Wandering Hamster

By: Paul Eres

On: October 24th, 2008

Wandering Hamster, the “flagship” title of the Ohrrpgce (Official Hamster Republic RPG Creation Engine) was created by the author of that engine, James `SPAM Man’ Paige. It has one of the longest development times of any indie game: it was first released in 1997, and has been continuously updated every year until today (and it’s still unfinished and still being updated). Whenever the Ohrrpgce engine got a new feature, so did this game; recently when portraits and sound effects were added to the engine, this game got them too! (Yes, most Ohrrpgce games were created with the versions of the engine which don’t even support sound effects. Thousands upon thousands of games were created in the engine anyway.)

The game is a humorous, surrealist RPG, much like the Mother series (although probably not as good, but it does have a charm of its own). You play a Hamster and meet a variety of strange characters as you solve problems which I believe are created by an evil potted cactus (although I don’t know for sure, because the game isn’t finished yet). My view of this game might be affected by nostalgia (I learned how to create games largely by editing this game in the Ohrrpgce engine), so judge its quality for yourself. I do think it has some genuinely hilarious writing though.

Note: because the game engine uses 320×200 resolution, it might not work on monitors which don’t support that (it doesn’t work on mine). I believe there’s a way to get the game to auto-run in windowed mode, if I figure it out I’ll edit this post.

Posted in Freeware, RPG | Tags: Ohrrpgce

Valkyrie

Holy shit, nostalgia!

I remember playing this game about 8 or 9 years ago. I’m totally going to dig into this one. Thanks, Paul!
http://www.distractionware.com Terry

Haha, I remember this :D OHRRPGCE was probably the first game making program I ever encountered.

Speaking of obscure games, it reminds me of a strange OHRRPGCE game I went looking for a few years ago and couldn’t find – Atomic Knights Apocalypse or something like that. The guys who made it had a load of bizarre ZZT games too…
http://www.slimesalad.com Mogri

OHRRPGCE already defaults to windowed mode, ever since it became Windows-based rather than DOS-based. You are behind the times by several years!
Paul Eres

Perhaps the Ohrrpgce does, but the Wandering Hamster download itself doesn’t!
ElTipejoLoco

Purgatory, City of Dreams and Boundless Ocean+ also don’t turn windowed (to my knowledge). I think you can force them to run in a window by using Windows’s compatibility mode and telling it to do so.
Paul Eres

I think there was another way to do it, a command line option. Of course, most people today were born after Windows came out and don’t know anything about command line options, but they do work.
http://www.slimesalad.com Mogri

If you’re running them with the included files, they may not go windowed. In particular, I know Purgatory and City of Dreams were created with older versions that don’t support windowing. You can use newer versions of the executable to run the older files, however.
Paul Eres

James Paige just posted on CP that the stand-alone version of WH is outdated, and that he should update it.

So yes, for optimum experience download the latest Ohrrpgce “game.exe” and use that to run older Ohrrpgce games. This works for as far as I know all Ohrrpgce games, except for those with “custom” builds of game.exe like Missing, Sword of Jade, and Ziggurats for Red Turtle.
Nillo

Agh, this news post got my hopes up that Wandering Hamster had finally been finished. I guess I am too optimistic sometimes.

Also, the music still sounds god-awful on my computer for some reason. I’m guessing it’s because of the weird file format that OHRRPGCE insists on using.
Pnx

http://hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/index.php/Sword_of_Jade.html

Sword of Jade, my all time favorite OHRRPGCE game, it’s very very good.
Paul Eres

Haha, that’s another game that would be self-promotion, since it was made by two friends of mine and is also on my site :D

But I do agree, SoJ is probably the best Ohrrpgce game ever, so I’ll probably mention it.
Dusty Spur

I couldn’t get past the awful philosophical bullshit in SoJ long enough to start enjoying myself.
ElTipejoLoco

‘Awful philosophical bullshit’ is everywhere, so, uh, I guess you won’t be enjoying yourself for quite some time.
Paul Eres

Yeah, it’s a consciously philosophical game and its authors were a little too heavy-handed with it, but you have to get further into the game before it starts becoming meaningful. Like in Dostoevsky’s novels, the plot isn’t a battle between good and bad, but between differing philosophies.
Derek

I <3 you, Paul.
gulo gulo

this game is a good example of the sense of humor of the socially inept
gulo gulo

but it’s not a very good example of anything else :(
http://w-szawa.alterblog.pl Mruqe

“This looks JUST like Final Fantasy” – oh wow, man…
Zaratus

Heh, what’s next? MegaZeux? (Man, I spent a lot of time on that when I was younger.)
http://www.0xdeadc0de.org/ Eclipse

i vote for megazeux too
Elkovsky

Holy cow, this takes me back. I actually bought their “Games of the Hamster Republic” CD back in high school, and I was, like, the third person to post on the page dedicated to Elvis sightings. Yeah. Now I feel old.

If only he would’ve updated BobQuest 2: DireSpam…
Advenith

Bernard the Bard FTW, although I’m pretty sure it was already mentioned when they had the post about the DS port of MZX.
WineBlood

I was thinking a few days ago about this RPG game making program I tried years ago and had this wierd acronym, never thought I’d find it again! Seems like it evolved a lot since last time I used it.