Net Musings

                An article from Bill Commons

I am putting my thoughts down on how the Internet has affected my
adventuring.

I joined the net at about the same time that I bought the complete
Ultima VII CD and at first I was lost. Sue helped me out by
getting someone to email me on how to use the search facility, I
am sorry but I forget this helper's name but I must give him a big
thank you.

Once I had found the Ultima Dragons site I was hooked on Ultima. I
went on to complete UW1 and 2 and then U8. I tried for a couple of
years to buy the 1-6 CD but without success, I then tried
downloading the Apple and Commodore versions with several
emulators but my knowledge of these computers is nil and I could
not get them to run on my set up.  A couple of months ago I found
a site with these programs to download for the PC and I did this.
I have since found out that these are frowned upon as pirated
versions but I had to play them.

I started with U6 and this was great, then I read that I should
have done U4 first so that was next. I found the Karma thing a bit
of a trial as every time I got it up to the required level I would
have to kill some snakes or sea horses on my way to the shrines
and was not acceptable, I had to use the cheat mode to put the
values up again when I was just approaching the shrines.

Then I was ready to hit the big one, Ultima 1 and intended to go
through the lot. I was soon doomed to fail as I was unable to dock
the space shuttle, I slowed the computer down by using Moslo on
Command com and the game itself also disabled my external cache,
changed to my older computer again with the above options and
although the game crawled I still had to give up.

Having nothing to play I looked up on my dust covered games on my
shelf and loaded up Darksun 1, which I am enjoying.  First I
printed out the manual which is 92 pages long and full of graphics
this took an hour on my old Dot Matrix printer only to find that I
had previously done this two years ago and that was gathering dust
on the same shelf.

This game came in a compilation called Ultimate Fantasy and I did
a search of this on the net. It seems one of the games called
Unlimited Adventures has a great following and several sites are
devoted to it.  This is a AD&D designing kit and I was hoping
someone had put up their completed adventures for others to play
but all I could find were dungeons and puzzles that others were
offering to put into your own adventures. I am not very interested
in making games for others to play but someone on SynTax might be?
Also if anyone can find any full games to download I would be
pleased to hear from them, they go under the name of FRUA.

If you post a message or reply to a query on the news groups it is
fairly certain that your email address will be collected for junk
email, also if you reply to have your name removed this will be
sold on to others. I saw a letter on teletex from someone saying
that they received four emails offering a method of earning
thousands of dollars. I thought lucky him, I get twenty plus each
day and if I don't log on for a few days the messages scroll right
off the screen.  I had a rather disturbing one from MSN billing,
they said that an ex-employee had infected their computer with a
virus and it had caused it to lose all my personal details. It
requested that I send my credit card number and other information
back to them on a specially encrypted reply so that others could
not access the information and to do this quickly or my account
would be cancelled.

I became suspicious when it went on to say that if I sent the
wrong information I would be referred to the FBI for fraud
charges. Also the message was sent out to about fifty other
similar names to mine on the message header. I tried to telephone
MSN billing but this was a joke as I was passed around from
department to department each with its own recorded message then
someone asked for my home number and after a long wait, the phone
went dead. I then emailed the billing department and received a
reply the next day informing me that they were aware of the fake
messages and that I should not pass my credit card numbers to
anyone that I did not know. I wonder why if they know, why with
their knowledge they can't trace back the originators.

I noticed on the RPG news groups that the Americans seem to have
lots of games that do not seem to be available here.  Shadows over
Riva and earlier releases on the same theme is one, also Wizardry
7 and 8 get a lot of pleas for help. There are many others and if
anyone knows a source for these in the UK, I would be glad to
know.










                              - o -