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Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

Anyone remember Uplink[1]? It was a pretty fun, somewhat realistic black hat/script kiddie simulator game.

I always wanted to make a game where you go against another human, and try to hack into each other's systems; but with pretty graphics and some "physical" game world, where your agents could be autonomous or remote-controlled bots. So there's a bit of combat / tactics; "hacking" something could require solving a very short minigame (2048, tetris, hangman, think WarioWare[2]); you could dump a fallen enemy bot's memory to recover their programming and look for a weakness; deploy RF jammer to make enemy bots in the area revert to auto-pilot; etc. You get to make your own designs, setup perimeter defenses, maybe a little bit like Factorio meets Robot Wars, with scripting in Forth/Scheme/Lua.

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1510/Uplink/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarioWare,_Inc.:_Mega_Microgam...!

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Relevant discussion from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38047861

Not quite the same but the Netrunner card game is an assymetric hacker vs corp game. It's... being revived via community support and has an active online scene I believe.

Edit: Netrunner not Nethack... oops

> Netrunner ... hacker vs corp

"The game took place in the setting for the Cyberpunk 2020 role-playing game"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrunner

Yep, sounded familiar from the Cyberpunk RED game my tabletop group started recently. It's interesting to me how I just never heard of this setting for over a decade of playing TTRPGs and now it's seemingly everywhere.

Just to comment on this, given you mention a year: the game is from 90s and out of print. It is by the same person as Magic: The Gathering:

> Netrunner is an out-of-print collectible card game (CCG) designed by Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering. It was published by Wizards of the Coast and introduced in April 1996.

CCG is a bit of a weird mention, as there isn't the typical RNG involved with buying the cards (like w/MtG) since you buy the entire set or expansion in once.

The game also has a spiritual successor: 'Android: Netrunner' [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android:_Netrunner

I thought Android:Netrunner was a reskin/remake of the same game, so a bit more than a spiritual successor. Garfield is credited IIRC.

I don't know. I can only comment on the original. A friend of mine had it back in the days, could just play it like that. The game suffered from the same issue as Star Wars CCG: too little players in my vicinity. Everyone played Magic, and I only played type I cause I CBA to replace all my cards so often.

Either way, I won't play physical card games anymore except those involving the basic set from A to K plus joker (whatever its name might be). Because those cards are cheaply replaced when playing with little kids. Otherwise, for multiplayer, a computer is OK. Same with tabletop RPGs.

Android: Netrunner was a partnership between Fantasy Flight Games' Android (who is now owned by someone else I think) and Wizard of the Coast's Netrunner.

The game lives on via a community version: https://nullsignal.games/products/system-gateway/ it's print and play or order cards, it has a core set and regular expansions. I don't know how vibrant the scene is but they seem to do regular work on it.

Yeah Netrunner was a fun card game, and not really P2W but B2P. You'd buy the set (or expansion) and you and your buddy could play, doing blue vs red and vice versa. The game was fun but also you had to buy it once and that was it. No RNG with regards to packs of cards, new expansions obsoleting your already owned cards, etc. If you want a fun B2P fun card game (with rogue-like elements, which you may appreciate given your comment of Nethack ;), I can recommend Slay The Spire.

Sorry, you mean asymmetric.

assymetric is when both buttchecks are not perfectly identical.

(Most of my own long term spelling problems are in this same format — I know there’s a double letter, butt I double the wrong letter. (Sorry))

I think youll find Assymetric is a measure of how much of an arse someone / something is.

At my job, this is something we are measured on. ( I work in a call centre, for a government complaints dept)

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