Freeware Game Pick: Wikirunner (Doches)
Wikirunner is an a chase game inspired by Jeremy Bushnell's Wikipedian Tag. Created for Mini Ludum Dare #12 (the theme was 'Wikipedia'), two players are given a random Wikipedia page each, and then 'the chaser' must try to navigate his or her way to the same page as their opponent, while 'the runner' must try to stay off the same page as the chaser for as long as possible.
Both players can only move to another Wiki page if it has some relevance to the page they are currently on - so for example, you could move from 'London Olympics' to '2012', but not from 'Russia' to 'kangaroo'. The chaser also gets two goes for every one of the runner's goes, to give him a fair chance. The game can be played in a 2-player hotseat style, or 1 vs AI, or AI vs AI (if you want to watch how the program thinks).
By far the most fun mode is an AI chaser vs a player runner. It's interesting to see the choices the AI makes - at one point I changed to 'Canada', so the AI jumped over to a page on 'Dumbledore's Army'. Escaping to the Wiki page for 'Iraq', the program then tried to follow me by bringing up the page for 'The Manchester Evening News', which just so happens to be my local newspaper strangely enough.
Give it a go and see how far you can run. (For Windows and Linux)
Comments
Putting the next and previous options directly on top of the choices was a serious design flaw.
Posted by: Anonymous | September 14, 2009 3:13 AM
Very, very clever. I was running among some obscure pages and I noticed that he is in "Middle East" while I was on some turkish name. I tried to run to the "western culture" but he cought me. 10 turns together. Very clever.
Posted by: Scivias | September 14, 2009 6:42 AM
Me and my brother used to do this in 1997 with Microsoft's Cinemania.
Posted by: dieubussy | September 14, 2009 8:11 AM
great idea but feels unfinished. Definitely needs a logging option for the trails of pages you get, I'd love to keep those - maybe an online leaderboard or something?
Posted by: zeek | September 14, 2009 8:28 AM
Of coures it's unfinished, it was made in a strict time limit.
Posted by: Allen | September 14, 2009 11:19 AM
@zeek: As Allen says, since it was made for a Mini Ludum Dare, Doches only had the weekend to create it. For a weekend's work, I think it's pretty fantastic.
Posted by: Michael Rose | September 14, 2009 11:26 AM
Cool game.
Dates back much further, though. Folk used to play this pre-internet! They even mentioned it in Amstrad Action once, so that instantly makes it super-old!
But yeah, nice idea and works well.
I'd love to see a more advanced version built from this.
Posted by: Jayenkai | September 14, 2009 12:15 PM
Interesting; that's my local newspaper too :-)
Posted by: Adam Piper | September 14, 2009 12:44 PM
Can anyone post a new link? I can't download it :(
Posted by: Lunter | September 14, 2009 3:22 PM
@zeek
Yeah dude, I'd love MOAR features like Co-Op, 100 man multiplayer, and ofcourse for him to pay me everytime I play it.
Posted by: Gohjke | September 14, 2009 5:37 PM
I just chilled in small towns in Colombia FOREVER. Eventually I came out of hiding and went to the USA and the AI found me, after nearly 200 turns.
Posted by: Quetz | September 14, 2009 5:43 PM
@Quetz: I was hiding in small towns in Germany. But it became boring after ~15 turns. Im interested how the "links" are chosen. Are those the articles linked with your current article?
(The normal links on Wikipedia)
Posted by: Bleagle | September 14, 2009 6:49 PM
I don't know about you guys, but I had some serious trouble with the long delay between turns. 200 turns? took me about 3 turns before I gave up and quit because it was going so slowly!
Posted by: Nero | September 15, 2009 4:58 AM
Seemed buggy to me. It was sending me to pages when I was trying to scroll through the list, and sometimes would send me to the wrong one when I did click something
Posted by: Eric | September 15, 2009 10:13 AM
Thanks for the comments, folks. I know the game is super-buggy -- it was written over a frantic, frantic weekend, and is in no way ready for the prime time -- but I'm working on it. I'll be releasing a (much) more polished version in a few days. If you want to follow development or leave me a suggestion/criticism, please (please!) do, ideally over at http://texasexpat.net/posts/wikirunner.html
Thanks for the feature, IndieGames team!
Posted by: Doches | September 15, 2009 4:41 PM