Comment Old games and new ones in their spirit (Score 1) 137
I played Tradewars since the days of 100 sectors. Once the Internet came along my Tradewars days stopped, but last year I went back to check out the way of things now. And modern Tradewars is no longer Tradewars... now it's a MUD. It always seemed like the one thing Tradewars lacked was real time multiplayer, and now that it exists, the character of the game is totally changed... there's no more sneaking around and building empires... instead, a set of optimal strategies have been devised and the game is all about exploiting the rules more efficiently than everybody else, and putting in more time. This just isn't the same.
Games I used to love: Operation Overkill (1 and 2), Esterian Conquest, The Pit, Global War, Catacombs of ASCII. Operation Overkill was the only game that ever got me up early... school certainly never could.
The closest game I've found to Esterian Conquest these days is called Emperor of the Fading Suns. Like Esterian Conquest, it's an immersive, complex, turn based, galactic grand strategy game.
Shameless plug: http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~tich it's more of an EFS strategy site, but hopefully it will reveal some of the joy of the game.