Since the last post was about computers and 80's computing adventures....anyone remember, uh, 80's computer adventure games?
I'm talking about the ones where you had some role playing characters- your basic swordsmen, spell casters, thieves, and "Medics." (Who were always technically called "Clerics," or "Priests" but that basically always ended up being their designated job- they were always the guys with all the healing and anti-poison treatments in these games.)
So, in these games, you'd play anywhere from one to six characters, and would generally run around in these crudely drawn wire-frame hallways. Doors would be drawn as rectangles in the sections of walls. Sometimes annoying things would happen: ("A PIT! Everyone takes damage!") Or you would find a place where there was no light source and instead of the wireframe dungeon graphics, it would just say something like "It's Very Dark Here!) Occasionally, some goofy looking monster would appear that you would have to do battle with, and due to the low resolution graphics, the monsters often looked like they were wearing checkerboard shirts and pants. So you'd get some treasure, exit the dungeon, have your medic (ooops scuse me, "Priest") cast some healing spells on everyone, and then you'd go back in and repeat, until you killed enough checkerboard plaid low resolution monsters to get to the next level. Which meant, your characters didn't die as easily, and they got to fight tougher checkerboard plaid bad guys. And sometimes you'd find better stuff. Like the coveted "Blade of Cuisenart." Or the elusive "Amulet of Manifo" or the mythic "Staff of Mogref." (These are all actual magic items you would come across in these games.)
Never found any hot dominatrix with a whip and paddle in any of these wireframe dungeons though. That would have been cool. Just things like "Creeping Cruds," "Small humanoids" and "Poison Giants." Or some wizard dude on the bottom level name Andrew who for some reason always spelled his name backwards. I guess he was probably a male dominant though. You were supposed to kill him and get his amulet.
The games eventually got better though. Well, somewhat. There was only so much you could do with just six colors and 64 kilobytes (remember, kilobytes, not megabytes or gigabytes) of RAM. Instead of wireframe halls, you'd get crudely drawn brick halls or strange looking orange and blue walls. Or in one game, it was supposed to be outdoors, and you'd walk through mazes of flat walls that were supposed to look like mountains and trees (but which basically looked like flat walls with mountains and trees painted on them.)
By the time computers got good enough to run sophisicated games with great graphics, I realized life was too short to spend in front of a computer screen wandering through digital dungeons. (I prefer the real thing, with real people, ha ha.) I shouldnt talk since I'm typing this, but I do have an excuse; I got out on my bike earlier this evening and rode up through the hills. And last weekend, I managed to get away up to the mountains. (For all you race fans...I didn't watch; as I was up in the mountains hiking to some high alpine lakes, but Chris Buescher won the Richmond auto race.) And this weekend, more adventure awaits....huzzzah!!