Games: Steam Deck, Valve, and “Multi-User Dungeons”
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Forbes ☛ Benchmarked: Is ‘Monster Hunter Wilds’ Playable On Steam Deck
Monster Hunter Wilds has a new benchmark tool. Can Steam Deck handle the game? Let's find out before this weekend's open beta.
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Forbes ☛ Valve Warns Millions Of Steam Users About Abandoned Games
Valve just implemented a welcome warning message that proves the company continues to put its Steam customers first.
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Jack Kelly ☛ How Copyover MUD Servers Worked
When I was younger, I played a lot of MUDs (“Multi-User Dungeons” — the text-only predecessor to modern MMORPGs, often played over Telnet). They were great fun, particularly during high school: a lightweight multiplayer game with no client state meant you could log in from any machine in any lab, even Windows shipped a Telnet client in those days, the Telnet protocol was light enough to run on my school’s slow PCs and limited internet connection, and the lack of flashy graphics meant it was easy to hide the window from a passing teacher or librarian.
At some point, building and tinkering with MUDs became more interesting than playing them. In those days, MUD builders and wizards (admins) were often recruited from each game’s playerbase, and many MUDs let builders edit the world through in-game commands. This was incredibly cool at the time — even through a clumsy line-oriented (ed-style) editor, there was something magical about summoning blank rooms from the void, writing rich descriptions to turn them into “real” spaces, and adding items and “mobs” (Mobile OBJects — NPCs) to make them come to life. A few of my friends and I signed up to a “builder academy” MUD, where everyone got a zone to mess around in, and we tried our hand at crafting our own areas. Most of these projects didn’t get very far, and all of them have been lost to time.