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.

Kiriki

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

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

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

kanatest

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

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

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

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

For the record, the version included in the repositories is two releases out of date.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

kamefu

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

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

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

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

Just for the record...

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

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

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.

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.

GNOME-Mud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gnome KiSS

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

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

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

I feel dirty.

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

glpuzzle

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

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


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

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

gLife

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

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

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

Exult

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

GCompris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DroidBattles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DosBox

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crack Attack

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

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

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

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

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

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

Circus Linux!

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)

bugsx

This isn't actually a game. I wouldn't really call it a toy, either. In its own words:

bugsx is a program which draws biomorphs based on parametric plots of Fourier sine and cosine series and let's you play with them using genetic algorithms.

Basically, you breed graphs. I'm not sure how you affect the breeding process. You have two options: 'initialize' and 'breed'. They both leave you with sixteen new 'bugs' formed from line-drawings.

They look neat. I

Bug Squish

Bug Squish reminds me of nothing so much as Orisinal gone horribly, horribly awry.

It's the same type of repetitive, reflex-based gaming - in this case, it's basically a light-gun game - but rather than being horribly cute, it's uhmm... well, it's about squishing bugs. Hence the name, I suppose.

The graphics are a bit yesteryear-ish but they're good enough to be mildly revolting, in a stylized way. You can identify the different types of bugs, and they make appropriately icky piles when they're on the screen. They're barely animated while alive, and totally static when squished, so it's sorta like clicking on sprites over and over again.

It saves the last score and the high score, which is nice, but doesn't allow you to put your name or initials in, or keep any real high score 'list'.

If you dig Orisinal games and B horror flicks, this is right up your alley, I suppose. As a fan of B-movies but not of repetitive pointless gameplay, I can't say I dug it all that much. An amusing diversion, but all it has to offer is the bug-squishing motif. Otherwise, Barrage has the same style gameplay with better graphics, more offensive options, and physics.