Undoubtedly, you’ve played Uno (or the less commercial variant Crazy Eights) at some point in your life. It’s quite unlikely that you’ve ever played Hot Death Uno, though, unless you happen to have stumbled across this game on the early Internet, downloaded it to your Windows PC, and played it.
It’s basically like playing Uno but there are some extra special cards (and rules) that make it a bit more fun than regular Uno. So, of course, in college, I took the rules from this game, wrote them down, and made a real version of the game out of real Uno cards. And played it with my friends. For hours on end.
I’m almost certain I still have my deck somewhere. Meanwhile, I put my Hot”>http://phoneboy.com/hdu/”>Hot Death Uno website back online in case you want to download the original Visual Basic 1.0 program, check out the rules, or make your own deck!
I’m not the only person touched by this game, based on the fact I can find a few pages dedicated to this wonderful game, including a couple of attempts at recreating the source code so it runs on modern computers and doesn’t crash incessantly like the old Visual Basic version did. Someone even built it for Android (and”>https://code.google.com/p/hotdeath/”>and released the source)!
Meanwhile, for old times sake, I fired up the game in WINE–a Windows emulator on Linux that runs Windows binaries in an environment that emulates the Windows APIs without running the whole Windows OS too. It actually worked well enough to play without crashing, though as is usually the case with WINE, there were a couple of visual glitches. And the game runs really really FAST on modern hardware!
I didn’t exactly lose against my computer opponents, but I didn’t win either. That said, it brought back a few memories.
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