Hi all. Sorry for the late response, I've been busy around here.
This is a great topic. For myself I began gaming on the Atari 2600 when I was in high school, back then many of the games had pretty good sound cues that actually meant something because of the limitations on graphics at the time. This made for some really great games that could be learned even by a totally blind person which I am if you wanted to put the time and effort into it. I still own two 2600 systems and a lot of games, not sure how many at the moment I've lost count. I progressed through the atari computers of the early to mid 80's, the 400, 800, 800xl and 130xe. There were quite a few games that could be played by us on these too. I experimented with doing some programming, however with no speech access whatsowever it was simply too difficult to do anything really long or complex, although I do remember sitting up nights and entering many a BASIC program out of some of the old mags that I had access to. I actually have a programming reference manual in Braille around here still, and I have an Atari 800, an 800xl, and a 130xe around here along with numerous games for them. But back to gaming. With the advent of the early Nintendo systems which is what we had where I lived from the late 80's to early 90's I found that gaming access was far more limited than before. More emphasis was placed on graphics and the sounds grew less and less meaningful. For that reason I became somewhat frustrated with mainstream gaming and pretty much quit it for a few years. In the late 90's or maybe around 2000, I started reading about the Atari Lynx which was the first color handheld system of its day and, like many Atari products was extremely advanced and ahead of its time but failed due to poor advertising. I picked one up off of ebay with maybe a dozen games and started experimenting with it. I still have this system as well. Gaming access was somewhat mixed. While I can and do have fun with a few of the games that I have, Switchblade II, asteroids, atari pinball and roadblasters come to mind, many are pretty much not playable for us or at least I haven't figured them out. It's still a really cool system though and I still get it out from time to time. In the last two or three years I've really gotten back into mainstream consoles with a vengeance thanks in no small part to some of you on this list, you know who you are and I say thanks again. I've picked up a Sega Gennisis, a psp, then a ps2, and most recently a ps3 with of course games for all of them. It is really great to see the resurgence of meaningful sounds in many of the modern games, it's like the good old days in many ways except the sounds themselves are of course much much better than they were back then. My ps2 is currently on loan to another blind friend who I am teaching about gaming. He is a formerly sighted guy who used to really love gaming and had pretty much thought that he couldn't do it since losing his sight. My psp is pretty much inseparable from me it's always in my pack with its charger and games. I'm still just getting started with the ps3 but so far it is the bomb! Now to audio games. I think the first audio game I discovered was grizzly gulch from Bavisoft. This game is really quite fun and the sound work is extremely good, I only find it very sad that their support is so poor especially recently. After that I believe I got the first Troopanum from BSC Games which led to my friendship with Justin and my starting to work with BSC Games and Blindsoftware.com. Over the years I have also picked up all of the GMA games although I have frankly never done all that great at Lone wolf. I also have Rail Racer when I get in a mood for some driving and racing, although again I have just not put the time into this one to get good enough to want to compete online all that often. Well that pretty much covers my gaming experience both in the mainstream and the audio gaming genres. Game on! Tom -----Original Message----- From: gamers-boun...@audyssey.org [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of dark Sent: Monday, April 05, 2010 12:42 PM To: Gamers@audyssey.org Subject: [Audyssey] How did you start? Hi. all this talk about if Is getting me a litle nostalgic, so i thought a topic about how people got into audio games and such might be fun. For me, I'd always played what graffical games my eyesite could cope with, first on an atari 2600 (at age 3 and 4), then an amstrad cpc computer (similar to a comador 64), a comador amigar and finally a Snes (which i stil own). But in the mid 90's with the 32 bit 3D era, the number of games I could play dropped from about thirty percent, to almost none. Though I used a laptop for school work, and university, it never occurred to me I could do anything with it bar write. Yes, I had the D&D manuals and used it to do some tabletop gaming in about 99-2000 before I went to uni, but I never actually thought of games. It wasn't until 2003, that I saw an artical in a braille publication mentioning tom lorimers' whitestick.co.uk site and accessible computer games. Despite a lot of net access shinanigans (hal version 5 and internet access was fairly new at that stage), I found toms' site, and played a number of online games like ashes of angels and legend of the green dragon. I do remember checking the offline games page, but A, the idea of a game with sound I found rather bizarre, and B, I was stil using a five year old laptop with windows 98. I did however play a lot of if. Things went on. I started on Sryth in late 2004, bought an xp desktop in mid 2005, then ran into Bryan peterson. When finding we both had defficient eyeballs and an interest in exploration games he directed me towards shades of doom (I stil remember sitting up all night playing it), and by degrees audiogames.net. Sinse this corresponded with me finishing my masters and for various confusing academic reasons having a lot of free time, i signed up to the audiogames.net forum in 2006, and spent the next few months trying almost the entire audiogames.net database, signing up to the audeasy list somewhere along the line. And the rest is history. Beware the Grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gam...@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gam...@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
