Castle Paradox

[TMC]

Yes, really! Today, is the remarkable 20th anniversary of the oldest surviving copy of the Official Hamster Republic Role Playing Game Construction Engine, a demo of Wandering Hamster dated November 4th, 1997.

You can still download it today and play it in DOSBOX! Check out the Wandering Hamster page archived from 1997:
https://web.archive.org/web/19971011231138/http://www.cyberverse.com:80/~spam/wander.html
(mirror of the download)

See Timeline on the wiki for lots of tidbits about the start of the engine.

(Although I searched hard, I couldn't work out when the first release of the OHRRPGCE editor was, although I'm fairly confident it was January 1998 or December 1997. James started development in summer 1996. I don't know when the first demo of Wandering Hamster was either, but there were at least two before this one.)

To celebrate, I've added support for this early demo of WH to the next version, Etheldreme. Now we can claim 20 years of back-compatibility :)
To play it, you will just need to rename the WORKING folder in the .zip to something ending in .rpgdir, like WANDER.rpgdir, so that the engine will recognise it as a game.

(However, not all of my fixes are in the latest nightly build yet. Most significantly, two of the maps use the wrong tileset, and there's an engine bug message when James joins the party. I should have prepared this ahead of time!)





This demo of WH has no music or title screen. Flanat only has four buildings, and the demo is pretty short, with not too much to do at Hasim Castle but fight Broaste, although I did stumble upon a secret area which has since been removed! It is a long walk back and forth to the castle, and you do need to level a bit to beat Broaste.

Uhh, well the one thing that doesn't work is that lots of global text strings are mixed up! Theres lots of status effect messages which got removed later.

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