Re: what was the first audiogame you ever played?
[[wow]] Yukio, didn't know audiogames were so known about in Japan that a teacher would recommend them, needless to say it's not the same over here .
Myself, I have limited vision so played graphical games all my life from the age of four. i could read the text, but often in the contrast was good and if menues had highlighting I could work out what was going on, distinguish my character from the background and work out enimy position, heck, even in the 16 bit era I could play a lot of newly released games, although I did always want to play rpgs and other complex games.
My favourites were always those with exploration and story, starting with rurican on the Amigar (especially for the music), and going on to games like Metroid, the mega man x games on the snes, Super castlevania or First Samurai. I also played b eat em ups (I played both original mk and street fighter 2 in the arcades and on the snes), and some puzzle games like bomberman, as well as harder, more arcade like games like the Marrio series, although it was the exploration action platformers such as mega man x that were my absolute favourites.
Unfortunately though, the 32 bit era and the production of 3D games made playing most games near impossible since the spacial relations were just too complex, it was no longer possible to distinguish my character, the surroundings and enemies in the same way. I could still of course play beatemups, but that was not near enough.
in 2003, just after I'd been at university, I found a braille magazine article talking about online games, and I found the whitestick.co.uk site. I played a lot of online games and textual games, such as legend of the green dragon, ashes of angels and sryth, (I was one of the original people who played the free version before there was a paid game). I had seen the page listing offline games and read a little about some audio games (I remember reading the galaxy ranger description), but I assumed that they must be symplistic or reduced in scope, and not near what I had experienced with graphical games.
While I admit I was wrong on this point, in fairness remember that a lot of stuff aimed at blind people in this country has a very condescending edge.
In late 2005 On the Sryth forums, I discussed games with bryan P, and mentioned my love of exploration. he showed me the sarah developement page over at pcs, and mentioned shades of doom as a game with a huge area to explore. I downloaded the thing and was absolutely hooked, since it let me play a type of game I'd never tried before, a first person shooter. I think had shades not been my first game, had I first played a card game or a simple arcade game I might well have not continued, but after trying shades I ran across audiogames.net, and was highly interested to see what else was available.
Since at that point I pretty much had just finished my masters but not started anything further, I spent all of 2006 trying audio games out one after another. Some I liked, some I didn't, but even games like the bsc ones impressed me with sound quality,. I of course also posted on the forum, and in 2007 Sander and richard asked myself and a few other members to start help by writing news posts, ---- and the rest as they say is history! .
Btw, I do also still play graphical games, particularly a very good turrican remake for windows, albeit I probably spend more time on audio games, web games and the like (partly for the purposes of the db).
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=145121#p145121
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