Koules

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.

Kobo Deluxe

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'...

KAsteroids

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.

I Have No Tomatoes

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.

Holotz Castle

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.

Heroes

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!!

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.

Gtkboard

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.

GNOME Breakout

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

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.

Frozen-Bubble

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.

FreeDroid

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.

FloboPuyo

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.

Epiphany

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.

Emilia Pinball

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.

Criticalmass

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.

Circus Linux!

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

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.

Briquolo

A Breakout clone that actually works, Briquolo was just what the doctor ordered after a bunch of non-working/frustrating games. It works fine out of the box, looks quite pretty, and offers at least one really interesting new idea.

The purpose of the game is to destroy all the destructible blocks on the level's field of play. This is done by bouncing a ball off of it. It plays like Pong, basically, only you have to destroy blocks, not just keep the ball in play. There are a number of power-ups, which do things like increase (or decrease) the surface of the reflective piece, or alter the speed or size of the ball. There are three types of destructible objects: those which take one hit to destroy, those which take two, and explosives (which damage the objects around them when destroyed).

Briquolo can be played in the classic 2D top-down style, but defaults to a 3D isometric view. Best/weirdest of all, one of the power-up icons turns the game into first-person for a short period of time. It's not a very helpful thing - if there's a lot of stuff still no the board, it's 'bloody awful hindering' - but it's thoroughly awesome nonetheless. The transitions are dizzying and it's a lot of fun when it takes you by surprise because you weren't paying attention.

The game is playable with the mouse or the keyboard; to my surprise I found the mouse to be much more accessible. Either way, the controls are precise and responsive. Mechanically speaking, the game is spot-on. Plays like a dream!

Aesthetically, Briquolo is also up to snuff. The art is soothing to the eye, and the on-screen action is easy to take in; in short, it's an attractive game. There's no music, but the sound effects are apt and adequate. When the screen shakes as a bomb goes off accompanied by an explosion, there's a perfect relationship between the graphics and sound. It's not the prettiest or best-sounding game you've ever played, but it does use your 3D-card a teensy bit, and for an open-source version of a 30 year old arcade game (rounding up), it's perfectly acceptable.

Complaints? No score. And no 1-ups. Implementing a score system that offered extra lives at regular intervals would make playing through the game more interesting, and also make coming back to it more appealing. That's why they do that in arcade games. As it is, the lack of extra lives is no handicap, as you can select the level you wish to start in when you begin the game. Even relatively unskilled players can sample each n' every level. But since there's no scoring system, there's no impetus to not just sample each level and call it a day.

There are two sets of levels; 'Original' levels and 'New' levels. There really ought to be more 'New' levels - they show off some additions that have been made to the original source-material, like pinball bumpers, and fun rotation effects, that make the levels much more impressive both from an aesthetic and mechanistic point of view. This is not really a complaint, mind you, but a request for more: essentially it's a compliment.

Briquolo is a pleasant way to while away some spare time, and a virtually flawless Breakout clone. If you loved the old game (if you're a 'gamer of a certain age', anyway, and even remember it at all) it's certainly worth checking out. It won't change your life, but few arcade games do...

Bomberclone

I never played Bomberman so Bomberclone is new to me. It was fun, and promises to be more fun if you play it via the network with up to 16 other people. w00t! as the people who decide what the word of the year is would say.

Gameplay = simple. I'm tired of saying that. Not really, simple game mechanics are often the most fun, but really, I feel like a broken record. You use the arrow keys to move around, and you use the 'drop bomb' key to drop bombs. After a few seconds, they go off. The 'special' key will do different things, according which special power-up you've most recently picked up.

So you're in a maze (usually with quite limited freedom of movement at first) constructed of blocks that can be blown up, blocks that can't, and empty space. Blowing up blocks creates more empty space in which you can maneuver, and occasionally unlocks upgrades and power-ups. The point is to be the last man standing.

As mentioned earlier, the game offers network play for up to 16 people in a game, which seems like sheer insanity if the maps are as small as the ones I was playing in single-player, but they're probably not (note: I just ran through it with 15 AIs to see if it gave us anymore room; nup, it's insane (and awesome)). In single-player mode, you can tell it how many AIs you want to play against, and set different options for game-type, map, and tile-set.

While the graphics are relatively low-res, some of the tile-sets are hilarious (sheep!) and the maps show a lot of variation. It's old-school, but not clunky. Custom maps and tile-sets look to be easy to create, so you've got that whole infinite-replayability/customization thing going on.

The sounds are simple beeps n' booms, but they just add to the old-school flavor. With a bunch of players/AIs, they're a bit overwhelming at times, but that just adds to the chaotic fun.


Retro-arcade fun, mostly. Didn't notice anything broken, no clipping or stuttering, and a good time. The AI was a bit suicidal occasionally, but I kind of enjoyed that too. This gets a thumbs-up, although it probably offers limited amusement as a single-player game. If they really wanted to impress me, they'd add a campaign mode with storyline. :)