The idiom ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ can be extended to ‘don’t judge a computer game by its graphics’. Whilst the games featured in this article have extremely basic graphics, they have many redeeming qualities beyond evoking fond memories of the early days of computer gaming. Text-based games are often forgotten and neglected in the Linux press. However, there are some real ASCII gems out there waiting to be explored which are immensely addictive and great fun to play.
Dungeon, dungeon, dungeon…
where’s the cool game that atc is? OK, technically it comes from BSD, but it was ported to Linux ages ago.
ATC is byfar the best and most addicting game I play very often. Maybe its because I am a pilot myself…
Not a gamer myself, but on a related note: Some years back I wondered if it would be possible to create a character-based Linux setup for a really old computer. Nothing spectacular: a word processor like WordPerfect 5.1, a spreadsheet like Lotus 1-2-3, and so on. Like a DOS box circa 1992, but with Linux.
Surprisingly, it couldn’t be done. Linux fans may love the command line, and they may have their civil wars about the best text editor, but beyond the great Midnight Commander, there just don’t seem to be a lot of non-X character-based Linux productivity applications out there. Which seems … strange.
I did end up making that old 486 a DOS box again (took a bit of [cough], torrenting, but the old DOS apps are still out there if you look hard).
Or did I miss something?
emacs
EDIT: With org-mode (comes standard)
Edited 2011-12-13 13:54 UTC
We discovered better paradigms and built on them. Nowadays, you write TeX files using your favourite editor (emacs or vim) and the results are way better than using WordPerfect. Likewise, you use plaintext files plus awk/shell scripting/perl/multiple utilities to achieve what you would do in a spreadsheet.
“Or did I miss something?”
Yes, you completely missed it. Your thinking is focused on seeing dwarfs in file cabinets, on wide open spaces you will only find unixcorns. But you have to look hard, so why bother?
No ASCII list is worth it’s webspace if it does not contain ye mighty ADOM: http://www.adom.de/adom/roguelike.php3
It’s not open source, but a little rougelike called ADOM should certainly be on that list…