Klickety

If only I'd known how temporary the insanity would be - after the inscrutable KJumpingCube that kept me from updating for a week or so (my downtime due to a dead power-supply doesn't count), I found Klickety quite easy to scrute. It plays like a couple of other games we've looked at before, most prominently SameGnome (review here). There's a bunch of pieces of different colors, and you attempt to clear the screen of all blocks.

It's basically the same game, actually, though there are a few more colors than you'll find in SameGnome, and consequently the game is harder. You clear blocks out by clicking on them - when there is at least one other block of the same color horizontally or vertically right next to that block, all of the blocks of that color disappear. More colors = less blocks of the same color residing in the requisite spots.

Outside of that, Klickety sucks compared to SameGnome. It's less configurable, it's ugly as hell by default and you can't make it prettier (SameGnome has themes). The only thing Klickety has over its Gnome sibling is internet-enabled high scores that allow you to compare yourself to the other people playing this inferior version of the same mechanic.

Did I say this game left me unflummoxed? My bad. I neglected to mention that I can't make any sense of the high-score list. The top players all have a score of '0' which I would take to mean that they were ordered according to who finished fastest, but... no. There seems to be no rhyme nor reason to how the players are ranked.

Unless you're obsessed with comparing your accomplishments to those of faceless others (and don't mind a mindboggling metric for comparison), I can't recommend this game to anyone. What it does is done better another, equally free, equally open-source game. Why bother?