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Holy Lord!! It has been forever and about 2 years since I last entered the Avara. (Geez, that feels an awful lot like the start of confession.....egad!)
Can't say I haven't missed this game.....Avara used to be my oxygen. I can remember the old days with guys like Malkavian, F.Yu, Homer, Archer, Spartan, Yo'momma, me Eloise, Yuggoth, Shakespeare, Vertigo, White Lightning, USHER, MoFo Extreme, and of course, my mortal enemy...Gimli! There were so many...if I used to whoop on you too, but I didn't mention ya...its not that I forgot, I just can't sit up all night typing the list of names!!
I must say that I am impressed at the longevity of Avara!!! Even back when I was an everyday player, I wouldn't have imagined we'd still have people roaming the tracker in 2000!!
For those of you unfamiliar with my exploits in the old days, I entered Avara in college (shortly after Avarastorm), and immediately became hooked. There were a bunch of us at Michigan State who played, and so I honed my skills before I ever ventured onto anyone else's servers. And who did I pick to start with? Yup, the AA.
To my surprise, I actually didn't get hammered as bad as I thought. Next thing ya know, in about 2 months I was holding my own, and made it into AA.
Back then, the closest thing we had to a message board was the "Brag!" page. I made my rep both on the tracker and on the Brag page. I'll admit, I was over the top, young and full of myself. But I could back up my words.
I remember the "Icebox" rage, the "Choke" phenomenon, the "Bwadi" epidemic (you guys who used to sit at the bubble are STILL wusses...that includes Homer, if he's still out there :)).
I remember the first AA level set, the time I got a 3-0-0-0-0 in a 4x1 on Choke; playing Lionball with MoFo as my teammate against Malk and F Yu; teaming with Archer and Shakespeare in some various 2x2 tourneys, my failed attempt to run a tourney of my own (hey we made it to the semifinals in 1x1); learning about latency, pings, bandwidth, IRC, ftp, HTML, Photoshop, and various other aspects of the internet solely from Avara; kicking TOUPS for bitching about being butt raped in 6-man AA games; playing various idiots in "Firing Line" for being idiots; actually winning a game of "Firing Line" as the TARGET against Flart God; I remember Coromoran being MY level (as in "my house!"); Internet Explorer being MY KOTH level (once again, IE is my house!); I remember the first time I killed malk..and thought I was hot ****; I can remember being honored that a level was named after me in the same set as levels for Homer and Vertigo (who at the time were waxing my rusty ass); I remember Cameroon Indoor Arena on spring afternoons at the start of a 9 hour Avara session; I remember the dawn and stagnation of Avara ladder play; I remember when finally Legend beat me 1x1 shortly before I quit..and how he made it seem like such a huge accomplishment; I remember how I used to 3-0 clan leaders in their "entrance tests" and the refused to join; I remember how Whipping Boy dogged me on Brag for kicking him because of his high pings until I 3-0'd him 1x1 (the guy was playing on a 14.4 from Hawaii for god's sake); I remember defending AA daily against "threats" and charges of being "elitist" and "bandwidth nazis"; I remember the 5 basket Lionball game I had against Bishopp and kamakazi; I remember bitching out Frogger for singling me out in 6-man games; I remember the "onion boyz"; I remember how my various server invites were a constant topic of humor ("Idiots will be kicked after I sleep with their girlfriends"); I remember the day we all did mafia names on an AA server (Don Vengeanciano, and Malkavalini); I remember renaming all of the characters in Final Fantasy 7 after AA members; I remember renaming all of the Unreal Tournament bots after old Avara buddies...just for nostalgia (and increased motivation against the Inhuman difficulty level); but most of all, I remember the people, the friends, and the good times that I had in Avara...and I appreciate you people for indulging me in my little stroll down Avara memory lane.
For anyone who wonders why I don't come back, I'm on a PC (gasp) P3 750 with 256Meg of RAM and am WICKEDLY into Ultima Online and Unreal Tournament. If anyone who used to know me back then plays either of these games, give me a shout at dark_vengeance@hotmail.com, or ICQ me at 15487654 so I can whoop your ass again.
Man oh man, do i have memories here.....almost makes me want to trade in my computer for an iMac so I can get back into my rust-laden HECTOR and learn to be great all over again.....almost.
In the meantime, take care....keep the game alive...it was the best $20 I ever spent in my life.
Bring the noise. Cheers..........
A friend of mine just got hold of an old Mac an wondered if there are any great games for such a old and slow machine. I recommended Ambrosia, and of course Avara. So of I went to see if Avara is still alive, and stumbled into this webboard. Then reading Dark Vengeance stroll down nostalgia lane made my eyes water. I recoginzed all the names, and all the happenings. Avara was the first game that I played on the net, and I remember foundly all the nights I have been sitting in front of my old PowerBook DUO playing. Avara is also the only multiplayer game with a decent chat function. Several people started Avara servers just to chat with other Mac users, and I made contact with several great people all over the world, like Viking and Captain Red. Avara is still a great multiplayer game, don't let the simplistic graphics fool you. It only shows that a good game is more than fancy graphics and high-powered sound effects. Yes, I am a PC user nowadays, and just as Dark Vengeance I play A LOT of Unreal Tournament. But still, Avara was my first foray into multiplayer games, and I miss (somewhat) those old days. Hmm, I have an old PowerPC under my desk, maybe I should....
Just a little bump, for the new generation, and the members of the old generation that are still looking.
Almost 6 years ago, and even then Avara seemed like a distant memory.
Bring the noise. Cheers............
Dark Vengeance, on Feb 21 2006, 07:08 AM, said:
Bring the noise. Cheers............ View Post
Time to start planning the ten year release anniversery.
I thought I was hot s### the first day or two of release when I managed to kill vetere in Icebox. Ahh, it was all downhill (for my college grades, anyway) from there...
Every six or nine months I get a bizzare urge, and poke at Avara a little bit. I played a few hours last week, I sux rox, and the application itself isn't glass smooth, like I remember it being. Darn emulation. Pretty soon, it won't be playable at all on the new Intel machines. I suppose then the game will finally die.
I haven't really been involved in any internet game communities since Avara . I guess it was the fact that Avara was so, well, unsuccessful (putting it bluntly), that made the community fun for me. I knew everyone I played against, as opposed to playing random stranger number #25498. I played a lot, but was never more than a slightly above average player...I don't have all the fast twitch muscle response, apparently. Malkavian waxed me on a regular basis, the arrogant little prick.
To all my former AA compatriots--this beer is for you. Icebox Classic forever.
Gimli, on Feb 21 2006, 06:30 PM, said:
... snip ...
To all my former AA compatriots--this beer is for you. Icebox Classic forever. View Post
10 year anniversary... whoa... what's that, september 2006?
The hot s### moment happened for me the 2nd day I played multiplayer, came close to beating Pter, and was the first modem-using Avara player (14.4k ROX the BOX) accepted into the AA.
I accept your beer, and raise you a vanilla vodka tonic!
kickin some AA butt whilest on dial-up was a treat; rarely sampled from my poor side of the telco.
funny though but it would seem the geezers won in the long run seeing as yall are EM now, or on the verge,
say, concidering the heaping stack of script farmilliars who have rolled through here youd thing someone would have cobbled together the one click mac emulator avara combo to run in windows or linux,
or xbox??
just say, nice seein you guys...
This post has been edited by slick henry : 14 March 2006 - 02:22 AM
Avara Xbox? Are you kidding?
I suppose I could try to cobble something together, though I dont have anywhere to upload it. I would be able to give you everything but the ROM and a stable (not System 7.5) OS, which you would have to pull and find yourself.
slick henry, on Mar 14 2006, 06:21 AM, said:
<snip>
Slick henry? Are you the person that I me in my earliest days of playing, you showed some interest in my levels, and you told me "I can teach you things you won't read in the guides, like put your direction indicator on a goody, then you can unload all your ammo in another direction while you walk to it..." I think that was back when I spelled my name śŁĺ§Ą˘ ??N because I (mistakenly) thought it was cool.
And then you disappeared and I never saw you again. Or am I thinking of some other guy? That would probably be seven or eight years ago.
You could maybe run Avara on the Xbox by doing the Linux mod and then emulating Avara? Sounds like it would run slow as hell...if I get up the money to buy an Xbox, I'll try it and let you know if it works.
It would work. Of course, you would have to do something about the lack of a keyboard...
lack of a keyboard?!?!?!
dont you guys all browse from your gamestation chaining your keyboard via wifi through your cordless controller base??
hey pc!!
ya... that was me... gosh, sounds like i was rather full of myself at the time... heh.
oh and thanks for the interest guys... but as i do recall being excited about getting a 150mhz process back then to see how much avara speed up over the 25mhz quadra id been playing it on for the previous 3 years...
i just dont see why the emulation of enough os7 or 8 to run avara ISNT running on my ipod right now... or my xbox...
I came here to look at this topic, which seemed to be about some guy who hadn't played Avara in a while, and just found it... hadn't played it in 2 years. Then he says it's 2000! So, how old is this game, anyway? Sounds like it was one of the first Ambrosia released.
And this topic may be the oldest active topic here.
Avara was released in late 1997.
-§carlet §torm
This post has been edited by Consul Bob : 09 April 2006 - 10:42 PM
Correction: Avara was released September 17, 1996.
-§carlet §wordfish.
avara 96'
Geezers.....
we were there YOU wernt
I may not have played Avara nearly as much as some of you, but I certainly had a fair share. Takes me back to when I first encountered Ambrosia, back in elementary school. I tried loading up Avara on my dad's 66 mhz Performa. Of course, being 10, I was immediatly repulsed by the loads of controls, and I gave up and went over to Escape Velocity.
A few years later, when I had finally got an appletalk network going between my 224 mhz Motorola clone, my dad's Performa, and an old 25 mhz "pizzabox" we'd aquired, I rediscovered Avara. I got my 2 younger brothers interested in it, and we'd play it for hours at a time over our little home network. I wasn't able to get on the internet to play it because of restrictive parents.
It seems a shame that the Avara community is dying out. I'd insert some message here hoping for an X port, or an Avara 2, but after some internet research, it looks like that probably won't happen. At least we all had fun back in the day. Here's to Avara, and all the other old Ambrosia games.
I never really got into Avara because ten years ago I was eight years old and hated losing. The game was still fun (even unregistered), and I played it a bit with my brother. It was elipsed by other great mac games though, like EV, Spin Doctor, Bolo, and Klick & Play, because those games required far less effort to have fun with (Bolo, though also networked, had AI bots you could play against).
But if Dark Horizons: Lore were more Avara-ish, I would now be doomed. As it is it outclasses my machine, has a completely different style of play, and it seems impossible to make an Avara conversion out of it because it behaves much more like a traditional FPS than the Mechwarrior/Normal FPS control scheme (not that I am saying these predate Avara) that Avara has.
sigh
I want to be doomed.