ARENA - Free PBEM Gladiator Combat Game (Beta)

From: srt@aero.org (Scott 'Dr. Pain' Turner)

Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1993 03:18:05 +0000

A few weeks ago in this newsgroup someone posted a sample Duelmaster's
turn.  I thought it looked like the kind of sloppy program a junior
high school student might throw together in Basic on his TRS-80, and I
said as much.  Nobody really disagreed with me.  But it got me to
thinking.  Surely I could put together something at least as
sophisticated as Duelmaster.

The result is ARENA, a gladiator combat game similar in conception to
Blood Pit, Duelmaster's, etc.  I wrote it in a few days, and I've
spent a few weeks ironing out bugs and adding a few additional
features.

ARENA is a fully automated PBEM game.  You send your orders in and
they are immediately processed and returned.  ARENA is also completely
free.

As you might imagine, ARENA is still in "beta test".  Or maybe even
"alpha test".  At any rate, it probably still has bugs in it; and it
certainly isn't as developed as I'd like.  But I thought it would be
worthwhile to make it available and let people beat on it for a while
before I put any more effort into it.

The next two postings will contain the rules to ARENA and a sample
turn.  If you decide to play ARENA I ask that you follow a few simple
rules.

(1) Don't abuse the ARENA server.  In particular, don't flood ARENA
with mail.  Please don't send more than one (or at most, a couple) of
order sheets to ARENA per day.  If ARENA places a large load on mail
to my machine, I may have to discontinue the service.

(2) Please send feedback.  If you're smart, you'll have two paragraphs
of praise for how great ARENA is, and then a sentence at the end that
starts "Oh, one tiny little thing which isn't very important and
probably doesn't even deserve mention because its clear that you're a
much better programmer and probably a better game designer than I am,
but..."  But even if you don't follow this format, I'll appreciate
hearing your opinions.  And of course, if you find any bugs please
report them.

(3) I won't be maintaining an ARENA mailing list, so I'd suggest that
general comments be posted to r.g.pbm.  But please put "ARENA" in your
subject line so that uninterested parties can skip over these articles
easily.

That's it.  Read the rules, try it out, and let me know what you
think.

-- Scott T.