When I was a student (and I use the term student loosely as I did feck all studying) many moons ago in kevin st, I became hopelessly addicited to MUD .Not the brown wet stuff, but multi user dungeons.These lads were the forerunner to your everquests and planetside.Imagine one of those old style text adventures;"go north, look at tree, pick up mace of smackage" etc.
Now add in D&D combat, hit points,classes and equipment "you LIQUIFY the giant rat with you +20 hit".Finally mix in a few hundred players working with
(and against )each other "any party need a LVL 17 " cleric??? ...anyone...hello".Thats MUDS in a nutshell.I played on a few , Jedimud and Holomud (they were scifi themed in case you hadnt guessed).There was a good community feeling on the muds, a bit like p45(only not as witty ,intelligent or good looking, obviuosly:) ) This would have been about '93 or so, the Net had'nt
kicked off, so it ran via telnet.The great thing was that you didnt need much to play it ...no installs or anything, all you needed was a telnet connection and
you were in.
Anyway after college I was always half heartedly searching for something similar, i.e. that would be accessable where ever I was, was involved, but unlike the epic quests of the muds ,something that I could dip in and out of fairly quickly.Oh and most importantly was free! (by the way , in case the boss is reading , these are only for wasting time at home, I never "waste time at work" honest:) )
Over the years I've tried a few different things,www.Runescape.com was one I was fond of for a while, similar to a Mud , but graphical (albeit ugly as hell).After a while though it went to a pay model, (fair play to em I say)with all the decent stuff taken out of the free site.
I tried and then got sick of "battlemail" after a while ..theres a website somewhere for them , but I'm not giving it out as I dont want to start all that up
again...;)
I was hooked on Max Barry's www.Nationstate.nets for a while, but to be honest it repeats after about a month or so, which isnt much fun..
Right now the flavour of the month is www.bots2.net ,which takes the combat bits out of the Muds, as well as the stats and weapons building, and happily throws the rest in the bin .The way it works is , you build your 'bot , and assign a few points to strength dexterity, intelligence etc.., you send it out to fight other bots , if it wins you get experince which , when you get enough, allows you level up , which in turn gives you more stat points and so on .You also get cash for winning which you can buy weapons , armour ,shields etc.
The nice thing is , you get some xp/cash for losing fights as well (not much though) so you can get out of a rut if you've made a mess of things and are
getting your shiny metal ass handed to you in fights.
Graphically the site is nice enough ,if a bit spartan , with some pics
of your bot/weapons etc(I think the weapons are lifed from diablo in some cases??, er...say nothing anyway).
The site itself is run by an amiable enough dutchman called Fl0r, who is happy enough to help out players, which they need, quite often.
Two problems , firstly the majority of the players seem to be american teenagers , whose idea of a good argument is " U is Gay d00d", which means i try and "talk" as little as possible there.The dicussions on second gulf war over there were quite funny, "We's ned the gas fro our SUV's be-atch"Not all the users are that bad though , and there are fighting teams
(clans) constantly on the site so theres some interactive fun to be had.
Secondly for the sites strange habit reffering to the act of constantly attacking the same bot over and over as "ass-raping"??? A bit weird especially when some days its mentioned on the login page many times in large letters..Try explaining that to the girlfriend..possibly the creators spent some time in prison,or something i dont know...
Anyway If you feel like trying yourself , go to www.bots2.net or www.blue.bots2.net (the new server , better because its easier to get in as its rarely full).
*[Oh if you see a bot called beezle/beezlebug say hi as its me (probably getting my shiny metal ass handed to me ..again:) ]
--added april '05 - apols to the guy from Bots who posted here ...you're comment got lost while I was cleaning out the mountain of spam I was hit with ...sorry 'bout that :(
