Hole in the sky?

My name is Major.

Monday, December 27, 2010

I Started Playing Subspace/Continuum Again.. Also, a guy named Matt.

I started playing years ago with my first Non-Macintosh computer. I owned Macs from about 1998 and back, so i guess i started playing around then. I bought the CD rom from Babbages at the Mall. Shortly after i bought the CD and started playing a lot, the severs crashed, VIE went under, and i started playing Ultima Online full time.

The first time i had seen the game i was blown away. This may have been 1996.. Decemberish. Up late at Matt Mateka's* house, Matt, otherwise known in gaming circles as "Gamemaster**", and no I'm no kidding, would pretty much ignore us and play his game of the night for a while, it was Diablo. (a long, long while) Gary had met him somewhere, inadvertently, and that's how i started gaming paper-and-dice. (long story) Side note: I later met up with Matt and we started hanging out midnights at Tilt, the arcade at the Edison Mall whose manager let people in after everything was closed to play tournaments, namely, Soul Caliber.

*This part of the article was edited by it's author on 3/27/2011. Matt has been found, i repeat, Matt has been found.*

Anyways. Staying up late watching Matt play the Beta of Subspace, online no less, and free, i was most certainly floored. He had one of the first sub woofer-speaker combos for a PC i have ever seen and the sound was amazing for a Soundblaster 16 card with none of the finer things in life like dynamic reverb and such. He moved after a while and let me have a turn. I shot people with bouncing bombs, repelled others, became someones turret. Generally it was mass chaos. Anyone who had access to the Internet played this game or had memory of someone that did and bragged about it. The people who had Internet and had not heard of this game were too busy chatting on AOL and making free web pages on Geocities.

A couple years later (i think) Subspace was released to wide critical acclaim, and was available on then new, full install CD roms. I bought my copy and it was instantly rendered useless. All the servers were down and i could not play the game i just bought. Meanwhile, there were still copies on the shelves I'm sure they were selling. Player run servers were the only alternative, and they were free. The old games i loved were gone and in its place shitty hacked together maps on unreliable servers. I stopped playing around this time as did many people.

A few people decided many years ago to re-tool the game and call it Continuum. You could not hack this version, servers were reliable and all my old favorite maps were back. Player counts were and are super high. This was a game that is 2D, requires tons of skill, and is simple enough to play on any computer new or old. I was hooked again. I have played on and off since 2003, and lately i have "discovered" the game again. Please give this game a chance. Trust me.

 *I spell Matt's name wrong on purpose, only because i remember him not liking that at all. I really do miss the guy.*
**Matt - gamemaster, antpile    Gary - Droslow, Twiggy       Major - droz, docdroz, Taija, Tinehaut

2 comments:

  1. Not nice at all!

    .... and I still hate paper and dice games. Like, a lot.

    - Matt

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  2. WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN!?!

    I had hoped when i wrote this article, that you would one day google yourself so i could see how you were doing. I shared my thoughts with Gary and this seemed like the best way to do so.

    Drop me an email, will ya?

    ReplyDelete