Wikipedia Article on Uplink
Edit: The forum's link parser doesn't include underscores, so I had to manually add a link.

For some random reason I started working on a BYOND game that is very similar to Uplink (a bit more command line based though.) So I was just curious, for those of you who have played Uplink (and I know you're out there - I searched!), how do you like it? What are your thoughts? How realistic do you like your hacking simulator games to be?

I haven't played Uplink in over 7 years but I seem to recall it being a little hokey. But adding too much realism might make the game overly complex for people.

If you had to do 90% of your gameplay through something that resembled Bash (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash), memorizing commands and manually entering addresses, editing configuration files, etc, would you get bored of it?

I've only worked on it for like 15 to 30 minutes so there isn't much, but right now when you log in all you have is a black window that resembled a terminal window (including only using the typical 14 ANSI colors). It tells you that you're connecting to some random IPv6 address, makes you wait for a random (relatively small) amount of time before it tells you that it is handshaking with the server and the connection is established. It then shows a login prompt and enters "root" automatically one character at a time as if it is being typed, followed by a password prompt with 8 astericks entered in a similar fashion.

After you "log in" the screen is cleared and it tells you that you have an unread mail message and to enter "mail list" to read it. It gives you a prompt [root@(your BYOND key)], and when you type commands at the input bar at the bottom of the screen it'll display them after the prompt one character at a time as if they were being typed before parsing them and executing a proc or telling you that it is an invalid command.

When a player checks their mail they are given a brief welcome, told what the basic commands are (ls, pwd, cd, more, less, etc), and told to go to a certain directory to read a file. That file contains instructions on how to connect to a remote server and contains a username and password for you at the bottom of the list. You can then connect to the remote server (which opens up in a second window similar to the first), and download and run a script (also through command prompts) that will do stuff to increase your score...

And that's basically all I have at the moment. Like I said, it's only been about 15~30 minutes of work, and just a quick example. But does that sound too tedious for a game? Would it be better to just have it mostly GUI based and a bit more fictional like Uplink?

Would you be interested in a hybrid, where you still use terminal windows for most of your work but have them embedded in a GUI with quick buttons to do some of the more mundane things for you?

Overall, just by making this little project I feel incredibly silly. It just all seems too hokey to me. But that's probably why I only played Uplink for a few days. What is it that makes hacking simulations more fun and less cheesy?