anyone remember barrysworld

[FerociouS]

ww, not heard that name in years.

 

[Clown]

Is it bad that I can't remember any of you saying you played AQ2? FH is full of DAoC nerds now. Awesome.

 

[Kainz]

The gaming community back then was quite awesome as we were all roughly the same limited connections bar the ISDN tarts.

I still remember the members of our quakeworld clan iDentity sharing out user/passes to the popular Red Hot Ant ISP and using them on an two hourly basis - I say that because there were 2hr disconnects back then. We're still around today as is our quacknet channel.

Who remembers the free isp once known as X-Stream? Iirc they were the first to have a 1hr totally free connection, whilst it was awful, some of us still ended up using it for gaming!

I truly cherish and miss those days. All those companies really made 1998-2003 probably the best era for UK gaming back then.

 

[antijoke]

Jolt was also good, and I spent a lot of time playing CS on that.

Ahhhh 2 hour disconnects, those were certainly the days.

From memoery my super (which was also a Diamond Supra Plus) modem used to give me pings of 190-220, to think back and imagine what it must have been like to play on these connections is quiet amusing.

 

[Confused]

This thread has brought back some memories!

I certainly remember BW, as well as Wireplay servers - playing AirAttack (albeit not as much as some of my friends did)

Kainz, I remember X-Stream as well - for the time it was amazing - one of the very first 0800 ISPs, which made getting online totally free (if a bit slow due to the number of users!)

I never had a Diamond Supra Plus, but I did have the US Robotics Courier V90 modem, which I then upgraded for the newer V92 version - of course both serial, after trying PCI and USB ones to find they were appalling!


I also used to always play on the Jolt CS servers, albeit that's a few years down the line after BW and Wireplay!

 

[Durzel]

Poor X-Stream, RedHotAnt, etc never had a chance. People would just abuse the hell out of their services.

I remember BT doing a limited time period 0800 scheme too and if you managed to get onto a 62.6.x IP address you could stay connected long after they closed the phone lines. Of course that was back in the days of Windows 98 which you couldn't leave running for any significant period of time without it falling apart at the seams.

Blueyonder used to pay for my ISDN line (long story) which is just as well because I remember getting quarterly bills of several hundreds, and speeds of like 7kB/sec. Nowadays we've got people on 50Mb lines, etc.

 

[BoozerDawg]

You lot have got me remembering all my CS days, with all the clanning and what not i used to do (M3 clan, anyone remember ? Members like Shotgun and Phoenix). I actually installed the original CS yesterday for a quick bash in hope of finding a game as good as in the past..... *sigh* i remember why i stopped. I personally think CS went downhill the minute Steam popped up.

 

[HangTime]

I started my online gaming life on Barrysworld back in 1998, as they ran a Qizmo proxy which let me play Quakeworld from behind my uni's firewall.

Interesting to see Wizzzards mentioned, one of my earliest matches for my first clan was against them I think.... trying to remember some nicks of their players, "Nailer"?

To be honest I probably spent far more time on BW FFA than I did studying for my degree, I don't really regret that though, it was happy days racing to hit the 50 fraglimit with Twink, Raggy, Treznor, Jimbob, Caustic etc. Sadly I was a little too late on the scene to play much against the true 'legendary' clans like QL/QPD/DC/EA/SK, that's the only regret really, winning UKCL/MCW didn't feel quite as sweet as it should have knowing that many top players had moved on to Q3.

 

[HangTime]

I remember BT doing a limited time period 0800 scheme too and if you managed to get onto a 62.6.x IP address you could stay connected long after they closed the phone lines. Of course that was back in the days of Windows 98 which you couldn't leave running for any significant period of time without it falling apart at the seams.

Yeah there was a 2hr cut off on the weekend 0800 thing, it was quite amusing at times seeing people all dropping from irc at 23:55 or so on a Sunday night, all trying to get a fresh connection Also they blocked multilink ISDN, but only on the ISDN numbers, so you could 128k if you used the 'modem' phone no. instead Downside being it always gave you a 'host5' rather than 'host62' i.e. no chance of staying on beyond the 2hrs.

Incidentally a guy on these forums (str) wrote a little app called RASdial which some of used to use, basically it would continually spam redial attempts much quicker than Windows DUN dialog could, giving you a much better chance of connecting to X-Stream.

 

[Tunney]

The gaming community back then was quite awesome as we were all roughly the same limited connections bar the ISDN tarts.

I remember going to a LAN party hosted by someone in my QW TF clan. He had BT Home Highway - dual ISDN! I went on a public server after everyone had gone to bed and racked up a massive score. There was no ping compensation in those days.

I also remember the first person in our clan to get a broadband connection. He lived in Guildford and was part of NTL's first trials. Insanely low pings (~20 when everyone else was pinging 130+) but he had 60% packet loss for the first few months.

 

[Kainz]

Yeah baybee! I used Rasdial! Used to spend upto 2hrs+ just redialing into redhotant (amongst many other users) all trying to logon with the same user/passes back then. It was sheer madness and most ISP's during the 0800 days wouldn't last very long at all. Only the strong (Pipex, Demon, Nildram etc) survived.

I remember Barrysworld getting some dialup/isdn sort of service - I'm not sure how long that even lasted.

 

[njj1046]

I started my online gaming life on Barrysworld back in 1998, as they ran a Qizmo proxy which let me play Quakeworld from behind my uni's firewall.

Ah, my fondest memories of online gaming - Quakeworld. Using my trusty Pace PCI modem to connect to the Barrysworld Qizmo server then onto one of their duel servers. Curse all those LPB's

Your name sticks out Hangtime. I remember you on the QW servers a lot. I used to use the alias 'DaNig' back then. I used to love FFA and especially the duel servers on DM4

Good times

 

[Masterdog]

Man, some good reminiscing on here. I hearted Barrysworld - they ran two UK TF servers which were the only places to play. I actually had a column on their website for a while, which was probably only read by me but was nice to have anyway. After they went we all migrated to Demon's servers, but twas never the same.
What was the major alternative to Qizmo? I think it ended in 'Mo' as well but can't for the life of me remember what it was called.
I remember the CLQ as well! Used to use it mainly for AQ2.
I was on X-stream for a bit, but I wonder if anyone remembers Screaming.net? If I'm remembering it right, you signed up and got free weekend and evening calls if they came in under an hour. Then it was just a case of finding an ISP which offered a national number as 0845 wasn't included. And hey presto, free internet.

 

[s-p]

Wonderful memories are invoked whenever I think of these guys.
Barrysworld - Free rental of servers, + Free MySQL hosting (very few people ever offered this for free back then)
Blueyonder - Brilliant FTP site
Wireplay/Jolt - Massive Server selection

Although I don't really play much online these days, who or what has replaced these communities? The breakdown of such regular haunts was the reason I gave up playing PC games online. I can imagine such environments are pretty expensive to maintain, but surely there are communities out there which could attempt to facilitate a similar sort of experience?

As demonstrated by this thread, it's quite clear that there is an awful lot of fondness associated with this era. Maybe old age is simply catching up with me , but it was different back then wasn't it?

 

[Masterdog]

Imo it was different because it was smaller and more personal. Each community had its own meeting places, its own personalities and figureheads, even in some small ways its own cultures and traditions. Game communities were organic and you had to work to become part of it. And once you did, you could guarantee that you'd know most of the people you were playing with and that they'd love the game as much as you did. For me personally games were quite parochial - I pretty much only played TF for QW, and AQ2 for Q2 and so on.
Games nowadays provide everything for you and there's really no need to explore outside the in-game browser. That's probably a good thing - it's exposed many more people to online gaming and significantly lowered the knowledge you need to enter. But it does mean that the community spirit isn't really there any more, both because a) it has become so casual and b) there are so many people involved.

 

[spirity]

As demonstrated by this thread, it's quite clear that there is an awful lot of fondness associated with this era. Maybe old age is simply catching up with me , but it was different back then wasn't it?

I think a lot of it was down to the fact the internet was still a relatively new thing and online gaming was in it's infancy. Also, messageboard communities were just starting to appear, such as the ezboard ones. It was a pretty exciting time to be part of something new and fresh.

 

[Inferno99]

Online gaming in the 1998-2002 region was the best era for me. Felt much more like a community compared to now. Haven't even used IRC in over half a decade.

Mind you, it used to cost £40 a month + ISP to use the BT Home Highway back then. I too was on RedHotAnt and i found it to give the best pings on the Jolt servers when it did eventually connect with rasdial. Started off with the Asuscom TA but purchased one of those active Eicon Divas. Was quite serious about the LPBage. Still remember those codes i used to type into the dialling settings for the Diamond Supra (pre-ISDN) to make it dial faster etc etc.

 

[Sem]

As demonstrated by this thread, it's quite clear that there is an awful lot of fondness associated with this era. Maybe old age is simply catching up with me , but it was different back then wasn't it?

the exact reason i made the thread

im so disillusioned with pc gaming right now
its not nearly as much as fun as it used to be

 

[MotherMayI]

Was that the place that let you rent TFC servers for free for like an hour at a time? If so, they were awesome, relied on them completely for clan practice sessions in the old days.

Wireplay did that as well.

But yeah, good times

Oh what I would do to go back to an era of online gaming without legions of l33t pr0z, egos and 12 year olds.

Whoever mentioned about the UK QW scene - Its not dead, by a long shot. Still a lot of servers running.

 

[lumpeh]

I'll raise you.. who remembers wireplay?!

And I mean the old DOS client, not the windows one that came out about 1 year or so later.

hellsyeah! I remember my first ever online gaming experience was with the Descent II demo and a guy called kekabeater cost me 1.50 an hour though