Are you growing tired of playing all those high-framerate first person shooters? Perhaps you long for the days of blocky graphics and text-based play. You’re in luck because Tradewars 2002 is still around. Many of you will remember this 1980′s BBS based game, playing a limited number of turns per day in an effort to rule the galaxy.

The game may be around, but the way you play it has changed drastically. The advent of custom scripts that interface directly with the game system makes this more of a who can write a better script rather than who is better at the game. A hacker’s challenge if you will.  Using programs like TWX Proxy or Swath, scripts can be written and executed to perform just about any task you wish. Mapping out the galaxy, automatically trading for profit (cashing), automatically colonizing planets, and much more can all be done automatically. The most advanced script writers have produced advanced team scripts that several people run at once to coordinate team based strategy and hunting scripts that try to anticipate where enemies will end up so they can be ambushed.

There are plenty of resources for learning to play the game, the basics of the scripting languages used, and finding servers to play on. Dust off your coding skills and get down to some ASCII graphic goodness.