(video) Card games vs (mother) Board games. 
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Yeah, the scope of the project (number and variety of ports) has been quite amazing.
-Wade
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I answered “seldom”. I used to play a lot of puzzle-based games (like Sokoban, Rush Hour, Wriggle sort of games) and board games (like Ataxx, Hnefatafl, Reversii sort of games) on my phone on the train travelling to and from work. If the question had been “in the last 12 months”, then I would have answered “never” due to working from home because of the pandemic.
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Concur and agree. I always explore EVERY nook & cranny of W/JRPG; and as “advanced testing & experimenting” I dabble in “Interactive fanfiction/dojinshi”, not to be released…
hmm… as an exception, I can relate that a WIP of mine is influenced by certain modern/supernatural JRPG franchises AND First things first
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Yes, me too. I play a lot of MAME and emulated video game consoles from my youth (Colecovision, Atari, etc) but no modern games.
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Since my last reply, I’ve remembered that there is a more recent roguelike I pick up sometimes. It’s called World of Horror. I think it’s worth a look for anyone who loves cosmic horror, old Mac graphics, or permadeath. There’s a demo (build is two years old) at itch.io
WORLD OF HORROR by panstasz (itch.io)
Has anyone else tried this? I bought into early access a while back because I found it so appealing.
Since my last reply, I’ve remembered that there is a more recent roguelike I pick up sometimes. It’s called World of Horror. I think it’s worth a look for anyone who loves cosmic horror, old Mac graphics, or permadeath. There’s a demo (build is two years old) at itch.io
I saw World of Horror during the Steam demo week and thought it looked unique but I wasn’t aware that it was a roguelike. I thought it was more like a visual novel or adventure game. How do you play it exactly?
On another topic: Shadow Tactics is free on GOG for the next 35 hours.
It’s a top-down strategy game with stealth and puzzle elements…I don’t usually play RTS games but this is one of the best games of the last ten years IMO.
Very difficult (save-scumming is an official endorsed part of the game) but it’s also very accessible because you are always working with a small cast of characters.
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It is a roguelike that looks and plays like a hypercard game, if that makes sense.
At the beginning these elements can be chosen: character, difficulty, and elder god
The characters all have different stats, and I believe each one has a perk. Each elder god has a constraint the player will have to deal with.
At game start, the PC is conducting an investigation into strange events around their town. In the course of this investigation the player must solve five mysteries (these are procedurally chosen).
Basic play involves visiting locations and “investigating” them. Each investigation will cause an event. These events may present a choice, a skill check, combat, or be non-interactive (as in most roguelikes, luck is an important factor). In addition to the implications of these events, each investigation adds to the “doom” meter. When it reaches 100%, the elder god returns and the world ends.
With each mystery solved, the world gets a little less friendly, and the game adds a new debuff. After all five mysteries are solved, the player can enter the final area–the lighthouse. It’s hard to make it to the lighthouse with enough stamina and reason (if your reason reaches zero you become permanently insane) to reach the top.
Like most old timey RPGs, this town has healing (the hospital), shops, and magic (trade doom for spells at the school library). It’s not easy to find money so items and equipment are quite restrained.
On normal and higher, I find it tough to beat. There is apparently a second “timeline” that remixes mystery outcomes, but I haven’t tired of the default yet.
While the visual conceit is definitely 90s Mac adventure, it’s about stats under the hood
Thanks for the heads-up! I’ve heard about it over the years but have never tried it.
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Roguelike, turn-based rpg, and hypercard sounds like a super difficult combination. I will have to check it out though.
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I have about 1500 hours in Terraria and help write guides/edit the wiki, and have played a lot of Bloons and different Plants vs Zombie games.
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I’m a mile (1.609344Km) wide, inch (2.54cm) deep person. As such IF is just one of many interests. They vary from Age of Empires 2DE to Galactic Civilizations to Civ 5 to Trainz with various other card and board games thrown in. I don’t get as much time as I thought I would have after retirement (wife has other plans) so I can’t get too involved in anything. Currently rewriting an old BASIC game (The Search for Almazar) so I guess that counts as text, but I still need the divergent breaks with the other games.
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I remember that. It was published for the TRS-80 in 80 Micro, 1983 special anniversary issue, pp. 288–294, 296–297. Are you the original author? It was hailed as ‘Part 1: The Proving Ground’. Were there ever any further parts?
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No, unfortunately I’m not or this conversion would be a lot easier. 
I found it in the same mag, although I can no longer find my copy. I still have a photocopy with my scratchings and I have since downloaded a PDF of the Mag. The frustrating bit is thaty some of the BASIC code is not correct for QB64. (There are GOTO statements inside of FOR - NEXT loops that are my major source of “enjoyment” trying to come up with a suitable workaround.)
Once I have it working in BASIC, I’ll be better placed to convert it to Inform6.
I have never come across any further parts either, so if they exist at all, they are being kept secret.
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Drew, not all people have used 68K macs, so perhaps explaining what Hypercard was ought to be of help…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
Having only casual knowledge of legacy Macintosh computers (just familiar enough to recognize a HyperCard interface), I don’t feel qualified to answer in any depth. Here is my meager attempt.
HyperCard was a platform for Macintosh computers released in the late 80s. It is a now-deprecated relative of hypertext. Each screen is a “card,” and they may feature graphics, text, clickable objects/links, and so forth. The links, in turn, open other cards, which open other cards. A HyperCard program is a stack of such interactive cards. It featured scripting support (I don’t know the extent) and had a database of some sort to track card states.
Myst was the most successful and widely known Hypercard application.
World of Horror is very much a tribute to late-80s Macintosh visuals. It certainly doeesn’t look like Myst. The images are all 1-bit (or binary) by default. By this I mean the entire palette is made up of two colors, black and white. While I presume that World of Horror is more complex than a hypercard application, I think the visual resemblence is easy to recognize (even for a PC guy like me).
Here is a link with some sample pages (and a good article):
30-plus years of HyperCard, the missing link to the Web | Ars Technica
Here is a link to some World of Horror Screens:
WORLD OF HORROR (wohgame.com)
A bit of trivia: all of World of Horror’s images were drawn in MS Paint.
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There is this recent indie game which remakes the cancelled Silent Hill game P.T. in hypercard which gives you some of idea of how it works.
Basically, Powerpoint for Mac is how I understand it?
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Only 70 votes in this poll ??
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Basically, Powerpoint for Mac is how I understand it?
Sort of, but mostly not.
The basic metaphor for Hypercard is less close to PowerPoint than it is to a web page. PowerPoint slide decks almost always have a canonical order and are gone through from beginning to end, which is true for virtually no Hypercard decks I ever encountered. For PowerPoint, scriptability is limited and is basically a bolted-on afterthought; virtually all Hypercard decks took advantage of at least the simpler bits of the complex and powerful (and English-like) scripting language that was baked into Hypercard from the beginning. Hypercard decks also could be (and often were) extended by writing and compiling code in non-Hypercard languages that could be integrated into the Hypercard decks in ways that passed values back and forth between code written in HyperTalk and code written externally in (say) C or Pascal (or any Mac development environment that could meet basic macOS compilation conditions for building system tools).
Really, a better metaphor would be some contemporary IF languages that provide a framework that handles background tasks in a consistent way that moves it towards near-universality in most cases: the “card” metaphor is a sort of underlying layer that’s mostly consistent from deck to deck in the same way that Dialog or Inform give you a default world model. Not having to design that from the ground up and being able to just script drop-in elements is a real benefit for certain tasks: you use TADS or Twine because you don’t want to have to build the framework from scratch and just want to write the bits that are unique to your particular application.
Hypercard was kind of like that, but with a focus on presenting hypertext.
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Oh, I wasn’t aware of the scripting capabilities. That does make it quite a bit different.
I made some very simple games with Powerpoint when I was younger but they didn’t use variables, which I don’t think Powerpoint supports…everything was based on timing and branching paths actually.
Is anyone trying to bring hypercard back to life, with a clone of it or anything?
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