Many people go online and find all sorts of different web-based games. There are all sorts and almost anyone who has gotten bored at work, school, or just wanted something to do has played a flash game. In my search for games, and I can't even remember the first day I signed up for this game, I found an HTML, all text-based game called Torn City.
Its nothing new really. City full of crime, lots and lots of gangs, drugs rampant, gun laws almost non-existent, and a whole community of players who are hardcore about their text based game. It is almost unreal how much people enjoy this game, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. It is all reading. You read to find out how you punched someone. You read to find out how you commited a crime. You read to find out that your items got sold on the item market.
Now, I'm no stickler on reading, in fact, reading and me get along just fine. But there is a limit to how much fun I can have with reading. There is no end to the words. They don't just simply pull up a flash animation, power bar, anything at all to relate to skill/hand-eye coordination that a player must do to become "better". You even have a job in this crime infested city, which is highly unlikely in the real world, that gives you money, stats, a certain "job points", and special commands that are mostly work-related. Go figure.
However, the biggest drawback I find is that they give you 3 bars to tell you how your character (which you never see) is doing labeled "Energy", "Happiness", and "Nerve". Energy is what is used to attack, work out at the gym, and get enrolled into schooling (and maybe a few other things...). Energy regenerates 5 points every 15 minutes, and energy gets depleted in just a few actions. Very time consuming. Happiness only determines how successful you are at crimes. Not super important when there are many other factors to increase or decrease the success rate. And last is Nerve, which is used only to commit crimes. Oh, and bust out of jail yourself or someone else, but thats still a crime. It's more forgiving than energy, at a rate of 1 per 5 minutes, but when you're higher level, a single crime costs about 8 nerve.
tl;dr very time consuming game with little reward, and it is all text based.
There are many other text based games out there. Who else wastes their time on it?
http://www.torn.com/
