When I was kid Commodore 64 was big thing and I played ‘Gateway to Apshai‘ hour after hour. It really hit me. Others liked Ultimas but ‘Gateway to Apshai’ was THE thing to me. Years after C64 was gone with the wind I found world of Rogue, Omega and Nethack. Sweetest of them was Omega. Omega’s World map was big and you could do what ever you like and wander around and you didn’t have to fight all the time. As this was a long, long time ago none of those games are no more in active development but Sami Maaranen is still developing unique northern hemisphere survival game called UnReal World RPG.
See bigger pictures at IndieDB
UnReal World RPG
What makes UnReal World RPG so unique? Game is huge, difficult level is infernal and it’s all about survival in north (Iron-Age Finland actually). As said UnReal World RPG tries to be as quite realistic. You won’t find goblins nor elves around but UnReal World RPG gives you elks, mooses, bears, wolves, lynxes and really long dark cold winter. If you want to survive the arctic winter you have to try little bit harder (and you probably die). If you like to get into fight you probably die or you get serious wounds and you probably die soon because you can’t make fire.
Many times this game feels a bit sadistic in modeling how hard it have been in Iron-Age Finland but developer Sami Maaranen (and co-designer Erkka Lehmus) have spent lots of time studying about old ways crafting things, building traps and living off the land in general. As said before learning curve in this game is bit steep but there are plenty of ‘Let’s play‘-videos floating in Internet to help you out and you can’t find many games that gives you so much fun. So if you like survival games this is for you.
This sounds good
And it is. UnReal World RPG is not Open Source nor it’s Free Software but it’s free to play and download (no strings attached). Developer is only asking donations and if you like the game you should really consider to donate small amount to support the development.
Little bit deeper look
UnReal World, or shortly UrW, was first released in 1992 as more traditional fantasy roguelike game. Then it evolved and evolved steadily. URW started as MS DOS ascii based game after that was VGA/SVGA DOS upper memory semi graphics version. Third generation took URW to Windows world with SDL-library. At that point notorious rewrite of graphics, sounds and user interface was proceeded, but it was heavily tied to MS Windows world.
porting UnReal World RPG
In some point people started to tell in URW forums that they are playing URW in Wine (both Mac OS X and Linux). They were happy because it worked. Playing in Wine ain’t pleasant all the time as it’s with native game.
Porting SDL 1.2 game to another platform is really nice. It only does what it states. You don’t have to worry about internals and differences between platforms you just figure out differences and make sure everything is working smooth. Although MSVC is very different compiler C than GCC’s one. There is even huge difference between Mac OS X libc and Linux libc. Even little bit bumpy ride everything went well at the end and version 3.13 was first Linux and Mac OS X native version released.
Developing multiplatfrom has its’ pains but now Linux and Mac OS X are released in same time as Windows version. I used openSUSE system as base Linux system for the port to Linux. Currently there is openSUSE RPM-version (Which is for Fedora also), Ubuntu/Debian DEB-version/Tar-ball and Mac OS X. Statistics show there is steadily growing phase of people coming from those platform to play URW. Only Ubuntu have currently 64-bit version because there is no demand on openSUSE or Fedora (people with Ubuntu just plays more games!).
Game ON!
If you don’t have anything else to do on your Christmas vacation: Go and grab UnReal World RPG new 3.18beta3 version when it’s hot hot hot. Find yourself building a cottage and swimming in lake or try to survive the arctic winter.
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