OT: Any One Remember

[Baron Munchausen]

StarShadow said:
I remember a fun space-based trader game on BBS's. Can't remember what it's called now, though.

Tradewars! (And then 'Tradewars 2000')

You had to seek out planets and/or build bases, develop your economy, research new technologies, build warships, and fight your enemies. I'd say it was the grandparent of all 4X computer games.

[StarShadow]

That was it, Tradewars! That was a great game. I've always thought it'd be really cool if there was a modern single-player version, no 3d though, 2d graphics at best, although I think it'd stll work with ASCII graphics.

[AgentZero]

Tradewars effing rocked! Between it and Legend of the Red Dragon, my phone lines used to be busy from when I got home until dinner time. I can't describe how happy I was when my parents got me my own phone line for my birthday.

Almost as happy as when I realized that while the default speed for my modem was 900 baud, it'd go all the way up to 2700!

[Atrocities]

I found it.

http://www.planetarion.com/news.php?...on&section=ann
A Wikipedia page about the game

[Sivran]

Planetarion's gone through a couple owners now, and since going pay to play, has shrunk drastically. You have to be hardcore, dedicating all your time to it, or you'll never get anywhere.

Same goes for most games like that.

[Atrocities]

I just remember that back in the day it was a rigged game. On day one of a new round there would be players with huge scores so massive after just a few hours and turns that no one could challenge them. I was lucky enough to join a good Alliance and later discovered that one of the players of that alliance was also a Tribes player. He was a top 20 player of Planetarion and one night on a Tribes server he let the nasty cat out of the bag that most of the high ranking players started the game that way. I never played it after that but always wanted to run a game like that so that I could run it fair.

[Possum]

Hehe, my first 'puter at home was an Apple IIc

I agree the old Trade Wars 2002 BBS game rocked. I ran the Possumhole BBS back in the day, and it was fun.

Today there is something remarkably similar over at Starport

[Artaud]

Makinus said:
My first computer was a 286 with 20mb HD, 640kb Ram and a CGA (4 colors) monitor...

Same here. Four colors! It was maybe in 1989 that my wife and I bought our first computer. It cost us $1,500. Before that I had a Magnavox word processor, because I'm a writer and I thought I never would have any use for a home computer.

One of my first computer games was Sim City. I had a friend who thought sitting at a computer and playing games was the most idiotic thing a person could do.

Then he and his wife came by for dinner and he started playing Sim City and...he would not leave until midnight. It was a week night, a work night. And his wife was curled up on the floor half asleep saying "We need to get going," but he was utterly fascinated with his black-and-white cities. He would cause a nuclear meltdown and then sit there and laugh at the destruction.

Another of my early games was "Empire." God, that game gave me so many hours of fun.

Atrocities, I don't see any of my gaming time as a waste. In the 1980s I did the nightclub scene very heavily for several years. I had a great job and made lots of money, and spent lavishly. Me and my friend were living the Miami Vice lifestyle, except for the drugs. Well, except for the *quantity* of drugs.

Now I'm married to a great woman, and I'm content to stay home and do things like play computer games. I'm approaching middle age and I'm too tired to do the stuff I used to do. The streets are now filled with crackheads and violence, so I stay at home with my books and my sweet wife and my computer.

Lounging in my recliner, playing SEIV (and maybe SEV someday, when it gets patched, ha ha!), watching the late show with a bowl of popcorn and a six pack, talking to the wife and curling up with a good book are all a LOT cheaper and SAFER than the things I did 25 years ago.

[Kamog]

The first computer I used was a Commodore PET in my school classroom. It had a small, green monochrome monitor and a slow cassette tape drive. We thought it was really amazing and there was one guy in my class who knew how to write simple programs on it in BASIC, and I was totally impressed with his knowledge and skill. There were a few games for it that came on cassette tapes, and it included space invaders, a racing game and a maze game. The graphics were very blocky but I thought it was the greatest thing.

The second type of computer I ever used was a Commodore 64 which one of my friends had. We used to play games on it like Archon, Black Hawk, Temple of Apshai, Rambo, Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, etc. It had a big external 5.25" floppy drive, a color monitor, joystick and a modem (I don't know what speed).

The third type of computer I used was an Apple IIE in high school, on which I learned to program in BASIC in my very first computer science course. The BASIC back then had line numbers and we learned how to write messy spaghetti code that used a lot of GOTO commands. I used to stay late after school to learn and write little programs just for fun.

The fourth computer I used was a Macintosh 512E, which has 512K of RAM, also at school. I was so impressed with the Macintosh's graphical user interface and mouse! I learned to program in Turbo Pascal on those. This was back in 1988 or so.

When I finally had enough money to buy my own computer, I was attending university and my first computer was a Macintosh Powerbook 145. It had 4 MB of RAM, a 40 MB hard drive, and a Motorola 68030 processor running at 25 MHz. I loved that Powerbook and I used it for many years. I later got a Powerbook 170 as well, but both powerbooks were stolen one day when by house got broken into. My next computer was a Pentium 233 with 96 MB RAM and 2 GB hard drive. When I first started playing SEIII, it was on that computer. I was still using that computer when I got SEIV, and the turns processed so slowly.