Ubuntu-Quest 2008

KPoker

2008-06-17T17:29:00.000-07:00

When video poker meets KDE, KPoker emerges. At first glance, it's full-featured and grand, but appearances are - only a bit - deceiving. It's relatively grand, regardless.

Because poker is fun! When you're playing against someone, anyways, and the computer opponent doesn't seem to win as often as a computer should, making it enjoyable, while he does seem to win enough to keep you on your toes, making it satisfying.

Y'know how I said it seemed full-featured and grand at first glance? At first-glance, when you start a new game, it looks like you can have multiple players, configure their names, and maybe even play some local multiplayer instead of just playing against computer opponents.

In actuality, you can either play one player by yourself, or two-player with a player named 'Computer 1'. Who is a computer. Those are your only options. As a poker replacement for Solitaire, then, KPoker does fine. But as a full-featured card game, Hoyle's it ain't.

On the plus side, it's got lots of different deck facings - and you can mix and match fronts and backs for ultimate flexibility - some of which are actually quite decent. So it's at least as configurable as its chief rival, Solitaire for Windows. It also features persistent score-keeping in the form of how much cash you (and your opponent) have, and even has a save-game feature.

That's about all there is to say about it. It's got the grimy, low-fi look of what must be last-gen KDE games, but it's not ugly, just very plain. If you enjoy playing what is, if I remember my poker games properly, '5 Card Draw', you'll have fun with this one. Of course, it would be nice to have other poker variations, and a decent implementation of versatile multiplayer, but for what it is, it's competent. You know if it appeals to you; I don't need to recommend it, or warn you away.

Koules

2008-06-08T15:38:00.001-07:00

Prepare yourself for a head-trip with Koules. It's crazy. It doesn't give you instructions, so I didn't even realize what I was supposed to be doing the first time I played it, and I never did figure out what one of the game-modes was supposed to be, but I think it might have been a multi-player only mode.

In the gameplay mode I did eventually figure out, you're a rotund little yellow guy with big blue eyes, and you move towards the cursor, if you hold the left mouse-button. Armed with this control-system, you have to bounce these little red balls into the walls, without hitting the walls yourself.

It starts out simple, and seems to get harder, but this introduces one of the flaws: there's seemingly virtually no difference from level to level. If you have a low threshold for sameness, you're probably not going to have any interest in tackling Koule's 99+1 levels.

I really wanted to like this game. The website shows a great sense of humor behind it, albeit one that speaks English as a second language and doesn't brake for typos. The core mechanic is pretty unique, and it's realized very well. I just kinda found it boring after a while, though.

The graphics are endearingly old-school, which I suppose is a label that could be applied to the entire game; it's from 1995. It claims to have sound, but I didn't hear any. Your mileage may vary. It's got local multiplayer support, and two game modes, one of which involves swinging around some weird sort of tail, which I think can be used as a weapon, but I couldn't really figure it out.

I'd recommend this to fans of the Orisinal games. It's got the same kind of one-trick mechanic, and repetitious gameplay, that you'll find there. Along with a completely insane backstory. If you're looking for the kinds of games most people think of when they think of videogames, this isn't really going to do it for ya.

Konquest

2008-06-08T11:05:00.000-07:00

If I were making a list of the most dull games I've ever played, Konquest would surely rank pretty high. It's the most simplistic turn-based strategy game I've encountered, in a long and storied career of playing turn-based strategy games a few times then quitting because I suck.

There's these planets, see. And they produce ships every turn. Every turn, you can send ships from your planets to other planets. And that's it. Send ships to other planets you own, to reinforce them. Send ships to planets you don't own to attack them - if you win, they're yours. The point is to control all the planets.

They added 'depth' by having each planet generate ships at a different rate, and also having each planets' ships be of different effectiveness. Wow. I'm so impressed. Linux gaming disappoints once again!

In all honesty, the only thing that could possibly save this game is networked multiplayer, because then you could engage in the social activity of chatting with someone while simultaneously engaging in this most boring of games. It doesn't work in person, because if you're playing this in the same room as someone, you'll both realize that it would be more fun to watch Die Hard 2: Die Harder, and quit playing the game around five turns in. Unfortunately, there is no network multiplayer.

It's funny, because the open-source gaming community is often running its mouth about compelling graphics being irrelevant, because compelling gameplay is all-important. Konquest makes this point nicely, by having a nice-looking GUI for what is essentially the least compelling experience I've ever had in a game that wasn't tragically broken. Did I say 'wasn't tragically broken'?

My bad. You have a good chance of opening the game up only to discover that the tool-tips that give you a planet's stats (i.e. make the game possible to play, basically) are cropped and invisible. I'm not sure what caused the problem, and whenever it happened, I just had to close it and restart it and it fixed itself, but man, it never rains but it pours...

To summarize: Konquest sucks. Don't play it. Download an abandonware copy of Master of Orion or something, if you have to get your turn-based space-game on. This is just too limited and simplistic to offer anything near a fun experience; if you want a simple but satisfying turn-based strategy game, just play Go.

Kolor Lines

2008-06-07T18:23:00.000-07:00

The big ole' 'K' that most of these KDE games get, along with the phrase 'color line' gives us Kolor Lines, which I can only assume will be a racist logic-puzzle. Only half right! It's a KDE remake of Gnome's Five Or More. You can read my review of that here; I'm just going to describe the differences in this review. There aren't many.

Kolor Lines doesn't have a 'shapes' tile-set, so it isn't color-blind friendly, and both of the themes it comes with are inferior to the default tile-set in Five Or More (this is debatable, and entirely a question of taste). Kolor Lines is also less configurable, in that you can't change the size of the field of play (no arguing with this one!).

There you have it. You know the drill, at this point: these games are so similar, it comes down to which one was installed by default on your flavor of Linux. If I had to pick one, I'd pick Five Or More but the differences are so small that it doesn't really matter. Unless you're color-blind.

Kolf

2008-06-07T17:17:00.001-07:00

Just when I thought that the KDE games had all become beautiful, playable, tiny little slices of cuteness, along comes Kolf to ruin everything. This brings to mind the first few KDE games I played, in that it's ugly as sin, a little bit broken, and not very much fun to play.

Which is a shame, because its basic underlying mechanics are fun - everyone likes minigolf - and when they work, it's very satisfying. Hitting a shot just right, and watching it play the course, rolling down hills and through blockers and catching enough speed in just the right way to bounce of a wall into the cup feels great in real life, and they mostly managed to capture that feeling with Kolf.

Maybe 1 hole in 10, at least, managed to capture that feeling. If you look at the screenshot, you'll see that I was woefully inept my first time through. I played with it enough to be consistently hitting par, at least, and all the frustrations I had with it the first time through were still with me.

The biggest problem is the graphics, namely the fact that they don't actually work very well whenever there's movement involved. Pieces of the course, like like sliding barricades, get all glitchy and drop in and out; most annoying is the fact that sliding barricades tend to disappear at the least opportune time, i.e. whenever they're actually barricading anything. You can't see them to judge when you should make your shot.

The other big problem with the graphics is that, backgrounds occasionally aside, they look like they were done in MS Paint. And not like they were done in MS Paint by someone who was trying to a good job. Slapdash and crappy is the only way to describe the look of this game.

This is doubly a shame because miniature golf is so associated with great picturesque setups. 'Over the drawbridge, through the castle, under the windmill and up the ramp,' becomes 'Around the brown jagged lines, through the brown jagged lines, over the yellow splotch, into the jagged-looking circle, past the crappy looking numbers.' A game that should be cute and engaging is a hideous fucking C.H.U.D. of a creature.

The controls seem a bit imprecise. You hold down the left mouse button to determine how hard you want to hit the ball, after lining up the pointer thing in the direction you want to hit it, which is fine, but it seemed like hitting the ball the same hardness, in the same direction, on level ground, three times in a row resulted in three wildly variant end-points for the ball.

It would be nice if the impact indicator would oscillate back and forth between the hardest you can hit it and the softest; instead it just goes until it hits the point where you'd hit it as hard as you possibly can and automatically shoots - sending your ball careening wildly about the course and more often than not leaving you somewhere right close to where you started.

On the plus side, it does have local multiplayer support. And it has a lot of different courses. On the downside, everything else about the game, including the fact that it doesn't have network multiplayer support. Thank god there's no sound; if it were on par with the graphics, it would sound something like a 4 year-old playing on one of those cheap toy keyboards. A really inept 4 year-old.

Screw this game. Don't bother. You can probably find a better looking, better playing, mini-golf game for five bucks in a bargain bin at the software/grocery store of your choice. It's ugly, it's broken, it's not any fun, and it sucks. If the project isn't abandoned, it might be great in a couple of versions, as the skeleton of a fun game is here, but at the moment, it's just a skeleton. They need to put some meat on these bones.

Kobo Deluxe

2008-06-07T16:20:00.000-07:00

Hey, what's going on? Kobo Deluxe isn't a KDE game! Can it be? Blessed respite from the logic-puzzle/strategy doldrums, in the form of an action packed top-down space shooter? By Crom!* It is!

Maybe just because it was something different after the last half-dozen games, but I really enjoyed my time with Kobo Deluxe. Anyone who's played a video game in the last 30 years is familiar with the basic mechanics of these games; use the arrow-keys/number-pad to move your ship in the direction you desire, and press the fire-button to shoot.

Your ship in this game shoots out of its front and back (stern and bow?) simultaneously whenever its firing. The ship is always moving; there's no brakes, no accelerator, and no way to stop. You're in constant, uniform motion. With those two bits of information, you know all you need to know to play Kobo Deluxe. There are no power-ups, and on the 'Classic' difficulty level, one hit = death (the other difficulty levels have a life-bar, and the possibility for your guns to overheat, which didn't seem to have any affect when I played it).

This simplistic approach belies the frustrating, adrenaline-fueled nightmare of fun that actually makes up the game. The magic is in the level design. It's kind of hard to describe your goal... remember at the end of the first Star Wars movie (Episode 4, for the anally inclined) where Luke had to shoot that one spot on the Death Star? It's kind of like each level is populated with these squarish mini-Death Stars that have to be destroyed. Get 'em all, and you beat the level.

Each one has a central node, that destroys the whole structure when you hit it, and a bunch of other nodes (they're a different color) that hold up various pieces of the matrix. All of the nodes spit out something harmful, be it missles, weird spiky bullets, bombs, or what-have-you. So you have to dodge a constant stream of evil things while attempting to clear enough of the outer nodes to expose the central node and destroy the matrix/Death Star.

It's really fun, it gets really challenging a few levels in, and its addictive nature is enhanced by something the greatest gaming blog in the world mentioned when discussing Trials 2: as little interruption as possible between dying and trying again. The fire key doubles as the enter-key, so when you game-over, you can just tap it impatiently for a second and a half and you're right back in the game, at the level you died on. This makes it really easy to zone-out and kill shamefully long periods of time trying to get further.

It's got fifty levels, which will probably be enough to satisfy the person who only dabbles at the scrolling shooters, but expert sh'muppers will probably run through that, eventually. The levels are laid out in the same way (i.e. each Death Star matrix is in the same position each time you play the level in question) but the layout of the matrices, internally, is randomly generated each time, so they're slightly different - sometimes in maddening, level-altering ways - each time you play.

Hrmn... what else should I mention? There's a radar screen, that comes in extra handy in this game, as you can use it to line yourself up with targets that aren't on screen, and make strafing runs. I found the strategy invaluable, myself, but I have the reflexes of a garden-slug, so it may be less necessary to you able-bodied gamers.

The graphics are nothing to write home about, but they look coherent, with a retro style that makes the most of the low-fi visuals, and thanks to their relative simplicity, the game will probably run on just about anything. The enemies and obstacles are all clearly differentiated from one another and easy to spot - I didn't run into any of the sophomoric errors that haunt indie games, where stuff looks nice but is a pain in the ass to play with.

Sound-wise, it's got a typical retro sh'mup score with decent enough sound effects to get you into the spirit of the game aurally as well as visually. Of note is the fact that the game actually generates all of the music algorhythmically when the game is loaded, rather than including a bunch of .wav files in the install. That means less than nothing in today's world of broadband (even when the music's been generated, it only takes up a meg and a half of space; who cares about an extra meg in a game download?), but if you're using the game on a PocketPC or something, it might come in handy, and it's just neat. Go ingeniosity!

Add it all up, and you've rather surprisingly got a sh'mup that has my unqualified seal of approval. Tiny elements of a dozen games get mashed up into a thoroughly satisfying gumbo of gaming greatness. It's not going to change the world, or even change the world of gaming, but if you're in the mood for some semi-twitchy gaming you could do far worse. Check it out.

*- I've been using this phrase since I was 10, occasionally, so please don't think I'm promoting Age of Conan or anything. Though I can't wait to try it as soon as I get my PC upgraded to current standard. I'm just sayin'...

KNetwalk

2008-06-07T14:38:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking that KNetwalk may be my favorite KDE game so far. It may just be that I'm really, really sick of playing these damn KDE games, though. Remember the classic game Pipe Dream? KNetwalk is sort of like that, only you have to make the water flow through every piece on the board.

The difficulty that suggests is mediated by the fact that you don't have any time constraints; there's no 'water' per se, just electrical charge, so you have as long as you need to get 'er done. I can't believe I just used that phrase.

Anyway, the basic premise is, like I said, one you've seen before. You have to rotate pieces so as to allow the network connection to hit every PC on the LAN, and there can't be any pieces unconnected to the LAN.

It's a lot of fun, actually. It uses your brain, the game's over pretty quickly, it rarely frustrates for very long on the easier difficulty levels, and it features high-scores in the form of counting how many clicks it takes you to complete, so you get to compete against yourself (and anyone else who plays games on your computer).

Simple logic-puzzle gaming fun for those who like simple logic puzzles. It does feature sound effects, but I think they're only when you begin a game, and when you end a game. I tend to not hear them, because my speakers cut off automatically when they don't get any sound for a long time, and the sounds are so short that when they play, they get lost in the speakers re-powering up. I hate these speakers, for the record.

If you're looking for a quick game, this is probably more mentally stimulating than Solitaire, if not generally as fast-paced, for me. I'll go ahead and highly recommend it for fans of logic-puzzle games looking for a bite-sized snack.

KMines

2008-06-07T12:46:00.000-07:00

I shouldn't take up too much of your time talking about KMines. It's a Minesweeper clone - like Mines for Gnome (see review here) which comes preinstalled with Ubuntu.

In fact, there's only one real difference: KMines has themes. Only three are installed by default, but I assume you can add more. Playing full-screen, the 'Gardens of Danger' theme looks quite sharp, and adds a much-needed splash of color into a traditionally grey game. Unfortunately, it's not so playable when it's small, and you're better off sticking to the 'Traditional' or 'Default' themes if you're going to be playing in a window.

Outside of that difference, it's Minesweeper, it's Mines, it's whatever other similar games you've played. In the end, who really cares? This is a well-done implementation of the Windows classic for KDE, but unless you're a true Minesweeper-ophile, I wouldn't bother installing it; I'd just stick with the game that came with whatever flavor of OS I'm using.

KMahjongg

2008-06-05T19:36:00.000-07:00

We return to an old favorite with KMahjongg, the KDE take on the classic Chinese game of solitaire (not to be confused with the classic Chinese game of gambling and multiplayer hijinks). There's very little to discuss if you've read my review of Mahjongg for Gnome. They're essentially the same thing.

Graphically, KMahjongg is better, as it has more tilesets, and they all look alright. The 'Alphabet' tileset is painful to look at, but it's amusing; the rest are all in the same basic vein and all well sculpted in seeming 3D. Mahjongg looks as good, mind you, but it has fewer tilesets, so it loses the battle.

Mahjongg also has more gameplay types (not real variations in mechanics, just different layouts to put the tiles in), and they have amusing 'Confucius-say...' sounding names, so it wins that particular skirmish leaving us in a vaguely familiar place, though it's been a while.

We have a tie! I can't actively recommend this to anyone who's installed Ubuntu, as Mahjongg is essentially the same shiznit and there's no point in installing a different piece of software that does the same thing as a piece of software installed by default. And the reverse is true: if you've installed Kubuntu and KMahjongg is automatically in there (I don't know if it is or not, as I haven't been able to get Kubuntu working on the laptop so far), then there's no reason to bother with Mahjongg. If you're working with a blank slate, I'd have to say to go with KMahjongg, as the extra tilesets change the gameplay more than the extra layouts do, in my opinion. Whatever. All mahjongg games that work are awesome.

Klickety

2008-05-26T00:22:00.000-07:00

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?

KJumpingCube

2008-05-25T23:54:00.001-07:00

There are many reasons for my extended absence, but the most recently relevant is that KJumpingCube was too smart for me. I got a new job, my power supply died, and I started playing Knights of the Old Republic but all of that had been dealt with a few days ago. All that's been keeping me from posting for those past three or four days is the fact that I can't figure this damn game out.

It should be simple. You click on squares in a grid, sort of like Mines (review here), only clicking on them doesn't uncover them, it just gives a +1 to the value of the square and, if the square is neutral, makes it yours. All squares start out neutral, with a value of one. The goal is to make every square your own.

It's a classic world domination game, if we assume that the world consists of a simple grid which itself consists of a collection of numerical values.

And it totally sounds simple, doesn't it? Things get complicated with the following statement from the rules: "If a square has more points than it has neighbors, the points jump to its neighbors and take them over."

Which, in and of itself, also sounds simple. But the way it plays out, I just can't scrute. I've tried off and on, for a few minutes here and there, for the past week and a half. And every time I think I know exactly what it means, it behaves in some weird way that belies the explanation for previous behavior I've so studiously developed.

I'm not even going to get into it. If you're really curious, or you think I've missed something extremely basic, feel free to comment. I'll respond there. The basic premise of the game seems either fundamentally arcane or fundamentally flawed, and either way, it both irritated and shamed me so badly I've been putting off updating this blog despite the fact that I got a new PSU days ago.

KJumpingCube makes me feel less a man. I have this sort of... faith, for lack of a better word, in the innate sensibleness of the open-source community. They may make games that are ugly, or boring, or broken, but they do not make games that I can't figure out. For god's sake, I figured out Einstein (review here). (That was a joke; Einstein is not a hard game to figure out) KJumpingCube is ugly, and would be boring (to me) if I could understand what was going on. It gains interest-points it doesn't deserve by virtue of being seemingly inconsisten.

I can't recommend it, but I feel like I can't pass a judgement on it at all, because I can't understand it. This game is a failure on my part. If you like two-player logic puzzles (with bad AI - I don't know what I'm doing, but still never managed to lose a game) then you might both enjoy this and be able to figure out by what method the game mechanics operate. More power to you.

Kiriki

2008-05-17T18:29:00.001-07:00

There's no need to dwell long on Kiriki as it's just a KDE clone of Tali (review here), which is in turn a Yahtzee clone. There's almost no difference - I think even the default names for the computer players were the same. All of the same features are used the same way to the same result: a decent game of Yahtzee.

The only real difference that's readily apparent is the way the dice look. Tali featured nice looking rounded red dice. Kiriki features nice looking sharpish-cornered red dice. For what it's worth, I like the rounded ones slightly better, but that's totally a personal-taste thing, and has absolutely no effect on the gameplay whatsoever.

If you're using Kubuntu, I assume this is one of the games installed by default. If you're using Ubuntu (i.e. Gnome), then Tali was installed by default. Just go with whichever one's the default for your system as there's no discernible difference at all, outside of the tiny little corners of the dice.

KGoldrunner

2008-05-10T13:36:00.000-07:00

I may be way off-base here, but I think KGoldrunner is what happens when you cross Dig-Dug with... Donkey Kong? Something else 80s arcadey, but you can jump in Donkey Kong so it's not perfect. It's an action strategy game where the player must collect all of the gold coins on a level, and then ascend the magic ladder to the next level.

Several things complicate this simple-sounding feat: there are bad guys, for one. But even without those nefarious fellows, levels are layed out in such a way as to utilize your only skill outside of walking. That skill? Digging. To the left or the right. NOT directly below the character.

That limitation is rather important, as it totally changes the way things play out when combined with the other aspect of the digging which is a bit different. That aspect? Blocks dug out fill themselves back in after a second or two, and if you're still where the block was, you diiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeee!

Do you like how I'm eliminating run-on sentences by splitting them up and adding fragments between the two halves? I'm a bit bothered by it, myself. I think next time I will just run on.

Ahem. So, there are two major results of the way those holes operate. Firstly, it's very easy to commit suicide by accidentally falling into a hole you dug. You have to operate in series of holes, if you're going more than one layer down, and it's tricky at times. Especially at first. The flip-side of that is that enemies also die if they're in a hole when it fills back up.

The enemies have a skill that is denied the players: jumping. They can jump out of holes, and will, typically before the hole fills back in, so you have to be strategic. They also never actually die; they just respawn somewhere else in the level after you off them.

All of this needless description of the game mechanics boils down to: real-time action logic-puzzle. Fun mix, to a point. It fails to hold my attention because it ships with hundreds of levels, divided into a half-dozen or so sets. That's actually a good thing, if you anticipate a mind-bending logic puzzle that also requires quick reflexes like I anticipate my next bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon. To me, however, it just seems like a lot of busy-work with no pay-off as there's no story or reward outside of amassing points and bragging rights.

Who would I brag to? No one else I know plays these games. Alas, I have been let down by not only myself, but also my peers!

Graphically, it's very basic. Call it hi-res Intellivision. Everything looks a bit blocky, though the actual movement animations are surprisingly smooth. Even at full-screen, things seem small and lack detail. There are a number of different, and widely variant, themes. This adds a bit of flair and personality to the game, or a bit of ugliness, depending on which theme you choose to go with, but they're all of the same basic level of quality.

There's no sound, which I mention because this seems like the kind of game that just begs for an 8-bit sounding beepy-bloopy sort of soundtrack. I don't mind, but if you're going to spend hours going away at it, you might wish for a bit of sound. I made up for the lack by listening to the 80s show on my favorite radio station, 97.3 FM in Richmond, VA! (shameless plug for the station I DJ on)

The controls are probably the most interesting thing about KGoldrunner. You can use the keyboard, in which case it plays rather annoyingly like Pac-Man. You know how Pac-Man keeps going until he hits a wall? Same here. The way these levels play out, though, it's really annoying. Sometimes you want to stop and it's counter-intuitive as hell to hit up or down to stop yourself, and not even always possible (if you're over or under a latter, one of those won't work, it'll put you on the ladder, moving in the given direction).

The other way you control the game is with the mouse: the character heads for the cursor. If the cursor's right on top of him, he stops. I've played Flash games that worked like this, but generally not in this kind of set-up. Running about in a 2D platformer with the mouse with a lot of vertical movement felt very odd and unique. I'm sure that's just because I'm ignorant, but for what it's worth, it's well implemented and doesn't take too long to get used to. Make sure your mouse is working well, though, and look out for the edge of the mouse-pad to avoid frustration.

My final judgement? KGoldrunner is a neat, quirky little game that should appeal to its target audience, although if you need eye-candy you're going to have to look at other action logic-puzzles (good luck; the genre's not exactly chock-full of entries). I wasn't a big fan, but that's a shortcoming on my part, most likely. I've had a gift-certificate to a fancy-schmancy restaurant for the last year that's about to expire: I haven't used it because they don't have anything on their menu I want. I know it's probably all good food, but it's not my kinda food. Same thing here, with KGoldrunner.

KFourInLine

2008-05-05T16:45:00.000-07:00

My initial reaction to KFourInLine was simply "Wow! Pretty!" and now that I've played with it a bit, that still sums it up quite nicely. KFourInLine is a KDE clone of the classic Connect Four game that was done decently in Four-In-a-Row (review here).

The basic game is simple, so there's not much to say about it. You drop checkers into different columns on the board, trying to get four in a row before your opponent does. Your opponent always wins, in my experience. As far as features go KFourInLine doesn't offer anything that would differentiate itself from other clones.

Where it shines is its look: it's skinnable with different themes, and all of the themes it 'ships' with are fancy lookin'. The board and the score-card are very smooth looking, easy to interpret, and feature a coherent aesthetic that's quite attractive. I congratulate the dev-team for keeping it simple and yet not completely ignoring form in favor of function, as is often the case with open-source games.

One quick complaint: the game runs slow. Probably because my computer is a bit outdated, and it probably runs fine on a more modern machine, but I was still taken aback by the fact that it seemed a Milton-Bradley game actually had a low frame-rate. I never thought of board-game clones as being processor intensive.

Other than that, all I have to mention is the multiplayer. There's support for local as well as the all-important networked human v. human games, and it's very simple to set up. Props for that too: none of the godawful clunkiness and irritation that comes with match-making servers and the like. You just start the game, and your opponent connects to you, or vice-versa. No muss, no fuss.

This is the best Connect Four clone I've ever played. That's faint praise, I admit, but it does mean KFourInLine beats out the one that comes preinstalled with your Ubuntu installation. I recommend it to anyone that wants to play Connect Four on their Linux box. Obviously, if that doesn't sound fun to you, you're advised to pass it up.

Updated Ubuntu to 8.04...

2008-05-05T16:42:00.000-07:00

... and it seems that the list of games is a bit different. I think I'm just going to keep going from where I'm at now, and once I finish (if I ever do) I'll go back and plug holes that have appeared due to new games in the repositories.

This quest will never end, apparently... hoo-yah. More reviews comin' up!

KFoulEggs

2008-05-04T23:03:00.000-07:00

I can't help but feel that Puyo Puyo clones were put on this earth solely for the purpose of causing me irritation. I'd love to complain about KFoulEggs a lot, just because I had to play it, but unfortunately the only thing I can really bitch about is the lack of network multiplayer. Oh, yeah, and being completely broken when playing against the AI.

It's another Puyo Puyo clone, in case you missed that. It plays like Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine only with graphics that lack personality and a better digital font than the last game I remember having a digital font. The original game of this type should have been called 'Bitris' because the pieces drop in twos instead of fours and it bites.

I'm being petty, I'm sorry. KFoulEggs is a solid clone, if you want to play by yourself against nothing. It's not pretty, but it works just fine, and it's not actually ugly, either. It's just uninspired. It attempts to offer up to four opponents, locally or AI-controlled, but... well, see the next paragraph.

The controls work fine. Pressing 'down' to speed the fall of pieces makes them go a bit too rapidly, in my opinion, but you just take that into account and wait on them to fall rather than hurrying them. I did run into one problem: when I was playing multiplayer against the AI, the keys didn't seem to work properly. Nothing worked, actually, except that 'down' button. Couldn't move pieces to the left or right, couldn't rotate them, but I could make 'em fall as fast as I wanted.

So really, I suppose I was justified in being petty. Never mind about my feeling guilty - this game sucks. There are other games of the same type out there, and they're all better. Some of them offer working multiplayer, some of them offer brilliantly varied gameplay, and none of them have a feature that completely and utterly doesn't work. So far, anyway. I'm sure I'll run into another totally broken Puyo clone at some point in this blog. Until that happens, KFoulEggs is the worst of the lot. Avoid it.

Kill Everything That Moves

2008-05-01T19:53:00.000-07:00

While it's currently unimpressive, I have high hopes for K.E.T.M.* - if it isn't completely abandoned. It's a shmup in the classic twitch style, or aims to be, and it's playable in this early incarnation but from screen shots on the website, it's going to be much prettier.

One thing it's not, in the current incarnation, is twitchy. It's kinda slow, actually. It's very smooth - there's no lag, the framerates are fine, and the controls are responsive - but it's not exactly fast-paced. Your ship moves like a fat man in molasses. Hopefully, they'll fix that, as it tends to make the game feel easy. It might not actually be easy - I didn't beat all of the levels - but it just feels like if I wanted to devote the time, it would only take patience to finish it.

The graphics remind me of DOS games towards the end of when they were viable. Not the top-notch ones, mind you, but the decent shareware ones. See the screenshot? Yeah. That's what it looks like. It's decent enough but low-res. I'm not sure if I was getting it as good as it got: I couldn't get fullscreen to work. It was turned on in the options menu, but that didn't have any effect. All of the other options as far as graphics go were set to their highest setting, but if the option menu isn't actually implemented then I'm not sure what meaning that has.

There's no sound. I mention it because sound was turned on in the option menu, and because many shmups have memorable soundtracks. Would have been nice to at least get a zap sound or something when I shot stuff.

There's a decent amount of variability in the weapons. Flame-throwers, homing missiles, bizarre lasers, a basic gun... they look decent, but don't seem to affect the play much because you just keep shooting and killing stuff with not much effort, regardless of what your weapon is. Maneuvering is basically useless, on account of your ship's slow speed, so that's probably a good thing.

K.E.T.M. is basically fatally flawed for fans of shmups, but it's a decent tech demo. The website that seems to be the official page for the project has a screenshot or two of what must be a much later build, but it also has no links to download any version at all. Unfortunately, it also has a blog, last updated early in 2006, revealing that the lead programmer decided to change the engine and recode the game in Python. I'm guessing that this was an overly-ambitious decision that lead to the project being abandoned, but they're still paying for the domain name, anyway, so maybe not. Here's to hoping: this could be decent.

*I can't actually tell if this is the website for this game or a website for a game with the same name, of the same genre. Looking around, it seems like they acknowledge some sort of debt to the game I reviewed in the article, if nothing else, but they have no playable release and their version looks a lot better. No idea on this one, guys.

Kenolaba

2008-05-01T19:02:00.000-07:00

And so the revolving cycle continues, with Kenolaba being unique if not exactly engrossing. The best way to explain it is Othello if it were sumo-wrestling. Confused? My job here is done!

Honestly, that's pretty much how it plays out, right down to the annoying give-and-take tactics that take forever to play out. You start out on a hexagonal playing-field populated with balls. The point is to push your opponent's balls off of the playing field. You have to have more balls in the group you're pushing with than the group you're pushing.

My room mate cracked up every time I said 'balls' while trying to describe it to him.

It's graphically on-par with late 90s shareware for Windows, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The graphics are simple, but clear, and not entirely unattractive. I hate the color yellow, so I personally don't really care for the color-scheme, but the vaguely golf-ballish look of the pieces is fun. It compares favorably to most of the other KDE games I've looked at, meaning it doesn't make me want to vomit, so there's that.

There's no sound. Once again, and I'm tired of saying that, so I think I'm just not going to mention sound when it isn't present and isn't necessary, this game doesn't need sound. It's a turn-based logic-puzzle/strategy game. Without a plot, or any kind of dramatic tension at all. Sound would just be irritating.

Final verdict? Meh. Not my thing, but at least it's not a clone of something I've played six times already, and fully functional. It's got an AI opponent, with different degrees of difficulty, so it's cool for single-player. If they were to add networked multiplayer it would pretty much be perfect for what it is. Want another abstract strategy game? Check it out. Want another FPS? Pass.

KeepAlive

2008-04-27T16:05:00.000-07:00

Yumpin' yiminy! These GGZ games have reached a new low! KeepAlive is not only no longer being developed, the server for it is no longer being run, meaning it is 100% useless. I mean, the code-base may be useful for people developing something, but you can't play the game at all, so there's no reason whatsoever for it to be in the damn repository.

I have no idea if it ever worked. The screen pictured is all it does when I open it and I can't tell if it's locked up or just waiting for something from a server, or what. Nothing I do affects it. Which is what caused me to look it up and discover that even if it did something, it wouldn't do anything like 'be a game' because it has been shut down, dismantled, and removed from the GGZ servers' operations.

Ignore at all costs.

kcc

2008-04-27T15:46:00.000-07:00

We seem to be doing an alternating thing, here, which means kcc sucks. I assume the acronym stands for KDE Chinese Checkers. It's vaguely functional, in an almost sort of way, which makes playing it that much more tedious. If it just didn't work, I could have ignored it. Instead, I had to wait for it, and deal with it, at great length, so I could give you my honest impressions.

It's Chinese Checkers, for your computer. It's low-res, it's sluggish (dear god, the eons I spent waiting for the five AI players to make their moves could have been used to raise a child... or even a village, which would then be utilized to raise a child, all while waiting on the AI to make their moves), the AI sucks, and there's no multiplayer. A boardgame without even local multiplayer (much less networked) is a boardgame which completely and utterly sucks. This is made especially ironic due to the fact that it's part of the GGZ package, which endeavors to be a one-stop shop for online gaming.

Playing kcc is extremely tedious. The AI seems to have no interest in winning, I couldn't find a way to configure any options that might alleviate the lag, and it's ugly as hell. There is no sound.

Oddly, the 'menu' window is separate from the 'play' window, which is star-shaped (i.e. in the shape of the game board, with no background). This was probably supposed to be a neat visual trick, and it is, as long as you're not actually playing it. When you are playing it, it's really annoying how the cursor changes to reflect what's behind the board whenever you cross a transparent seam, sometimes causing you to accidentally bring a program you're not trying to use into the foreground.

Outside of that interesting twist on making a bad game, the rest of its faults are quite run-of-the-mill. It just sucks on all fronts. It looks like there's a newer version available from GGZ site, as well as a GTK version that's quite nice looking, so once again the Ubuntu repositories prove to be woefully out of date.

I'm beginning to wonder if the perception that Linux sucks for games isn't actively being perpetuated by the poor maintenance of repositories - anyone who thinks that the games in the repositories are all that there is has to believe that there are virtually no decent games for Linux. Since one of Ubuntu's selling-points to less technically-minded users of Windows is that they can download all the software for it without having to compile or configure anything, I expect that most of Ubuntu's user-base never goes beyond the repositories. Just updating them, and getting rid of the going-nowhere, abandoned, non-functional projects would go a long way towards making Ubuntu seem like a legit project.

Those thoughts out of the way, here are my thoughts on kcc: Don't bother. Please. If you are in the market for a Chinese Checkers game, get the more recent version of this one from somewhere else or try a completely different one. The version of kcc Ubuntu offers you is horrid.

KBounce

2008-04-27T15:06:00.000-07:00

Yet another KDE game, KBounce does alright. It's a Jezzball-clone (the second one we've encountered so far), and unlike the first one (IceBreaker (review here)), it's pretty much alright.

A quick refresher: Jezzball games are games where there are balls bouncing around, and you have to trap them in as small an area as possible, liberating all the other space. When you have freed up 75% of the field of play, the level is over. Difficulty is increased by adding an extra ball into the mix with each level. You lose a life when the walls you're trapping balls with encounter a ball before the wall is fully formed.

KBounce looks pretty much the same as its progenitor, Jezzball. This is an improvement over the much uglier version we tackled earlier this month. The balls themselves are very sharply defined, and revolve in such a way as to... 'look really neat,' I suppose, is the technical term. I would suggest that the developers change the horrible font - a sort of beveled faux-digital-clock look that's hard to read and ugly - but other than that, I have no complaints.

There is no sound. Does KDE suck for sound? I think I've encountered one game written for KDE that had any noise at all. This is another one where it doesn't really matter, but it would be kind of fun to have a sound play whenever the balls bounce off of a surface. It would get laughable once you had a bunch of balls in play, but that would be awesome. I like to laugh.

Final judgement? Solid clone of a neo-classical game with solid but ultimately uninteresting mechanics. If other games of the type do it for you, you could do worse. KBounce is a highlight as far as the KDE-based games distributed via Ubuntu's default repositories.

KBlackBox

2008-04-27T14:45:00.000-07:00

A pox upon the House of KDE! KBlackBox was frustrating, in that I couldn't really figure it out. This could be because I keep trying to do so when I'm hungover, tired, and miserable. I kept putting off actually writing the review so that I could approach it with a clear head, but whenever I have a clear head I'm not masochistic enough to try, and so in the interests of progress, I give up. Is that ironic or oxymoronic?

As far as I know, it's a bit like Minesweeper in that the point is to predict where the balls (playing the part of 'mines') are hidden in the field of play. Unlike Minesweeper, where your only option is to randomly click a few tiles in the hopes that they will give you clues as to the locations without blowing up and ending the game, you have tools dissociated from the field of play. You have lasers. You turn on lasers, and then you get feedback in the form of a number or letter that indicates where the light-beam ended up.

I know what you're saying to yourself: How could Minesweeper plus lasers be bad? The answer: the feedback the lasers give you seems to run counter to the feedback they're supposed to give you, and even if they didn't, that feedback is hard to interpret. It's possible that I'm just interpreting the manual wrong (likely, even), but even allowing for that, it's still just amazingly hard. Almost on the level of that Einstein's Puzzle (review here) thing.

KBlackBox is not very appealing graphically. It has no sound.

I give up on making sense of this game. It is either impossible, or very difficult, or I am very stupid. I freely admit that a combination of the latter two is the most likely scenario. If you like logic puzzles that make you feel dumb, and have hard-to-interpret ASCII-art renderings of in-game screens as directions, you will love KBlackBox. If not, you had best pass. As per usual, this version is a release behind, and the most current release looks slightly better.

KBattleship

2008-04-25T21:47:00.001-07:00

While it's hard to take serious, KBattleship* is actually the best KDE game I've played so far. Sure, it's a simple game from the getty-up and nothing is added feature-wise that makes it any deeper than the board game. But it works, it's not a hideous C.H.U.D. (this is not a C.H.U.D. reference, but rather a Clerks II reference, since I'm referring to the fact that KBattleship is not ugly, and not claiming that it doesn't kill people due to mutation (it may)), and it's kinda fun.

How does it play? Oh, come on - you know how it plays. There's a grid. You place a couple of shifts on that grid, of varying sizes. Your opponent does the same. Then you randomly pick spots of your opponents grid to blow the hell up, in the hopes of thoroughly decimating their fleet of battleships.

That's all there is to KBattleship. It doesn't add any weird modes of play, or power-ups, or anything at all, really. It's just a game of Battleship (that's right, I italicize game titles, but not board-game titles). On the other hand, it's a game of Battleship that features an AI opponent and support for network multi-player, so it's better than the board-game, all other things being equal.

And they are! The field of play is sprite-based, so it's not uber-sexy 3D but it's exactly what you get with the board-game: chunks of ship and ocean to be utilized as you see fit. Since the board-game is basically tile-based, you lose nothing whatsoever in the translation, and gain the ability to play it alone or with friends in Antarctica.

The sound is better than the talking version of the board-game, despite the fact that it does not talk. The explosion sounds are nice n' bassy, compared to that tinny crap-speaker mess I heard on the TV commercials back in the day. The sound of a missed shot, a shot scored on your opponent, and a shot scored by your opponent are all different in a lovable way. You get a basic explosion sound when you hit the other guy, but when you get hit, there's a hull-ringing clang of explosiveness that lets you know bad things are afoot.

To sum up in a slightly anti-climactic way, KBattleship is another game that I'm sad won't really appeal to anyone. Because really, who the hell is dying for a chance to play Battleship on their damn computer? On the plus side, I feel less guilty about not recommending it because it's really simple and I suspect that it didn't take all that much work (comparatively speaking).

If you are, by some strange chance, longing to play Milton Bradley's classic on your Linux box, KBattleship is everything you could want. Unless you want shiny happy pretty graphics that don't really add anything, of course, in which case you will probably be disappointed by 90% of what the open-source community offers anyway.

*Yeah, for the record, the screenshots on the official page on the KDE Games site look nothing like the version you get from the repositories. I hate to keep bringing this up, but I think this version I played (that you get from the repositories) is woefully out of date. Just, y'know, for the record.

KBackgammon

2008-04-24T22:15:00.000-07:00

Because I have journalistic integrity, I spent a really long time learning the rules to backgammon so I could review KBackgammon. I want those hours back, thank you very much. Short review: the damn thing works, much to my chagrin, but it's ugly as sin.

So yeah, now I know how to play backgammon. And I now know that a game of backgammon takes an hour or two to finish, when you're playing by yourself, against yourself because there's no AI. Which is probably my biggest complaint about the game: without an AI, it's not really possibly to play as a single-player game. I mean, I did but it wasn't like playing a game.

The interface is simple enough; drag pieces where you want 'em to go. Clicking buttons lets you do everything else you'd need to. If you're familiar with backgammon, you know that means rolling dice and doubling the points-value. There's a critically annoying one-second delay in between when one turn finishes, and when the game realizes that it's the next person's turn. Outside of that, the basic mechanics work fine.

KBackgammon makes up for its lack of AI with working online play, through something called FABS. I was able to make an account and login all via the game's UI, so that was convenient. In a two-player boardgame, I have to say that I think I consider online multiplayer to be the single most important thing. So good on them!

Visually, it's just ugly. Seriously, it needs a re-skinning really badly. The colors are mealy and unattractive, the pieces look a bit dithered, and it's very rudimentary. All of these KDE games are ugly as sin, but whenever I look them up, I hear people talking about how great KDE makes things look. I'm a bit confused at this point.

There's no sound. Doesn't need any.

The final summary? If you really want to play backgammon with friends on the internet, this'll git 'er done. It might not be as pleasant an experience as you'd hope for, but it works. If you have an alternative to KBackgammon, you should probably try that one first, cuz' this is just functional. Nothing more. If you want to get into backgammon, I'd recommend that you not do what I did and learn to play backgammon with this one.

KAtomic

2008-04-22T21:36:00.000-07:00

If you've read all of these reviews (and I pity you, if you have), KAtomic is going to look very familiar. It's a KDE version of the game Atomix I reviewed a few months ago. As such, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it.

The point of each level is to construct a given molecule by moving the pieces around the board in order to hook them up properly. The trick lies in getting them where you want them to go: they move until they hit a wall or another atom, so it takes some careful positioning to line everything up.

I'd love to say this plays exactly the same as Atomix, which worked perfectly fine, but KAtomix unfortunately falls short of the standard set by Atomix. Due to a graphical glitch, it's a total bitch. If you look at the screenshot, you can see two white squares. Those are the pieces that have to be moved. They show up as transparent squares, for some reason, and not as spheres. This has the effect of removing the tiny little pieces (on the sides, in this case) that show which one has to go on which side of the central molecule.

This makes gameplay something akin to russian roulette, rather than a game of skill, as you can line up the pieces perfectly only to discover that due to the hidden nature of the connectors, they don't actually connect. It wasn't a big deal on that first stage - I just had to reverse them, which only took a second. The next stage had six that were transparent squares. Screw that.

This is another KDE game, and I've had trouble with virtually all of the KDE games I've tried, so it's possible that they just don't work right under Gnome. If that's the case, they might think about not making them available under the regular Ubuntu repositories, but instead only for Kubuntu. Since they are available, I'm forced to assume that they just plain don't work. As such, I can't recommend this one at all. For the record, Atomix is also a nicer looking game, so I wouldn't recommend KAtomic anyway.*

*A bit of research determined that the most recent version of KAtomic is 3.0 - the version the repositories provide is 2.0, with a copyright date of 1998. That it's so outdated probably explains the graphical glitches; I'd guess that the libraries it uses have probably changed over the last ten years, if it isn't just that bugs were present in version 2.0. Ubuntu may make installing applications very easy, but the abysmal lack of maintenance I'm discovering is disheartening to the extreme.

KAsteroids

2008-04-22T21:18:00.000-07:00

Being exactly what you would expect, KAsteroids is a KDE-clone of Asteroids. While it adds a few features, and looks a bit better than its Atari 2600 forebear, it's basic gameplay is unchanged. Fans of old-school arcade games would probably say that the original game was perfect in its design, and needs no changes.

You know the drill: you control a ship, which you point in a given direction and apply thrust to, in order to move about the screen, and which shoots a projectile in whatever direction it's pointed in, upon pressing the fire button. The object of each level is to shoot all the asteroids; when they're shot, they subdivide into smaller pieces which must then be shot, and so on, until you've cleared the screen, at which point you move on to the next level.

What features does it add? Powerups. You can collect shields, which you can activate to prevent death upon touching an asteroid, extra guns which allow you to have more projectile on-screen (you start out with only two), and brake upgrades which allow you to slow down without trying to turn around and apply opposite thrust.

They don't really change the way the game plays for me, because I'm not exactly a power-player. If you're the kinda guy who's thinking about setting the world record for the arcade original, they'd probably affect your strategy, but me, I'm just tryin' to stay alive and blow up asteroids. No strategy required.

Graphically, it's very simple - don't expect some Rez-like super-cool graphical effects here, or even anything along the lines of a classic 16-bit sh'mup. The font looks a bit amateurish to my used-to-stylized-lettering eyes, and the lack of any shadows or textures on anything except for the asteroids gives it that shareware-look we all know and love.

Musically, there isn't any music, and sound-effects wise, it's completely silent except for when you blow up. I found it weird that there wasn't a sound whenever you shot your gun; it made for long stretches of silence where I'd forget the game had sound, and then get surprised whenever my speakers erupted with the explosion noise.

The only real complaint I have is that it doesn't seem to support a joystick. Growing up playing similar games on joysticks and gamepads for decades, it just seems odd that they wouldn't support one. The keyboard controls work just fine, but it would be nice to have the option, y'know?

I can recommend this to anyone looking for an Asteroids-fix or youngsters who are wondering what Asteroids was. It adds nothing of substance to the game, and certainly does nothing original, so it's not going to satisfy anyone looking for a game that scratches the ever-present 'I wanna play something new' itch.

kanatest

2008-04-22T19:42:00.001-07:00

While kanatest isn't a game in any real sense, it does have the virtue of doing what it's supposed to do. It's a flashcard game: it shows you 'kana' characters and you type in the 'romajin' equivalent.

As such, it's not an enthralling game for someone who a.) doesn't know any Japanese characters, and b.) wants to play a game, and not learn Japanese characters. If, however, you are someone studying Japanese and need something to assist you in memorizing the characters, rock on. You've found your saviour!

In all honesty, it's pretty full-featured. You can choose between what appear to the illiterate-in-Japanese-eye to be the two styles in which the characters are rendered, and further choose which characters you want to be drilled on, either by using one of the pre-created 'lessons' or by creation your own lesson.

Sure, there's no sound, and the graphics (read: fonts) aren't awe-inspiring. They don't have to be. This is an educational tool, and not a game, and while you can make educational tools as pretty as you like, their foremost function is... to function. As far as functional designs go, kanatest is great. Simple, clear, easy to figure out without consulting a manual or the internet, and best of all, in fully working order.

For the record, the version included in the repositories is two releases out of date. Click the link above to go to the website for kanatest and download the latest version. All of you broke otaku desperate to learn Japanese characters so you can feel elite, here's a great tool for ya. All others need not apply (except, obviously, non-otaku who still want to learn Japanese).

kamefu

2008-04-22T19:19:00.000-07:00

Huzzah! We have yet another non-working, out-of-date, emulation utility, m'lord! It goeth by the name of kamefu. Only it doesn't, because apparently switched its name to gamefu some time in 2006, meaning this broken thing that I got from the repositories isn't just completely useless to me, it shouldn't even be in the repositories as there has been a new version (with a different name) out for years.

Opening it up launches a wizard that asks me where my roms are. I put one in a directory called 'roms' and pointed it there. Ehn, it didn't recognize it and locked up at 'updating collection'. Re-starting the program, I was told I had zero roms. Dammit, I have one rom: the SNES version of Shadowrun I downloaded to review the last broken emulator.

I suggest not bothering with this. If you are going to bother with it, pick up the most recent version from SourceForge as it probably works. Or at least comes closer to working. As near as I can tell, this is just a multi-purpose front-end, meaning that configuring it is probably a bitch, and you'll have to download a bunch of actual emulators and learn to use them from the command-line anyway.

Purpose-built front-ends for specific emulators tend to involve little to no mucking about with command-line switches, and also to actually work, so I'd instead recommend that you find one of those.

Jump n' Bump

2008-04-22T18:51:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm one up on Gen. MacArthur because I have returned. After a week-long hiatus spent not playing the game I took a week off for, I'm back with my nose to the grind reviewing Linux games, and we take up the quest once more with Jump n' Bump. Remember Mario Bros.? Not the 'super' one that got everyone so excited, the earlier one that was just Mario and Luigi trying to score points by killing each other on single-screen levels that also had monsters. Jump n' Bump is like that, only with bunny-rabbits that explode in a shower of viscera when they're offed.

Out-of-the-box, there's only one level, and the closest thing to a website for it that I can find is an empty blog that according to other websites actually had over a hundred extra levels for download at some point. With only one screen, the novelty wears off mighty quick, so here's to hoping that whoever's got that website adds their old content back at some point.

It's basically multi-player only as there's no AI, but I'm reviewing it anyway because I could play by myself using the keyboard and the mouse to control competing rabbits. The controls are good on the keyboard, and even decent on the mouse, which surprised me. You left click to go left, right-click to go right, and click both buttons at the same time to jump. I thought it would be awkward but it works well.

The mechanics being so simple, it's a decent formula for competition, and it supports four-player simultanous play both locally and via network. If you were pining to relive the game that lead to the game that started it all, this is a great version.

The graphics are cutesy, and therefore amusing when the gore happens, but itsy-bitsy when playing windowed at the default resolution. Checking the 'double resolution' box fixes that, leaving you with a game that looks like something from the SNES-era with decent art-direction. Oddly, it's in widescreen, but it may be that I only find that odd because I'm way behind the times and have a standard-ratio monitor.

The music is also of the cute, old-school shareware style: think games for kids. Thankfully, it's quiet and manages to be complimentary to the gameplay rather than a soul-destroying annoyance.

Honestly, if you're into competitive multi-player gaming enough to download and install a game, and make your friends download and install the same game, so you can play together, you're probably more into Counterstrike or Halo than Mario Bros.-meets-bunny-rabbits. This is definitely not for that crowd. It's also not for the famed 40-year-old-lady market that devours puzzle-games.

I can't imagine there are a lot of people out there who would be into the experience this game provides. If, however, you're a parent with a four-year-old who could benefit from the practice at audio-visual coordination the simple mechanics provide, and looking for something mostly non-violent (toddlers don't know what those chunks are, do they?), this is something you could play with them. It's a shame the appeal is probably quite limited, because it's a polished release with solid mechanics and a decent-enough feature set, reflecting what must have been a lot of TLC.

Just for the record...

2008-04-14T18:39:00.000-07:00

... I'm taking a break from reviewing Linux games to play Pathologic under Windows. I read the beginning of a complete breakdown of the game on RockPaperShotgun and it was so intriguing, I forced myself to stop reading so as to not spoil anything for myself, and sought out a copy.

I was getting open-source-fatigue anyways, so hopefully taking a week off to explore a thoroughly broken but narrative-filled and professionally-done-for-the-most-part retail game will restore my flagging spirits and get me through the next few months of reviewing Ubuntu's repositories. Expect more content to appear here in a week or so. Until then, have lots of fun playing whatever you play, and feel free to listen to my weekly radio show on Mondays, starting at 11PM EST, at www.wrir.org (yes, that was a shameless and completely unrelated plug).

I Have No Tomatoes

2008-04-10T19:55:00.000-07:00

While I Have No Tomatoes is unlikely to amuse you for longer than five minutes (which is unfortunate, considering that a game takes exactly ten minutes to complete), it's a well-done and interesting arcade-esque game with a nice visual style. It's another skill-based game, which to my way of thinking is at least a nice change from puzzle-based games, but as such it just didn't have the depth or progression necessary to captivate me for very long.

Basically, you're a little Q-bert lookin' guy in a small maze-like grid-based level. You move by pressing the arrow keys in the cardinal direction you want to go, made a bit awkward at first by the game's isometric view. The maze is also filled with constantly re-spawning tomatoes, who run amok and kill you if you touch them. Hitting space tosses a bomb, which will explode in a linear fashion after a second or two, killing anything its explosive force encounters.

The point is to kill as many tomatoes as possible. The twist? Rather than being limited by the number of lives, the player is limited solely by the clock. Each level lasts exactly 60 seconds. There are ten levels, so each play-through takes ten minutes to complete. You can die as much as you want, but time spent re-spawning is time not spent offing tomatoes, so it's in your best interests to stay alive.

The only other thing to be mentioned is the special-powers. When you off a tomato, it leaves behind a colored power-up that you can use to do a special attack: wild-fire, lightning, etc. Most of them kill everything on the screen, with the exception of the teleport power which I never actually used, the trap, and my favorite, the potato man. It summons a potato man who runs around the maze offing tomatoes. That's just awesome.

Graphically, it's full-screen only, and the resolution is a decent 800x600, so things are as sharp as they have to be to look good in the game's cartoony style. Not much other than the colors seems to change between levels, so after a few levels with differing-but-similar layouts and graphics, it tends to get a bit old. I was slogging through the last couple of levels hoping it would end even in my first go 'round with the game.

The sound is low-key but non-annoying. The default level of the music basically allowed me to ignore it, and the sound-effects are on-par with everything else in the game: pretty good.

I Have No Tomatoes' interesting feature - the time limit - is also its downfall. With all of the content so basically similar to itself, and the lack of any deviation in subsequent attempts, you've experienced everything it has to offer the first time you play it. For perfectionists who thrive on trying to best their highest score, this isn't a problem, but I play to unlock content (preferably narrative), and when the content is going to be unlocked any damn ways, and is sort of boring to boot, there's just nothing to keep me coming back.

Fans of arcade games from the 80s should give this one a look-see, as they might look at it and see something I'm missing. I'm not the intended audience for this title, and those who are will probably find its gameplay more rewarding. If nothing else, it meets the base level of competence that so few open-source games do, and that should be encouraged. It's nice-looking, it works, it offers an interesting twist in the game-play, and it even has a sense of humor. If it didn't bore me to tears, I'd love it.

Ice Breaker

2008-04-08T18:23:00.001-07:00

Well, Ice Breaker brings back memories. It's a direct clone of JezzBall, a game I remember from some Microsoft Windows Game Collection from when I was in high-school. The only difference is that instead of trapping bouncing balls, you're trapping bouncing penguins (okay, maybe it's not the only difference).

Trapping? In the immortal words of Mister Doctor Professor Skulhedface, allow me to elucidate: you click on the screen to draw a line, horizontal or vertical, that will divide whatever area you're clicking in from the point at which you clicked. If there's no penguin in one of the halves, that half will disappear. The point of each level is to eliminate 80% of the space in each level in the fastest time possible.

Level one has two penguins, level two has three, and so on, ad infinitum (I assume; I did not reach the 'infinite penguins' stage to verify its existence, but I can't imagine they'd have put a level cap on it). The game is simple to comprehend, and difficult to master, requiring both sound strategy and quick decision-making.

It's not really all that fun for me, because I don't like puzzle-games and it's basically a real-time puzzle game. All of the requisite features are represented, in that it works, it doesn't crash, and it keeps a high-score list. Oh wait, did I say it keeps a high-score list? My bad. It asks you to enter your name after you die, but it doesn't actually save the names. Maybe you could keep a notebook by your PC to record your scores?

Graphics are functional but will not delight and awe you. The developer claims the graphics are superior to Jezzball's graphics. I disagree, but he's welcome to his opinion. The only sound is encountered when a penguin hits a still-forming line (taking away a life and stopping the line from forming). It's a bassy glass-breaking sound that's not too annoying but impossible to miss, so at least it's clear on when you've screwed up.

I found Jezzball relatively addictive when I was in my teens, and this one should scratch the same itch. I don't seem to have that itch anymore; Wizardry VII and No One Lives Forever have permanently ruined me for mindless mechanics-based games. If these sorts of things are up your alley, you could do worse.* It's another mediocre clone, and its high-score list is broken, but it works and it's free. You decide.

*You could also do better: there's a Java version playable here, that has a working high-score list and saves high-score lists for the whole gosh-darned world, both daily and all-time. I have no idea if it does malevolent things, but it didn't put any spyware on my machine, or cause any popups to open up in Firefox. Your mileage may vary.

Holotz Castle

2008-04-08T17:40:00.000-07:00

The internet seems to agree that Holotz Castle is a Lode Runner clone. I can't really remember Lode Runner, though I'm pretty sure we had a copy of Lode Runner Construction Set on my XT back in the day. Therefore, I have no idea if it utilizes the amazing mechanics of that classic game or not. It certainly didn't amaze me.

It's one of those 'beat the room' games where you have to collect a certain number of somethingorother and then make it to the exit. In this case, you play the part of two people who "touched that stone" and were transported to another world. Woot. One of them has to collect keys, and the other has to collect stones. You don't get to pick, it just arbitrarily decides which character you are for each level. And it has no meaning whatsoever. The two characters play the same.

The rooms are littered with beasties and traps which must be avoided. Examples: slugs, firepits, acid/lava puzzles, dissolving floor spaces. Pretty par for the course, really. Getting to some places requires doing things like swinging across on ropes, which is fun, or would be, if it weren't for the fatal flaw in this title...

... Namely, the fact that the jump button must be held down to complete long jumps to ropes and platforms, but also automatically re-jumps as soon as you hit a platform or rope. So you immediately launch yourself off of the thing you're trying to land on nine times out of ten. The one time you don't is when you're jumping onto something close by, that doesn't require you to hold the jump button down.

The fact that jumping - the only mechanic in the game outside of walking left or right - is hopeless broken makes what would be an enjoyable bit of beat-the-clock action gaming into a frustrating 'I'm going to throw this ever-lovin' keyboard through my monitor' experience. Normally this is where I say something along the lines of "And it's a shame, because if it weren't for that, this would have been a great game."

That's not really true, in this case. It would have been a passable, dare I say mediocre, game. Which is almost praiseworthy in the open-source community, but honestly, even if the jumping worked, it would just make the game easy enough to complete in a few hours max. In a way, the broken controls kind of extend the replay-value like the cut n' pasted levels in F.E.A.R. The graphics are cute but unimpressive, and the sound is basically the same.

There's some attempt to have a story, with semi-cutscenes playing every few levels where people say things like "I told you not to touch that stone. What are these keys? I think I should collect them." It's not exactly engrossing material. I don't think the developer speaks English, however, so it's possible that in the native Spanish it's a gripping epic of a thriller.

If the jumping thing got fixed, this game would be good for a few hours of fun. With additional levels and a level-editor available for download from the website, you could theoretically extend that fun, but the core mechanics are so limited that I suspect it would get old rather quickly, and so broken in their current state that I can only view additional levels as additional torture.

I have to suggest passing on Holotz Castle; if you crave LodeRunner gameplay, you can probably find some console ports of LodeRunner that play fine in an emulator, have more levels, and aren't broken. They all probably also support using a joystick, which this one doesn't.

Hex-A-Hop

2008-04-08T01:26:00.000-07:00

The open-source community seems to just love making puzzle games, and so Hex-a-hop* had to be quite a good game to stand out. It stood out. Despite the fact that I hate puzzle games, and I hate them even more after downing a bunch of bottles of Mickey's Big Mouth while fighting a head-cold, I was hooked.

You play the role of a cute little girl who has to crush green tiles. Once you land on one, it cracks, and once you jump off of it to another tile, it's crushed and falls into the sea. The whole 'puzzle' part involves going from tile to tile in such a way as to be able to crush all of them, leaving yourself a solid tile to jump onto from the last one standing.

It's really hard when you've been drinking 'Fine Malt Liquor' and it's probably really hard even when you haven't. After you beat a level, it unlocks more levels in a world-map from which you can select which one you want to play next. If one of them is too frustrating, you just go back to the world map and pick another one... Which will also be too frustrating, eventually. I spent forever trying to brute-force a solution for the second level I played, before giving up and finding much greater success with the alternate branch.

The world is not filled entirely with green tiles: there are a plethora of purpose-specific tiles to aid/hinder you in your quest, and figuring out how to use them, as well as how they interact with other sorts of tiles, is sure to bring you hours of delighted frustration. With over a hundred levels, I have barely touched the surface of what Hex-a-hop has to offer, and it was enough to kick my ass.

The requisite technology analysis: graphically, it's got a cute/cartoony art-style that looks as cute and cartoony as anything else windowed, but blown up to full-screen isn't quite as high-res as commercial software. It still looks really nice. You could even call it 'current-gen' as it's been ported to the PSP and PSP Slim by homebrew developers, so it's running on cutting-edge console hardware. :)

There is no audio, so the audio never gets monotonous. Sound effects would perhaps be nice, but by the time you've restarted the same level thirty times because you're 'in the zone', you won't even notice that it's been completely silent for forever. Until the dog barks and it scares the hell out of you, anyways.

If you're into puzzle-games, this one's a keeper. Even though I'm not, and I'm miserably stuffy-headed, I couldn't help but keep trying... and trying... and trying... to progress in the game. There's no real-time element, so it's entirely a cerebral experience, but its instant rewind and restart features keep the pace up even when you're thoroughly frustrated. If you're only going to install one turn-based logic-puzzle, this is the one (at this point in the list, at least; its closest competition is probably Fish Fillets NG (review here)).

*This is the website for the game, but I can't get it to load. I couldn't even get a return when I pinged the domain. I hope it is just temporarily down, because I want to see the hints page. :)

Heroes

2008-04-07T23:30:00.001-07:00

Having last received an update in January of 2002, Heroes is surprisingly awesome. When the description said it was "similar to the Tron and Nibbles (review here) games of yore," I was expecting something along the lines of Armagetron (review here). What I got reminds me of nothing so much as a Sega Genesis game from the good old days.

It is, basically, Nibbles. With Genesis-style sci-fi arena graphics (vaguely reminded me of Smash T.V.), a host of power-ups and crazy old-school console effects (Remember when SNES games would get all wavy after a death or a big battle? You can pick up a power-up that does that to the screen. It feels very retro.) that probably would have made this game a hit amongst console gamers of the early to mid 90s.

Amazingly, for a game that only reached version 0.19, it feels about as polished as a console game did way back then. Everything works, it never crashed on me, there's support for local multi-player, and it's even got four very distinct gameplay modes. They all look pretty similar, and they all involve not dying while lengthening your worm and trying to collect things, but they play relatively differently due to their different end-game requirements.

Graphically, the game suffers because... it looks like an old-school console game. The only resolution it runs at is 320x200, and I'm not sure it even takes advantage of that as well as it could: at full-screen it doesn't look as good as an SNES, but is only a little bit sub-par to the Genesis. I've seen Genesis games that looked worse. The resolution is so small that it's a bit hard to play in windowed mode.

If you want music or sound effects, you'll have to install them through Synaptic, but - other Linux developers take note - it actually tells you that in the description of the game in the package manager. There's no scouring the internet to find out why sound doesn't work. With the packages installed, the sound is... well, it's a bit like an old-school Genesis game, again. Not as good as the music you'd find in an SNES game, but certainly on par with the Genesis.*

Okay, I'll go ahead and complain a bit. The biggest fault outside of the built-in handicap of the low resolution is the font. It's one of those sci-fi looking affairs where the font is boxy and stretched, and it's a pain in the ass to read. It's great stylistically - it meshes with the look of everything else, and makes for a complete aesthetic which is sadly lacking in most open-source developed games - but it's a bit low on the actual usability scale.

The other big thing is that it only offers local multi-player. There's a total of like six AI opponents, but there's only support for two human players, and even that's a bit of a stretch if all you have is the keyboard. The game handles joystick input just fine (unlike a certain emulator I could name) but without network multiplayer this game is nowhere near tapping its full potential.

I found it a bit difficult, or at least time-consuming, so I can't recommend it wholeheartedly: it's a very well executed design, but it needs a certain type of gamer to appreciate it. If you're that certain type of gamer - if you loved Genesis ports of arcade games, basically - then Heroes is something you should definitely check out.

I'm amazed by how many memories it brought back, and how close to fun it was, considering that it's basically just a souped up version of Nibbles. I mean, I hate Nibbles. And this was almost something I wanted to play until I'd beaten it into submission. If you like arcade classics, I highly recommend it. I'd really like to see someone pick up development where it was left off so many years ago, update the graphics, and add network play. Even I would have a lot of fun getting my ass kicked by my friends, with this one.
--
*I feel like I'm dissing the Genesis because it always tends to come up short in the comparisons I keep making in this review. For the record, I actually enjoyed my Genesis a lot, and I think there were more great games for the Genesis than the Super Nintendo. That said, in retrospect, I don't think you can deny that the SNES was probably superior hardware, and definitely tended towards prettier and better-sounding games. There are exceptions, but that was the trend. Better gameplay? I loved me some Genesis games.

Help Hannah's Horse!!

2008-04-06T20:02:00.000-07:00

Mostly like a Pac-Man clone, with some variation coming from the additional influence of something called FastFood, Help Hannah's Horse!! is a nice-looking game that is less than the sum of its parts due to an unfortunate bug in the way it deals with player boundaries.

You play the role of Hannah (Pac-Man) whose horse is sick and needs pills and food. The ghosts of angry jockies (that's just weird) are running around trying to prevent you from collecting all the dots and carrots that litter the board. The dots are in place like a Pac-Man board, but the carrots appear like fruits in Pac-Man at random places in random intervals. Unlike the fruits in Pac-Man you have to collect all the carrots that appear in a level in order to complete it.

The only problem I have with the game is that the sprite that makes up the character is apparently bigger than the picture of the character. Rather than not touching the ghosts, you have to stay an indeterminate distance away from the ghosts. Otherwise, despite the fact that they didn't get you, you die. That's sort of a game-breaker for me.

Other than that, it plays like a Pac-Man clone, with additional depth added via gates that only the ghosts or only the player can cross, and an invisibility potion that allows you to pass through ghosts (but doesn't send the ghosts back to their lair, like power-pellets in Pac-Man and horse-pills in Help Hannah's Horse!!).

The music is awesome. It reminds me of Smokey and the Bandit. It's a midi-fied cross between country and bluegrass which is totally great, and never got old to me. Mind you, if you can't stand country and bluegrass, you may react differently.

Final judgement? If you can deal with the fact that you have to avoid an invisible death-wall that surrounds the ghosts, it's a great Pac-Man game with a ridiculous premise. I've never before seen the phrase 'Equimyocine pills' in a game, and I don't expect I ever will again.

Hearts

2008-04-06T19:45:00.000-07:00

Gnome Hearts is the full on official name for this game that doesn't work upon install. I really don't understand what's up with this; I've run into games that were out of date by long periods of time before, but this one's still in active development and I would think the developers would talk to the people who are in charge of the repositories and make things happen.

The game crashes immediately upon launching. From what I can gather, if you download the game from the official site (linked above) you can get it working. This blog doesn't deal with games that you download from web-pages, it deals solely with games that you download from the default Ubuntu repositories as accessed through the 'Add/Remove...' feature under 'Applications', and as far as that goes, the internet has this to say:

"And yes, it's a shame that by default, edgy still installs a version that crashes, four months after it has been fixed and three month after it's been proposed for inclusion in Edgy."

Or rather, the internet had that to say. That's from a post written in April of last year (2007). It still hasn't been fixed at this point.

Gweled

2008-04-06T19:11:00.000-07:00

I found it hard to believe that Gweled accurately represents the game which began the casual craze, inspiring thousands of bloggers to write millions of words about the middle-aged women who are the biggest thing to hit gaming since the NES. But I checked out Bejeweled and it turns out that Gweled is a near-perfect clone. So I now find it hard to believe that anyone finds this gameplay 'addictive', but if Bejeweled is your thing, and you want a free off-line version, Gweled is exactly what you're looking for.

Don't get me wrong: it's not the exact same experience. While the graphics are as good as the original (I would go so far as to say better), and the core mechanics are completely unchanged, it suffers a bit on the sound side.

PopCap's game gives a variety of different audio hits whenever you do anything above the ordinary 'kill 3 gems'. There's but a single sound that plays whenever the player clears anything in Gweled. As PopCap Games is fully aware, sound-cues can help make the difference between addictive and monotonous.

If you're truly addicted to the gameplay, then it won't matter, but if you're playing because Bejeweled takes advantage of the brain-chemical rewards that you get from pleasing audio and visual cues to addict you on their presentation of the gameplay, Gweled will probably be less than adequate. On that note, I'd recommend that every fan of Bejeweled go ahead and check this one out, and let me know if you find it as satisfying without the wide array of audio/visual rewards. It's a very solid clone.

GTK Slash'EM

2008-04-06T17:04:00.000-07:00

Fun name: Super Lotsa Added Stuff Hack - Extended Magic is what you would think it would be after decoding that acronym. It's another rogue-like game based on the Nethack source. Technically, it's based on the SLASH source which was in turn based on the Nethack source, but you know what I mean.

After I figured out how to make the graphics work (hint: it's under 'Options' not 'Preferences') it got a lot more playable. Not because I can't decode ASCII, just because the default font-size was really small at 1024x768 in its tiny little window. It has the option to use a 'big tile' tileset as well as a 'big 3d tile' set, which is nice because I don't really like the fact that the Nethack visual tile-set is as itty-bitty as the regular ole' ASCII at high resolutions.

They look as good as anything did that was shareware for Windows in the early 90s: specifically, they don't look any better than Castle of the Winds. No big deal. If you're into rogue-likes you could care less what it looks like. The 3D tileset is a bit confusing to look at, because it's not actually 3D, it's just tiles that are drawn to look 3D, and so you move like a sprite that's not 3D in a 3D world, and it... yeah, it just looks awkward. I can't recommend it. The 'big tiles' one is great, though.

Mostly, this just plays like a rogue-like. For specific differences between this one and Nethack, see the website, but there are a few extra classes and races, as well as that 'Extended Magic', whatever that is. According to the Wikipedia entry, there's been some cross-pollination with new ideas from Slash'EM being incorporated into Nethack. That's gotta be the highest form of compliment in the rogue-like community.

I found it harder than Nethack; I didn't make it off of the first dungeon level in my first four attempts. This was partially due to the fact that I was playing classes I'd never played with before, but mostly it was due to the fact that Slash'EM defaults to having you pick up everything you walk over, so I kept getting encumbered and not being able to move or defend myself while I tried to unload whatever object it was that had pushed me over the edge.

Most annoying feature? It accepts the arrow-keys for movement, but for inputting directions for commands, it demands the 'only used in frickin' rogue-like games' set of directional keys employing the 'k' and 'h' and whatever keys that I can never remember. I like to play rogue-likes (well, actually I don't) with my right hand remaining over the arrow keys while I deal with everything else with my left hand and too often I was having to change that up. Every other rogue-like I've played accepted the arrow-keys' directions at all stages.

I could go on another rant about how much I hate rogue-likes and why, but there's no reason. This seems like a fairly fleshed-out experience that differs from Nethack mostly in esoteric ways that only the experienced rogue-like gamer will notice, or even reach. I'd recommend it mostly on the basis of the larger tile-set, compared to Nethack, as it makes it easier on the eyes for extended playing.

gtkgo

2008-04-06T16:12:00.000-07:00

gtkgo is a decent version of the classic game Go. It actually works pretty well. You'll note that the name doesn't link to anything this time: there's no website for gtkgo that I can find. I believe it only got one release, version 0.10.0, something like five years ago.

That makes it pretty amazing, as in that one release, they got all of the necessities working, and if you pick the right skin it doesn't even look too shabby. There are two different AI scripts to compete against, and you can also play against another human being (local only, no network support).

Outside of the fact that you can't make it full-screen, I have no visual complaints. gtkgo ships with five skins, of which one is boring, two are ugly, and two look alright. The skins change the look of everything from the pieces to the configuration menus, and while they obviously weren't done by design majors, they look self-coherent and are easy to interpret on all the skins.

There's no sound, but there's an option to turn sound on, so I assume sound was going to be added at a later date and no one got around to it. No biggy; soundtracks are for action games, not board-games. Right?

I probably could have stopped with the first sentence: gtkgo is a decent version of Go. Wanna play Go against your computer? Pick it up. Don't wanna play Go against your computer? Don't pick it up. I think it's the best version of Go I've seen so far, and it's certainly the nicest-looking. Shame it's not in active development; add network support and some higher-res skins and there'd be no reason for a different one.

Gtkboard

2008-04-06T15:36:00.000-07:00

You know those crappy five-dollar CD-ROMs that have 'hundreds of games' on them, only they're, y'know, really bad shareware from ten years ago? Gtkboard is like one of those, only unfinished.

According to the website, the actual inspiration for the title seems reasonable: since the AI for all of the single-player board-games they saw were essentially the same, why not just do every board game in a single game? Sounds alright if vaguely sketchy; I don't understand how say, Risk or Clue would utilize the same AI as a chess game. Regardless, I'm positive that Pac-Man isn't a board-game anyways, so whatever good intentions that they start with, the inevitable grandiose feature-bloat that kills all Linux projects kicked in, and left Gtkboard an unfinished pile of crap that occasionally works.

There are thirty-two games in this collection, most of which are played on some sort of board, and are two-player games. Most of those are playable single-player with AI. Maybe twenty or so of the games are fully implemented; the rest are either completely unplayable, or playable but so broken that there's no point. The Pac-Man clone strikes me as the single worst iteration of that storied franchise I've ever encountered, finished or not; most people don't release something that broken, even in beta. It's not fun, but it's funny.

Tetris features here, and it's pretty much a less-pretty version of Gnometris (review here), but unlike Gnometris, the tetris clone in Gtkboard actually works. So if nothing else, Gtkboard is an option if you're looking for a barebones tetris-clone. There are better out there. The only other thing that was neat and never crashed to the desktop on me was the maze game. You move a cursor from one corner to the opposite, through a maze. It reminded me of elementary school.

Generally, I've been running a lot of reviews that boil down to 'This is a very minimalist and ugly game, but it functions' - that's only half right in this case. Guess which half? That's right - this game doesn't function! Even in the case of the 'fully implemented' games that were supposed to work flawlessly, the program kept crashing back to the desktop.

The project has been dead since 2003. I don't know why this is even in the packages... it's a broken project that isn't even being developed anymore, and so will never progress beyond the half-coded shambles it's in at present. This one gets a 'don't bother' rating with prejudice. There are better ways to play
virtually everything in this package.

GTetrinet

2008-04-04T17:20:00.000-07:00

GTetrinet is multi-player only competitive Tetris. Since I'm not really reviewing multi-player only titles in this blog, I only played it for a sec. It did work, it was multi-player, it was competitive, and it was Tetris. All promises delivered upon!

Despite the fact that I don't want to do a real review, I will state that it was nice to play something that was actually a game, and actually worked. It's been a while.

Since I've gone this far, I'll go ahead and mention that it plays better than Gnometris, and has decent layman-like graphics, but doesn't wow me at all, aesthetically. Sound didn't work; probably needs sound files or something.

This non-review is basically a review, so I might as well pass judgement: it works fine. Go for it. Tetris is always fun; if you want to compete against others via the internet, here ya go.

GSnes9x

2008-04-04T16:54:00.000-07:00

Yay, GSnes9x is not a sudoku game! It's a broken SNES emulator frontend, instead! Snes9x is a cross-platform SNES emulator; GSnes9x is a graphical front-end for Gnome so you don't have to muck about with that whole command-line thing.

On the plus side, it includes Snes9x, so you don't have to download that as well. It just works right out of the box. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well.

Joystick support is broken and sound didn't work for me either. No idea why, as far as the sound goes, though it appears that others had the same problem. The joystick thing is due to an error with the path it looks for the joystick at; it appears to be an Snes9x problem, rather than a GSnes9x problem, but the fix is to edit a configuration file of some sort somewhere, and I can't be bothered.

It also refused to go to full-screen despite the fact that I told it to in the configuration for the rom, and in the global preferences. The graphics look nice in their little window, but everything looks decent when it's really small. Downside? Everything's really hard to read when it's that small.

I decided to test the emulator with a rom from Shadowrun for the SNES; I loved the Genesis cart of the same name (completely different game; same franchise), and never had gotten around to playing the SNES version. It's essentially an adventure game, so the unreadable text was a bit of a hassle.

All in all, I'm sure you could get GSnes9x working with a bit of effort, but I have to wonder why you'd bother. The version of Snes9x it comes with has to be out of date, as GSnes9x has been listed as a dead project on SourceForge since 2004. You'd be much better off finding an SNES emulator that is still being updated, or at least works out of the box - I hear good things about ZSNES. I'll let you know if it works when I get to it.

GRhino

2008-04-04T15:37:00.000-07:00

While it hasn't reached the level of clone saturation you find in the casual-games market, it's a bit disheartening that there are so many versions of the same games in the open-source community. GRhino is another Reversi/Othello clone. Sure, it's a classic game with time-tested mechanics, but I do have to wonder why they bothered. Was it just an attempt to develop the programmer's AI skills?

I hope so. Iagno (review here), which is the Othello clone that comes with Ubuntu's default installation, is far superior in virtually every way. Prettier graphics (3D, even, I think) and network play are the two most important areas. Ignoring the graphics, the fact that you can play Iagno against other people makes anything GRhino might have to say for itself a moot point.

GRhino seems to pride itself on having an exceptionally difficult AI opponent. If that's true, then maybe there's a place for it in your collection. After you slaughter all the other, prettier, less facile AI players in all the other versions of Othello, you can turn to this one. I saw no evidence that it was inherently smarter than any of the other AI opponents I faced. The margins of victory and length of games ended up the same as those I encountered with Iagno.*

If you are desperate to play single-player Othello and your computer was made fifteen years ago, it may be that GRhino is your only option; its lack of 3D graphics probably allows it to play just fine on an older machine. Outside of that unlikely scenario, I give out yet another 'why bother?' to this pedestrian attempt at porting a classic board game to the desktop.

*Both AIs beat me a lot: this probably suggests that I suck at the game more than that the AIs are comparable.

GNUDoQ

2008-04-04T14:52:00.000-07:00

Fresh from reviewing a sudoku game, I bring you... GNUDoQ, a sudoku game with pastels! Nope, not kidding. Just look at those colors! Exciting, isn't it? I promise to stop being sarcastic when people stop coding sudoku games. For the record, this one is basically just GNUDoku (review here) with a facelift. As per the authors' statement, the code is based on GNUDoku and it doesn't offer anything that GNUDoku doesn't have, outside of colors.

In fact, in one respect, it offers less. GNUDoku gives you instant feedback when you input a square wrong; it lights up all the errors with a crimson highlight. GNUDoQ eliminates that; all user-inputted squares are in white, and it's not until you ask the computer to solve/verify the puzzle that errors are pointed out. Probably not a big deal if you're used to playing sudoku puzzles on paper, but it is a difference that could be annoying if you invested hours in a puzzle only to discover you'd made an error long ago that invalidated much of your work.

It does actually add one thing that I didn't even notice GNUDoku was missing: clicking with the mouse on an inputtable square can be used to input numbers, so the game is playable completely via the mouse. This is always a nice option, even if in this game it tends to make filling in squares a bit like texting on my crappy phone. Gnome Sudoku (review here) does it better, but the method GNUDoQ uses is perfectly functional.

The lord giveth and the lord taketh away. We're missing one feature, but we added another feature, leaving the two at a dead-heat in the feature-race.* I like the look of GNUDoQ, so I'm going to have to call it superior to GNUDoku, but Gnome Sudoku is still a better game, mechanically. Gameplay counts more than graphics, so I'm going to go ahead and say that you shouldn't bother with this one either; Gnome Sudoku has you covered.

*As pointed out in the comments below, GNUDoQ also allows the user to print out their sudoku boards for play on the go - which GNUDoku doesn't. So I suppose we're no longer at a tie for features, and GNUDoQ is unquestionably superior, since printed out sudoku boards can be played anywhere and therefore GNUDoQ doesn't even need a PC to play! Seriously, though, just for the record, Gnome Sudoku also offers the printing of boards, so it's still the overall victor in the sudoku-wars.

GNUDoku

2008-04-04T14:25:00.000-07:00

Hooray, more sudoku games! Yes, I am dripping with sarcasm. I can't help it. I'm underenthused. GNUDoku is a completely functional sudoku game, but not as feature-rich as Gnome Sudoku (review here), and completely lacking anything like a stylized graphical design.

Gameplay-wise, there is nothing special. It can generate sudoku puzzles, and has a difficulty slider for selecting how hard the generated puzzles will be. To place a number on the board, you click on an empty square and type the number in.

If you've made a mistake, and entered a number that can't go there, both the square you entered and all the other squares it has a problem with turn red. This is the full extent of the game's 'graphics'. Everything is done with default window elements, which probably makes this a very small file compared it its more-interestyingly-styled cousins.

In the age of broadband and huge hard drives, I can't imagine a sudoku game that occupied any meaningful amount of space, no matter how they pimped it out. Unless it had FMV cutscenes, anyways (For some reason, the idea of a SquareSoft-developed sudoku game makes me laugh). Since that doesn't matter, I call the design 'boring' rather than 'making economical use of space' but it's not ugly, just not interesting. It looks like it could be spreadsheet software.

It works perfectly, despite its lackluster appearance. It does have a 'solve' button which will fill in all the squares... but only if all the squares you've already filled in allow it to complete the game; it won't change anything that wouldn't work, it just does nothing if you ask it to solve an unsolvable situation. That, coupled with a save/load feature, and a 'load seed' button that allows you specify a number for it to plug into its puzzle-generation algorithm, are the entirety of its features.

I think I have to give this one a 'why bother' rating - Ubuntu's default installation includes Gnome Sudoku which is a superior sudoku game. Since they're both free, why not go with the better one, and leave this one alone?

GNUbik

2008-04-01T21:54:00.000-07:00

The ultimate physical puzzle, the Rubik's Cube, is translated into a somewhat un-ultimate puzzle game with GNUbik. Featuring a 3D (it looks 2D-isometric, but behaves in a 3D manner, so I'll take their word for it) representation of a Rubik's Cube, you click in order rotate the desired section of the cube until you've solved the puzzle.

Honestly, for what it is, this is almost as good as it gets. You can set the cube to be whatever size you desire, you can alter the colors, turn them into patterns, and even use photos as the tiles on your cube instead of plain ole' colors, it's got built in scripts that will solve part or all of the puzzle for you... it's quite a full-featured piece of software. You can even rewind what you've done, all the way back to the beginning or back to a marker you placed at some point.

The implementation of the single most important thing, however, is a bit dicey. Moving sections of the cube is done by moving the mouse over the cube until you have an arrow pointing in the direction you want to rotate the piece over top of the piece you want to rotate. I think it's supposed to decide which way you want to go on the basis of which edge of the individual tile you're closest to, but it doesn't work very well at all and requires a lot of intricate mouse-jiggling all-too-frequently in order to get it set up to go the way you want it to.

Everything else about the game works great, so it's doubly a shame that the actual play of the game is so painful. Rotating the entire cube, to get a look at the other faces, works like a charm. You just drag with the mouse-button held. The graphics aren't exactly super-snazzy but they get the job done, and get it done with precision and clarity, so you really can't complain. There's no sound, but for god's sake, a real Rubik's Cube doesn't have sound either, so it's no lack. It's realism!

If you would like to play with a Rubik's Cube on your computer, this is definitely an option; the unwieldy controls can be lived with, and the only thing it's missing is a 'save' feature. Without that, you have to leave the program open until you're done, and I can foresee a situation where hours of hard work are lost due to an unfortunate system crash. Add saving, and fix the hot-zones for the rotation, and this would be a perfect (if not particularly attractive) game.

Nethack for Gnome

2008-04-01T20:47:00.001-07:00

Nethack is the holy grail of Linux/open-source gaming: it embodies all of the characteristics that define the traditional *nix game. Nethack for Gnome is a prettied-up version of Nethack that is playable under the Gnome environment. It's just Nethack with a graphical overlay. For all intents and purposes, it is Nethack; it even installs Nethack along with the graphical version, so you can play it in all its oldschool ASCII glory from the command line, if you like.

Quick refresher for those who don't know what Nethack is: it's a rogue-like game, some would say the definitive rogue-like game, and what that means is that the game consists of randomly generated dungeons, it's impossibly hard, the controls are more complicated than rocket-science, it has no storyline, but nonetheless has a devoted cult of followers who think it's the most brilliant game ever, probably because they've devoted so much time to figuring the damn thing out that they're forced to praise it so that they don't seem like complete wankers. You move around these text-based dungeons with the arrow keys, move into monsters to attack them, and use a gajillion unwieldy and ridiculous key-combinations to do obscure and unlikely things to the random objects you encounter along the way. You cannot restore a savegame if you die, which I'm actually fine with, but a lot of people hate that.

(Honestly, I just don't see the attraction to these games; I've tried to get into multiple rogue-likes multiple times over my years of gaming, and they all tend to... suck; I'm not a graphics whore - I loved MUDs and BBS doors - but rogue-likes are simply not good games without an investment of thousands of research hours on the part of the player, that would be better put to use curing cancer or world hunger).

Rather than re-conceptualize the Nethack experience, like Falcon's Eye (review here) did, this is a simple tit-for-tat ASCII-for-sprite swap for the most part. The view of the map is exactly what it would have been in regular ole' Nethack, only it's made out of little graphical tiles instead of being made from letters n' symbols. There are some other differences but they're mostly cosmetic.

As in Falcon's Eye the re-tool for a GUI involves making the mouse accessible, which has the result of giving you a convenient list of the major commands in the menus at the top of the screen. Remembering that 'ctrl-d' is how you kick a door in, 'q' is how you drink a potion, and 'Q' is how you ready ammo in a quiver, 'w' is how you wield a weapon, 'W' is how you wear an item of clothing... all that's theoretically a thing of the past, cuz' you can just click to get 'er done.

Of course, you'll probably get sick of all the clicking and just use the keyboard, but at least when you can't remember how to do what you want to do, you can consult the menu, which is actually more effective and efficient than trying to go through the help internal to the ASCII version.

Nethack is the game that invented whatever the opposite of user-friendliness is. It actively hates its players, it wants them to die, and it demands study equivalent to that required to attain a PhD in order to fully comprehend its ins and outs and develop a winning strategy.

Or so I have heard - in the time I didn't waste trying to figure out how to play Nethack, I've gotten a double-major in English and History, read a few hundred novels, beaten a good dozen or so video games, played a plethora of others to varying degrees of success, and consumed countless gallons of booze. While my degree may be less marketable than Nethack-skills, I can't say I have any regrets.

Playing this graphical version is as painful as playing the Windows graphical version (though I think I liked the look of this one's non-game-map areas better; the map itself looks exactly the same) which is as painful as playing the text version, for all intents and purposes. If playing a game that can only be won by actively going through the code that created it searching for unknown features that will allow you to find victory sounds like a good time, rock it out. It doesn't appeal to me, personally.

This is at least one up on Falcon's Eye as, although it's perhaps not as pretty, it doesn't introduce any of the problems that Falcon's Eye's isometric view did, while it does have all the benefits that result from adding mouse and GUI support. Since you can play this graphical version completely via the keyboard if you like, it's exactly like playing Nethack only with tiny little tiles instead of characters. The mouse support adds accessibility while not ruining the game for old hands at Nethack. In that context, the game is a success.

For what it's worth, lots of people (a minority, but still lots) do like rogue-like games, and you may be one of them. For a different take on the genre, I recommend John Harris' column @Play over at GameSetWatch - he manages to keep convincing me that I should be playing rogue-likes despite the fact that I know I hate them, and he's reviewed a number of the more famous iterations of the rogue formula, as well as some obscure ones. If I ever acquire a Nintendo DS, I'm going to check out Shiren the Wanderer solely on the basis of his numerous in-depth examinations of the game.

GNOME-Mud

2008-04-01T19:43:00.000-07:00

Continuing our series of non-game software that still sits in the category of 'Games' in the repositories, we bring you GNOME-Mud. It's a client for MUDs, so while it's not actually a game, it is used to play games, so close enough. Basically, a MUD client is a purpose-built telnet client, and this one doesn't offer much more.

MUDs, for those unfamiliar with the term, are text-based multiplayer games. They tend to be fantasy role-playing games, with a handful of sci-fi games out there and an even smaller number of MUDs that don't fit either category. Those last are usually based on some sort of license, ala Dragonball Z. They play a lot like oldschool text-adventures who've had a veneer of RPG-style character development stuck on top.

You need a client to play them - they all run over telnet, so any telnet client will do, but since most of them use ANSI for color and occasional graphical fun, you're going to want to use a client that at least has support for ANSI. In a game that tends towards walls of text, anything that can spice it up is nice - if for no other reason than to give your eyes a break.

GNOME-Mud is a serviceable client, but zMud, a Windows client I was using when I actually played MUDs, offered more features and better-implemented features even then (call it a decade). GNOME-Mud does ANSI fine, and technically works, but there's very little in the way of extra labor-saving or convenience features that had become standard for purpose-built MUD clients forever ago.

Virtually the only feature it's got that makes it not just an ANSI-enabled telnet client is its auto-mapper, and unfortunately the auto-mapper sucks. Rather than reading your keystrokes to determine when you've moved, and map your movements that way, it requires you to input your movements from the map screen. With the mouse.

These games are played entirely with the keyboard; a full mouse-based interface could be built, for a specific code-base of MUD, but GNOME-Mud doesn't have one, so if you want to use the auto-mapper, you have to go about your business with the keyboard, and then switch to the auto-mapper to move.
There doesn't seem to be any reason at all for it to work this way. If you can think of one, let me know.

For the record, it does have a wizard for creating a list of the MUDs you play with your login information saved, so you don't have to type in addresses n' ports n' logins n' passwords every time you want to play. It's not a big deal, but it is one of those little conveniences that virtually every other GUI-based MUD-client offers.

For what GNOME-Mud offers, you might as well just use any telnet client that offers ANSI support for your MUDding. It works, but it's nothing special. So far it's been the only MUD client we've encountered via Ubuntu's packages, so it wins by default, but I expect that if there's another one, it will be better.

Gnome KiSS

2008-04-01T12:39:00.000-07:00

Gnome KiSS is a non-game - it's a file viewer for 'French Kiss' files, which are sort of an upgraded music-and-scripting-enabled version of the old 'Kiss' files which were... paper dolls on your computer.

Yep. You use Gnome KiSS to view Kiss packages you've downloaded. Open 'em up, and you're presented with a 'doll' figure and a bunch of clothing you can drag and drop onto it. When I was 12, I was amused for like 18 seconds by dragging all the clothes off of one, and seeing it naked. That's still amusing for a few seconds, but after that brief time passes, there's nothing else to do. Unless you like playing dress-up with cartoons on your computer.

For the record, I downloaded a Ranma 1/2 Kiss set to test out Gnome KiSS with, and while it seemed to work (it was actually neat, in that just like in the comic, Ranma changes gender when s/he gets wet, so you could poor water on the character model to swap it back and forth), it gave me error messages when it loaded, and didn't play music despite the fact that it was supposed to. No idea where the error lies, and the basic 'gameplay' of dragging and dropping clothing worked fine.

I feel dirty.

Since it's not really a game, I can't really recommend it on the basis of its gameplay. If the idea of playing with drag n' drop paper dolls on your Linux box appeals to you, then by all means, give this one a shot.

GNOME Breakout

2008-03-31T18:39:00.000-07:00

This appears to be a day for playing inferior versions of games I've already played. Pity, that. GNOME Breakout is, rather obviously, a Breakout clone. Unfortunately, while it's barebones-competent, it's a bit unplayable, and certainly not as good as Briquolo (review here).

The controls for the keyboard can't keep up with the speed-increases that occur pretty damn swiftly in the first level (which I couldn't beat), making mouse-control the only real option. Unfortunately, GNOME Breakout doesn't grab the mouse - when the game starts to get faster, you inevitably move the mouse out of the window. Catastrophic in Circus Linux! (review here), it's annoying and only occasionally game-breaking here because the game pauses automatically whenever this happens. Usually, you can react fast enough to wherever the ball was when it paused to save it. That doesn't erase the stop-and-go nature of the gameplay, though. I'm uncomfortably reminded of driving downtown in Richmond and being annoyed by the oddly out-of-sync traffic signals.

So with gameplay that reminds me of one of the more annoying aspects of the town I call home, we're already off to a rough start. We could fix the problem with the mouse by going fullscreen, but GNOME Breakout only operates in windowed fashion, and it's probably a good thing. Graphics that look amateurish in their tiny window would probably really suck blown up to full-size. While not as lo-fi as the Atari version, it's pretty bad. Early 90s shareware level, at least.

So, the controls suck and the graphics are crappy. Next? No sound. Probably would have had crappy sound that got annoying if they had included music, but some kind of impact sound-effect would have been nice.

Moving right along, there's the levels. While the game 'ships' with three level-packs, and has the capability to import more, there's no level selection. This means that, if you're like me and can't beat the first level, the only way to experience another level is to delete the level-pack that it defaults to starting you with. Yay, I can play a completely different level that I still can't beat! I did come closer, however. If you can play this game at all, the extra levels will extend the replayability. I was basically non-functional at the game, so extra levels for me to suck at weren't very appealing.

A quick refresher on Briquolo: functional keyboard controls, functional mouse controls, expandability, decent soundtrack, fully in 3D, great graphics, unique and interesting gamplay modes, and the ability to select levels and level-packs. The fact that GNME Breakout works at all is a testament to the developer's ability; he did a decent job creating a fully functional piece of software. Unfortunately, a little bit of tweaking would have made it actually fun to play (or, to my mind, playable), and he didn't go that extra mile.

I should note that, despite the fact that the game was last updated in 2001, this version is the next-to-most-recent available on the net. No idea what changes were made. I recommend Briquolo to anyone looking for a Breakout-style game for Ubuntu. There's no reason to bother with this GNOME Breakout.

glTron

2008-03-31T17:46:00.000-07:00

If I hadn't already played Armagetron Advanced (reviewed here), I probably would have been impressed by glTron. Unfortunately, they essentially offer the same gameplay, and while glTron has a few nice touches, Armagetron Advanced is a more feature-rich and solid production.

Like Armagetron, glTron is a lightcycle game, based on the scenes from the sci-fi Disney classic film. It captures the look of the film, and the controls are simple and intuitive, but... so does Armagetron.

Differences? First, the positive: the mini-map that shows the whole playing field is a nice touch; you can tell at a glance exactly what's going on and plan your strategy around that.

The other big difference is the booster-button. Pressing it gives you a speed boost, and in one game mode allows you to power through walls. Armagetron allows you to gain extra speed solely via a weird wake-system, where if you're close to a wall, you gain a bit of extra speed. It's very unintuitive and I never quite got the hang of it. In glTron, the booster button allows for a simple and highly intuitive method of gaining extra speed, which can be very useful. Huzzah for that!

A minor difference that may make all the difference to you is that glTron has a simple method for adding your own music to the game. You just drop your music files into the appropriate directory, and select them from the internal menu. While you could play Armagetron with another music player running in the background, in-game support theoretically means less processor overhead and is just a nice feature.

Negatives? As far as I could tell, glTron runs only in a window, and only at one resolution (technically, you can change the resolution from the command line, but can't go into full-screen even from there). The graphics aren't quite as nice looking, even at a comparable resolution.

glTron does offer different artpacks - you just download the artpack and plop it in the appropriate directory, and it becomes available within the game's menu system the next time you start the game. Some of the artpacks may make up for the game's innately lackluster look - I didn't install any. Their screenshots showed them to be better done than the graphical themes available for Armagetron, which is an amusing quandary: better game, with better graphical engine, or lamer game with more creatively styled graphics? You decide. Out of the box, Armagetron is more appealing.

Biggest drawback? No network support, yet. You can play up to four players locally, sharing a keyboard, but uhmmm... yeah, that's not ideal. Armagetron offers 16-player networked games, which is in fact ideal. With no story and limited AI, these games depend on their multiplayer to make them fun once the mechanics have been figured out - without the added dimension of intra-human competition, there's just no real reason to play very much. The FAQ on the website says that network play is planned - for 2004. Obviously, they didn't make that deadline, but glTron was still being updated as of October of '07, so there's still hope.

Those are pretty much the only differences. glTron isn't a bad game - it's a solid implementation of the lightcycle game from Tron. But it's not as good as the other lightcycle game available from Ubuntu's default sources, so I don't see any reason to mess with it. If they get around to implementing network play, you may want to revisit this one and see if the alternate artpacks make it more aesthetically appealing, but until then, I'd pass on it.

glpuzzle

2008-03-26T20:05:00.000-07:00

While glpuzzle is good enough at the very limited thing that it does, I suspect gCompris (reviewed here) offers a similar 'game' that, at the very least, offers a few more pictures. glpuzzle is a jigsaw-puzzle program; it comes with twelve photos, ranging in difficulty from 4 - 25 pieces. It was hard enough to take me a whole minute and a half to finish the one with 25.

Obviously, I'm not the target market for the software - I hesitate to call it a game - but even for five-year-olds, it's a bit lackluster. It works perfectly, but with only twelve photos total, someone with basic motor-skills and decent vision/pattern recognition would maybe be able to kill thirty minutes with this. A few of the photos are so busy I suspect the uber-young, who are the only people who could benefit from the game, would have difficulty solving them.

It seems like you should be able to add photos, and create your own puzzles, but there's no mention of that on the website and the photos are in some proprietary-to-the-software format that Gimp doesn't recognize. To nit-pick and add insult to this poor programmer's injury, the sound it makes when you connect a piece made my nerves crawl. I may have had the volume up too loud.

In short, throw it on our PC if you want to amuse your pre-school aged children for a bit, but don't expect it to hold their attention for long. As mentioned, gCompris has a gazillion things that would serve to sharpen the same skills, in a more aesthetically pleasing package that also offers tons more. I don't recommend glpuzzle for anyone over the age of four.

Globulation 2

2008-03-26T18:34:00.000-07:00

Having not yet reached a full-release version, Globulation 2 is still one of the most polished and interesting games I've played in Linux. While there are areas for improvement, if they stuffed it in a box and put it in a GameStop it would totally be worth 20 bucks as it is, and probably be superior to anything else in that price range (new, for the record).

At its heart, Globulation 2 is a different take on the real-time strategy genre. Most RTSs involve direct manipulation of units, sometimes in a frantically fast-paced manner that gives the same sort of feel as an intense action game. Rather than trod that well-worn route, the makers of this one elected to combine RTS mechanics with management-style games, and ended up with a beautiful hybrid that plays like an incredibly deep take on Desktop Tower Defense.

As a player, you don't order your 'globules' to do things, you just sort of proclaim 'Let it be done!' by placing something on the map (a new building or a rally point) and your globules respond by... trying to make it happen. If you give an order that taxes your poor critters to the breaking point, it'll happen very slowly, and you might even end up with some losses due to starvation (I'm not sure, but I think that's how I brought about the cataclysmic downfall of my first non-tutorial empire).

Basically, you never give commands; the only thing you give orders to is the architecture. If you want something specific done - lets use an attack on a specific building for example - you place a marker on the building called a 'war flag' and if you've got any warrior types, they'll all rally 'round the flag, if they can get there. They automatically attack the enemy, so once they get in range of the target, they attack it. Delete the flag and they'll return to your defensive areas.

Which is how everything works... you define goals, and your people make it happen. Want to make sure they're defending your HQ? Paint the area with a defensive marker, and they'll be sure to keep the area patrolled. Trees in the way? Paint them with a 'clear' marker and your workers will harvest lumber from that area first. It sounds like a mere difference in semantics, but it plays out as a substantially different beast from your standard RTS.

It's very intuitive, and while you may occasionally be reacting just as frantically as a player in a standard RTS, you're usually busier strategizing than real-timing. Deciding what to do first, what needs to be upgraded, how large your army should be, how you want to manufacture units... that's the gist of the game. Set your architecture up correctly and defense will take care of itself; when you're ready, wipe out the other guys.

It most resembles Desktop Tower Defense in that you can build defense towers. And walls. And if you like, you can build them in such a way as to channel enemies into specific areas, and slow their progress, creating kill-zones and... you see where I'm going with this? If you haven't played Desktop Tower Defense you don't, but if you haven't played that, then you should click on the link up towards the top of this review and do that. It's a Flash game, and it's rather ingenius even if I do suck at it.

Of course, if you want to build intricate structures you're going to need workers, and workers need food, so you'll need more workers to harvest food, and you'll need inns for workers to eat and so on. Globulation 2 is an expanded and uber-deep implementation the basic mechanics of that game, combined with the resource gathering and population management of the RTS genre and ends up something else altogether, with the potential to become something greater than the sum of its parts.

It's not quite there yet. On the handful of maps I played, it seemed too easy - I never played a map where I didn't just build all the useful structures, max out their upgrades, build an army, and go to town. Some of the smaller maps may have played out differently, with constant skirmishing redefining the pace and prioritization, but that wasn't my experience.

Most damning is the lack of a campaign. The version offered by Ubuntu's package sources has a tutorial that's quite short, and no campaigns. The most recent release (again with this complete out-of-sync thing going on; there have been three releases since the one the packages are distributing) has expanded the tutorial into a four-part campaign, but it's still just a tutorial. For single-player fun, a campaign is (IMHO) essential for this game.

There are a decent number of varied and interesting maps, for the record. This makes online multiplayer sound very appealing, as it's almost certain that human opponents would not only make victory more appealing, they'd offer up surprising and entertaining strategies compared to the rather blasé experience one gets from the AI. Thankfully, there is networked multiplayer support (LAN or internet), and so all is right with the world.

The graphics are nice, and actually remind me of the style you get from some of the better Flash games (possibly just because I was thinking of Flash games as I played it). Crisp, but also cute - I seem to have neglected to mention that the game centers around competing tribes of 'globules', gelatinous-looking faceless creatures. I mention it now. They're amusingly cute, almost relaxing to behold, and the art-direction goes with the trend. Everything has a sort of pastoral, innocent vibe.

Well, except for the combat music. It's whimsically menacing, if not exactly impressive, making for a vaguely edgy vibe when one of your globules encounters a combat unit of the opposing side. There isn't a lot of variety in the sound-track, but it never gets insanely grating despite the repetition.

As it stands, the game's a bit limited as a single-player game, but still capable of providing hours of enjoyment to the lonely gamer. Should you be inclined to rock it all multiplayer-style, you'll find it even more rewarding. This is among the most enthusiastic thumbs-ups I've given in this blog: Check it out. Even if you're not a big RTS fan (I'm not) you might find that it wins you over.

gLife

2008-03-23T14:51:00.001-07:00

gLife is another non-game. It's an artificial life simulator. You can alter a few characteristics via the preference menu, but the gist of it is very simple: you click 'start' and these dots start to move around. There are male dots, female dots, and terrain dots. Watch. Be engaged.

Honestly, it's not that engaging, but it was sort of sad. Around 220 turns in, all the dots stopped reproducing, leaving unoccupied yellow terrain dots behind as they died of old age. Finally there was only one little guy left (I was amused that it was a guy; considering that women have longer lifespans in virtually every society, you would think the last person alive would be female) and he bounced from square to square, a hopeless dot in a wasteland of yellow.

What does it all mean? Beats me. This is an interesting-for-thirty-seconds novelty unless you're going to dig into the source-code and alter bits n' pieces of the rulesets to run experiments on artificial life systems or what-have-you. It hasn't been updated since 2000, but the elephant's graveyard that is SourceForge still has the page up for it. The messageboard there is almost as sad as the last blue dot on earth, scurrying about the desert.

GL-117

2008-03-23T14:00:00.000-07:00

This makes the second flight-sim we've looked at here, and while GL-117 is bunches less realistic, it's also bunches more fun. It appears to be a few versions out of date, which is a bit odd considering that the last version released was released in '05, but even in this state it's completely playable.

There are four training missions that give you the hang of controlling the aircraft and blowing stuff up, but the meat of the game lies in its campaign mode. There doesn't appear to be any sort of 'story' per se, at five missions in; each mission is arbitrarily defined, and not related to any of the others.

GL-117 is an arcadey combat flight-sim; prior to each level, you pick your plane and your armament package, and then it plops you into the mission a few hundred feet above the ground. While taking off and landing are not the important bits of combat, the fact that you never take off and that it just cuts to the mission-select screen after you finish a mission certainly make the simulation a lot less immersive.

Where GL-117 really shines is in the controls - I've never played a flight-sim with mouse controls so intuitive and streamlined that they feel perfectly natural. I wasn't even tempted to pull out the joystick, which is a first for me as far as flight-sims go. Huzzah!

Graphically, it's got the Linux-3D look. You know how everything is sharp and well-defined, but doesn't look photo-realistic, it just looks 3D? If retail games are using oil-paints, your average open-source game is rocking crayons or colored pencils. This falls at the upper end of colored pencils, but it's certainly not as impressive as that game for the 360 I keep seeing ads for.

The machine-gun and explosion sounds are a bit too tinny and empty for my tastes, but the throttle sound is fun. The music is decent and oddly dancy, but it only plays in the title screen, so it doesn't really matter.

Flaws? The most glaring issue I had was that I couldn't create new pilots or delete a pilot or anything; this resulted in my playing through everything as 'Pilot AB', and only having one slot I could play with. Couldn't find any mention of the problem elsewhere, so I'm going to assume it was fixed in a release after the one installed via Ubuntu's packages, and that I would have had no problem if I'd compiled from source.

The campaign, as mentioned, doesn't have any sort of narrative to it, so you are going to play solely for the joy of the mechanics. Thankfully, the mechanics are well-conceived and well-implemented, so it's still fun, but it doesn't have the pull to push further that a connected series of campaign missions would have had.

It's greatest strength is probably its largest flaw to a lot of people: it's not an accurate simulation at all. It's a fun simulation, but you only have to know five buttons and that includes the three buttons on your mouse. What it offers the casual player in terms of instant fun and accessibility, render it useless and unsatisfying to the hardcore flight-sim player.

There stands the verdict: if you're looking for a light n' fluffy pastry of a combat flight-sim, GL-117 is exactly what you need. It's simple, fun, and fast-paced. If, on the other hand, a hearty meal full of minutiae and realism is all that will satisfy you, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Ghextris

2008-03-22T20:44:00.000-07:00

Somehow, I don't think the world is ready for Ghextris' hexagonal-Tetris gameplay. Mostly due to me being finicky about the actual physics of my Tetris games. See, in real life, due to the nature of a hexagon, pieces wouldn't slide in perfectly like they do in the game. They'd stack. It would be impossible to ever get a line cleared because they'd catch whenever there was just one space left in a row.

Ignoring that admittedly anal-retentive complaint, Ghextris is a serviceable if decidely un-featured take on Tetris with hexagonal pieces. There tend to be more piece-configurations with the hexes, and there's also a lot of variability in how you can play them, so it's actually a fun concept.

The graphics are uber-simple; no 3D effects here. None are really needed, but it's not even as pretty as Tetris was on the GameBoy, so... you decide. If the graphics don't matter at all, they don't matter here, and it's fine. If you like your games to please the eye as well as the brain, you're not going to like what you see.

There is no music; generally I would say this is somewhere between a good thing and a completely unimportant thing. Sure, Tetris had a great soundtrack, but virtually every other puzzle game ever made has a soundtrack that just gets irritating. I'm fine with the lack.

If you're an OCD Tetris player searching for a new kick, give it a spin. If you just want a fun real-time logic-puzzle sort of game, there's loads of better ones out there, even ones with multiplayer and high-score lists. In short, pass on this one unless you're a fetishist for Tetris variants.

Gamazons

2008-03-22T20:01:00.000-07:00

Weird game. Gamazons is a chess-like game, played on a 10x10 chess board where you get five pieces that move like queens. I'll never play it again, but people who like playing chess on a regular basis should probably check it out, as it's a very different sort of game but it relies on the same sort of tactical thinking, perhaps moreso.

You see, not only do all of the pieces move like queens, they also all have to shoot an 'arrow' at the end of each turn. So the board slowly fills up with these permanent 'arrows' that can't be moved over. You don't take pieces, you eliminate squares. The winner is the last person who can move a piece. Your goal is to trap the opponent's pieces with arrows while leaving your own pieces with mobility. It's just as brain-stressing as a game of chess, but with different strategies.

Graphically, as you can see, it's a bit simplistic. Outside of one or two of the 3D chess games and a handful of other exceptions, graphics haven't been very impressive for any of the logic-puzzle/strategy games we've looked at, so I wouldn't take off too many points for that. Gamazons has no music or sound effects.

There is an AI opponent, so you can play against the computer, watch the computer play against itself, or play against another person locally. There is no network support, but the website states that network support is planned, so just hang in there. Maybe.

If you're a fan of turn-based strategy board-gaming, you should probably check this out. If you're not - and I'm guessing you're not - you should probably not bother. If you don't dig playing chess, you're not gonna dig this any more.

Fyrdman

2008-03-22T19:33:00.001-07:00

What can I say about Fyrdman? It's ugly, I can't make it do anything, and I think it's multi-player only, which puts it outside the mission of this blog. It has no documentation: it was designed to run under KDE, not Gnome, and so trying to use the help command just gets you a 'There is no documentation' error in some KDE help-file system thing.

This is a game from the 'GGZ Gaming Zone Project', which "makes free online gaming possible." Or at least, the website says it does. It doesn't seem possible for me.

Frozen-Bubble

2008-03-22T18:58:00.000-07:00

As I am always in the mood for Puzzle Bobble derivatives, Frozen-Bubble sounded like it might be a good time. Despite its polish, Frozen-Bubble suffers as a single-player game. The fact that it offers multiplayer support both locally and via network saves it from being a completely skippable title.

First, the good: it's a clone of Puzzle Bobble, and it's very cute n' pretty. The theme is penguins (someone, please explain to me who thought it was a great idea that Linux and penguins be forever entwined? Honestly, it's just weird), so there's a cute little penguin at the bottom of the screen cranking your little aiming-turret thing left and right according to your will, and there's an arctic vibe to everything.

The graphics are really sharp-looking windowed; I couldn't find an option for full-screen. They're also consistent - the artists had an aesthetic in mind, and stuck with it, making everything look very nice with everything else. I love it when that happens.

The multi-player mode has an interesting chaining effect where bubbles that are dropped but not part of the color that was exploded can return to the field of play and pop more bubbles. It's hard to explain, but easy to figure out once you see it in action. I thought it was cool; it was probably ripped off from some other game, but if they invented, props to them.

Downside? Scoring is inscrutable. I couldn't find any info on it on the website, or within the game. It's non-existent for the single-player game, which is bad enough. Half the fun of Puzzle Bobble is getting massive amounts of bonus points for finishing quickly or for dropping lots of bubbles at once, and they eliminate that fun by having your level and time serve as your score in single-player mode.

That seems doubly pointless when you take into account that they have implemented scores for the multiplayer mode - why take them out of single-player? But even in multiplayer, it's not a fun scoring system because I have no idea what earns me points. It wasn't just dropping balls; that would give me points sometimes, and other times not. I dunno.

The music is unimpressive. Every Puzzle Bobble game that has music, has music that eventually gets really old. So that I got tired of this perky electronic stuff rather quickly doesn't mean it's bad. The sound-effects are nicely remeniscent of the source material, as far as high-pitched squealy voices go.

Basically, this is a solid game that works well and looks great but isn't very fun in single-player mode. I'm sure it's great for multiplayer, but that's not very hard to do, as you bring fun with you when you're gaming with your friends. All a game has to do is not get in the way. I wouldn't recommend this even to fans of the genre, unless they've tried every other option available and are just desperate for more levels, as far as single-player is concerned. For intercontinental bubble battles, it's a go.

Frets On Fire

2008-03-22T18:08:00.000-07:00

Hrmn, this one was disappointing but I think it's because my computer sucks, not because the game does. Frets On Fire is sort of an open-source version of Guitar Hero, which I've never actually played. But I've seen people play it at parties, which qualifies me to judge it, right?

The guitar-controller of Guitar Hero and Rock Band looks a lot more intuitive than using the F-keys of the keyboard, especially my keyboard with its weird gap between each set of four function keys, making my life difficult. That said, I'd think that anyone who was into the game could quickly get used to his or her particular keyboard, and you can re-map the keys if you're so inclined.

I couldn't really do a good test of this game, however, because it ran so poorly. Even at 640x480, there was horrible lag in the menus and in the game. I couldn't tell if my low scores were because of the lag, or because of my own ineptitude combined with the lag, but the lag was definitely a problem. Actually, my ineptitude was probably just as big a problem, but I'll never be certain, thanks to the lag. Sometimes it's better not to know.

Still, it's kind of a shame, as I would have liked to get into the game. It was worth the download just to go through the tutorial, voiced by a hilarious German accent that perfectly captures the personality of the sneering metal snob. Kudos for that!

On the downside, every time I tried to change video settings, it crashed to desktop with my resolution changed to 640x480, which was a major drag. I just had to log off and log back on to fix the resolution, but crashing is uncool. Thankfully, it did save my changes each time. Unfortunately, disabling anti-aliasing didn't help with the lag.

Also of note is the fact that the default package installs just the game. You can use Synaptic to download the default four-pack of songs, or you can search the internets for others. Torrent sites seemed to be full of them, as they were virtually all that came up when I googled for song-packs. As installed, it doesn't have any songs, so it doesn't work. But the tutorial works fine, and that was the best part for me, anyways.

Don't trust this review's negativity - others speak very highly of the game. If your hardware exceeds mine (almost everyone's does), it's probably very playable. It's a free Guitar Hero-clone that, according to the website, even accepts input from a guitar-controller, so it adds free extensibility to your console guitar games, if your PC runs it well. I have no valid opinion to express.

FreedroidRPG

2008-03-22T17:09:00.000-07:00

What a pleasant surprise. While in an obviously incomplete state, FreedroidRPG is a surprisingly functional and full-featured attempt at blending a Diablo-clone with a more traditional RPG. I'd definitely recommend it to fans of Diablo-style RPGs or fans of sci-fi humor, without a second thought.

The plot is just weird. You're on a far away planet, where bots were the friends and helpers of humanity until just recently; they revolted and are out to slaughter all the humans. You play the part of Tux, a Linerian (read: a penguin). Linerians are an ancient and wise race said to be able to communicate with computers via their minds, and they came from an unknown galaxy for an unknown reason centuries ago. Tux was in cryogenic sleep until he was awakened by a human who was hoping he could save the world.

Yeah, it's really that bizarre. It's actually got a decent amount of depth; there's a city run by the tyrannical Red Guard, who offer folks security at the cost of outrageously high taxation and lack of personal freedoms. The city is well-populated with a diverse and unique cast of characters. The surrounding countryside, as well, is peopled with bizarre personalities that are a joy to interact with.

And that's the best thing about FreedroidRPG: its personality. The game is full of amusing jokes about Linux culture and geekdom in general, making it a delight to uncover new characters. While the writing is occasionally clumsy, it's usually witty and clever.

Unfortunately, there's not as much personality or cleverness in the general plot progression, as quests inevitably devolve into going into the same type of place (a dark and cramped dungeon) and doing the same type of thing: killing all the bad bots.

Its lineage is partially to blame for this; you could say similar things about Diablo, but Diablo did feature unique and varied locales which contained unique and varied creatures to kill. Here, everything looks pretty similar, and the bots are mostly derivative and unimaginative. This could change as more art assets are created for the game, but at its current state, outside of the city there's an awful lot of awfully similar terrain.

The graphics are a slapdash mix of aesthetics, with romantically pastelled post-apocalyptic trees surrounded by futuristic classic sci-fi looking buildings - it's Star Trek-meets-Fallout, competently done to varying degrees of success. It's never ugly, but it's occasionally boring.

The music is pretty but it gets old really fast. The music changes whenever you hit a different area, which makes for grating rapid transitions whenever you're near a border; this isn't the first game where I've noticed this, and it's a bit annoying.

Everyone's played Diablo so the basic game mechanics should be easy to pick up. Click to move, click to attack. Unfortunately, the pathfinding blows in constrained spaces and there's enough of a problem with item-finding that to pick something up or to attack something sometimes requires a bunch of random repositioning to find the sweet spot where the game will recognize what you're trying to do. It's manageable, but annoying. A little work on the part of the dev-team could fix it.

The only other real problem I found was that quest items are not indicated as such. This directly led to me quitting the game, as I discovered that I'd inadvertently sold an item needed for the completion of a quest, before I even got the quest. After wandering around the game world for hours, some Googling revealed that I had been wasting my time, and that I would have to start over to finish the quest. Game-breakers like that suck.

Outside of those faults, however, it's a fun romp in a geektastic post-apocalyptic world. Forewarned is forearmed (don't sell the energy crystals!), and keeping the flaws in mind, you should have a good time with FreedroidRPG. If it ever makes it to 1.0, it will be favorably comparable with any of the commercial Diablo-clones of the past few years. Open-source games, like ugly people, prove that personality goes a long way. FreedroidRPG has personality in spades.

FreeDroid

2008-03-17T18:13:00.000-07:00

Apparently, FreeDroid started out as a clone of the game Paradroid, but morphed into FreeDroidRPG. This is a review of the former; the latter will be reviewed next. This 'classic' version of FreeDroid hasn't been updated since 2003, so it's safe to say that it's been abandoned, I think.

The game begins with an introductory story, explaining that two ships have turned on distress beacons indicating that the droids on board have gone wacko. They're in a contested border region of your galactic empire or whatever, and therefore the ships must be boarded and the droids must be destroyed, to keep their technology from the enemy.

I had a really hard time figuring this one out, because to have any staying power at all you have to play a minigame where you take control of other robots, and it's not documented at all within the game or on the website. I got enough of it to feel like I half-ass know what I'm doing from the man page, but I still feel like I'm missing something.

The basic play is simple; use the awsd keys to move your little guy around, blasting droids. Unfortunately, your little guy is constantly losing juice, and to refuel you have to take over other droids via the mini-game described above. The graphics in the menu and the death screens are all really nice looking, in a two-dimensional hand-drawn way. The game itself is pretty low-fi.

Your speed seemed to depend on what you were controling, and there's a bit of physics implemented as far as momentum goes, when you crash into other droids, which is fun. Mostly the controls were responsive, but they get clumsy in the minigame (adding insult to injury), sometimes overshooting or doing nothing, in the same way Gnometris did.

The sound is low-key and the music, while quiet, is soothing old-school style electronica. In all, I'd say its sound design was its strongest feature. The core game mechanics were decent enough, but inscrutable enough to be frustrating for quite a while.

Mostly, I'd give this game a pass unless you were a fun of the original Amiga 'classic' I'd never heard of. There are better real-time games out there, and it's not much of a strategy game, though it seems to try. FreeDroid tries to do two types of gameplay but does neither very well. The result is unimpressive, though it's not actually bad.

FreeCiv

2008-03-17T13:37:00.000-07:00

Firstly, I just want to mention that the version of FreeCiv that Ubuntu installs is out of date. This is going to be a negative review, and a few of the issues I had may have been fixed with later releases. The release I'm reviewing is 2.0.9, released in February of last year; the latest stable release is 2.1.3, released in January of this year (2008, if this blog is still around in the future).

When I started this quest, I was looking forward to FreeCiv a lot. Since the first Civilizations! game came out, there's been some form of Civ on every PC I've owned; right now, I have CivIII installed on my XP partition. I figured I'd be wading through a lot of alpha-level, poorly designed and coded crap. FreeCiv was going to be my reward for getting through all the games from 'A' to 'E'.

After trying to get into it for over a week, I just can't stand to play it. I could write an epic monologue on all the problems I had with it, but quite frankly, I'm ready to move on. So here's the gist:

The biggest problem is that it's sluggish. It's just very unresponsive on my machine, and it shouldn't be; the graphics are about at the level of CivI. There's a split-second of delay whenever I do anything, and an awfully long - sometimes a full second - pause whenever I re-center the map, or try to drag the map to a different view.

A second is not a very long time. But it's something you're doing anywhere from a handful to a few dozen times per turn, depending on the action. Those seconds and fractions of seconds add up to make gameplay a source of annoyance and irritation.

The other big problem? I don't expect this one to be fixed by a further release. The controls are clunky and un-ergonomic. I have a list of a thousand tiny little complaints, but what they all add up to is that neither the keyboard nor the mouse is very good at anything; you have to use both, constantly.

And switching back and forth is just obnoxious, when it wasn't much of a hassle in the retail games that inspired FreeCiv. I don't know how or why they decided to break the game-control, but they did, and as someone who's played tons of retail-Civ, FreeCiv is just full of things that irritate me to no end.

Quick example of an annoying feature: the 'City Management' screen has five tabs. You can't change what you're producing from the default one. In Civ I-III, you can, from one screen, see all the production you're doing, the buildings you have, the units that are stationed in the city, and all the other stats... and you can change them all, from that one screen.

In FreeCiv, I can see what I'm building from the main screen, and even after a week, I'm still absently clicking on that, and then remembering it doesn't doing anything, and then clicking the 'Production' tab, and selecting what I want to build from the list. There's no reason at all for production to be altered on a separate screen. I can envision the arguments made in support of it, but everything that's added to flexibility doesn't make up for the huge sacrifice in ergonomics. Especially to someone who's familiar with the retail versions.

Graphically, the game's not pleasing. Not only is it not pretty (in any of the default tile-sets), it's a weird mish-mash of default window-elements and graphical-elements that is offensive to the eye, if you care about such things. Generally, I would say that what's important about a Civ game is the gameplay, but since they broke that, it would be nice for the game to at least be as aesthetically pleasing as the first Civ game. I should also point out that I occasionally got artifacts and glitchiness when scrolling the map, so the graphics aren't just ugly, they're broken.

For the record, I keep seeing screenshots of a prettier setup for FreeCiv but I can't figure out what it is. If you go to this page, the first and last screenshots show a GUI that's very nice looking. I think the difference must be that it's the SDL version, as those are the only screenshots that mention being the SDL client. That version isn't available for Linux. Oh well.

I couldn't get sound working. No idea why. There were no additional soundpacks or anything to download, ala Abuse, and the game gives two options for sound engines; both work in other games, just not in Civ. Again, sound's not a huge part of what's attractive about Civ games (though I do like the sound effects in CivIII a lot), but it would be nice for it to work.

There are some neat things about FreeCiv. Customizable rule-sets and themes are a cool idea, and the number of nations you can play as is awe-inspiring; you can be Mordor, for god's sake. It's playable multi-player in a weird real-time turn-based combination that sounds quite interesting. FreeCiv is very feature-rich.

Unfortunately, it's also a pain in the ass to play, ugly, clunky, and poorly designed. Just out of curiosity, I dusted off my surprisingly-without-bad-sectors copy of Civilizations! and got it running under DosBox. It looked better, it ran better, and it controlled better. The same is true of Civilization III which is currently available for five bucks from most major retailers with a discount-software section. I'm sure it plays fine under Wine, and five dollars is close enough to free that I don't see why you'd bother with FreeCiv, except for the multi-player.

FooBillard

2008-03-11T18:41:00.000-07:00

It's impossible to perfectly replicate a game of pool on the PC - enough complexity to satisfy someone who regularly plays the real thing inevitably results in an overly complex and thoroughly unwieldy set of controls. FooBillard manages to reach a near perfect balance, offering most of what you'd want in a game of pool but also offering simplified systems that allow for the best of both worlds.

This is not to say it's not occasionally clunky, although if you want to play without utilizing english or using the mouse to set the velocity of your shots, it's pretty streamlined. Rotate around the cue ball until the dotted line indicating the ball's path is where you want it to be, adjust the power via a slider bar, and hit the space-bar. Repeat.

If you want to add english to your shot, however, you've got to switch camera modes. Then hold down 'shift' while also holding down the right mouse button, and you can alter where the cue will strike the cue ball. It's not intuitive, but it becomes natural after just a few games.

If you prefer an analog system for making shots, you must be in the same camera mode. This time you hold down 'ctrl' and the left mouse button, moving the mouse down to pull back on the cue, and then back up, determining in the process how hard you strike the ball. It works well enough, but there's no way to aim the direction of shot in this camera mode, so you'll end up switching back and forth at the end of each shot, which is a bit of a drag.

Even that becomes second nature after a bit, and it's a good system, offering as much control as you could want if you're willing to take the time to adjust to it. Clunky systems of input have been around since Rogue, if not longer, and this is at least a case of a necessarily clunky system that has been streamlined as well as can be expected.

The physics are generally great, for the balls that the cue-ball hits, but the cue-ball itself doesn't seem to behave quite like they do in real life, after it impacts a ball. It sort of feels like it's not losing as much kinetic energy as it should in the impact, and bounces around a lot more than it should. I'm not an expert at pool, however, so it's possible I'm just imagining it. Either way, taking it into account wasn't a problem, and outside of that one quibble, everything has a very good feel to it.

The inevitable graphics paragraph: the graphics look nice, if not overly impressive. At 1024x768 in full-screen, with all the highest detail settings, it performed well on my machine but didn't seem to look quite as slick and perfect as BillardGL did. BillardGL was missing virtually all of the features necessary to make it a decent game, however, so any tiny points it gets for slightly better graphics don't matter in the long run.

There is no music, and the sound is just what you'd expect it to be. Clickin' and clackin' as the balls strike. No more, no less. Nothing more needed, or even expected, so all is well here.

Though I didn't test it, it features networked as well as local multiplayer. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the AI player to work, so it suffers a bit as a single-player game. The key to toggle between AI player and human player never seemed to change anything, nor did the 'AI shot suggestion' key, although pressing the latter did prevent me from actually making a shot. It's possible I just didn't understand how the system worked.

There are actually four pool games on offer in FooBillard: 8-ball, 9-ball, carombol, and snooker. I only played the former two, as I wasn't familiar with the latter games. One minor detail that was a bit odd: in 8-ball, it didn't always rack the balls properly.

Rather than having a solid at the top of the pyramid, it was often a striped ball, and sometimes it didn't follower the alternating-stripes-and-solids-around-the-perimeter rule, as a result. The eight was always in the proper spot, so I suppose it doesn't matter much in the long run, and it's possible that in Germany (where they do, in fact, spell the game 'billard') the rule is different.

FooBillard is unquestionably superior to BillardGL and very much a playable game. I had fun with it. It's pretty to look at, with a solid physics engine, and offers the flexibility of a fully-featured aiming system. Add in the network play, and this is definitely a viable option for those who wish to get their pool game on via some open-source software.

FloboPuyo

2008-03-11T17:13:00.001-07:00

FloboPuyo is sort of a more traditional, less insane, but also less clever version of the game Cuyo I reviewed a while ago. Both are vaguely Tetris-esque, but while Cuyo depended on different rule-sets and wildly variant graphics on each level, FloboPuyo simply ramps up the opponent's AI with each level. I think.

The gameplay is simple: a single 2x1 colored 'puyo' block drops from the ceiling; position it where you want them. Match the colors in series of four to make them vanish, sending a 'ghost puyo' to your opponent's screen. Removing more than four in a series or performing a chain reaction exponentially increases the number of ghost puyos you send to your opponent's screen, and they're harder to get rid of than the regular ole' puyos. The point is the same as Tetris and Puzzle Bobble and every other game where stuff drops down from the top: don't fill up the screen. Outlast your opponent, you win the level.

There's nothing really unique about the gameplay - it's directly inspired by the game that was titled Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine in the U.S., and doesn't add any depth or complexity that wasn't there. If you like these sort of real-time puzzle games, you'll find it satisfying.

It has an interesting look, but the levels aren't very differentiated; I think there are three backgrounds and they just cycle through them over and over again. However many unique backgrounds there are, they're all pretty similar: they feature a spy/private-eye looking guy in comic-strip style art in between the two players' fields of play. The puyos themselves are sharp and colorful, but they don't have any neat effects or animations. That's not important for the gameplay, but it makes the game compare unfavorably to its peers.

The sound effects get a bit irksome after a while. The music undergoes a sharp change when either of the players is nearing defeat, which is useful. However, the transition is very abrupt, and based solely on blocks reaching a certain height, so it can be discordant when someone's hovering around the transition-point.

There's local multiplayer, and the game also features a decently challenging AI. Network support, as always, would add a lot to the fun-factor and replayability of the game, but the website doesn't mention any plans for implementing it.

FloboPuyo is competent, and aesthetically coherent, but very limited. I'm sure there are better titles out there, featuring the same type of gameplay, so I can't heartily recommend it. For my money, Puzzle Bobble-style mechanics are more enjoyable anyways. After a three year hiatus, it seems to be in active development again, so maybe it will differentiate itself from the pack in the future.

Flight of the Amazon Queen

2008-03-09T22:51:00.000-07:00

Our father that art in heaven, hallowed be they name, thank you for letting Flight of the Amazon Queen finally be over. I have been playing this game literally since a few minutes after my last post. I took breaks for sleep and work, obviously, but I've just been slogging through this wretched piece of adventure-gaming history in virtually all of my down-time for the past week. I had been looking forward to it, but anticipation quickly turned to dismay, and dismay didn't take long to turn into agony.

At its essence, Flight of the Amazon Queen plays a lot like its demi-sibling, Beneath a Steel Sky. They were released by the same company, I think they use the same engine, and since they're both adventure games, they both conform to the standards and conventions of that genre. Unfortunately, while Beneath a Steel Sky is a pleasure to play, Flight of the Amazon Queen magnifies its flaws and creates a bunch of new ones, while neglecting to have any of the positives of the former.

The story isn't a dark dystopian view of the future, which is fine. I don't demand dystopias in all my diversions, and a change of pace sounded great. But the story for Flight of the Amazon Queen is also retarded, which is less than fine.

You're an airplane-pilot for hire who is supposed to fly a movie-star to the Amazon jungle; unfortunately, you crash-land and to escape, you have to rescue an Amazon princess from the clutches of an insane German scientist named Dr. Frank Ironstein, who is plotting to turn all the women of the Amazon tribe into dinosaur cross-breeds and use them to take over the world. He plots to do this with the aid of a magical crystal skull, and a DNA dino-raygun which he has developed. It sounds laughable but fun; it's implemented in such a way as to be laughable, but also mind-numbingly stupid, without an ounce of fun.

The writing itself sucks, but the voice-acting is painful. I was screaming for mercy from the vilely-fake Jersey accent the protagonists uses within minutes. And it just kept going... and going... and going... like some Energizer bunny of dialog suckiness. Your main rival's accent is supposed to be Dutch, but instead sounds like the worst Sean Connery imitation you've ever heard. The best voice-work in the game comes from the Germans, because even though they're supposed to sound like over-the-top caricatures, they're still the most accurate and least flat portrayals. And they're not any good either, for the record.

For all intents and purposes, you can't skip any of the dialog. And Joe King (more on the bad humor, next paragraph) has something to say about everything. Maybe when this came out, voice-acting was so new that it was cool even when it sucked. I've been listening to bad voice acting in video games for over a decade, and this is the worst voice acting I've heard, except for Blue Stinger on the Dreamcast. Painful things you can't skip are par for the course in this game.

Ridiculously juvenile humor is a constant. Twelve year-old boys would have cringed playing this; it must have been written by seven year-olds. I was involuntarily grimacing every minute or two; groans were so constant my room mate asked me if I was okay, a few hours in.

You spend a lot of time going back and forth in the same environments. By the end of the game, I was going back and forth between reading Kotaku and RockPaperShotgun, and playing the game. I would click on the exit, then alt-tab to my browser to read while I waited for the character to actually get there.

Yes, I could have sped up the game, but I didn't know until the end that there was never anything time-sensitive; in most adventure games, you sometimes have to slow the game down because there are real-time interactions that result in certain death. In this game's favor, as far as I know, it's impossible to die. Every adventure game should adopt that philosophy, and most of the good ones did. Playing at its default speed sucks, regardless.

Even playing at a higher speed, you're re-treading the same screens so often that it's just boring. They tried to do a bit to ameliorate that in the jungle portions of the game, by having a central point from which you could get to the main areas. But they messed it up by designing the locations poorly.

For example, take the crash site. It's where you start the jungle portion, and you'll be returning to it quite a bit. But getting back there always requires you to go through two screens that only have something to do on them the first time you visit them. Every time you have to go back to the crash site, you have to walk through those screens. Why? For no reason whatsoever, except that they didn't think the layout through at all.

The credits listed around 30 QA people - I can't believe they actually played the game all the way through; anyone with a brain would have been annoyed by the needless treking about that could have easily been fixed. They would have been annoyed by the horrible dialog. They would have been annoyed by the stupid humor (unless they were less than ten years of age). They would have hated the game, and made constructive criticisms that could have been used to make the game not suck.

The puzzles are, for the most part, not only painfully obvious but painfully contrived. Normally, adventure-games are so obtuse that they have you banging your head against the wall, so kudos to these guys for not going down that route, but they went way too far in the opposite direction. Example: girl says she needs perfume. Cue cutscene, where a character just happens to throw her perfume in the lake, for no good reason, and stalk off.

That happens constantly. Just once in a while, it's totally forgivable. You have a neat idea for a puzzle, and can't make it flow smoothly, so you make a coincidence. I'm fine with that. But every frickin' time? There are just too many utterly laughable coincidences taking place. Again, the writers must have been pre-teens to think that wouldn't make the experience a lot less immersive.

If you're an adventure-game fan, and you've exhausted all other free options, feel free to take this one for a spin. It works, and it's longer than Beneath a Steel Sky. That it's longer only in an artificial way because it makes you go back and forth between the same old environments, and that it has the most juvenile story-telling I've encountered in an adventure game not coded by Roberta Williams, make it a game I could only recommend for an obsessive-compulsive player of the genre. All others, steer clear. Very clear.

FlightGear

2008-03-04T18:36:00.001-08:00

I can't say I enjoyed FlightGear much at all. I enjoyed it so little, actually, that I ended up booting into XP and installing it there, to see if it sucked as bad in Windows as it did in Linux. While some minor issues were a bit better, it was basically the same thing, and therefore not any more fun.

Mind you, a lot of the problem with FlightGear is just part n' parcel of what it is: it's a flight-sim that wants to be everything to everyone, and completely simulate every aspect of flying a plane. And I suspect that it's pretty gosh-darned difficult to learn to fly a plane; there are lots of manuals n' tests n' whatnot, anyway. Learning to fly in FlightGear is probably not quite as difficult as learning to fly in real life, but it's as close as they could come.

Add in the insanely un-user-friendly controls, and it might actually be harder. I don't have a flight-stick with pedals, so right off the bat I've got a less intuitive control system for the basics of flight than anyone in a real plane. Or anyone who really loves flight-sims, which is the real target audience for this game - those guys are likely to have a completely different play experience, because a.) they already know all the minuscule basics, and b.) they already have the specialized gear.

Outside of the joystick/pedal issues, which were relatively easy to make better (turn on an automatic thingy that eliminates the need for you to use pedals, making turning a bunch easier in general, if costing you a bit of realism and - presumably - control), there were the rest of the controls.

Playing FlightGear is more like playing NetHack than anything else I can compare it to. There are tons n' tons of spots where both the capital and lowercase versions of a character are mapped, so you have to remember that 'g' raises the landing gear, and 'G' lowers it - or is it the other way around?

Realism's all fine, well, and good, but if they really have two separate buttons on an air plane, one for raising the landing gear, and one for lowering it, they need to talk to their engineers. That's stupidly redundant in real life, and obnoxious in the game - the gods made toggle switches for a reason. Those reasons? A combination of ease of use and efficient use of space. Neither of which do the minds behind FlightGear know anything about.

Now that we've dealt with the fact that the keyboard is unintuitively and often ludicrously set up, on to the mouse. Surprise, it sucks too. Right clicking alternates between three different mouse modes. 'Flight control', 'Camera View', and 'Interactive'. I think the theory here was that, rather than memorizing 255 keyboard commands, you could just click on stuff on the control panel to make things happen.

The reality is a confused, jumbled mess.

Right-click once to go to camera-view mode, so you can find the starter. Press 'x' to zoom in so you can actually see the starter. Right-click again to touch the starter, and cut the plane on. Shit, now we want to push in the throttle. Right-click again, and you're in control-mode, and right-click again to get back to camera-mode. Guess what? Although you didn't notice it, you juggled the mouse just a bit while you were in control mode. Your plane is now set to go hard right. Find the throttle. Right-click to go to interactive mode and push it in.

We're moving! Shit. We're moving in circles because the flightsticks got nudged hard-right. Right-click again, to get back to control mode. Try to nudge it to the left a bit, not too much, that's right, just a bit. What happened? The sky is brown. Right-click to go back to camera mode. Find the sky. There it is, underneath the plane. You've toppled your airplane.

Now, that's what happens if you try to use just the mouse. No one would do that. Unless they had to. Why would they have to? Well, in both XP and Linux, the keyboard controls for throttle and flight-yoke would randomly just stop working. They'd come back after I quit and restarted, but since it happened virtually every time I played, I gave up on using the keyboard controls completely.

The mouse controls are actually quite responsive, compared to the keyboard, but since other random features of the keyboard would also cut out, I would have to toggle between the many modes of mousiness on a regular basis, leading to the scenario I just described. Worst-case it is, but... worst-case was pretty common. Pretty inevitable, actually.

The front-end for the Windows version let me set some parameters that were very useful before launching the game. This wasn't available in Linux, but it never is, so that's no big surprise. It still hurt the play experience - I was playing in a lower resolution because I couldn't be bothered to find the config files and/or launch it from the command line with a page full of switches.

Graphically, the control panel looked sharp, but the ground was icky, which is a shame. They appear to have the whole earth mapped out n' ready for you to fly over it, realistically simulated. Only it's so fuzzy, even at 1024x768, that San Francisco might as well be Dallas might as well be Richmond, for the most part. The sky was pretty.

Sound was pretty monotonous, but that's to be expected. Engine sound, and an occasional beeping caused by I-have-no-idea - it tended to happen whenever I was flying straight, leveled off, and not about to wreck my plane; maybe I was flying over restricted airspace? In Linux, the sound was choppy and would cut out for half a second every ten or twenty seconds. Not sure what's up with that; probably a configuration error on my part, but since the package manager configured it, not me, it's not actually my fault.

For the record, FlightGear is an amazingly ambitious project. And if you have the right equipment, and want to spend the time configuring it, it may be actually playable. If so, it's probably a lot of fun. It's got multiplayer support, the whole world with literally hundreds of airports n' airstrips (you have to download them, for the record), and tons of planes. It even has a few helicopters. I didn't want to try and resolutions higher than 1024x768, as my machine was already taking forever to load the scenery - maybe my issues with the graphics would have been eliminated, had I run it at 2048x1536. I wish the developers the best of luck, and I'll re-visit this whenever I upgrade my PC.

Their current version number is 1.0, which I think is amazingly optimistic/ridiculous. In both XP and Linux, I had technical issues and playability issues that made a mockery of the idea that the game was full-release worthy. Ignoring the fact that my play-experience may have been improved by a superior computer, I'm well within the recommended system requirements. It's so still in beta.

If you want to make the investment of cash n' time, please let me know how it works out for you. I can't recommend this game to anyone that's not obsessive about their flight-sim experience, and even then, I suspect there's better software out there. Sure, it's free, but sometimes you get what you pay for.

Fish Fillets NG

2008-03-04T16:31:00.000-08:00

Hrmn... bizarre. The best way I can think of to explain Fish Fillets NG is Finding Nemo meets Klotski. I can't believe I just said that. Great puzzle game, though.

You're in control of two fish (fish secret agents, even) who have been given a number of missions, by a self-destructing mission-disc in a briefcase. Anyone else remember James Pond? That was an action game. This one's a logic puzzle.

You solve the missions by advancing through tiered sets of levels, each consisting of one screen. In each screen are movable objects. You have to manipulate them in such a way as to allow both fish to get to the exit point. If you manipulate them improperly, a fish dies, and you have to start over or restore from a save-point.

The levels get pretty hard - don't let the kiddy graphics fool ya. Your performance is scored by counting the number of moves it took you to complete the level; lower score = better. So it's also like golf, only not really at all. :)

Graphically, it does look like a kid's game, but it looks like a well done kid's game. It's 2D, but everything looks hand-drawn, and very nice. I believe this was initially a shareware/for-profit game, that was released under the GPL a few years after it came out, and it's got a more consistent and professional looking aesthetic than your average open-source project. Which is to say, rather than focusing on function and ignoring form, you get both.

Sonically speaking, I found the music to get a little annoying on the levels I had problems with; I just got sick of hearing it. But that's probably due to the fact that I have a non-functional brain, and I was playing the levels for longer than it would take a normal, non-hungover person to beat them. Good music, and varied in style, from typical video-game sounding music to classical piano.

I don't have much at all to say, as far as negatives go. The controls feel a bit wonky - there's delay between when you press the button and when the fish you're controling moves - but it doesn't cause premature death so it's not a big issue.

The method for saving within a level is a bit weird. Rather than doing some kind of save-state that captures where everything is, it records all your moves. When you tell it to load your save, it starts the level over, and then does everything you'd done prior to saving, at a relatively fast speed. If your last save occurred near the end of a complicated level, you end up waiting for what seemed excessive amounts of time, but only because I'm impatient.

If I were to pick something to change, that save system would be the one thing I could think of, but it only irked me in very rare circumstances. I suspect that people who love puzzle-games would be better at them than I am, and probably not need to resort to as much savin' and loadin' as I did, so it wouldn't be an issue.

In all, I have to say that this is a really good game for fans of the genre, and an enjoyable time-waster for people just looking for something to play around with. Your progress through the levels is saved automatically, and it's really easy to pick up and put down at your leisure. The levels are bite-sized enough that you can quit at any time without having to go through a painful amount of retreating, even if you didn't get a chance to save. Thumbs up!

FCE Ultra

2008-03-04T01:07:00.000-08:00

Another emulator, here. FCE Ultra emulates NES games. It works, and works well. There's really not much to say. The only thing I noticed that was a bit annoying was the input-configuration. I was using the GUI frontend for GNOME, and it wanted 3-4 different buttons for each NES button being mapped to my joypad. It was different for each button; the directions got two, the A button got 3, the B button got 4, and so on. Just a bit weird. More annoying was the fact that it didn't save the config, so after closing the GUI, when I restarted it, it had forgotten the controller info. If you were to be un-lazy and play it from the command line, you'd have to edit the config files, and that wouldn't be an issue. So while the emulator is dandy, the GUI has issues.

Falcon's Eye

2008-03-04T00:07:00.000-08:00

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention something here: I don't really like rogue-likes. They're boring and frustrating to me. Falcon's Eye is a graphical engine for playing the most famousest rogue-like of all, NetHack. As such, it's not my cup of tea. Is it a good game, however?

Sort of, if you like rogue-likes. But sort of not. Let me explain: There are two issues with NetHack that people who don't like it, don't like. Every complaint with the game falls into one of these two categories: the gameplay, and the graphics. Falcon's Eye does nothing to fix the former - it's still NetHack. If you don't like the way the game plays, throwing graphics on top of it won't help. Trust me, I know.

But replacing the ASCII graphics of the original with some well-done if not exactly impressive 2D-isometric tiles does a lot to make it easier on the eyes. Gamers who didn't come up on text-based games and old-school low-res graphics tend to dismiss rogue-likes out of hand because they're so unapologetically low-tech, graphically, and Falcon's Eye does a good job of eliminating that, at least as far as independent/open-source games go. It certainly doesn't match current retail-gaming graphics, and it's not even as pretty as the best of the independents, but it does alright.

I said that it doesn't fix any of the problems people have with the mechanics of rogue-likes, but that's not entirely true. Mouse support had the added consequence of getting rid of the need to remember a bazillion keyboard commands - since the game is supposed to be playable with a mouse, clicking on things brings up option menus that allow you to select the command. I suspect that not all commands are represented in these menus, but the vast majority of them are.

Admittedly, one of the (many) reasons I don't like rogue-likes is the insane number of commands, many of which are useful only in very rare and specific circumstances. So kudos to Falcon's Eye for ameliorating that issue. But it just adds its own set of issues, as it's a bit annoying to have to navigate through these long lists of commands every time you want to do anything. What the mouse adds to ease-of-assimilation, it detracts from ease-of-usage.

Those perks come with a further price. Say what you will about how lame ASCII graphics are, as far as map-reading goes, they have a benefit: it's very simple to understand the layout of the level you're moving around in. The 3D isometric nature of the graphical overlay makes differentiating between different corridors problematic, when they're very close to each other (which is common), and the mouse-support makes it even worse. Click a teensy bit to the whatever-direction-you-like, and instead of moving a single square, you're walking five miles through a bunch of corridors to get to a tile right next to it.

And basically, that's the downfall of Falcon's Eye. Not that, specifically, but the reason it's a problem, and the reason there are others. Falcon's Eye isn't a graphical rogue-like, it's a graphical overlay on top of a text-based rogue-like. It wasn't written from the ground up to be graphical and mouse-driven, it just had a graphical and mouse-driven coat of paint slapped on top.

For this reason, I can't really recommend it, even to fans of rogue-likes. Rather than opening up the world of rogue-likes to players who like graphics, it's more likely to annoy players of rogue-likes who don't mind the ASCII. It's still not super accessible, and you're still going to have to scour the code, or FAQs on the internet, or both, if you want to come anywhere near actually surviving to the endgame. It's not the best of both worlds, or the worst of both worlds. It's the mediocre of both worlds.

Exult

2008-03-03T23:28:00.000-08:00

Ultima VII was one of my favorite games, back in the day. Despite the fact that it ran for crap on my 486SX, and I didn't have a CD-ROM at the time, and had to go with the floppy-disc version, it was awesome. Exult is awesome too. I'm remembering middle-school, and my friend Dave who moved to Vermont, n' being drunk for the first time... Those were the days!

They weren't really all that grand, but Ultima VII remains a favorite, and Exult is essentially a replacement game-engine that fixes some of the flaws, adds some features, and works on a modern-day machine. Cross-platform, even, as evidenced by the fact that it's working perfectly on my Ubuntu machine.

It's a 2D game, but the view is 3D-isometric, kinda like Diablo, for all you kids out there. You play the part of 'the Avatar', who visits Brittania in times of need and embodies all the virtues that the magical land of Brittania holds dear (because you set up their religion in a previous game, basically). You point n' click to do everything, the plot's great, and playing it on Exult is a much less frustrating and bug-filled endeavor than the original was.

For a review of the game itself, check anywhere that has reviews from the early 90s. This was the best game of the Ultima series, which was a very important series for the evolution of the RPG and defined a lot of the things we take for granted with RPGs today. Basically, Ultima, Wizardry, and maybe Might & Magic, are the series that defined the genre for a few decades. Even now, some entries in each of those series do it better than anyone else ever has. Unfortunately, some of them suck large donkey-balls, but such is the nature of series, I suppose.

Exult just lets you play the game now, on your monster machine that would laugh at all the PCs Ultima VII was designed for. As such, a review boils down to: Does it work, or not? The answer is a resounding 'yes' - it works so well that it actually has a version number higher than 1, which is almost unheard of in the open-source development scene. More people are crushed by toppling vending machines every year than open-source projects leave beta.

There are a few gameplay improvements, and much like your average console-emulator, a few graphical filtering options. They work pretty nicely, making the game look alright, if not gorgeous, but have their drawbacks. All of the ones I tried tended to have issues displaying the text in the various books which are scattered about Brittania. They were readable, but missing letters n' whatnot, a lot of the time.

The downside - there always is one, isn't there? - is that it's just the engine. You have to find the data files from the original game in order to make it work. I'm not sure if they're still in print. They ought to be; there have been a number of collections that included it, over the years, and whoever owns the rights to Origin's software is a total effing retard if they don't have a version of the game modded to run under XP for sale.

If they don't, however, the game is readily available for download, apparently. Not all 'abandonware' sites are as concerned with technicalities as Home of the Underdogs. I actually still have a copy from one of those collections I mentioned, that I don't pull out as often as I should, but I checked Google and didn't have a problem finding it for download. It's probably completely illegal though, since I definitely saw some stuff on Amazon. In print or not, it's available for purchase.

Epiphany

2008-03-03T17:52:00.001-08:00

I remember playing Boulderdash on my old XT in CGA. Epiphany is supposed to be a clone of Boulderdash but... well, it's a bit broken and inconsistent. I had a devil of a time beating level one, due to some issues discussed below. Read on!

The concept is simple: run into squares on the field of play to 'eat' them (i.e. make them disappear) if possible, or push them if they're inedible. Or, alternately, if they're part of the level's structure, they're neither edible nor movable. If something falls on you, it kills you, so you have to dig in such a way as to gain access to all the edible gemstones without having anything fall on you. The level is over when you consume the requisite number of gems, and make your way to the exit.

The first level seems to randomly load in one of two ways: the less common way is depicted above. See all those red dots? If you make a rock fall on one of them, they all blow up, which opens the path to the exit. That way, the level is solvable. It started loading like that after a good dozen tries the other way it loads: without the bombs, and without the brick wall which needs to be blown up and without the right number of gems. I would run through it, pick up all the gems, and just wander around waiting for time to run out, so I could die and start again.

I was about to quit, and call the game completely and utterly unplayable, when it inexplicably started loading that level the right way, and I was able to solve it. I have no idea what caused it to start loading properly, and no idea why it still sometimes doesn't load that level properly. Given that there's a good chance, as far as I know, that any given level will load in an unsolvable state, the game is still unplayable as far as I'm concerned, but more forgiving and patient folks who just have to play a Boulderdash clone may derive some amusement.

Of course, even without that problem, there's still the issue of controls. The game requires precision, and the controls don't allow it. Epiphany seems to suffer from a problem reminiscent of Gnometris: it sort of keeps a record of repeated keystrokes when you hold down a movement button, but does it in a flawed way which will randomly leave you stopping short or going to far. Sure, it adds to the challenge factor, but in an arbitrary way that leaves the player wondering why he's bothering. If games don't play fair, they're no fun to play.

Fix that, and whatever wonky issues it has with loading levels properly, consistently, and you've still got an ugly game with crappy sound, but by today's standards, the original was an ugly game with crappy sound. The core mechanics are challenging and fun, and they do bring back memories, so the graphics aren't that big an issue. But if it's going to be ugly, it should at least work, and if it's going to play crappy, it should at least be pretty. Don't bother with this one until the kinks are worked out.

NOTE: The version the Ubuntu packages install is 0.5.0 - there are four newer versions available on SourceForge, so some of these issues may have been fixed. This blog reviews games as available via the packages, not as available to compile - if I did every game available for free on the internet, it would be infinite. This is the second time I've encountered this issue, though, and while this is not as bad as the first one (the newer version of that had been out for a year or two), this is still kinda crappy. It's been 4 months since the most recent version was uploaded.

Enigma

2008-02-27T20:09:00.000-08:00

Until Enigma, I'd never encountered a real-time logic-puzzle game.* It's crazy. You want adjectives? Brilliant, frustrating, tedious, difficult, devious, intricate... how's that? You'd really have to play the game to have an opinion on how well I did at adjectivizing it, but I don't mind if you pre-judge.

You're a marble. This marble responds to the movement of the mouse. The goal of the each level is to unlock pairs of colored blocks by hitting them. But you have to hit each block of the same color consecutively; if you hit, say a red block, and then hit a purple block, it un-hits (neologism or illiteracy on my part?) the red block. The colors of the blocks, and sometimes their positions, are randomly determined, so experience counts for naught.

Logic and skill count for everything. This game is really hard to explain. Some blocks can only be reached or unlocked by moving other blocks. The only way to interact with any block is to ram it with your marble (vaguely sexual there; probably only because it's been way too long). Since you rebound from blocks at high speed, and there are pieces of terrain that will kill you if you touch them, this gets dicey awfully quick.

That's the basics. The intricacies would require tons more text than anyone would be willing to read - the tutorial is 65 levels long, for god's sake. Necessarily so. After you get through the tutorial - which is no walk in the park - there are a bunch of additional level packs, adding up to hours n' hours of addictively frustrating... fun? It's all relative. The more you want to punch your monitor, the more satisfying actually completing the level is, so in an odd way, the more you hate this game, the more fun it is.

Graphically, it's a tile-based game with decently res'd tiles, so it's not super impressive, or even impressive, but it's totally adequate, in a pretty way. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's aesthetically great, but not technologically advanced. The marble is a wonder of physics, which the graphics display perfectly, but the tiles themselves wouldn't wow you in '99, much less '08.

The sound isn't worth mentioning. Almost all you'll hear is a glass-break indicating you killed yourself, and a rebounding sound indicating you hit something. It doesn't really matter.

These levels were designed by sadistic geniuses. Honestly, there were levels that I had issues with due to personal skill at manipulating a mouse (don't laugh 'till you've tried), and levels I had issues with because figuring out what to do that would make the level solvable was hard. With such a simple concept, that's impressive. I mean, all you need to know, from a user-input point of view, is 'move the mouse, the ball moves' - and they constructed such nefarious labyrinths of interactivity that I couldn't figure out how to make it work.

I'm getting tired of mentioning that logic-puzzles aren't my cup of tea. Partially because I've said it a lot, and partially because I'm starting to feel very inadequate. This is a brilliant game, if it's your kind of thing.

The controls are responsive, the graphics are nice, and the level design - which is all important in this type of game - is straight-up great. Even though it was the most frustrating thing I've played in a while, in a genre of game I don't consider myself a fan of, I'll still be going back to it. If you dig logic puzzles, and don't mind a game that also tests your dexterity, I heartily recommend it. (note: the tutorial levels don't necessarily serve as logic-puzzles; play the regular level packs to see what I mean).

*I feel certain that I have, but I can't think of one right now. Regardless, this one stands out so much that I can't have encountered one this intense.

EnemyLines7

2008-02-27T14:22:00.000-08:00

EnemyLines7 is essentially the same as EnemyLines3 only a bit more difficult, and missing some convenience-features that make it less fun over all.

The only difference between this one and EnemyLines3 is that the things you're shooting at stay in the sky, and fly in formation, instead of randomly dropping from the sky. 'Story'-wise (big double-quotes with fingers around the word story, here), you're in a battle-mech this time, your opponents are bombers (not robots), and you don't have a jetpack, you have 'jumpjets'. It's all cosmetic, mostly.

Your health is actually the city's health, which makes you a giant target. Combine that with the fact that there isn't really anywhere you can go that gives you a great vantage point to defend against the waves of bomber-planes, and you can see how the game is more difficult than its precursor.

The limited amount of booster fuel is as annoying as it was in EnemyLines3 but it probably matters less - if there were enough of it that you could spend a lot of time in the sky, then it would totally change the way the game was played; as it is, you just don't use it very much.

EnemyLines7 feels like an attempt to retool EnemyLines3 that the author got really bored with and never finished. Something about the way the jetpack (oops, jumpjets) moves means it's really hard to tell exactly where you're putting your feet down, which wasn't a problem in 3, and there's only one level that just goes on n' on in this one. It also forces you to quit the game whenever you get a game over, and then re-start the game from your taskbar/command-line for another go, which is just annoying.

Basically, don't bother with this. There are 8 EnemyLines games by this guy, and a lot of them are very different; I'm not sure why the Ubuntu people decide to only offer packages of 3, and its decidedly inferior demi-clone 7, but I'm sure that there's no reason at all to play 7. 3 is better, and 7 adds nothing. Unless you have a bomber-fetish; then 7 is all that will satisfy, I suppose.

EnemyLines 3

2008-02-27T13:57:00.000-08:00

EnemyLines3 is a first-person shooter that scratches the same itch Solitaire does. It's a quick, simple to understand, infinitely replayable, and essentially mindless game. It's awesome!

There are four game types, and all of them feature the same simple mechanics: stay alive, while shooting these weird-looking little robot dudes who fall from the sky and eat buildings. There's a timed-game, where you beat the level by staying alive for a certain length of time, a kill-based level where you win by killing a certain number of the little guys, a find-the-keys level where you have to find all the keys to win (that seemed redundant, didn't it?), and a base-defense level where the goal is to keep the bad-guys from eating a specific square of building.

The graphics are old-school 3D as all-get-out, but somehow appealing anyway. My favorite is in the timed levels, because after you've gotten about halfway through the requisite time, there's a lot of building-less space, and you just see legions of the bad guys coming at you, moving in unison like faceless undead zombie hordes... of cuteness. Anything that combines undead zombie (robot) hordes and cuteness is okay in my book.

The sound's as simple as the graphics, but not really as charming. A 'zap' for your laser gun going off, a white-noise like sound for your jetpack (did I mention that you have a jetpack?), and an explosion when ever you kill a critter.

It really feels like 2D side-scrolling shooter gameplay more than anything else. It's fast-paced and fun, with minimal emphasis on tactics or strategy compared to the average FPS. Your health, ammo, and jet-pack fuel are all indicated by bars in the top-left corner of the screen, and can be replenished by waiting, or by picking up color-coded extras.

For a quick FPS-fix, this is great. The game actually connects to the developer's website after each time you die, to update the high-score list - someone had an awful lot of free time on their hands at some point, so I got nowhere near getting on the actual list, but if you're driven to compete, there ya go. For a small and very limited game experience, EnemyLines3 is just what the doctor ordered. If you demand a campaign or plot with your FPS (or multiplayer) then you're going to want to look elsewhere.

Emilia Pinball

2008-02-26T19:58:00.002-08:00

It's a shame that Emilia Pinball isn't getting worked on anymore. It's not a bad pinball game at all, and it would be nice to see someone taking this and adding a few more pinball machines to the package.

Everyone in the Western and Eastern worlds is familiar with pinball, so I'll spare you a deep description of the mechanics of play. The first board, 'Tux' is a Linux-penguin-themed level that has a couple of special spots to shoot for, and a ball trap, and... well, the bare essentials to call it a well filled-out pinball board. The second one, 'Professor', is more bare-bones, and basically boring, though it does do some neat things with elevated tubes that are fun to look at. I think it may be unfinished.

Both boards are pretty minimalistic - it seems more like a proof of concept that never got any more work. The graphics are nice-looking, and the physics and sounds complement one another for a good play experience. But the two boards that come with the game are limited, and don't do anywhere near as much with the engine as they could/should.

Emilia Pinball works fine windowed, but be leery of full-screen. I ended up having to do a hard-reset for the third time today, as after quitting the program I got a black screen with a mouse-cursor and nothing else. After the game proved decent, and performed flawlessly, it seemed doubly a shame that it would crash on me when I was done with it.

If you're looking for a free pinball game, look no further, but don't expect it to hold your interest for very long. Neither of the two boards are quite up to the level of complexity of the pinball game which shipped with certain versions of Windows, quite, but the potential is definitely there. Contrasting the the great projects that are dead, and the overly-ambitious projects that somehow keep treading water while never nearing completion is a depressing thing, I think.

Einstein

2008-02-26T19:13:00.000-08:00

Ouch. Einstein had me craving a simple sudoku puzzle in no time. For logic puzzle fans, this is a great one. For people who don't want to spend an awful lot of time staring at a screen trying to work out relationships (the mathematical kind), this is probably not something you should download. I think this would work best with a piece of (a ream of) scratch paper handy. Get ready to bang your head against a wall! Repeatedly!

The premise is simple, of course. There are six rows of six unique cards. The game gives you clues as to the relationship of some cards to other cards. Your job is to use those clues to discover which card is where. The best way to describe it is Minesweeper, without the randomness but requiring infinitely more concentration.

If you tell it a card is in a certain place, and the card isn't there, game over. Thankfully, there is a 'save game' option. I kept having to brute-force the first card or two, based on guesses, and from there I was mostly okay. If I'd wanted to get out the scratch paper, I think I could probably have worked out the position of that first card most of the time, but... yeah, I'm impatient and lazy.

If Minesweeper meets sudoku sounds like a raucous good time, this is so up your alley. It was very, very, very far removed from my alley, but I have to admit that it's a great logic puzzle, and it looks nice. Not much in the way of sound, but what there was wasn't annoying - just some plops n' the sound of breaking glass when you screw up. Great game for a very small niche.

Egoboo

2008-02-26T17:50:00.000-08:00

The creators claim that Egoboo is eventually going to be a top-down (actually isometric, for the record) 3D NetHack-style randomly generated dungeon romp. It's not quite there yet.

The list of annoyances abounds. I'll start with the most important one, though it's not actually a problem with the game. Playing with the mouse was impossible, and playing with the keyboard was infinitely better but still horrible (I'll go into why in a minute). This leaves the joystick.

After I got the hang of it, the joystick was definitely superior to the other two options, but after around fifteen minutes of play, the game would bounce from full-screen to windowed, and everything would go grey. Then it would all lock up. The program was still running, and my PC was still running, but I couldn't exit from Egoboo or do anything else; I had to resort to the reset switch.

After it happened twice, I realized what was going on: apparently, Linux doesn't recognize activity on my USB joypad as input, so it was trying to cut on the screen blanker thingy due to inactivity. When I moved the mouse to try and get back to the game window, it stopped doing that, but left me in some weird limbo state where I was neither in the game, or in my regular OS window, but instead stuck.

After having to reboot twice, I took to jiggling the mouse for no reason every five or so minutes, and the problem stopped. That was seriously annoying, even if it wasn't the fault of the game. Doesn't happen in Windows!

Onto the other issues: targeting sucks. You attack in the direction you're pointing. On the keyboard, there are four directions. It's virtually impossible to hit anything, ever, without tons of work, and taking tons of damage. This is a step above playing with the mouse (you essentially can't even move, using the mouse to control). Even with the joypad, there were more misses than hits; I suck, but I don't suck that much.

Other interface problems? You have three keys for each arm. An attack/use key, a pick-up/drop key, and a put-in-pack/remove-from-pack key. They default to T,G,B and Y,H,N - in the words of the limited but simple Pandion Knight, Kalten of Elenia, it's 'bloody hindering awkward'. The joystick is a bit better, but a more streamlined interface would be nice. Even on the joystick, the setup is innately weird and non-intuitive.

There's more along that vein, but it's minor stuff compared to the movement, targeting, and interaction systems. Let's move on, shall we? The actual content is quite limited, but the game is still in development, so that's to be expected. Rather than any randomly-generated dungeons, there were a collection of static dungeons that had simple objectives; when you completed them, you didn't move on to another one with the character that you'd spent time developing, but instead were told to 'Press Escape' which exits the game.

Most of the levels had objects which had to be jumped on; jumping on switches was relatively painless, but jumping on floating platforms was a reminder to the world that Old Man Murray's Chet and Erik were right a decade ago when they decried jumping puzzles. The control issues make jumping on stuff a pain in the ass.

Outside of the limited levels, lack of character generation, and apparent lack of character progression (some of the levels suggested that characters could be imported from previous dungeons to others, but there was no evident way to accomplish this), the levels themselves were nice-looking and fun to run about in.

The camera zooms too close to the character, and there wasn't any way to pan it on my joypad (I think there is, if you have enough buttons; the config files reference it), so it was a constant struggle to see enemies before they saw me, bu the environments in my limited view were always nice-looking. Somewhere between SNES and Dreamcast quality graphics, at 800x600, which offered little to no improvement over 640x480.

Hrmn... other complaints... oh, each of the levels had a sort of intro-screen that explained your goal, and what you were doing. I think. It flashes by so quick that I never got more than half a dozen of the words. Someone should make that screen wait for a mouse-click.

The graphics, as mentioned, are adequate and consistent if a bit amateurish. The sounds are that, but more on the amateurish and less on the adequate. I didn't enable the music, so I can't vouch for it.

The bottom line is that this game is incomplete, and not a lot of fun at its current state. With control issues, a clumsy interface, no reward for extended play, and no character development, there's just no reason to bother with this release. Perhaps after it matures a bit, and comes a bit closer to its stated goals, it will offer a delightful diversion to fans of rogue-likes, but for now I'd pass.

GCompris

2008-02-26T16:08:00.000-08:00

I am not the target market for GCompris: it's "an educational software suite comprising of numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10." I'm ashamed to admit that I still had some fun with it.

I think the docs say there are a total of around 80 games, though not all work without some additional packages installed (specifically, the ones that require the computer to speak seem to require an extra voice-pack for your language). There were more than enough to occupy my alcohol-addled brain for a while, as I bounced from memory games to alphabet and reading games.

They were still a bit below my grade level, but I was amazed at the quality and level of polish. They're going for an easy-to-see, broad, over-sized, childlike sort of look, and with that in mind, the software is almost perfect. While the controls and the goals for each of the games/applications weren't always immediately obvious, it never took more than a second or three of experimentation to figure out what was going on.

And even though the games are for the 2-10 year old age bracket, some of them are actually a bit difficult, in that Brain Age brain-training sort of way. Especially fun (for me) was the kiddy-sudoku that used shapes instead of numbers; there were smaller grids a very limited number of shapes, to start with, but it kept ramping up the difficulty until it was halfway as hard as a normal game of sudoku, but also only half as annoying. I dug it.

Graphically, as mentioned, this is a child-like delight to behold. The GCompris apps all share the same sort of aesthetic, and they're all quite functional. Things which are not the same are quite obviously different, and everything it bright and bold and easy to see.

The sound was also oddly great. Background music tended toward the classical/orchestral type - presumably thanks to those studies in back in the day that suggested we learn better when we're listening to the old masters' symphonies - but occasionally wandered into more contemporary electronic terrain. Sound effects were as easily differentiated as the visual cues, letting players/students know via multiple senses that they'd done something correctly (or not).

I doubt anyone reading this is going to be very interested in an educational software suite aimed at primary-schoolers. But it must be said that this is a very polished piece of software, indeed, and is absolutely on par with pay software of the same type. It should be noted, of course, that generally edutainment software even in the retail sphere is pretty shoddy. If you've got kids in the house, this is almost definitely better than anything you could purchase. The only downside is that it doesn't contain any licensed characters to hook your kids into the learning. :)

eboard

2008-02-26T00:06:00.000-08:00

I can predict the future. Just two posts ago, I predicted that a network-multiplayer enabled chess game was sure to follow. eboard is that game. It followed even closer than I expected.

Interestingly, unlike the other games that had single-player but no network play, this one has network play but doesn't support single-player, out of the box. You have to install a chess engine in order to play with yourself.

Network play works, which is always a good thing in a game which exists primarily for network play.

Graphically, it's 2D only, but it has support for multiple themes, and one of them is even pretty nice looking (pictured above). It's got customizable support for sounds (as in, you can tell it when to make noise; I didn't notice any option for setting what sounds actually get played, but that doesn't mean there isn't a way).

A few minutes ago, I found it hard to get excited about another chess game. Imagine how un-excited I am now. At least eboard fills the one feature-niche that none of the others did, by allowing you to play games over the internet. There is officially no need for another chess game to be on this list. I will bet good money that I end up with another one anyway. Any takers?

DroidBattles

2008-02-25T23:41:00.000-08:00

Ouch. DroidBattles is probably awesome to people who already code in assembly, and enjoy coding in assembly so much that when they're not coding in assembly to be productive, they're desperate to code assembly for play.

I'm so not that guy. If I had even a rudimentary understanding of any solid programming language, I'd be trying to use it to make Phantasy Star II Meets Phantasy Star III Meets Wizardry VII. I don't. And if I'm going to take the time to learn a programming language, it will be so I can make that game, not so I can play DroidBattles.

Basically, writing code is 'playing' DroidBattles. I'm sure that, at its most basic and simple level, i.e. just getting a droid to run, it's not very complex. But just getting a droid to run doesn't sound very rewarding, while the alternative - spending hours upon hours in a custom-built version of assembly writing search routines and device drivers for your droid's various components - sounds nothing at all like fun.

I did test the game, for the record. If you follow the instructions in the documentation's 'Quick Start', you end up with a little droid that goes in circles looking for other droids with a scanner, and shoots them when it finds them. All you can do with it, however, is put it in an arena with another of the same type (because I didn't have a different bot to test it with), and see which one blows the other up first.

You do not actually interact with it. It's code battling code, which is especially pointless if you're like me, and it's the same code battling itself. It's not like you're going to determine which one is better, y'know?

This game works fine, as far as I know. I was able to test its features, and they performed as described. But unless you're really into writing code, uhmm... why bother? It's actually a really neat idea, and I'm just being mean because I feel inadequate. But I can't help but think that the number of people this game would appeal to is pretty gosh-darned small. Maybe not. Does that screenshot up there make you horny? Then you should totally check out DroidBattles.

For the record, it would probably be a lot of fun at programming-challenge events. Watching matches between a bunch of droids built by a bunch of different would sort of be like the software equivalent of the robotics competition they have every year at my alma-mater.

DreamChess

2008-02-25T23:21:00.001-08:00

The open-source community is apparently obsessed with chess. DreamChess is further proof of that, not that I was looking for any. It's the best of the bunch so far, though if Brutal Chess continues to improve, I 'spect it will end up my favorite.

It's got everything the others do (i.e. Brutal Chess and GNU Chess). It's also got more themes than either, and its 3D implementations are as good as Brutal Chess's, although jagged-looking as hell, like GNU Chess's 3D mode (thankfully without the horrible lag of GNU Chess). It doesn't have the fun-but-useless rotate-board feature that Brutal Chess does, so it loses points there.

Still, though, it's got all the functions of either as well a bit more graphical flair than either (DreamChess looks cooler, even though Brutal Chess looks sharper). Especially amusing was an 'Elemental' theme, where instead of white vs. black you have fire vs. ice. Also adding a bit of whimsical flair is the fact that each theme portrays a life-bar for each of the players, which goes down as pieces are captured by the other team, and also keeps a running list of which pieces each side has captured along the side.

When you get right down to it, any of these games will let you play chess with yourself or against someone else locally, and none of them will let you play chess over a network. Apparently chess games improve according their location in the alphabet, though, so I expect we'll get one with network play before we make it all the way to zed. Onward!

DosBox

2008-02-25T22:47:00.000-08:00

I've been fighting the urge to give up on this crazy quest to review Linux games, and just re-install my battleworn copy of Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant for the 1,000th time, in the hopes that this time I will beat it. I was strong, firm in my resolve to consistently review Linux games according to my master plan. But I had to test DosBox today, and so...

... yeah, I tested it with Wizardry VII. I managed to pull myself away, though. Eventually. After defeating the Horror of Ra-Sep-Re-Tep. I was very tempted to go after the Map Kit before quitting, but I knew that I would be lost, if I went that far, and I wouldn't get back to doing this review-blog for a week or two, minimum.

Which is to say, DosBox works. Oh yeah. DosBox is a multi-platform DOS-emulator; it exists so you can play old-school games on your new-school fancy computer with a minimum of hassle and hardware incompatibility. You mount a directory on your hard drive (where you have all your old DOS games) as a drive in DosBox and you're good to go.

I actually had fewer problems with it under Linux than I did the last time I set it up under XP. I had a sound-flake out (I lost digital sound but kept MIDI) for a little while, but it never happened again, after the first time, and everything was perfect. Incidentally, I first played Wizardry VII on a 14-inch monitor. Playing it on my current 21-inch for the first time today was a little bit like drinking one of those mega-sized cans of Foster's Lager (Australian for Beer, though I'm told actual Australians drink more Victoria Bitter).

DosBox gets a huge thumbs-up for me. If you can figure out Linux, you'll have no problem getting around in the command shell, and there are so many good games from back in the day that there's really no reason to ever buy software again, outside of graphics and larger real-time sandboxes. The downside, of course, is that installing DosBox doesn't get you anywhere. You have to have some old DOS games laying around too.

The whole 'abandonware' issue will probably never really be resolved, because most of the companies with a stake in the issue don't actually exist anymore. All I have to say on the matter is that purchasing software, when it's available, is definitely the moral high-ground. For everything else, there's Home of the Underdogs. Enter at your own risk.

DeSmuME

2008-02-25T12:01:00.000-08:00

DeSmuME isn't a game, it's a Nintendo DS emulator. So analysis of plot and storyline and what-have-you is kinda irrelevant. It's also kinda problematic from a use standpoint - while the emulator is free, it's useless without games to play, and the vast majority of games available for play are ripped roms of DS cartridges. Which are illegal, n' all*.

Doesn't really matter, though, as it's useless even with the roms, mostly. To try it out, I obtained a copy of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. It seems like every time I look at Game|Life, some sort of Phoenix Wright related news pops up, and I was curious as to how close the actual game was to that Flash-demo that they released for the newest one.

Admittedly, my machine is not the fastest on the market. It wasn't even the fastest on the market when I built it a few yews ago. It's an Athlon 2000+ XP with uhmm... 1.5 GB of RAM, and a 512MB nVidia AGP card. But it crawled on my machine. With nothing else open, it was playable, jumping between 14 and 20 FPS, and usually around the 14 mark. At first.

By the time I was halfway through the first chapter of the game, I couldn't get a framerate higher than 12 fps, was often as low as 8, and had to click the mouse a couple of times to make sure it registered with the simulated touch-screen. With a browser window open - not active, just open - I'm currently averaging 7 fps.

This game is already kinda slow - I'm a fast reader, and any kind of wait-time annoys me - but pauses that are probably dramatic on the original hardware are turned into excruciatingly long lulls in DeSmuME. Your mileage may vary; maybe it's a better experience on a dual-core processor. But as far as I'm concerned, this emulator is just not ready for regular use. I can't imagine how frustratingly lame any sort of action game would be.

Sound and graphics were mostly 100% - there was one spot where the graphics got glitchy, and occasionally the sound got slow - but the whole thing just trickled like molasses. DeSmuME is not yet ripe.

*Yes, I know they are legal in certain circumstances, but those circumstances almost never exist in reality, and have never (as far as I know) been tested in an actual court room anyways.

Cuyo

2008-02-23T21:16:00.000-08:00

I can't decide if I hate Cuyo, or love it. I mean, I'm positive I don't really want to play it, much, mostly because of level three. You'll see why in a second. But it's a weird combination of total rip-off and amazing variation that has me sort of questioning myself in a broad way, while having no interest in it in a specific way.

It's sorta like Tetris. Only it's different in tons of ways. Firstly, and more broadly than any other difference, is the fact that pieces are only two parts, rather than the four that make up every Tetris piece. Outside of that, the basics are the same. You want to combine like parts so that they are eliminated from the field of play.

Here's the thing: the types of pieces, the way they interact on the field of play, and the way they combine for elimination are all different with each level. The first level, for example, seems to be snot-inspired. You have to get six like pieces touching one another vertically or horizontally (no diagonals) to make them disappear. When they disappear, they explode, and you win the level not by making a set number disappear, but by exploding in the right places to destroy a pre-set collection of pieces.

Each level has these pre-set pieces. Blowing up blocks next to them makes them go away, and when they're all eliminated, you beat the level. That's the only constant. For example, in level four, pieces only connect to other pieces when they're diagonal to another piece of the same type, which is antithetical to all of the preceding levels, where diagonals don't count.

Level three is the devil, though. Mind you, there are probably a vast number of devils in this game. Level three makes me think these people are evil masterminds. So I can only assume that there are more evilly masterminded levels later on; level three is the first evil level. Why is it evil? The blocks change depending on what they land next to.

See, it's based on Apple Basic. Rather than shapes dropping from the sky, Apple Basic statements drop. 'To', or '""', or '42', (is that a Douglas Adams nod?), for example. Which is geektastic - my Basic programming took place under MS-DOS, but it's still cool. What's crazy is that as blocks drop down, and land next to other blocks, they change to make different statements in Basic. It's sort of easy for the first little bit, but after a while, remembering what's what is virtually impossible, when you're intoxicated and haven't coded in Basic for ten years.

It's absolutely brilliant. But a total pain in the ass. I'm pretty sure I don't like it, but I'm positive that I respect it. Just playing the handful of levels I played, this game has a lot of versatility and variability within a very restricted rule-set. It's awesome, as a demonstration of how minute changes in mechanics can have widespread effects as far as actual gameplay are concerned.

Graphically, it's not very great, and it has no sound. But if you like Tetris and Sudoku, this is neither. Hah! You thought I was going to say something else, didn't you? You were right, I must admit. While being neither, its gameplay is a weird mish-mash of both of those types of puzzle-games (sometimes, anyways), so yeah, you should probably toy with it for a bit if you're into them. Otherwise, it's most likely not Steer clear if you don't enjoy frustrating real-time puzzles that also ask for logic.

Criticalmass

2008-02-23T16:14:00.000-08:00

Wow. We've done 50 reviews! Critical Mass was a surprise - I couldn't stop playing it. It's basically a Galaga clone, and I've mentioned before that I don't really care for 'shmups. It's not even particularly pretty. But it's addictive as all-get-out.

You control a fighter, who's shooting at bugs. They come in waves, with a set type and pattern of movement for each level. It's pretty hard, as running into a bad-guy is instant death, and your fighter doesn't take a large number of hits from the projectiles that the enemies fire. By default, you can only move on the x-axis, and you're locked to the bottom of the screen. This is best turned off - it makes it a lot more likely that you'll crash into an enemy, but lessens the likelihood that you'll be stuck in a corner waiting for a bullet to hit you that you can't avoid. I like having my destiny in my own hands.

Even more excruciating is the fact that you only get one life. If you die, you have to start over from the beginning. Not a big deal, while you're still getting used to the game, but once you get to the point that you can pass a few levels consistently, it's quite disheartening to lose your spot.

Graphically, it looks like a hi-res Galaga-clone more than anything else. It's crisp and sharp, but you can see edges and the creature design - while very good - is simple and geometric-shape-looking. It's pleasing to the eye, but also a bit amateurish.

The sounds are no better and no worse than those of Chromium, which themselves didn't stand out as bad or good. The only place where Critical Mass differentiated itself bunches was a very small and simple place indeed: the levels have names. Names that are funny or punny or both.

I think that there were two reasons I kept coming back for more (and keep coming back for more, almost to my chagrin): those names are one of them. I just want to see what the levels I have yet to unlock are called. The other thing is that it's just so easy to get right back in the game. Unless you've earned a new spot on the high-score list, you just right-click and you're right back in the game. At level one.

As you get better at the levels, they become more fun, and less annoying, because the patterns' predictable nature means you can blow right through them with better scores and less time invested each go-round. I felt like a hamster hitting the pleasure-button in some bizarre experiment every time I right-clicked and started over.

That Jonathan Blow guy would probably hate this game, and call it unfair for using a Skinnerian reward schedule (I have a vague idea what that means, and even less of a clue as to how you pronounce 'Skinnerian'). He seems like a pretentious bastard, and I bet his game's no fun. Critical Mass is fun. It's simple, and it doesn't break ground, and I have no idea why I found it so much fun, but it is what it is with every particle of its being. Much like everything else that is made of particles, but with more fun.

Craft

2008-02-19T22:39:00.000-08:00

I can't make Craft work. I can't find a website for it, either. The one that's hard-coded into the executable (so that I see it whenever it fails to run) doesn't seem to exist, and searching for 'Craft' in Google is a frustrating process. The word's too common. Different search-strings got me some reviews, but no actual website for the author, and no forum posts about problems.

The game-configure box opens up, but when I click 'Play' it just crashes and closes. No idea why. Actually, I was thinking that it was because I wasn't in the directory it was installed to (the docs specifically mention that you need to be) but I tried it from there, as near as I could tell, and it still didn't work. It also mentions that 'xhost' needs to be configured properly, but I think that only applies to multiplayer, and I disabled xhost and it still didn't work.

I'm labeling this one 'incomplete' not because it's not complete, but because it's non-functional.

Crack Attack

2008-02-19T22:03:00.000-08:00

There was a game called Tetris Attack for the SNES. Crack Attack is an open-source version of that. I never played the original, so I don't have anything to compare it to.

You start with grid with a bunch of multi-colored blocks on it. They scroll upwards as new rows are added to the bottom. The point is to stay alive as long as possible (in multi-player mode) or to score as many points as possible (in single-player mode). You do this by eliminating blocks. Blocks are eliminated when they are in vertical or horizontal lines of at least three, of the same color.

You can only move blocks by swapping two at a time - if one of the blocks is empty, it moves the colored block into the empty space. It's not actually much like Tetris but it does basically revolve around the same sort of goals, so I guess the original name was apt enough. There's a bit more to the game - 'garbage' is generated when you do things like kill a bunch of blocks at once or make combos happen - but it's core mechanic is the simple one you know from games like Puzzle Bobble and Tetris and a gajillion others.

Is it fun? As a single-player game, it's fun enough if you're into this type of game. It's mechanics-based, rather than narrative- or content-based, so I found it boring. I hate you, Linux gaming! It's solidly implemented, and the core mechanic is strong, but I can only do the same thing over and over so much before I hate the fact that I'm alive. I imagine that as a multi-player game, this is somewhat negated by the presence of a live opponent.

Graphically, it's not the bee's knees, but it's crisp-looking, and everything is well defined and easy to differentiate. The transforming and disappearing animations are simple but nicely done. There's no cause for complaint, but you will not be shocked and awed. There's no sound.

Fans of the real-time puzzle genre will enjoy this, I suppose, but I find the core mechanic to be less fun than that of Puzzle Bobble. I would probably also enjoy Gnometris more than this, if Gnometris worked. Since it doesn't, Crack Attack is far better. Crack Attack works.

Circus Linux!

2008-02-19T20:45:00.000-08:00

Ouch. I'm beginning to think that New Breed Software specifically has it in for me. Circus Linux is an adaptation of an old Atari game called Circus. Maybe Circus was cutting-edge in its day, and considered great fun. Circus Linux is not fun.

A clown is launched from one side of the screen; it bounces onto the field of play, and your job is to maneuver a see-saw with a clown already on it, down at the bottom of the screen, so that the other clown will land on the unoccupied end and launch the clown who's already on the see-saw into the air. At the top of the screen are balloons, which get popped (for points) whenever a clown hits them.

Basically, you're bouncing clowns around. It plays like Pong or Breakout. There are no levels - when you eliminate a row of balloons, another one takes its place - meaning that there's no reward for continuing to play the game. The first time you bounce a clown, you've done all there is to do.

Atari games were skill-based, rather than content-based, due to hardware limitations (you couldn't fit a lot of content in the memory they were working with). Rather than evolve the game to take advantage of the power of modern machines, the guys at New Breed simply slapped an early-90s level of graphical paint on top of the 30-year-old game.

Admittedly, this is not my kind of game, but even if you're into skill-based gaming, it's pretty crappy. Graphically, it looks like early 90s shareware. That's the best way I can describe it - I don't know if it's even in SVGA; it may just be 16 colors. That's probably mean, but honestly, it's not pretty. The animated backgrounds are kinda cute, but also kinda ugly.

Circus Linux! has a host of faults, but the most significant is this: there's no way to make it go to full-screen mode from within the game. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but the mouse is the only way to control the game well, and when it's running in a window, it's way too easy to end up getting the cursor out of the window of the game. When you do that, it ceases to control the game. You have to figure out where on your desktop the cursor is, and move it from there back to the window where the game is running. The game doesn't stop while you're doing this. So it's well nigh unplayable as installed.

You have to open a terminal window and launch the game from the command line with the '--fullscreen' switch to play the game properly. That's just dumb. Virtually every real-time game I've played for this blog either defaulted to full-screen, or allowed you to switch between modes from within the game. This is rank amateurism.

The figures are too small, however, to make playing in full-screen a lot of fun. This game probably uses the same aspect ratio of actors-to-playing-field that the original Atari game did. Meaning that if you play it from the same distance that you would play a game on your TV, it would be fine. But since you're up close to it, I found it impossible to keep the top of the game and the bottom of the game in focus at the same time, which was nerve-wracking. I didn't have the problem with Briquolo, for example, which is virtually the same game (mechanics wise).

The beginning of the song that plays during the title-screen is the best thing about the game; it's sort of a soulful SNES-sounding synth piece. Then it kicks into retarded circus music, making this game as painful sonically as it is visually and functionally.

Unless you have fond childhood memories of the game upon which this is based, steer clear. It is not fun, it is not pretty, it is not technically impressive, and it is not good. It may be nostalgic, but at this point, I don't know how many people are still playing games that used to play the old 2600. New Breed Software seems to specialize in doing simplistic, repetitive, skill-based games that suck. I can't wait for the next one I encounter!

(In all fairness, they're doing these games for free, and for all I know, they're Atari enthusiasts or something and they're making exactly the game they want to play - but no one in their right mind should want to play these games)

Chromium

2008-02-17T17:11:00.000-08:00

Another of those genres I don't really play much, Chromium is a vertical-scrolling top-down shooter. As far as arcade genres go, this is one of the classics styles of play.

Chromium plays like they all do, basically. You control a ship, and you have to destroy objects by shooting them to earn points. They add a level of complexity by justifying your extra lives: the ship you're actually in is never shown; that ship has an escort of fighters which it controls, who are supposed to protect it.

This means that, unlike in other games (like, say, 1943) where you are rewarded for killing a higher percentage of the enemy with points, but not punished for missing them, you virtually have to kill every enemy on the screen. If they get by your active fighter, they destroy one of your inactive fighters (read: extra lives).

This makes suicide a viable option, among other things. If four dudes are about to get by you, you're better off hitting your self-destruct button. They'll die in the explosion, and you'll only lose one life; if you let them all by, you lose four. Noticing and responding to situations like that in the heat of a frenzied multi-coloured battle elevates the game to slightly more cerebral than your average shooter.

But only slightly. Mostly it just plays like a shooter. The mouse controls your ship; move the mouse to move the ship, left-click to shoot, and double-right-click to self-destruct. Movement is smooth and precise - I never thought I'd think the mouse superior to the joystick for shooters, but this is the second time I've found it so.

The one constant in the realm of shooters is the upgrades: improvements to your guns or armor and/or other little perks that change the game in some way. Here, Chromium disappoints a bit - there aren't a bunch of them. There are only two types: gun upgrades, and ship repairs. Each has three items.

The three gun upgrades are alright, but you never get a spread-shot or anything like that, just a blue gun and a green gun to augment your beginning machine gun, along with a double-fire for the machine gun, and they are temporary (they fire differently shaped 'bullets' in different patterns, so they're differentiate well, they're just not super-interesting). Picking up additional copies of a gun upgrade you've already picked up just adds to the amount of ammo, rather than adding an additional skill.

The ship repairs are equally limited, but with a fun twist. The first two are simple: one repairs your shields, and one repairs your ship itself. The third gives you a super-shield, which is useful but if you don't pick it up, you get an extra man. If you're like me, you end up suiciding as a tactic relatively regularly, and the extra dudes are more useful. If you're actually skilled at shooters, you may find the shield more useful. It's nice to have a meaningful choice in how one will play the game.

Graphically, it's up to par with the games it was inspired by. The graphics are clearly delineated and nicely colored but they have the sort of fuzziness you got with old-school arcade games. It adds a nice retro touch. The enemies are simple but well realized, and they have different types of fire, and shapes that suggest the way they move, all nicely rendered.

The sound is decent enough, but nothing really special. You can set the game to use an audio CD from a CD-ROM drive as the background music, or have it play WAV, MP3, or Ogg/Vorbis files from a playlist. The default background music is typical techno-metal type stuff; you know it from 3/4ths of the action-game soundtracks of the past ten years. It's solid but stereotypical. The bleeps n' bloops n' explosions are at the same level.

If you're into shooters, you owe it to yourself to check this out. It's sure to provide amusement and joyful frustration for a while, at least. If you don't like shooters, Chromium does nothing new with the genre and is highly unlikely to change your mind.

CGoban

2008-02-17T14:17:00.000-08:00

Cgoban* is some sort of computer-version of the ancient game called Go. I can only make it work in multi-player mode, though there seems to be some sort of support for bots that will play as one of the players. As near as I can tell, you have to set up an account for your bot on a Go server on the internet, and run a program that connects to that server under that account and plays with you.

All I can say for certain is that it doesn't work as a single-player game with AI right out of the box, and I can't find any instructions for making it work. At least, the instructions I found are for getting it to work under Windows, with the assistance of a few .exe programs custom-coded for the purpose, requiring tons of configuration and batch files, and possibly aren't even for Cgoban but instead are for GNU Go, which according to Synaptic is a command-line, text-only version of Go. The instructions mention Cgoban so I'm not really sure what the deal is.

I can also tell you this for certain: I'm not going to bother. This is just too much work, even if it would work, and certainly too much work for a solution that possibly wouldn't. I didn't look very hard, but I looked at the first twenty results in Google searches for a number of different search-strings and got nothing that would do it for sure. If I get linked to a quick how-to for making it work, fine. Until then, this game will remain un-reviewed.

*This is actually the website for the KGS servers. I think they're connected to Cgoban somehow, and they offer the client for download. Actually, I think they offer a newer version of the client - the one in the package manager is years old. I think. Lot of uncertainty in this one, eh?

Cannon Smash

2008-02-15T20:14:00.000-08:00

Well, we've hit the 'c's. Starting with Cannon Smash, a table-tennis game (or ping-pong, if you prefer) that's like nothing I've ever played before.

I'm really bad at it, because I'm really bad at video games, and specifically really bad at video games that happen in real-time. But even if I didn't suck at gaming, I suspect I'd have issues with this one, because it's just different. Every tennis game I've ever played has been built around guesswork, and the game sorta taking over the actual action. I move around and hit the button, and hope I was in the right spot.

This one actually shows the right spot right there on the screen. Controls? Simple for movement. The devil for shot placement. Left-click = backhand; right-click = forehand. And there are two targety-looking circles that show where each will go. It's kinda hard to explain, without looking at it, but that's basically it. By moving the character around, you move those circles around, and that's how you make a shot.

Knowing where to place those circles is made easier by the fact that the trajectory of the ball is sort of instantly apparent. You see a grey line going from the opponent to you, and a red dot showing where the ball will be when you can hit it. So you move yourself until the red dot is in one of those circles, and hit the appropriate button when it shows up.

Which is full of issues, for me personally. You have the grey line, and then you have the actual ball, and then you have the red dot, and then you have the red circles, and quite frankly, I'm not very good at taking in all that visual data at once. I keep seeing the trajectory line, and jumping the gun, swinging before the actual ball gets there. This is probably entirely my fault.

But outside of that, it's also sort of insane what they ask you to do as far as targeting goes. The opponent's side of the table is divided into 22 sections. It's a grid, basically. And the way you decide where on the grid you're going to place your shot is by pressing a key. So there's 22 keys, and you hit the '1' key to throw it at the left-corner, or the 'q' key to put it a bit closer to you, still on the far left, and so on. There's 22 buttons. And because of the way a keyboard is set up, they're not in a perfect grid pattern or anything. If you move directly up or down, you're probably not going where you want to.

But that's all I can say about the game that's negative: Cannon Smash is actually pretty cool, once you get past the relatively complicated input system. Everything looks very Virtua Fighter-ish, really, with simplicized polygon characters and simple geometrically correct tables. It's not exactly a graphical tour-de-force, but it rocks as far as seeming like an arcadey old-school ping-pong game.

The sound is fine as well, but not really stand-outish. It doesn't really need to be, so it's sort of irrelevant; they meet the level of polish that is necessary to not suck, and there's really no way for them to go further than that. This is a game that exists for its gameplay mechanics, not for its acceptable graphics or its acceptable sound. And the mechanics are unique, consistent, and solid.

There's support for network-multiplayer, and there are a couple of different AI players that have different characteristics. It also features a training mode (which is annoying, but thorough) and a practice mode. In short, as far as features go, it's doin' alright. Not great, but good enough. The most important thing is banging the ball with the paddle, and that's well done. Everything else is gravy. I'd love to see a different system for shot placement, but I can't actually think of one that is as precise, and more user-friendly, so they may have done as well as they possibly could.

Think of this is a 'ping-pong simulator' rather than a table-tennis game, and you'll be right on the money. That the parts that aren't important still manage to be decent makes it a well-constructed game.