Infotaxis Blog

Many of us have, and yet more haven’t experienced the joy of text-based gaming. Contrary to popular belief, lots of people still play these. There are two types, single and multiplayer. Singleplayer are games like Zork, which I’ll show a few screenshots of:

Here I’m at the starting area, reading the starting information in a mailbox.
Here I’m inside the house, picking up a bottle full of water from a table.

This is a singleplayer text-based game. You wander around using text commands to interact with the world. Similar enough are MUDs, multi-user dungeons, which are the multiplayer form of such games. They can be extremely extensive, and are typically played over Telnet (remote login that leads to any program the server wishes, usually a game or command prompt). If you’ve not tried text-based games, pick one up. They’re tiny and entertaining. In the case of MUDs, you don’t even need software, just find one online and:

XP: “Start->Run->telnet ADDRESS”
Vista: Slightly harder, M$ decided to remove the telnet client by default. You can try Putty, which is what I’d use: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 10:26 am and is filed under game review. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.