December 2, 2006: SlaveHack
Be a virtual hacker in a virtual Internet!
Posted on 2006-12-02 12:56 by Jørn Støylen [permalink]
I discovered the online multiplayer game Slave Hack through a Jay Is Games review, and have been playing it every day since then.
Basically you’re given a crappy computer and a connection to the Internet. In your “browser” there’s a list of about a dozen sites and their IPs (this is a world devoid of DNS servers, or domain names altogether), and after following the brief tutorial you’ve downloaded your first waterwall (firewall breaker) and your first spam virus, and then broken into 1.1.1.1 and installed it on that server. Congratulations, you’re on your way to making some money for yourself, so you can upgrade your hardware or connection.
Then you scour the logs of each machine, extracting IPs of other players’ machines and deleting any trace of your actions, hoping you’re able to do so before other players get your IP and break into your machine.
There’s a bit more to it too, most notably the Riddle Trail—text files on certain servers containing riddles that, when solved, will give you the IP number to the next server in the trail, which contains better software and new riddles.
It’s a great game for just checking in on now and then, since just about everything you do takes time (and displays progress bars so you know how much time’s left).
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It sounds a lot like Uplink, which is a totally fun game.
Haven’t tried it, but I’ve seen their web site, there was a link in SlaveHack’s forums, I think. But Uplink is single player, which means it’s less interesting, since much of the fun is hacking into other, real people’s (virtual) computers.