Warning – here come the nerds. As things cool down a bit at work, I’ve been searching for ways to occupy my quickly-dissolving brain. So I’ve found these cool little web RPGs. They’re extremely simple, but they satisfy the basic guidelines for the genre – you kill things, collect treasure, and slowly improve your stats. For reasons, apparently, of bandwidth, they also constrain you by limiting the number of turns you can play each day, and most, after a trial period of about a month, charge a small fee. I’m amazed, but I think I might actually be willing to pay to be able to kill mutant bikers surreptitiously at work.
My favorite so far is Prison World . . .
My favorite so far is Prison World, based in a Mad Max-esque futuristic desert world. The design is simple and elegant, with a network of towns that you must travel between to accomplish various missions, and fairly decent visuals. I’ve also tried Warriors 2, which has a lot more bells and whistles (including pets and sidekicks) but satisfies a bit less, for various reasons I won’t be nerdy enough to go into right now. These are apparently pretty much the cream of the crop.
There are nice lists of other games of the type at Apex Web Gaming. Watch out, though – there’s some real garbage out there, and a lot of pokemon-esque pet games.
Both of these games, and from what I gather many others in the genre, are written in English, but authored in Nordic and Eastern European countries. I think that this may have something to do with relative availability of technology, or just with the fact that people in socialist republics have nothing better to do than get free health care and surf the web all day. But it means that the writing, frankly, sucks.
You should just go for straight-up MUDs. They have automappers and such now that make them much easier and more fun to play and the games are usually free.
Yeah, but text-based generally doesn't light my fire so much. But are these on the Web now? Might be worth a look.
I believe there are web-based MUDs now, but generally they recommend that you get a MUD client and run that.