MajorBBS door - Infinity Complex
reddit / bbs

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pangolinx · 2022-02-17 04:41

I have absurdly fond memories of the joys (and mostly the
frustrations) of playing Infinity Complex back in the day.  Including
a glorious month or two when my friends and I were playing for "free"
after someone tipped us off to an exploit in the credit system on our
area's MBBS.  (In hindsight, I feel bad for the operators, yet..)

Anyone else play the crap out of this game back in the day?  I've
spend a surprisingly enjoyable \~10 hours or so this week playing solo
on [TheKeep.net](https://TheKeep.net), mostly just mapping out the
complex in a way I never thought to do when I was a kid.

If anyone was ever deep into that game, I do have a handful of
questions I'd love to get help with.  The biggest is how to correctly
use bombs, although I think the main reason they aren't working might
be a bug of some kind and not user error.  I also see computer
terminals in some places and can't figure out if they have any use.
And I feel like I've mapped out all of the major areas, and the game
map is actually much smaller than I thought, but I wonder also if
there are major areas that are just especially hard to find..

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fang-castro · 2022-02-17 06:21

i've never played ..was big into Lords of Cyberspace, but your post
makes me want to try it.

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pangolinx · 2022-02-17 20:10

I gotta say, like many other games of the era, it's not very user
friendly.  The actual gameplay mechanics are pretty simple/easy to
learn but the game map is magnificently convoluted and arbitrary.  The
game has a "suicide" command that I've had to use a dozen or more
times in the last week just because I went down a floor and discovered
that the room I moved into is a dead end but doesn't have a ladder
going back up.  Or you walk into a room and immediately fall 3 floors
into another dead-end, ladderless trap.  I don't think it's even
intentional, the map just has a lot of weird twists and turns and
doesn't care whether they trap you.

It's also a side effect of one of the cool features of the game, where
players can expand the map by adding new rooms and carving out their
own spaces.  But you never know what you're going to get when you
blast open a new room, it could be a normal room or it could be
something without a floor/ladder.

There is a jetpack item that can save you and also allow for vertical
exploration, but they are basically single-use, non-rechargeable and
increasingly difficult to find.. I definitely remember them spawning
over time, but I'm not sure if they are doing that correctly in the
current (emulated? ported?) version of the game.