I still remember the good ol' days when i used to sneak in to my step father's study in the middle of the night and use TELIX and connect to BBS's all over Israel. I was about 10 or 13..?. I rememebr the first time i saw a live chat . man , it was amazing. The most amazing thing was that you could see the characters typed out as the person on the other end was typing, including typos, backspaces and everything. Suddenly the computer looked so human to me.
From that moment on, i snuck almost nightly into the study, and tried to silently connect using the 9600 baud modem to somewhere in israel. I say 'tried' because Telix had a 'feature' that made it beep insanely with loud up and down sirens when it successfully connected to another computer. That means that 1 out of three times i missed the mark and my parents woke up and sent me to bed, having this being a school night.
Even then i had a list of a few hundred BBS's all over the country, so i guess it wasnt as big a discovery as i thought it was. I didn't really know what i was doing, or was going for . I just had fun with the ability to be connected and talk and share with other people . That was the first time i discovered the ability to find solutions to console games i was playing. I remember having a game on my SEGA machine that was an RPG game. i was going all over the place with my pack, hunting and gathering. It was a blast. It went on for a couple of months, until i got up to a point where i was pretty much as powerful as one can get at this game (Darn , i can't remember its name!). There was an object in the game to search for magical keys hidden within the game map, in caves of some sort. I could find only one of five or seven. it was the most frustrating thing ever!.
One day i dicovered a whole section of cheat files that can be downloaded from some BBS. I blissfully downloaded what was then a huge download(probably several Kb's...?). reading through the downloaded text files, i saw a detailed description on how to get to each key. Without words, I quickly ran up to my room and started exploring the territories mentioned by the files. Bingo! the first key was found! i was as happy as monika lewinsky under the presidential desk! Now, only to find the next missing keys. I looked and looked, and followed the text to the letter. nothing. nada. zip. ziltch. zero. I couldnt believe it! I was as stumped as george bush when asked the name of the hungarian prime minister(I will stop with the analogies now, don;t worry).Hhow am i to finish this game? I never did. the game went on to survive in another boy's game box, having foolishly lent it to someone i can't remember up until this day...
Never again will i be confronted with these troubling and mysterious issues. I can find no real joy in today's RPG games. somehow, they just don't cut it for me. Every now and then i fondly remember the eagerness with which I hacked, slashed and captured monsters,gold and clothing, but for the life of me, I cannot recreate that feeling. Many a good bucks were spent on trying, though...
Anyway, returning to BBSing... Ah, never mind. Guess i'll go to sleep now :)