Aardwolf, played it for the first time years ago and wrote it off, now I’m hooked

8 years ago my buddy introduced me to Aardwolf. I had never given text based RPGs or MUDs a try. My mom used to play a Star Trek one back when the internet first came out, so admittedly I thought the sound of them was lame, especially given the fact I grew up on RuneScape, Guild Wars, NWN, and WoW. My bias was only confirmed when my buddy told me about MUDs and got me to play a session of Aardwolf with him. While playing with him I lied and feigned interest so as not to hurt his feelings since I know how it feels to be really into something, and then to show my friends and have the game/show/song/w/e falls short. I wrote off Aardwolf as just another game that can’t/won’t stand the test of time.

Well recently I did some digging through my old shit and found a dinosaur of an IBM thinkpad x60. It was missing a hard drive and it needed a new battery, but it still had a power plug and all other structural components were intact (this thing could survive a nuclear apocalypse). I ordered the hard drive and new battery off Amazon easy. Unfortunately, no hard drive meant no OS on the machine, and the x60 has no disc drive, so I had to figure out how to install Windows XP from a bootable USB flash drive. I did some research and used easy2boot (if anyone is interested in doing the same thing).

I started thinking to myself, what games can this thing run? I first installed a vanilla WoW private server I play on my main machine onto the thing (turtle wow) but I kept getting executable errors so I gave up on that. I played the pinball game we all played when we had an XP laptop, but no working internet for whatever reason. I thought about Dwarf Fortress, which I also dabbled in years ago, but I really didn’t want to watch tutorial videos and have to deal with the learning curve. It then occurred to me that I should give Aardwolf another try.

I went to the website and downloaded the MUSHclient. I booted it up, made my Human Warrior Soldier, asked a few questions on the newbie channel and got started in the Aylorian academy tutorial. I love this game so much. The simplicity is something I’ve been missing in a lot of stuff these days. I enjoy just reading the descriptions and little details about things, and using my own imagination to create the world. When my buddy introduced me to Aardwolf I didn’t realize that MUDs are a niche that will never die. He was like level 148 (or whatever max level is) at the time and I thought he was such a nerd for still unironically playing this game. I was wrong…He wasn’t still playing it to compete or measure up to some of the garbage that’s put out right now. He was playing it to return to a perfectly preserved capsule of a game that doesn’t need nor even try to be anything other than what it is. If anyone else here plays Aardwolf, I’m monadragon in game, I may be a noob but I am I no stranger to the art of the blade.