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If you're interested in a free game that has had this core functionality (online multiplayer Asteroids) since 1995 - visit https://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum... (edit: replaced with Steam link)

There has been a dedicated community of thousands of players, many of which have been playing well over a decade. Plenty of videos on youtube under either "Subspace" or more recently "Continuum".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game)

Also - a plug for my favorite Zone: HZ. www.rshl.org.

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I wasted so much of my life on this game around 1999-ish. I think one year I looked at my play time and about a third of my waking hours were spent playing.

Got the CTO of the startup I was working at into this game. One day his wife came in and saw me playing and said "Oh, you play this too." And I told her "Yeah, I was the person who introduced So-and-so to it." She hissed out "That was YOU?!" and walked away real fast. Never spoke to me again.

Amazing game - I spent several years in the early 2000s playing a spinoff called Infantry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infantry_(video_game). Sony ran it into the ground and I wound up trying SubSpace since it was supposedly the predecessor and had the same engine, but never got into it.

While typing this up I discovered Infantry is actually still alive, resurrected by some diehards on free player-maintained servers! Can't imagine that happening for any of today's games in twenty years. It's probably just nostalgia, but to me the early 2000s were a special golden age of PC gaming and community that will never be topped.

Definitely one of my favorite games of all time! I liked the server that had the economic model with all the different kinds of guns, shields, and armors it was super fun.

Extreme Games is my favorite (large CTF game with a bunch of different bases). Unfortunately it wasn't one of the default zones on the client last I checked and you had to go into the client's server view to add it. Really is one of the best zones. Much more interesting than Trench Wars.

If anybody played Infantry, the EOL zone was based on Extreme Games. Though it would blow my mind if anyone knows what I'm talking about.

EGFL has created some of the tensest gaming experiences in decades with teammates from across the globe. Regular 8 or 9 hour games that were hotly contested.

Lag-attaching as a strategy is an incredible example of how innovative gamers were given latency restraints. :) Shout out to Explosive, my first EG Squad.

I dont remember that many drawn out games in EGFL. Longest one i know of was imp vs mut, which was 12+ hours long. Lag attaching was a dirty bug which just added fun :)

Wow that takes me back. Some incredibly thrilling gaming moments with large numbers of people that climaxed after sometimes literal hours of back and forth.

I was in one of the better clans at the time and the sheer skill of some of those players was astounding.

Infantry from Sony Online? It was amazing! Used to play CTF all the time.

Infantry was nice, any game like that out there these days?

Team-based multi player, slow paced, casual, 10-15 minute games. I got World of Tanks in that category, anything else?

Fond memories of being an infil $$ PA sniper :)

Such a marvel of network engineering and game design, damn thing would run smooth over even 56k.

Wasted many hours on that game, was truly ahead of it's time in '95 with massive zones and lag compensation.

Since www.rshl.org doesn't appear to be loading here, could you give me an ELI5 on how this differs from Trench Wars (which I still play periodically having owned a copy of Subspace itself) ?

Hockey Zone creatively shortens the bullet lengths for ships and decreases the respawn timer to simulate a hockey check. A powerball serves as the puck, and there is both public games (effectively pickup in recreational sports nomenclature) and a 20+ year running league.

Technically Hockey Zone runs on something called ASSS (a small subspace server) which enables significantly more advanced features than the base client such as instant replay and dynamic scoreboard overlays.

That's fascinating and something I should definitely try one day - I doubt it'll replace Trench Wars in my heart but I bet I'll really enjoy experimenting for a bit.

Thanks!

www.rshl.org doesn't work, but rshl.org does. In Hockey Zone you play hockey with a powerball.

Ta.

Can I ask what the compelling gameplay is of this game, where people spend thousands of hours on it? From a distance it doesn't seem like e.g. a bit persistent world, but more of an arena, short one-off games kinda thing; I find it hard to comprehend you could spend thousands of hours on that.

I spent a summer there. Even playing solo free for all it was so much fun being the top scorer in a zone, having that little trophy next to your ship, and having people hunt you or get blasted. The ships vary, but there's a fast fighter that can one shot kill most things if you are a very good shot, and zoom by other ships on after burners with a little spin, dodging the return fire. That ship can also put a bullet through the openings in walls and bases and sometimes take out a defender. Even spending an entire summer at it, I wasn't the best shot by a long shot.

That's just my experience as well. There are many other types of ships like bombers with big explosive, slow shots with blast effect, and other ships that can have other players attach to them as turrets. If your team in the arena can escort a bomber safely to a base with some fighters, you can often nuke the enemy right through the walls and capture the flag there. Meanwhile if you are just piloting a fighter it's a big win to take out one of the turret ships. Then there's other ships like ones that can cloak and fire sneak attacks, etc..

I'd say that SubSpace and its predecessors were the first "haiku-competitives" -- a lineage that eventually resulted in DotA and League of Legends.

Essentially: distill gameplay to a relatively small number of rules + iterate balance until it's incredibly finely tuned + let the playerbase go nuts with whatever strategies they can come up with.

The attraction being that they're easy to pick up (few rules to learn) but incredibly deep (complex interactions and strategies).

Coupled with the fact that circa-late-90s, the idea of an MMO was still mind blowing. Games with friends and strangers?!

From memory, SubSpace also had a fairly addictive loot mechanic (tiered materials, item construction, randomly timed rare enemy spawns).

that was a favorite when I was younger and SubSpace was still being published by Virgin Interactive.

It was also the first game I wrote aimbots for -- which got shared among friends.

TrenchWars warbird sniping was a favorite.

p.s. a fond memory : getting ready to flinch when the thunderclap wav plays upon client execution

Click saver: linked game is Windows-only

There are versions (wrappers) for linux and mac (1). I am playing daily on a mac. Meet me in TrenchWars!

1: https://steamcommunity.com/app/352700/discussions/0/16960406...

P.S. the chat can be quite toxic though. It changed for the worse in the last four years.

Windows XP, to be precise. Here's the Lutris and Wine AppDB entries.

[1] https://lutris.net/games/subspace-continuum/

[2] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...

For a cross-platform multi player spacey game, lookup the venerable xpilot and it's many variants.

I lost many, many hours to Subspace in the late 90s.

Screw Spiders.

I remember playing one called Gravitron maybe on my old PC. The kind you launch from the DOS prompt. You have to navigate planetary terrain and defense systems while you're ship is in constant free fall, so you give tiny controlled thrusts to keep from crashing and slide left and right.

I've played two games like that: the arcade game Gravitar, and Gravity Crash on the PlayStation 3.

I remember this was the promo game on pepsi.com for a week (I believe I was busy collecting pepsi points for a Harrier jet at the time) and I ended up spending thousands of hours on it. Fantastic game - can't believe how well it worked on 56k.

Still playing continuum! :) Let's go base!

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