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I want to see Spaceward Ho! Updated. I see it's on the iTunes store. Some of these turn based stuff would make excellent tablet games.

Did any of you ever enjoy Strat Con? It did not use much horse power and should work fine if ported to javascript/html5.

old and older. I still play Spaceward Ho! (version 4) in Basilisk, on Linux. It's the fastest 68k Mac I've ever owned!

Anybody else remember playing Spaceward Ho!? http://www.deltatao.com/ho/

I think I'll have to dig it out again :)

It's funny. Now that I think of it, one of my favorite games of all time, Starflight II, had great box art. I bought the game simply because I loved the original game; no thought as to the artwork. But I do remember how intensely the pictures captured my imagination on the long car ride home from the store in the back of the family minivan (I lived in the boonies of Maine at the time). In fact, when I pictured what my own crew looked like, I pictured the crew shown on the cover.

Of course one of my other favorite games, Spaceward Ho!... not so good. IIRC, the "packaging" was photocopied (which explains why I can't find an example on the web). The game itself was fantastic.

Funny you should mention it, because Blizzard acknowledges that NetHack and Moria were the direct inspirations for Diablo. And WoW is basically MMO Diablo. So, in effect, MMO NetHack would be... World of Warcraft. ;-)

Also, for what it's worth, Clan Lord did MMO NetHack for April Fool's a few years ago. Here's a screen shot.

If all you want is the original game in color, you can get it now:

http://www.deltatao.com/darkcastle/

I prefer the solution implemented by my favorite MMORPG. In Clan Lord, a marriage can be between 2, 3, or 4 people of any class, race or gender. The justification for this is that 5 people can form a clan. (You can also declare yourself officially celibate, IIRC.)

But then, Clan Lord players are assumed to be mature.

There's one MMOG that has no level cap, has been running for 7+ years, and has an active development and player community...and seems to cater to the casual player. Mac only (though a java client is almost passable, and a windoze client is in the works).

I hear alot of talk about how casual player MMOG will never work, which appears to be a misnomer, as it is working. The graphics aren't l33t but the game play and social aspects are incredible.

http://www.deltatao.com/clanlord/index.html

And it showed its usefulness too!

Don't forget Dark Castle.

For what my (and many) parents do online, it's compact, easy to use, and not prone to the serious usability issues you get on an unmaintained Windows box. Because, let's face it, most parents aren't maintaining their Windows box.

I played that once a long time ago. Very cool.

Be sure and check out Enigmo, at Pangea
It's a puzzle game, and highly addictive.

Also, it's pretty unoffensive, but involves some good strategy play, Spaceword Ho! at DeltaTao Software

pop-pop is a great knockoff of the classic breakout, at Ambrosia Software

And of course, as people have mentioned, there's always Sim City :) Also Zoo Tycoon, published on the Mac by Aspyr is pretty un-offensive I'd think.

All these companies, with the exception of Aspyr (who publishes a lot of the triple-A ports), have pretty much exclusively G->PG-13 titles. But the ones I mentioned pretty much are lacking anything I can think of that could possibly offend.

You might have a look at Clan Lord. It's a fantasy themed MMORPG by Delta Tao Software (same folks who brought you Eric's Ultimate Solitaire, and Spaceward Ho!), but it's different from most. It has more of an emphasis on role-playing, relatively few snerts (by and large the community is extremely friendly), and some rather unique additions (e.g., a bard's guild for which players must actually compose music and audition to join, and then can play instruments in-game to entertain other players). FWIW, it has a relatively high percentage of female players. My wife makes fun of lots of the games I play, but she likes Clan Lord, and we often play it together. Of course, there's lots of quests, skills to train, etc. Some players like to spend a lot of time chatting, and it's quite a good forum for that I think. It's actually beed described as "Wack-a-mole with chat", though it's quite a bit more interesting than I think that makes it sound.

Some links:
www.clanlord.com (has screenshots, link to free demo, etc.)
humorous advertising flyer
faq list
The ThoomCare Media Network (news in Puddleby).

There's two gotchas: The graphics are somewhat primitive, by today's popular gaming standards (but then, it's cheaper too). Also, it only runs natively on the mac - PC players usually use the Basilisk Mac emulator (see the faq).

HTH,
"Wheatstone"

Delta Tao's Spaceward Ho! is still going strong and has been ported to OS X.

So has their long running MMORPG, Clanlord.

Delta Tao's Spaceward Ho! is still going strong and has been ported to OS X.

So has their long running MMORPG, Clanlord.

After all, Escape Velocity was a classic, and the reason I've kept an old Macintosh around for many, many years. But what about even older Macintosh games? For instance, Dark Castle? There's a new version of that, too: http://www.deltatao.com

...this largely mirrors something I posted on an earlier thread (re: the "Hollywoodization" of the games industry and risk aversion). Still, I was hardly the first to point this out.

But there are independent software labels. Take a look at:

Delta Tao
Ambrosia
Beenox

Of course, some of them live hand-to-mouth (i.e. on incomes of less than $100,000 a year) but, so do independent film makers and recording artists.

The fact is that like Hollywood, the games industry is dominated by risk-averse money people who spurn originality in favor of the sure thing. But like Hollywood, the games industry is always willing to leap onto independent innovators (the "My Big Fat Greek Weddings" of games), such as id.

Don't be surprised when yesterday's bold innovators become part of today's problem, that's part of the creative life cycle (just as great innovative scientists become curmudgeons in their old age).

Give Spaceward Ho! 5 a try if you haven't already. It's an amazingly fun and addictive game and features network play as well!

Windows users can get version 4 here.

For those of you who have Macs (and consider Masters of Orion only the second best space game), the classic Spaceward Ho! version 5.0 shipped recently. Think of it as the core essential fun gameplay elements of MOO without all the extra complicated junk. Main attractions of the new version are TCP/IP Internet play, and it's now MacOS X native. This is my second-favorite computer game of all time.

This game by Delta Tao got it's start in 1997 as an MMORPG and has been going strong ever since. It's catering to more of a niche and underrated market of course, the Macintosh platform, but they were able to create a highly addictive, playable game that was able to establish a real sense of community. It's something larger companies like Blizzard and Sony aren't capable of due to the fact that they can't possibly listen to all of their customers and customize the game to suit the individual's taste.

I definitely agree with the previous poster that the Macintosh platform is an untapped market. If you've millions of users with hundreds of choices, you're less likely to succeed, even if your game is awesome. There will always be something better. If you're working on a platform with less users, still millions, but with maybe 2 or 3 choices, you're far more likely to make money.

See this: delta tao "3/21/02 - We've started working on a new version of Eric's Ultimate Solitaire, featuring new games, awesome graphics, and X nativity. "

Ambrosia Software makes super games, as others have posted. A small Mac game house that makes really great games is Delta Tao - Spaceward Ho! and Strategic Command are great timewasters. If you have a Mac, you probably already have a sample version of their 'Eric's Ultimate Software' on your drive. Another fun Mac program: Knot .

These mooks have ported dark castle to newer, less-suckful macs and made it colour at the same time. It also looks like they've been doing the same with other badass-but-unmentioned-in-the-list games like spaceward ho.

For Macintosh, anyhow, (though I think there was a little Windows port) one of the absolute hands-down best space strategy games would have to have been Spaceward Ho! A classic theme, with a weird cowboy twist. Yahhh!

Anybody else remember Spaceward Ho! ?

As I see it, there are two types of games out there-- those to make a profit, and those because the designer was having a bit of fun.

The problem is that companies are trying to get the most profit that they can. For a flight sim, they've got to get everything right, or some anal retentive bastard's going to bitch that the lever to control the landing gear's in the wrong place.

It's not so bad with fantasy games, where you can make up whatever you want, and well, that's just how it is. [which is why Halflife starts getting lame when you're on alien worlds -- it's so much cooler to see how well they got the human reactions and such]

Some games are fun in a more nostalgic way... I'll go back and play Quake once in a while, or Duke3d, when I'm in the FPS mood, but QuakeII....I don't think so. Sometimes, I'm in the mood for a good game of C&C or WarcraftII. [Although, after playing it for so much, I guess I have to admit that AOE and AOK aren't bad games, either]

You still get people working on text based muds....not for the profit, but for the fun of it. [okay, and I know a few that are just there to be fascist bastards, but that's another story] People still work on NetHack. I think I remember seeing on slashdot a while back mentioning Trade Wars. Hell, there's even a sequel to Dark Castle coming out.

Good games are still out there, even if they're not coming from the companies who can afford the multi million dollar ad campaigns.

It's clear Delta Tao loves easter eggs. They even mention some in their manuals; I guess they got tired of users reporting them as bugs.

For instance:

Spaceward Ho! uses a cute Santa icon... um, you can guess why. Ho! also features planets named after DT employees. And there are special ship graphics that you get only when your stats line up just right.

Eric's Ultimate Solitaire changes card backs to mark special occasions. I don't remember what they were, but something special was shown on Mother's Day.

I don't know if it counts as an easter egg, but in their new game, Clan Lord, interesting things tend to happen on holidays. It also has some mini-quests that reward people who complete them with some cute, otherwise-useless prize. Some items in the game give funny messages if you use them in the right way.

This does beg the question: Is it an easter egg if it's in a game, where the primary purpose of the software is to entertain the user? On the one hand, it gives a little warm fuzzy to the people who discover it. On the other hand, the game is supposed to do that!

So, I would guess that you can count on easter eggs or like amusements in the future from Delta Tao. It seems to be part of their culture.

Is it obvious that DT is my favorite game maker? :-)

One of the best Mac games ever should be on every platform: Spaceward Ho! A definite classic.