Surfergeeks

Today’s entry is going to talk about a favourite game of mine. This game is Acrophobia. Now, most of you recognize the word as being the fear of heights. Not so in this case; Acrophobia is the fear of acronyms. The premise of this multiplayer online game is the players are given an acronym between 3 and 6 letters. From this they have to come up with a sentence based on the acronym. (eg. the acronym is ESAD. A possible sentence could be Eat Shit And Die) After the allotted time each players sentence is displayed and everyone votes on the one they like the best (can’t vote for your own). The top two players go into the final showdown where the other players decide who creates the best acronym for each of a few selections. The winner of the game then gets to choose the topic for the next game.

This game apparently started on IRC quite a long time ago. After that, Berkley Software (of You Don’t Know Jack fame) created a standalone client that used TCP/IP to play over their servers. Then they sold out. Flipside promptly shelved the game after acquiring and never brought it back.

It turns out I wasn’t the only one missing it. A couple different groups have formed to create new versions of the game. The first one I ran across was Acro2. This software is still in “Pre-Beta3″ but looks good so far. Another one I just came across tonight is Tams11 with their game called Acrofrenzy. I haven’t had a chance to download and install it yet. It seems to be played through their custom “Lobby” software which is free for 30 days. I’m going to be looking more into this one and find out the cost associated beyond the 30 day mark.

One of the biggest draws to the game (IMO) was the choice of rooms. Some of the rooms were designated as Adult rooms where anything went (and pretty much always did). I’ll leave it up to your imagination what words were usually formed whenever a C or an F made an appearance…

Anyway, check out both of the above programs – look for either Robb or RobbieRobb (or some form of) – that’ll be me. HFAGL