Feed on Posts or Comments March 28, 2024

Games Spencer on January 4, 2008 06:05 pm

Game of the Week (or longer)

So, as I mentioned in my New Year’s blog, a new feature that I want to start adding is my Game of the Week (GOTW).  This may not be each and every week, but should be fairly regular.  Games can range from different consoles (but right now primarily ones online will be featured) and will be an eclectic collection of old, new, cheesy, and anything else that may be tickling my fancy at the time.  For the first game, I’m reaching way back to the early nineties, well before the popularity of the internet.  So without any further adoo…

GOTW – Legend of the Red Dragon

Legend of the Red Dragon (L.O.R.D.) is probably one of the oldest and most popular games during the height of BBS (buletin board system) access.  First, for those who don’t know, BBS was in many ways the predecessor to the internet during the time that the internet (known then as ARPAnet) was only for use with universities and the military.  BBS systems were always accessed through dial up modem and all programs (known as doors) were text based.  Any graphics had to comply with ANSI characters and you had to have a terminal program that would support it.

L.O.R.D. itself is a text based role playing game.  When you first started, you create a character (magician, theif, warrior) and then you have options to help build up your character.  It’s a little like Dungeons and Dragons but can be played on a much larger scale with people from around town (or more depending on the reach of the BBS).  You would venture into the forest to beat up on creatures and gain gold and experience.  You could slaughter other players in the field, either in an on-line battle or while they were offline as well.  If your character died, when you log on the next day you came back to life so no permanent damage took place.

There was a place to buy weapons, armor, an Inn to rest at night.  Characters could even get married in the game or try to woo the ultimate non-playing character… Violet (or Seth Able if you are a female character).  There were also add-ons that BBS operators could add that would allow an even more diverse virtual world.  All in all, for a text based game, it was and still is a lot of fun to play.

Now that BBS systems are nearly dead, there are only a couple of places left where you can still play L.O.R.D.  The best one I have found is Nuklear LORD and it is free to play.  You can either use telnet in Windows or through a Java browser on the Nuklear website.

Next week I’ll introduce you to an online community game that takes a popular board game and really brings it to the next level.

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed

Leave a Reply