Wumpus games are usually small jokes, paying homage to "Hunt the Wumpus" possibly the first computer game ever, was played maybe in the early 1970's on mainframes using punchcards (no screen/no graphics). A signature of Wumpus games is that If you merely enter the room containing the Wumpus, you immediately suffer a horrible death being eaten alive. There's a 100 of these Wumpus games on every platform, the state of the art in Wumpdom involves humorous twists. This particular one is graphical, straightforward, and uses audio cues, though the original map formed pentagons not hexagons.
Recently there was a new Wumpus variant named "Be The Wumpus" for Linux in which you play the monster on a rampage to eat cave explorers, or just defending yourself I suppose. It's humorous twists include a perfectly pitch black screen (since you're in a cave and you don't carry a lantern) and randomized audio tracks of people screaming obscenities as you devour them.
Atari has "Alf in the Color Caves", and even the single greatest 8 bit game ever made ("M.U.L.E.") got into Wumpus homage but changed the name to Wampus which also happens to be the monster of a folk lore around the Ozark hills where MULE was made. The MULE disk pretending to have a Code Worm for copy protection (it's here on atarimania) lets the Wampus ruin your life, which the normal MULE game doesn't. |