Kolor Lines

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.

KNetwalk

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

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.

Klickety

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

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

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

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

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

KJumpingCube

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.

KGoldrunner

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.

KFoulEggs

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.

Kenolaba

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.

KBounce

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

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.

KAtomic

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.

Ice Breaker

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.

Hex-A-Hop

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. :)

Gweled

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.

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.

GTetrinet

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.

GNUDoQ

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

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

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.

Ghextris

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.