History of Video Games



Eamon (1980) – Donald Brown

*Okay, so there’s a lot to talk about with this, even before we get to the gameplay. This is going to be a long post. So, you know, settle in, grab some snacks, skip it entirely, you know, whatever feels right.

*So, Eamon is . . . well, okay, so, it’s a text adventure game created by Donald Brown, a computer programmer who wanted to create a game for the Apple II that would also function as a kind of gaming network and game creation tool.

*I’m going to assume you know how text games work. If you don’t, check out the image above. It’s basically the computer telling you a story and you have the chance to interact with the characters in the stories, the environments, etc. I’m going to refer to each of these stories as an “adventure” as we go forward. We’ll get into the actual gameplay here in a bit, but just now when I start giving you numbers about how many adventures there are, each adventure is a self-contained narrative story where you interact with characters, enemies, objects, environments, etc. An interactive short story, if you will. Like The Oregon Trail itself would fit into Eamon as one adventure, if you know what I mean. This is just to give you a real idea of the scale of this game.

*So, Eamon was a completely non-commercial effort. Brown programmed the basic set-up for the game, a Main Hall area where the player can create a character, and then a basic tutorial adventure. He then released this into the Apple II community with a note that he encouraged distribution of the software and that he wanted other people to create their own adventures for Eamon using the software and distribute those to create a massive game world created by the players. He published technical information to help people understand how to create their own adventures.

*It’s honestly pretty visionary for 1980, right? And it seems to foreshadow so many things about the way users interact with games now. I mean, we’re essentially talking about the birth of video game expansions. DLC, you know? And crowd-sourcing, of course.

*And in what seems almost like a wish-fulfillment fantasy adventure of its own, Eamon takes off. By the end of 1980, there were twelve Eamon adventures, half of them written by Brown. By the end of 1985, there were 114 Eamon adventures being distributed freely on disk among the game’s community. At that point, Brown had written four more, bringing his total to ten. The other 104 adventures were the fulfillment of Brown’s dream, free-standing adventures that took place in the fantasy realm of Eamon, created by the players, all distributed for free. Hours and hours and hours of free content.

*Some of these were fairly simple adventures. Others were complex enough that they required two or even three disks to contain the entire game.

*I mean, disks weren’t what they are now, but you get the drift.

*Things would slow down, of course, as the years passed, but Eamon has been around now for over forty years and the last official count of adventures stands at 278. The most recent adventure is Escape from Mt. Moon, created by Logan Blizzard. It was released . . . six months ago.

*No, I’m dead serious. November of 2021. Donald Brown could have never even imagined. Forty-one years later, the adventures are still happening.

*If you’re interested, here’s the running list being maintained over at the, still very active, Eamon Wiki. It notes that the 279th adventure is currently being written.

*So, here’s where I really blow your mind and you’re going to find that list of adventures handy.

*It’s often a struggle to find a way to play the games on this list, mainly because I want to play them in something approximating the original experience I would have had if I’d been playing the game upon release. You know, I don’t want to play some new spiffy graphics-laden version of The Oregon Trail. I want to play that very first text game, as close as I can come to that 1971 version that was so purely text that it didn’t even have a monitor, just a printer.

*Of course, that isn’t always easy, or even possible at all, to do. I ended up playing the 1975 version of The Oregon Trail because that 1971 version has been totally lost. Likewise, I couldn’t find an arcade cabinet of Boot Hill, so I played a version on my computer that was, at best, only an approximation, lacking in both the graphical and mechanical innovations of the original.

*Finding the original Eamon isn’t exactly something that I could pull off. But a very close experience to that original Eamon is Eamon Deluxe from 1988. It has some graphics at the beginning and the Main Hall area is rendered graphically. But in Eamon Deluxe you can load those original Eamon adventures and those play exactly as they originally did, as text stories that you interact with.

*You can find Eamon Deluxe for free on the Internet Archive.

*Here’s what I recommend you do. Dive the **** in.

*It’s pretty self-explanatory to get you through those first few text screens. Once in the Main Hall, you can move around and buy weapons, armor, skills in magic, etc. All you have to do to access the adventures is go to the top of the main hall and leave. It’s going to bring up a prompt that will allow you to go on an Adventure. Selecting that option will open up a screen with many sets of adventures, grouped by author and such. You can go into the Donald Brown menu, for instance, and access all of the adventures he created. Those adventures play in Eamon Deluxe essentially the same way they would have played in the original Eamon.

*Forty-two years later, the dream of hours upon hours of COMPLETELY FREE adventures is still a reality.

*I recommend playing a couple, just for the fun and the history of it. It’s an interesting experience. Which we’ll now get into my experiences. The Beginners Adventures menu is a good place to start. Start, in fact, with The Beginner’s Cave. It’s literally exactly where you would have started sitting at your Apple II in 1980.

*Anyway, let’s get to my walkthrough of the game. This is the first story-heavy game we’ve played on this journey. You may recall I did a special “leap ahead” edition of one of these posts a while back on the first Silent Hill, so I’ll be doing this review the same way I did that one, which is to say giving a basic walkthrough of the entire story of the game.

*So, yes, I did decide to play through all 278 of the existing adventures.

*Haha, just kidding, that would be completely insane. Does kinda sound like something I’d do though, doesn’t it?

*So, how did I decide what to play here? Well, I went very specifically with the details on the list entry: Eamon by Donald Brown from 1980. So I decided to play through only the adventures available the year of the game’s launch, 1980, and only the adventures written by Brown himself.

*And, yes, even as early as 1980, basically immediately upon the game’s release, other people were writing adventures. Jim Jacobson wrote a whopping five adventures by the end of 1980 and Red Farnum and David Cook both wrote one adventure.

*So, what that works out to is six adventures by Donald Brown that were available to play in 1980. So, we’ll go through those in turn.

*The first, The Beginner’s Cave, is essentially a quasi-tutorial and a grinding location of sorts. You can return to this adventure whenever you want and play through it again in order to get loot fairly easily and quickly.

*Well, I suppose the first thing to note is the character creation. You create a character with a name and you get a set of stats related to combat, charisma, magic, etc. Those stats can be increased by experience and also by essentially buying experience by going to the Main Hall and buying “practice” rounds at a combat training booth and a magic booth. The Main Hall also features a place to buy and upgrade weapons, buy and upgrade magic spells, a bank to place your money and a casino where you can gamble. Probably a couple of other things too.

*The bank is pretty important. If your character dies in an adventure, he or she isn’t actually dead. You can immediately play again or go back to the Main Hall. But you do lose loot that you have with you when you die. So, always deposit your money in the bank between adventures; that way the only loot you lose should you die is the loot you picked up in that adventure.

*Anyway, the notion of actually having a character with stats that you can upgrade and an inventory of items you can upgrade . . . these are huge steps forwards for gaming obviously.

*I feel like I should say at this point that it’s starting to get kind of muddy in terms of who should get credit for being the “first” at some new gaming innovation. This list I’m using is arranged chronologically by year, but within each year, the games are arranged alphabetically, not by when they were released in the year.

*So, in 1980, you really have four games come out that kind of start to really define the RPG. You’ve got Eamon, MUD, Rogue & Zork. They all kind of have different focuses (foci?) and some of them are clearly more in one direction than the other in terms of the different RPG elements. But they’re all kind of influencing each other to some degree.

*Because, for one thing, a lot of these games had been percolating off the market for a while. Zork, for instance, was out there as early as 1978 in a playable, but fragmentary form. Likewise, the first two adventures of Eamon were being played by industry people in 1979. And MUD, well, MUD had been accessible on the closed intranet of Essex University since 1978 as well; 1980 is when the game went live on the ARPANET, the internet of the time.

*So, I think in calendar terms of 1980, Eamon went live earlier in 1980 than Zork I did; but Donald Brown had played the original version of Zork in 1978 and openly talked it about as an influence on Eamon.

*So, anyway, as we move into the time period when you’re getting a lot of games, and a lot of them very innovative, dropping in the space of a single calendar year, it’s getting harder and harder to draw clean lines in the way that you could draw a line between, for instance, Space Invaders in 1978 and Galaxian in 1979. The industry itself is just growing or it might be even more accurate to say that the art form of video games is growing and as the 80s begin, we’re looking at more and more of a stew of games, all taking influences from each other and engaging in parallel thinking and such.

*So, anyway, all this is just to say that I don’t know that I can say for sure that Eamon is the first game to use some of these proto-RPG elements, like character stats and leveling up objects. Because, of course, MUD existed in more than one version before 1980 as well, so I don’t know in what versions those things started showing up there. Anyway, you get what I’m saying.

*Anyway, at least in terms of our journey here, Eamon is the first time we’re encountering a lot of the things that are going to become foundational elements of the RPG genre.

*Okay, so The Beginner’s Cave. The in-game premise is that the local warlord has the cave stocked with easily defeatable foes and various treasures in order for the local knights and warriors to gain experience in combat.

*Here, by the way, is a map of The Beginner’s Cave. Every adventure now has a map like this; originally, of course, they didn’t. You just navigate by the text telling you, for instance, “You’re in a tunnel running from north to south; on each side of the tunnel is a door leading to a room (N/S/E/W).” And then you pick a direction. Players of the game have now created these maps for basically all of the adventures, I think.



*In the cave, you will meet various characters. An old hermit with a vial of healing potion that you can take. A dude named Heinrich that you can smile at and he will either attack you, ignore or come with you to explore the rest of the cave, depending, I guess, on your charisma. I don’t know. I got different reactions from him every time I played the cave.

*You also encounter a classic monster in one of the rooms, a Mimic. It appears to be a treasure chest when you enter the room, but when you attempt to open it, it reveals its true form and attacks you.

*Later, you’ll run into a pirate with some jewels and a magical sword named Trollsfire which you get to take and use on your other adventures.

*Anyway, the cave just kind of introduces the mechanics of moving around the world and some pretty easy combat with rats and, you know, the pirate and the Mimic.

*The commands you can use are your basic text game commands: GO, USE, READ, LOOK, TALK, FIGHT, HEAL, etc. There’s a lot of them. You know, like SMILE. That’s not one it seems like is standard for every text game.

*If you’ve ever played a text game, you know, they all play more or less the same.

*Second adventure is The Lair of the Minotaur.

*Just for reference, here’s the map for this one.



*As you can see, things get very complex in some of these. And, remember, this is only the second adventure of Eamon ever, so, man, I wonder how crazy some of the later ones are.

*Like the original Eamon disk that Donald Brown and his friends distributed contained the Main Hall, The Beginner’s Cave and The Lair of the Minotaur. Later adventures would require two or even three disks for one adventure.

*Anyway, as The Lair of the Minotaur begins, the player is on the way to meet his or her significant other, Larcenous Lil or Slippery Sven, depending on the gender of your character. So, it was Lil for me, so that’s what I’ll use to refer to that character.

*It seems Lil has been captured by a guy who lives in a local castle. Upon trying to enter the castle yourself, you find yourself dropping through a trap door and with no way to get back up, you have to go deeper into the tunnels under the castle.

*Anyway, this one features a section where you ride a boat down a river and you can drown if you don’t get off in time. There are also a ton of enemies in this one: a skeleton, a black knight, a bunny, the high priest of a Minotaur worshiping cult, a blacksmith and, eventually, the Minotaur himself. Survive all that and you’ll come out with a lot of loot: a magical bag that allows you to carry very heavy things, a golden anvil (see above bag for how exactly you carry an anvil made of gold), the Minotaur’s battle-ax and, of course, Larcenous Lil, safe and sound.

*You will also meet a “wandering minstrel eye,” which is a giant floating eye-ball that sings songs. I was pretty flabbergasted by this, honestly.

*Anyway, this is a good time to talk about the fact that this game’s tone is ultimately just really silly, very comedic and very heavily referential. Like the bunny you fight in this adventure is obviously the bunny from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And, though I didn’t get this at the time, the “wandering minstrel eye,” is a joke based on the Gilbert & Sullivan song “A Wandering Minstrel I.”

*I’ll talk a bit more about this in a later adventure as well, but the jokey tone and the pop-culture references make this game feel, in some ways, like kind of modern. Also, I have to say . . . kind of cringe. More on that later.

*Combat is definitely harder in this adventure than the first one. The enemies are stronger and none of them are really one-hit kills, the way just about everybody was in The Beginner’s Cave.

*The combat is turn based. You type in “attack rat” or whatever and then the game tells you if you did a glancing blow or a direct hit or just missed entirely and then the rat attacks you and the game tells you if it hit or didn’t.

*One thing I really like that this game does is that after every “hit” in combat, it tells you the overall state of the character that just got hit. So, it might say something like, “A direct hit! The rat is really hurting” or “the rat is nearly dead” or something like that. The characters here don’t have a health bar you can see, so this is kind of the text based version of a health bar. I liked it.

*The third & fourth adventures for Eamon were created by Jim Jacobson and Red Farnum: The Cave of the Mind & The Zyphur Riverventure.

*As portmanteaus go . . . it’s not a good one.

*Anyway, we’ll skip those and move on to the fifth adventure, Donald Brown’s third, Castle of Doom.

*Castle of Doom is kind of back to the Beginner’s Cave mode as far as not having really any story at all. The premise is that these two kindly old ladies have a Castle of Doom where they keep a bunch of monsters and treasure just so warriors can come and have fun exploring.

*Anyway, as one explores the Castle of Doom, one encounters a lot of different enemies, a Mimic, like from the first adventure, a Succubus, a Mummy, a “carrion crawler,” a tiger, two harpies, a Vampire, a Sphinx . . .

*The fact that you don’t need character models in a text game really frees a creator up in terms of enemy variety.

*If you’re keeping up with annoying pop culture references, I should mention that at the beginning of the story, you encounter three dwarves named Huey, Dewey & Louie. You’ll also encounter a guy wielding a sword named “Sting.”

*That one’s a reference to The Hobbit, not the musical artist.

*They will accompany you on your adventure and they’re a big help in combat, of course. They all get a turn in every round of combat.

*In one room, you find an emerald in a stand. It’s labeled “Brown Travel Agency.” When you touch it, it transports you into an underground dungeon with more enemies and treasure. If you think an emerald labeled Brown Travel Agency is stupid, just wait.

*The way you get back to the castle from the underground dungeon is by finding an Oscar for Special Effects and touching it.

*How does one even come up with something that stupid?

*So, there’s something kind of weird going on with this game.

*It is, so far, the game most interested in actual world-building. You know, it has actual lore and it’s built to continually be expanded. It is the game that we’ve encountered thus far that is the most interested in creating a fully-realized world and immersing the player in it.

*It is also constantly breaking the fourth wall and winking at the player with immersion-breaking pop culture jokes.

*I find the push and pull of these two impulses kind of fascinating. It wants to both create a richly detailed and immersive world and also pull you out of it at every turn. It’ll give you a detailed description of an environment with hidden riches and details to explore and discover and then send Donald Duck’s nephews along with you. It’s constantly taking its worldbuilding very seriously and then undercutting it completely.

*I said it was kind of fascinating and it kind of is, if you’re doing like a critical analysis of the game. In terms of actually playing the game, I didn’t like it at all.

*This neatly segues us right into Brown’s fourth adventure, The Death Star.

*Allow me to just quote directly from the opening of this adventure: “As you left the Main Hall, you suddenly felt a queer wrench in your stomach, as if you had been turned inside-out, then right again. When things became clear again, you found yourself at the helm of a spaceship! You realize you have gone through a reality shift!”

*To be specific, you are at the helm of the Millennium Falcon, currently trapped on the Death Star. Armed with only “your father’s light sabre,” you must find a way to turn off the tractor beam and escape.

*That’s right, it is, in 1980, before Empire Strikes Back has even come out, the very first video game adaptation of Star Wars.

*Legal only because this game was never sold, I suppose.

*You can go for the tractor beam objective only and escape just fine to end the adventure. You can also choose to try to rescue Princess Leia, Artoo, Threepio & Chewbacca, though the latter is never called by name and only described as “A Wookiee.”

*Not sure why they pulled that punch. I don’t think you, the player, are ever referred to as Luke Skywalker either.

*The enemies are stormtroopers who are extremely easy kills.

*I’ll tell you who isn’t an easy kill though: Darth Vader himself! Armed with a “dark sabre,” (somewhere a youthful Kevin J. Anderson gets a really bad idea!), he’s pretty well just going to kill you instantly if you run into him.

*I think he’s genuinely randomized. Like I don’t know exactly how text games like this work, but he isn’t just always in the same place or anything.

*Once you’ve rescued the prisoners, they will help in combat, which leads to the game saying things like, “Threepio claws at a stormtrooper!”

*Oh, this adventure also features sound effects for the blaster shots and the light saber and the ship taking off. They’re just random computer bleeps, not the actual sound effects from the movie, of course.

*I will say that I wasn’t aware that my speakers were cranked pretty high while I was playing this game, because, you know, text game. So it just about gave me a heart attack when the first sound effect hit.

*There’s a kind of cool thing where you can actually use a TIE Fighter to escape without having to turn off the tractor beam . . . but then the game tells you that you died because you were killed by the Rebels who were attacking the Death Star.

*If you disable the tractor beam, you can get away in the Falcon, with or without Leia, the droids and Chewbacca; the adventure ends as you go through another “reality shift” and are relieved to get back to a world with “simple things like dragons and ogres.”

*Anyway, there it is. Star Wars has entered the world of video games. Predictably, it’s awful.

*The next two adventures for Eamon were by Jim Jacobson, The Devil’s Tomb & The Abductor’s Quarters. SKIP.

*Donald Brown’s fifth adventure is Assault on the Clone Master. In this one, you find yourself drafted into service by some rebels who are attempting to overthrow the Clone Master and destroy his Clonatorium. As you sneak into the Clone Master’s fortress, you are accompanied by three of the rebels, Natty of Nickleton, Nevil the Gnasher and Norwood the Nervous.

*Jesus Christ, this is stupid.

*Anyway, you kill enemies, get weapons, get loot, etc.

*Worth mentioning is that if you find the Clone Master’s bedroom you will be able to steal his Apple II computer.

*So, I know that in 2022, we’re all kind of pissed off about this whole thing with games that are going to start adding in-game ads. Let’s just hope as we move into this brave new world of marketing that the advertisements are somewhat more subtle than this one.

*Anyway, I guess you’re in some kind of space-time rift in this one too because when you kill the Clone Master you’ll be able to take his “gun,” which is a strange object that you don’t entirely understand. The rebels then show you where the temporal rift is that will allow you to get back to your own Eamon universe.

*I suppose this might make the Apple II appearing in this adventure make a little more sense except this presumably takes place far in the future since humanity has perfected cloning. Would the guy who perfected cloning still be using an Apple II?

*The next adventure is provided by David Cook; it’s called The Magic Kingdom, but it’s not about Disney World.

*Hang on, actually, let me check, who ******* knows, it might actually be about Disney World.

*Okay, no, The Magic Kingdom actually takes place in Magic Kingdom State Park which is *checks notes* yes, actually stupider than if it had been in Disney World.

*All right, let’s get to Donald Brown’s sixth & final adventure of 1980, The Tomb of Molinar. After this one, we’ll be mercifully moving on from this game.

*So, as The Tomb of Molinar begins, you are given a special mission by the King. Long ago, there lived a wise leader named Molinar; when he grew weary of his long life, he prepared a special tomb for himself where he could sleep until such time as he might be needed again. Now, some vaguely defined enemy has conjured an even more vaguely defined evil and the only way for Eamon to survive is for Molinar to be roused from his deathly slumber.

*There’s a magic mirror that has trapped a previous wanderer in it; you can free him by destroying the mirror. If you try to take the mirror, you will be pulled into it and trapped yourself. There’s a large underground area that you can find with a hidden lever. You’ll find an elderly woman named Lycernia chained up there; if you free her, she will instantly become young and beautiful and come with you on the rest of your adventure.

*I’m going to come back to something about this lower area in my wrap up because it’s key to why I disliked this game so much.

*It’s a thing with a dragon. Remind me about it.

*It’s . . . literally impossible for you to do that.

*You will encounter a chained up wizard named Monimar that you can free, if you’re a ******* idiot and have forgotten the name of the adventure you’re playing.

*Anyway, pressing on through the tomb, you encounter a giant made of stone. I couldn’t get past this guy.

*None of my weapons were powerful enough to do much damage at all, not even the “gun” that I got from the Clone Master. When I would hit him, it would tell me that he was barely scratched. And then like two hits from the guardian and I was dead. Your friend from the mirror and Lycernia are basically meat shield at this point, but even with the guardian fighting them first, I really couldn’t deal any damage at all.

*So, after a couple of runs where I tried a couple of different weapons on the guy, I gave up and so The Tomb of Molinar remains uncompleted by me.

*The stone guardian is the last enemy in the adventure. If you kill him, apparently you find Molinar in the room right behind him and you wake him up. If you freed Monimar earlier, Molinar will instantly kill him and tell you that he was one of the most evil wizards who has ever lived. He also says that he won’t tell anyone you stupidly released him.

*Stand up guy, Molinar.

*Apparently, if you free Monimar and leave with him instead of progressing further and finding Molinar, the game would tell you that the world of Eamon ended and then it would erase the adventure entirely from the disk. That’s pretty cool.

*Anyway, that’s it for the six adventures Donald Brown released for Eamon in 1980, so that’ll be that.

*I didn’t enjoy this game very much.

*It’s not that I dislike the text adventure style of game. I played a game just last year that had a lengthy section that was a retro take on the text adventure, Stories Untold. And I loved that game, particularly that section, which was able to create a real sense of suspense and terror. I find the reading/typing mechanic of text games to be enjoyable and often fun.

*So, I think my main problem here is honestly just that I didn’t find Brown’s voice at all appealing. Maybe, end of the day, it would have been instructive to play a couple of adventures written by somebody else to see if they were much different. From what I see online it seems that the Eamon style adventure often has the kind of meta-comedy that Brown’s adventures did. It makes sense that people would follow the template Brown laid down; obviously, if you fell in love with the game to the degree that you wanted to write an adventure for it, you would have had to fall in love with it by initially playing the Donald Brown adventures that I talked about in this post, so the majority of the Eamon adventures were almost certainly written by people who had the same sense of humor as Brown.

*I talked above about how I found the game’s dueling impulses (detailed and intricate world-building vs. immersion-breaking meta-comedy) really quite puzzling. It’s just strange to me that those are the two things in Eamon that we haven’t really seen before on this journey. To talk about what makes Eamon special, the “innovations” as it were, you have to talk about two things that don’t go together. At least in my opinion, they don’t.

*Let’s go back to the dragon in The Tomb of Molinar. He’s sitting on a massive pile of treasure (hmm, that’s probably a reference to something as well . . . but what? WHAT?), but when I attacked him, I did almost no damage and then he killed me with one hit. So, clearly, there’s something else to be done with the dragon.

*Before I encountered the dragon, I had found a net in another room in the underground section. On the net was written “DUM-DE-DUM-DUM.” I just, you know, took the net and didn’t even bother thinking about why it said that.

*The thought entered my head, “I wonder if I can use the net on the dragon.” And that’s when the penny dropped.

*Once upon a time, kids, there was a radio program that then became a television program that was one of the most iconic police procedurals of its time, a little show featuring Detective Joe Friday, called Dragnet. Jack Webb’s dry, affectless line deliveries became iconic, iconic enough that the show was ultimately spoofed in a movie from the 80s with Dan Ackroyd mimicking Webb’s bone-dry tones.

*One of the most iconic things about that show was its instantly memorable theme song.



*I mean, who remembers it now? That’s why I put the video there.

*You might notice a certain recurring motif in that theme song, a motif of four big brassy notes. A motif that might be rendered in text as “dum-de-dum-dum.”

*That’s right, those words are written on the net because this is a “dragon net.”

*YOU KNOW LIKE “DRAGNET.”

* . . .

* . . .

*Okay, well, hopefully that was enough a pause to allow you to compose yourself from that gut-buster. Oh my sides.

*Look, no offense, but that is the stupidest ******* thing I’ve ever heard.

*I literally face-palmed. I let out a heavy sigh and just put my face in my hands.

*Also, I’m just going to say that I feel like that joke was extremely creaky even in 1980. Dragnet started on TV in 1951. As they go, that one ain’t exactly on Pop Culture Reference’s cap the very button.

*Says the guy who just made a Hamlet joke.

*Anyway, I don’t know that joke just seemed to encapsulate everything annoying about the humor of Eamon. Labored, tired, incredibly stupid. Coming, as it did, in the final of the six adventures I was playing, it really seemed like . . . well, I just knew I was really glad I was going to get to leave the wonderful world of Eamon behind as soon as I finished that story.

*But, seriously, let’s talk about comedy.

*Comedy in video games, I mean. Are video games in some fundamental way just not suited to comedy? I think it’s a question worth asking. I mean, some genres are just better suited for the format than others. Horror, for instance, is particularly well-suited for video games, I think. Comedy, on the other hand . . .

*I mean, here’s a very simple and serious challenge: name a great comedy video-game. For real, can anybody come up with one? I can’t. I mean, the only things that come to mind are like Leisure Suit Larry which hardly seem like masterpieces to me, though, fine, to be fair, I haven’t played them, so maybe they’re great. I doubt it.

*And get outta here with your Jill sandwiches and your Spider-Man 3 clips. I mean intentionally funny. God knows there are a lot of unintentionally funny video games.

*So, then what’s a funny video game? Like not primarily a comedy, but a video game with a lot of humor? I mean, of necessity, there has to be a funniest video game I’ve ever played, right?

*Damned if I know what it’d be. Celeste had a couple of really big laughs (“I drink, mostly.”) Until Dawn and The Wolf Among Us both had witty characters given to saying witty things.

*Anyway, comedy in gaming; interesting topic. Someone’s probably written an essay out there somewhere. Perchance.

*And, look, there’s a lot of people out there who could hardly play Eamon for guffawing, I guess. Comedy is subjective.

*Anyway, look, I did have some fun with Eamon. And it’s a game that, due to its ready availability, I do recommend everyone spend at least a bit of time with.

*I mean, it’s literally a mouse-click away and you can play it right there in your browser. For historical reasons alone, I think it’s worth playing The Beginner’s Cave. And I’d recommend Castle of Doom. I think Castle of Doom is better than Lair of the Minotaur and it’s just full of all kinds of villains and interesting loot. It’s a fun map.

*But it just kind wore out its novelty after about three adventures and the constant silliness just wasn’t funny to me and was honestly just cringey most of the time. Like I was cringing a lot playing this game and not for the reasons some of these early games are cringey. Like bad graphics or bad controls . . . I mean, that’s just the limitations of technology, so you might cringe, but you forgive it. But this is a game entirely defined by its writing. And I just didn’t enjoy the voice of the main writer.

*If you’re reading this and you loved Eamon, please talk about it. Obviously, a lot of people loved the game back in the day. Heck, if you WROTE AN EAMON ADVENTURE please talk about that.

*I mean, the chances aren’t exactly good that anyone reading this wrote an adventure for Eamon, but the chances are probably better than if you were just in a crowd of random people in the real world, so I thought I’d ask.

*Anyway, Eamon. I’m glad I played it, though ultimately, I can’t really recommend it as anything other than historical experience. It was cool to experience and it was fun enough for about three adventures; then it kind of stopped being fun.

*Anyway, it is what it is. Mark Eamon off the list with a mixed, leaning negative review.

*Okay, so, next time we’re gonna get a little simpler again by hitting up the arcade for yet another Atari game: Missile Command!

 

Missile Command is one of my favorites on Atari.

 

My review of Missile Command will not be as negative as my review of Eamon.

 

Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok (2022). The latest expansion for the game, this one is themed around Norse mythology for its entire duration (expanding on two arcs from the base game that also explored Asgardian and Jotunheim). This one is Svartalfheim themed, with some interesting lore about dwarves under an invasion from Muspelheim. Dwarves vs Fire demons basically, it's a pretty cool setting realised very well. On the gameplay side, while the core loop of the game is still maddeningly simple, it's spiced up this time around with a couple of new powers that are really fun to mess around with. My favourite lets you turn into an eagle to zip around the map and reach new areas, but there's also some neat disguise powers, teleportation, and fire immunity. They really do a lot to make the stale loops more engaging to revisit. Because of the shakeups and the cool new setting it was probably my favourite of the Valhalla expansions, though I wish it had been a tad longer, and focused somewhat more on the story missions.

Flower (2009). A short and captivating delight, you just fly around opening flower petals through 6 brief levels. There's a lovely sense of pastoral nature being captured, helped immensely by the simple art design and the incredibly beautiful score by Vincent Diamante. The only downside is that playing the game requires tilting the PS remote via motion controls, which can be pretty floaty and imprecise. If it was controllable with a regular joystick it'd be a better overall experience. Still, even with the slight let-down of the controls, it's a lovely little game. Thatgamecompany seem to be masters of distilling plot and theme down to the barest elements while still telling moving narratives, as their later game Journey also proved.

 

You might want to take a look at both Abzu and The Pathless.

 

Already have played Abzu, twas enjoyable but not quite as grand as Journey or Flower

 

For me Journey suffered from poor signposting in level 3. First time around that killed the game, second time used a guide to get past it and, after that, it was all far more straight forward.

 

I've always remembered the initial trailer for Flower before it was released for the PS3.

 

Flower has to be up there as one of my all-time favourite games. It is such a calming and enjoyable experience, and whizzing around as gust of wind gaining petals is just so satisfying.

Kona
This game is weird! It is a story driven, survival, exploration and supernatural game, where you play as this guy called Carl who visits this town in Canada as a private investigator meeting up with a partner. It all goes terribly wrong and you are left exploring this barren town piecing together what happened prior to your visit. There are a lot of very fun aspects to the game, such as finding these treasure maps, building a jet ski, and just generally exploring all the empty buildings and finding out more about the townsfolk.The ending wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but was in no way disappointing!

 

Unravel Two
Played this game with a friend from work, it is a fun little puzzle plat-former, with some interesting mechanics. You play as two little yarn dudes, who are connected the whole time by their yarn. Initially I started playing with a keyboard…this is a no-no for sure! The controls are horrendous on keyboard, I just sucked and kept dying. It is much more enjoyable with an Xbox controller, and offers a less stressful experience xD The story isn’t really that prevalent, you watch it unfold in the background of the levels, in what I can only assume are memories. There are also these bonus levels which range in difficulty, we didn’t quite realise this, so attempted the hardest ones first, and were surprised when they took us quite sometime to get past! Great little game, with an emotional tale (despite it being a bit weak in places), and very fun puzzles!

 

So you watched the story of Unravel Two "unfold". No pun intended

I played either the original game or sequel as a demo awhile ago. Seems like a cute game, but at the time I was just invested in another major game like HZD or JFO, so I figuratively just put it on my radar for another time.

 

Lol, yes!

Definitely give it a try if you have time, especially if you have someone to play the second one with as it is very fun trying to work together!

 

You need to play Missile Command with the paddle controller.

 

Rogue1-and-a-half Plays Through the History of Video Games



Missile Command (1980) – Atari

*All right, here we go, on to the next game in this project. In this post, I’ll be talking about Missile Command, which came out in arcades in 1980 from Atari.

*It initially looks quite familiar. I honestly hadn’t really thought about how many video games followed this basic layout for some reason, but here’s another one that finds the player at the bottom of the screen, facing enemies approaching from the top of the screen. But despite that initial similarity to Space Invaders, I think this one does a few interesting things with the formula.

*This post may be structured a bit different. I’m going to jump right into gameplay and talk about the development and psychology of the game a little later.

*Anyway, the gameplay is pretty simple. You’ve got six cities at the bottom of the screen and three missile batteries. Using your missiles, you have to take out a hail of missiles raining down on your cities.

*What makes this one a little different from the others is that you don’t want to actually shoot to hit the missiles themselves, right? You move your crosshairs across the screen and hit a button based on which of the three missile batteries you want to fire. Then, when the missile reaches the spot your crosshairs were when you fired, it explodes. So you want to fire ahead of the missiles that you’re trying to take out and, ideally, you want to fire so that your missile explosions take out several enemy missiles. Because when your missiles explode, they create this widening ball of fire that takes out any missiles it touches.

*This is, I think, pretty accurate to how missile defense systems actually work. Or at least have worked in the past.

*This injects a level of strategy to the game. Like if you see a place where two enemy missiles are going to intersect, you want to try to put one of your missiles on that intersection point at the right time to get both of them with one shot.

*In later levels, you get to more and more things coming out on the screen, like airplanes flying over and such. It’s really satisfying to take out like three missiles and an airplane with one shot. Like watching the explosion expand and keep catching things. That’s really cool.

*One reason it’s important to take out enemy missiles in this way is because you are limited on the number of missiles you have. Each missile battery starts with a set number of missiles at the beginning of each level and if you run out, you’re just out.

*The game designers originally had this added mechanic of supply lines, so there would be railroads on the screen that you had to protect as well as the cities. As long as you kept the railroads from being destroyed your missiles would replenish, but if the supply lines were destroyed, then you’d be stuck with what you had.

*The designers eventually decided this was overly complicated and decided to just simplify it to you just having a set number of missiles.

*They do replenish between levels. I mean, this kind of makes the most sense to me. Like each level is one attack, so you probably have time to get more missiles between attacks, but you have to deal with each attack with what you have. You’re not going to be like getting more shipments of missiles in the thirty seconds of an attack.

*I should say at this point that I was not able to actually play this on an arcade machine. I’ve been extremely #blessed to be able to access a lot of these early arcade games on original or refurbished machines thanks to the Max Retropub and it’s cool-ass collection of arcade cabinets. But they didn’t have this one.

*So, as has happened in the past, I resorted the Atari Arcade app which allows you to play the arcade version of the game on the screen of your iPad. I was able to hook up a joystick to it, so I got something of the flavor of the game on an arcade machine, I suppose, but, you know, not ideal at all.

*It was also recommended that I play the Atari 2600 version with a paddle controller. Wasn’t able to do that either unfortunately.

*So, speaking mechanically, I had a little less fun with this one than I’ve had with some of the others along the way, but I think that’s in large part because of the fact that I had to play it in a kind of cobbled together fashion, attempting to simulate the experience of playing on an arcade cabinet.

*Not the game’s fault.

*Like early arcade games in general, there is no real “win” state here. The missiles just keep getting faster and faster with more and more extra enemies on screen until you lose.

*And when you lose, there’s this giant explosion sound and graphic and the words “The End” start flashing on the screen. It was kind of striking. I mean, “Game Over” is just the classic way these games end; the idea of an arcade game actually having an “ending” seemed kind of unique to me.

*So, I was going to make a joke about how that’s a statement of nihilism on the ultimate pointlessness of war.

*Turns out . . . that’s not even a joke. Let’s get into the history of this game and the mind of the game’s designer. There’s more going on here than I had ever really put together.

*Something I had never really put together was the fact that this game came out at the height of the Cold War and it is, ultimately, a much more realistic depiction of 1980s era combat than any other video game to this point. It is, essentially, a simulation of an ICBM attack.

*The lead game designer of Missile Command is a guy named Dave Theurer. He got tasked with the game by his boss with the simple premise of, well, the game: “You’ve got these missile trails coming in from the top and these bases at the bottom.” That was about the extent of his boss’s direction.

*Theurer was just finishing up work on a game called Four Player Soccer and he says that at the time he felt a thrill at the idea of Missile Command and felt like it was going to be a step forward for him as a game developer. And, boy, was he right.

*As Theurer started investigating the notion of ICBMs and how missile attacks and missile defense systems worked, the game started to take shape. And it was initially going to be a much more explicit depiction of the Cold War. The game was originally going to explicitly state that the missiles were being fired by the USSR and that the cities the player was defending were American cities.

*It got even more specific than that. The six cities the player would be protecting were, at one point in development, going to be labelled San Luis Obispo, San Diego, Eureka, Santa Barbara, San Francisco & Los Angeles.

*This is kind of mind-blowing to me. The notion here is that Missile Command would be specifically about protecting the California coastline from attack by the USSR.

*I mean, we’re used to games now where the player is trying to prevent violence from happening in real world scenarios or even games where real life cities get wiped off the map in the storyline or whatever. This seems way ahead of its time in terms of wanting to actually tell that story, a story about real life world-powers engaged in war in the real world.

*The story is that the city names got dropped because Atari didn’t want the game to be more universal and not feel too specific.

*I feel like it’s also just because somebody was like, “Um, do we really want to release a game where every time someone plays it, it ends with the entire California coastline getting nuked?”

*But what Dave Theurer would say later is that during the time he was working on this game and even for months after he was finished with it, he was plagued by a recurring nightmare of San Francisco, where he lived, being hit with nuclear bombs.

*In this nightmare, he would be hiking up in the mountains and he would find a vantage point where he could see San Francisco spread out in a beautiful view. And then he would see the missile trails . . .

*I mean, man, that is pretty horrifying.

*It’s also worth mentioning that when this game was ported to the Atari 2600, the manual said that the player was defending the planet Zardon against an attack from the planet Krytol. Which is just, like, made up of whole cloth. Like there’s nothing in the actual game.

*The fascination with placing video game violence way out there in outer space is interesting, especially when you think about it in terms of this game.

*Speaking of Theurer’s nightmares, interestingly enough, his other big contribution to 1980 video games was Tempest, a game we’ll talk about a little later; that game was inspired by a recurring nightmare Theurer had been having since childhood. I find that quite interesting. It’s a very personal and emotional style of game development he seemed to have.

*I suspect his experience on Four Player Soccer was not as harrowing.

*And so, to get back to that ending, Theurer later told Alex Rubens, who wrote a great article over at Polygon, that his nightmares “motivated me to create that final ‘THE END’ explosion . . . that was the whole point of the game, to show that if there was ever a nuclear war, you’d never win.”

*Man, this took a turn.

*Gotta say, I came away from researching this game with a lot more respect for it than I had going in.

*This genuinely is probably the deepest and most emotionally complicated game we’ve encountered thus far. I think you just miss that completely when playing it, if I’m being totally honest, though I will say that the moment of “THE END” is definitely striking and, as I said, it did feel very unique.

*I perhaps didn’t react as strongly to the gameplay itself as I have to some other games. At least in part, I’ll blame that on not being able to play it really as intended on an arcade cabinet.

*But after reading about Theurer and his process, I have to say I think this game is a real work of art. I think it’s personal and that Theurer was driven both psychologically and emotionally to make an actual statement. And not even just an emotional statement, but a political one. I really didn’t have a sense of this game in terms of its context, but I think it’s just undeniably an artwork absolutely defined by coming out of the Cold War. Really fascinating to me.

*Anybody that played this game back in the day, talk about it. Did you have any sense of the similarities between the game and the real-world doomsday scenarios people were talking about? I’d be curious to know.

*Anyway, Missile Command. Turns out it’s surprisingly deep and artistic. Who knew?

*All right, so what’s on deck next time? Well, it’s time for a little game that was not only the first game of its kind, but also a game that became synonymous with the genre it birthed. Join me next time for MUD!

 

Journey (2012). Thanks to a bit of finagling, I managed to play this game with my cousin. My sisters also took turns, for them it was their first time playing. A beautiful little experience, like Flower it's a short but sweet game. The art style is gorgeous and the gameplay is both simple and really satisfying to float around. The story is a little less pared back than Flower, but still very ambiguous (to its benefit). The unique randomised co-op really elevates it thematically as well, especially in the freezing mountain level where you huddle together for warmth.

Also played all the Bioshock (2007-2013) games. On easy this time, cause I was foolish grinding through these on hard last time, my mistake. I still think the original is the weakest. The game is frustratingly structured as a series of pointless side tasks blocking your from your goal, the enemies are all bullet sponges, and the political themes are cartoonishly unsubtle. I do admire the setting though, the alt-50's design of Rapture is very great, though it does lead to a lot of gloomy brown underwater tunnels being the majority of game environments.

Bioshock 2 refines the gameplay in several small but key ways, and streamlines the story structure, but still doesn't elevate it to greatness. The story has more engaging characters, I will say that, but otherwise is just 'more Bioshock 1', which I guess if you really like the first then you'll find stuff to enjoy here. Minerva's Den, the DLC, is pretty neat though, it's got some more interesting writing and is short enough to not overstay its welcome (and gives you an awesome laser-gun).

Bioshock Infinite is a game I enjoy a lot more. The city of Columbia feels a lot more well-realised than Rapture, with more interesting themes to dig into. I just adore the art design of the city, old 1900's Americana in the sky, hiding a deeply racist religious core beneath the surface. The timey-wimey stuff introduced near the end also adds a lot, it's got some great twists and foreshadowing that makes a replay worthwhile. The Burial at Sea DLC goes back to Rapture, but makes it feel more lived in and keeps up the strong writing and themes Infinite introduced. The gameplay of Infinite isn't greatly changed from 2, but the level-design was simplified to be just a bit more linear, enough that I don't feel like I'm wasting time searching every nook and cranny of a sprawling map.

 

Demon’s Souls

That was probably the hardest game I’ve ever played and I have no intention of ever putting myself through that again. Thank god it’s over. 2/10

 

Elden Ring says hi.

 

I bought the game but after the torture I just went through I’m definitely not playing it. Not even going to attempt it. My son will though so at least I didn’t waste my money.

 

I lastes few hours and gave up,

 

Hardest game I've probably done in recent years is Monster Hunter World.

Nergigante..... Goddamn bastard.

 

Rogue1-and-a-half Plays Through the History of Video Games



MUD (1980) – Roy Trubshaw, Richard Bartle

*So, our story here starts in 1977 or 1978. It’s around about that time that Roy Trubshaw, a student at University of Essex played an early build of a game called Zork. We briefly mentioned Zork when we talked about Eamon; it was also influenced Donald Brown.

*At around this time, the dungeon crawler was kind of becoming a thing. Colossal Cave Adventure was one of the first, but people were making them for fun. You know, text based dungeon crawlers, I should say. Games where you basically explored and found loot and occasionally fought things. Eamon would build on that foundation by expanding on the complexity of the stories you could tell. MUD was a dungeon crawler evolution in a different direction.

*Roy Trubshaw enjoyed dungeon crawlers. But University of Essex had an advanced, for the time, intranet and Trubshaw had access to some of the servers. What might make crawling a dungeon even more fun? Crawling it with your friends.

*And so MUD was born. It was to be a text based dungeon crawler where you could explore the world, find loot and secrets, fight enemies, etc. But it was uploaded to the intranet at the university and students and faculty alike could logon to the shared server.

*The game was named MUD. It stands for Multi-User Dungeon.

*Multi-User. Or, as we might say today, Multi-Player.

*That’s right . . . just like that, the first online multiplayer game.

*Like some other early games, including one we’ll talk about pretty shortly here, MUD gave its name to the genre it created. The Multi-User Dungeon became a genre of game and so you may see this game, the original MUD, referred to as MUD1 or Essex MUD. Those are all the same game though.

*It was in 1980 that Roy Trubshaw moved on from the university and a student named Richard Bartle came into the equation. Trubshaw had worked at upgrading MUD already, but when Bartle took over he created a third upgrade of MUD and it’s this third version that the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play recommends.

*And you might have noticed that I said this game started in 1978, but the book places in 1980. Well, that’s because it’s in 1980 that the game steps out into a larger world. That third version of MUD went public. The University of Essex intranet connected to the ARPANET, an early iteration of the Internet. And MUD was out there in the wild, waiting to be discovered by people outside of Essex.

*And, boy, oh, boy, did it ever? MUD became popular with people around the world and the game quickly spawned a catchphrase, “You haven’t lived . . . until you’ve died in MUD.”

*That’s a pretty good catchphrase, honestly.

*Trubshaw and Bartle would reunite to create MUD2, yet another upgrade of the game. But the original MUD kept on running on the Essex servers until 1987. CompuServe had licensed MUD at that point and it got moved to their servers under the title British Legends.

*Honestly a much worse title. I mean, MUD may not seem that great either, but it’s memorable and somewhat evocative.

*CompuServe hosted British Legends until 1999 when it went dark. I have no idea how many people were still playing it at that time. I suspect that it kind of set on their servers without much going on until the Y2K bug kicked them into clean-up mode and it was a casualty of that.

*So, has MUD been lost to the MISTs of time?

*MIST was a second generation MUD that was developed . . . oh, forget it. I thought it would be funny.

*Anyway, the answer is no. In fact, you can access that 1980 version of MUD at british-legends.com, a site maintained by Viktor Toth.

*This one isn’t as easy to play as Eamon. You could at one time play MUD in your browser there, but the great Java shutdown basically destroyed that. There was a program you could download called WizTerm, but it hasn’t been updated in well over a decade, at least not that I could see.

*But you can access and play the 1980 version of MUD I’m talking about in this post if you know how to telnet.

*I haven’t telnetted since . . . well, since I played the original 1975 version of The Oregon Trail for this very project.

*Anyway, I reminded myself of how to do it and after a false start or two, I found myself on the brink of MUD, a player persona created.

*I entered the world of MUD, finding myself on a path between an old house on one side and a graveyard on the other. Also, fields of gorse and . . . you know.

*I went into the house and was able to investigate several rooms, go up to the second floor, etc. There were a lot of items to pick up here, ranging from the obviously useful (potatoes) to the obscure (a violin bow). I found my way into the basement where I was attacked by a rat and violently killed.

*Okay, well, I’ve died in MUD. That’s like . . . my life has meaning now or something? What was the catchphrase?

*Okay, so I’ll talk about a couple of things just based on this first, very brief run at MUD.

*It’s a lot harder to keep directions straight in a game like this than I would have thought. I would like to once again underline just how great it is that Eamon tells you at the end of each descriptive paragraph which directions you can go in. You know, like (N/S/E/W) if you can go all directions or just (W) if you’ve walked into a dead-end from the East. That’s just super-helpful and I missed it here.

*Secondly, combat plays like a cut-scene. Like it’s turn based because it tells what you did and then what the enemy did and goes back and forth like that. But it just plays. It just goes until somebody dies. You can’t type any commands or pause or anything while combat is going on. I find this less satisfying than the way it was done in Eamon.

*Thirdly, there’s a bit where the game told me in the description that a door was locked, but I went up to it and did the OPEN command on it anyway and the game then said, and I quote, “Can’t you see it’s locked you berk?” And if you use a command that the game doesn’t understand it says, “It’s all double Dutch to me, mate!”

*What is the deal with these early RPGs having dreadful humor?

*Also, I had to look up “berk,” because I’d never heard it before and all I can say is oh dear.

*And to be fair, those are the only two bits of humor I encountered in MUD. I think it is, overall, probably a much more serious game than Eamon.

*But let’s talk about the elephant in the room or rather the elephant that is conspicuously absent from the room. It’s right there in the title: the whole point of MUD is that it’s “multi-user.” What is MUD if you’re the only one there?

*Does MUD have a player base now? No, I don’t think so. The British Legends site has a nice blurb about how books didn’t go away when movies were invented and so text games like MUD shouldn’t go away just because of newer games. I actually agree with that. And I do find value in looking at old games in the way that I’m doing here. Those are fine sentiments.

*But the fact remains that I logged onto MUD three times and played, over those three sessions, for around an hour. And I was the only one there that entire time. There’s a command you can type that will just show you what users are currently logged on to MUD. I was always the only one.

*I suspect the site gets a small amount of traffic from people doing things kind of like I’m doing. Someone was there last month. I saw a message from them in the “forum” which is really just a very short list of a couple of comments from people. As recently as March of this year, there were actually two people using the site at the same time, two people that seemed not to know each other; they acknowledged each other in comments in the “forum,” but they also acknowledged that they never happened to be online at the same time and so never saw each other in the game itself. Within the last year, that’s it . . . three people who posted on the forum.

*That isn’t exactly a true metric of players. I mean, I didn’t post on the forum. I think I would have if I didn’t only notice after I’d played my hour and my last character had died. I would have had to create an entirely new character in order to post something.

*When you die, your “persona” is deleted and you have to create a new character. I mean, that’s basically just picking a name, but you have to set up a new password and e-mail address and everything, so anyway, I didn’t really feel motivated to go through all that just to post a variation on “ANY BODY ELSE HERE?”

*Bartle has called the game as it is now a museum piece and I think he’s right. There is something interesting and valuable in some ways about being able to visit this environment again. But it certainly doesn’t feel anything like it must have felt back in the late seventies & early eighties when the world was crowded and you might run into anyone from a dude who lived down the hall in your dorm to a guy from halfway around the planet.

*So, what do I mean when I say I “played” the game? Well, near as I can tell, there isn’t any real story to MUD. I mean, there’s lore, but not really a plot for the player to experience. It seems to basically be an open-world (and reportedly a pretty big one, all things considered) that you can explore. As you do that, you can find items and secrets and fight NPCs.

*For example, on my last run, I was exploring a house and I discovered a secret room behind a book-case. I couldn’t go in because it was too dark. So I knew that what I needed to do then was make a torch. Back in the day, I guess building a fire in MUD was like a big first-step achievement or whatever.

*So I went to the woods and looked for a stick and I ran into a bunny which I interacted with briefly and then a “sprite” attacked me and I died.

*So, I mean, there are mildly narrative elements like that: you find a room, but you need a torch, so you go to the woods to make a torch and then you come back to the room. There’s an element of fun mystery in that kind of fetch-quest. Like I was curious to see what was in the room.

*You know, not curious enough to start over. I would have been able, I think, to just go straight to that house and open up that secret room without all the exploring I’d done on my previous run before I got to it. So I could have gotten to it faster and it wouldn’t have taken as long. But still I just wasn’t particularly invested.

*Apparently, the ultimate goal of MUD was leveling up your character. You get points for things you find and things you kill and as you get points you level up until eventually you can become a Wizard, the highest rank in the game.

*I have no way to verify if this is true, but I saw one guy online say that achieving the rank of Wizard usually took a couple of hundred hours of playing the game.

*I have no idea how many of those hours “playing” is actually spent exchanging filthy, filthy chats with other players, but you know, either way I’m not doing it.

*Anyway, I think I’m done with MUD. I think it is good that the game is still out there online. Accessing it and just spending a little time exploring the environment was interesting just to see how the game actually worked mechanically. But did I really have anything approximating the “experience” of playing it in 1980? No, of course not.

*This is always the problem with the multi-player game, right? It ultimately depends on that community and once it dries up, the game just usually isn’t much.

*I will say that it was kind of an interesting feeling to be wandering around a world like this, a world built for many players that I knew was empty. It does have a kind of ghost-towny feel.

*There was an indie horror game came out a couple years ago now called No Players Online where the premise was that you log into an online capture the flag server that is abandoned, but still operational. It had some nice atmosphere, but ultimately they didn’t really do enough with it in my opinion. But it is a cool premise.

*Going to any space that should be crowded but is actually empty is always creepy, right? No Players Online just transferred that feeling into a digital space. And there’s maybe a little of that feeling still to be found while wandering around the empty streets of MUD.

*So for pure curiosity, it might be worth checking out. But it feels unfair to even really judge the game as such; it’s just not the game it was before and it probably never will be again. Worth checking out? Your mileage may vary, but I can’t imagine anybody wanting to spend very much time there.

*Anyway, that’ll be that for MUD, I guess. Anybody that’s curious and wants to go check it out, PM me and we’ll set up a time and go together. Assuming I don’t hear from anyone (probably an extremely safe assumption), I’ll bid goodbye to the world of MUD, a groundbreaking and visionary game that remains a melancholy reminder of the perils of loving a multiplayer.

*This, I think, is going to be the last of these Rogue1-and-a-half Plays Through the History of Video Games posts for a while. I’ll definitely be swinging back to it though and when we do come back, we’ll still be in 1980 and we’ll be introducing a true icon of gaming and by “icon” that’s exactly what I mean. Next time, Namco introduces the first genuinely great main character in video games with Pac-Man!