I’m looking for strange/interesting/obscure PC games. Could be anything from Windows, DOS, Mac OS (old school), PC-98, Amiga, or whatever else I’m missing there. Let’s hear ‘em!
I’m looking for strange/interesting/obscure PC games. Could be anything from Windows, DOS, Mac OS (old school), PC-98, Amiga, or whatever else I’m missing there. Let’s hear ‘em!
I played a game called “hack mud” when it came out and it might be the most unique and rewarding video game I’ve ever played.
It was a text based, MMO, hacking game. You wrote, ran, and shared JavaScript in order to do basically whatever you want. It was incredible.
One user made a little app called “Haunty Mall” which was a play on the Monty Hall problem. You could run the app once a day, you picked one door, and if a little ASCII ghost was behind it payed out a bunch of money. It was probably the most run app in the game at the time.
I decided that I was going to steal that persons code but instead I changed two things. First instead of it paying out, win or lose it took money from your account and deposited into a dummy account that only I had access to. The other change I made was the name you had to type in to download and run the executable. It was a bit of social engineering. I made it one letter different so it looked identical at a quick glance, knowing coders like to just type two or three letters and press tab to execute commands I just made sure mine came up before the real exe. It worked even better than I expected.
What I didn’t think about was the war I was committing myself to with the person good enough to have unlimited free money to give away to people.
hackmud is still around. I play it off-and-on, but I have a hard time as it feels like everything’s been done already. There are lock crackers available for free, people just willing to give away free money. It doesn’t feel like I have anything to contribute, which is sad for a coding game.
This reminded me of another weird game - Else Heart.Break(). It’s an adventure game with non-linear story telling. The twist is that most entities in the game(doors, lamps, radios etc) are programmable by the player. It was kinda fun to mess with NPCs by reprogramming their doors to lead to nowhere or making their items explode. I also programmed a soda can that would crack all password-locked items in the level when my character drinks from it. There is a ton of other weird stuff to discover in the game that I won’t spoil. Beware that it can be a bit janky
I’ve played it. Tbh I’ve tried just about every coding game there is trying to chase the high from hack mud.
I think the core issue with these types of games is once people figure out how to use the code to escape it kinda just breaks everything.
Yeah, that was my problem too. Programming starts to feel like cheating once you know enough about the game world - you can get infinite money, you can teleport anywhere instantly and so on
That’s solved by making all the things that can affect the game state be gated behind an API that has certain limits on how the player may use it, or by only allowing the player to code an agent with limited actions. e.g. computercraft turtles cost fuel for every action they do and they need to go up to the blocks/entity they will interact with, so using them to automate something requires some engineering.
they must of done this with hackmud at some point. I stopped playing back in the day because some omega JavaScript nerd figured out the games code was also written in JavaScript so it was relatively easy to escape and took the whole thing down by accident I think. I think it’s still playable now tho
I have an extremely loose understanding of coding but I think JavaScript it’s pretty flimsy and easy to break