Well, as you're regular here, I take it you're eager and don't give up easily. This is great, as many people who lose their sight seem to instantly demoralise, which is a great shame.

My first game was Shades of Doom. At the time revolutionary, and in many ways still very good.

Cheers,

Sabahattin

hi

@sebby
i really don't give up that easy. the most mainstream games i played were online but aren't possible anymore like runescape and flyff. the regular pc games were rollercoaster. that's what i mean with not possible anymore.
but nice imput. shades of doom was a game what i found quite revolutionary. but got scared of the sounds what killed my char off.

@gamefighter

it is dissapointing that my german isn't as good as my dutch or english, so i ccan't join to talk about the german games. probably you can give some more info about them?
but topspeed 1 was indeed fun to play. was also a new method of gaming. with steering your car. completely different than sneller/drive.

but i also got hooked by other and bigger games, like swamp and railracer (this one is the most recent ..)

keep up the posting.

greetz mike

Well, I have to say my first real audio games I played were the bsc ones like troopanum or pipe 2 which were at the time the best games I played since I found out I could actual play games almost like sighted people with the exception of having a blank screen, of course. But of course, I then found more difficult and better games like adventure at c: battle zone and the road to rage, my favorites.

Hi,
The first game I played was top speed 2.

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 not 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 beat 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).

hi

yeah i am impressed by you yukio that a japanese teacher recommended you to play a certain audiogame. but that shouldn't happen in my country either, unless i am at a company for the blind and visually impaired people and the subject is gaming ...

but dark ... i am surprised by your story ... that you still have some remaining sight, while i was thinking when i saw your podcast for smugglers 3 that you also were completely blind since you're using hal. wich in my country is a screenreader wich will only be used by blind people.
this isn't meaned to be offending of course. i am just very surprised.

but back on topic. that are a lot of games you played in your past. and you're playing audiogames and good you can still play mainstream games wich is a part of both.

and harrylst enjoy your ride but be carefull to don't get your assistent want to jump out of the window. wich is Always my problem when i play sneller.

greetz mike

Well  Mike, I am registered blind in the Uk, however  to be registered blind in britain you are registered as blind if you have less than 20 feet of vision or less than 20 degrees visual field. Thus, a lot of people registered blind do have some vision.  I can see colour, light and dark, but only very close up, and as I said, graphical games have to be pretty specific in graphics for me to play them, usually 2D,  in fact I think had I not started with early consoles  like the Atari 2600 I likely wouldn't have got into games since most modern games are just not visually workable, with the exception of beatemups, and even those these days often include ridiculously complex menues or character  generation systems or full 3D  modes that would make them unplayable.

I read using  Hal, since print would  need to be gigantic in order for me to read it efficiently, though I can often see enough to for instance see how many items are in a menue or which is highlighted, (if the contrast is good enough), or  on a windows machine whether a  window is open.

I  have encountered people with similar levels of vision to me who just do't put in the effort to use  it, but for me it does make up part of what I do, for instance, in smugglers I could  tell the faction of the ship by looking at the colour o  of the ship on the picture, albeit I couldn't tell you the type or even (outside of context), that the thing I was looking at was a picture of a  spaceship.

this btw is also why i don't have much patience for fiddling around with  graphical games and doing things by sound, since I am used to being able to tell at least  basically where my character is and where enemies  or opponents are, and given the choice I'd rather  play a game with that level of detail, indeed I still collect older, 2D games play on my older consoles and still play them occasionally when I want the experience.

This is actually why, although I can play a game such as swamp, shades or  terraformers completely by sound (I've  tested this by turning my screen off), I do like to be able to use my vision for an overview, indeed I will admit that in swamp  it can be helpful.

What I want to play most however are rpgs, and those are just as inacessible to me.

My very first games I played were mainstream ones on the PS1. I never really got anywhere with them, but still found it rather fun. I was especially fund of GTA, Driver, various need for speed games and tekken 3, which I played by button mashing. Then, in I beieve 2005 I found out about Klango. This was back when they weren't known for the network and it was just a platform for running apps, mostly games.. There were, at the time, 2. I tried the Polish version of Pirate memory (the demo) and got hooked. I would go on to purchasing the game later, but anyway, in addition to hosting Klango itself, the site also had a Wiki, which had an entire section dedicated to international games. The very first non-Polish game I tried was sonic match from BSC, and then I found audio games.net and started exploring other games. I remember playing all of the draconis titles and hearing the Monkey business trailer, wishing I could buy the game somehow. And L works, with the Judgment day gameplay trailer before it came out. After that I started lurking on the forum and Audyssey, using them only to find out about new games, and to a lesser extent how to beat others. I did eventually manage to purchase Monkey business and Pinball Extreme, which were my first ever non Polish game purchases, followed by Judgment Day and Super Liam. This was through a person living in the States. My first ever purchase I made in person came much later, in 2010. It was Aurifi on iOS, but by that time I was already quite active.
The main reason Polish people aren't very aware about audiogames is mostly I think due to the language barrier. Someone might hear about a cool game, but as soon as he/she finds out that it's not in Polish, it's like, oh, I think I'll pass, because I don't know it very well. This is not as much the case as it was before though.

Hello all,

I think that the first few audiogames I played were:
1 - Drive, a game where you just have to go straight with your shuttle and pick up bonuses to go faster. It was very easy game but put me in confiance for other harder audiogames, because it was at a time where I just became blind and didn't know exactly what I was still able to do and what I could no longer do.
2 - Dark destroyer, the well known space invader from PB games. Not so hard too, but sufficiently hard at that time to keep me for a moment
3 - Top speed 2, what I consider as being the first really interesting audiogame I ever played. I enjoyed it in multiplayer mode for some years... at the beginning, it wasn't easy though: I crashed very often. But by playing more and more, you finally get it and manage to finish a race without any crash. I remember being very happy the first time I did it.

Today, I don't have much time to play for myself: between my computer science studies, and programming the playroom in my spare time, I'm quite busy.

EDIT: ah lol, I forgot to say that I just found the curb game again. Remember, the stupid game where you have to cross the road... it still works

The first audio game I ever played, as far as I remember, was SOD, back in... 2003 or 2004, I was 9 at that time. I didn't understand the plot at all, but found it very fun to play. That game was my favorite for many years.

Man, I feel so old!  My first audiogame was...uh...what was it even called? It was for DOS, anyway.  There was a maze or a ladder or something, and math or trivia questions.  And it had a burping noise.  Because belching is really the only thing you remember when you're 7 or 8.  So, yeah...that game!  Help, anyone?  Surely there can't be more than 1 audio game for DOS with a burping sound in it, can there?  It was on someone elses computer, as I still had an Apple2 at that point for my computer; I did play a lot of games on that, but none of them are audio games, so they don't count.  What with not really knowing how to use the IBM PC and the strange voice (keynote gold, maybe?), I don't really remember that much about the actual game. 

Eventually I got my own IBMPC computer, though.  For a long time the only games I played on it were things like Zork and A Mind Forever Voyaging.  I did hear about Shades of Doom, and I tried it briefly, but I thought, in the superior way that only a pre-teen can, that it was uninteresting and stupid, because everything happened in real time, so nobody could stop and think, and that audio didn't contain nearly enough details compared to a good text description.  I did have all of the Accessible Games from Robert Bets (Accessible Blackjack, Accessible Freecell, etc), and got Accessible Chat and Accessible Battleship soon after they came out.  Then I got ESP Pinball, and played that for about 3 weeks straight.  I loved it!  After that, I discovered MUDs, and my interest in audio gaming died almost completely.  The only other games I have ever purchased are Super Egg Hunt, Judgement Day, and Troopanum 1. 

To this day, I haven't even bothered to really even try games like Road to Rage, Swamp, Night of Parasite, etc.  I did play a little Accessible Quake because I knew lots of people who were into it, but I never played a single game of Accessible Quake where I wasn't in last place.  So I guess really my interest is in accessible gaming, and I couldn't care less about audio games.  Yet I'm a frequent poster on the Audio Games forum; go figure!

Edit: Oh, oh, oh! I forgot about entombed!  I own that, too! And love it!  You can sit on the combat screen for as long as you want, and nothing will happen. It's glorious.

I can't remember very well what my first audio game was, think it was accessible battleship. Before that since I still had a little vision, I played mainstream games, mostly on the ps2, though I did own a Gameboy at one point. Ofcourse, I wasn't very good at the games, and because when I look at a television screen things tend to move around to much for me to see them, but it was still fun to play the games. All I can remember is when I got my first computer, I wasn't very interested till my parents showed me audiogames, and even then I was still thinking meh, these can't be quite as interesting as console gaming, considering the first games I remember being shown were accessible battleship, G M A mine buster and pack man talks. It was only when I found the huge gaming list that pcsgames had to offer that I found this site and got my intrest in audiogaming.