KFourInLine

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

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

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

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 Probably because my computer is a bit outdated, and it probably runs fine on a more modern machine, but I was still taken aback by the fact that it seemed a Milton-Bradley game actually had a low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

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

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

KBattleship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KBackgammon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jump n' Bump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Globulation 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

FreeCiv

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FooBillard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FlightGear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The reality is a confused, jumbled mess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

eboard

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

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

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

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

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

Craft

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

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

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

Crack Attack

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.

CGoban

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

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

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

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

Cannon Smash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

bzflag

bzflag is multi-player only, and I don't review those. This is a placeholder, in case I get an itch to play a multi-player game. If that happens, and I play this one, I'll go ahead and review it.

I've done like five or six entries today, and only one or two actual reviews. This has been a disappointing streak. Hopefully the next game will end it.

Boson

I really, really tried to review Boson. I spent an entire day with it. Not playing it, mind you. I tried doing that, but couldn't figure it out. I spent an entire day alternating between playing it for a while and getting frustrated and annoyed, and looking for instructions on the internet.

Gaming in Linux had always tended to be a painful process; the only surefire way to make something work was to download it, extract, find a guide written by someone using the exact same distro as yourself, modify the code according to their instructions, and compile it. Ubuntu and other distros that offer the same sorts of package-managemnt promise to change all that. However, it ain't there yet.

Boson introduced a new level of frustration: I couldn't get the documentation to compile. No, I'm not kidding, and no, I'm not being metaphorical. The documentation needs to be compiled. But let me start from the beginning...

Upon opening the game, everything seemed to be going fine. It started, at least. I loaded a campaign - the first mission in the default campaign; if you want to play a campaign, you just play a number of missions in a row - and there my troubles began. Sometimes, clicking on a unit does nothing. Sometimes clicking on a unit selects the unit. I have no idea what causes it to be ineffectual, but it also affect dragging to select multiple units. Sometimes it just doesn't do anything.

None of the buttons are labeled, none of them have those handy little pop-up descriptions if you mouse-over them and - as installed in Ubuntu by the package manager - nowhere is there any documentation. That I could find. It may be there, but it's buried as hell, and not findable via searching.

Anyways, you can imagine my distress. I was finding it very difficult to play the game, since I couldn't do anything consistently or intentionally. I believe I eventually figured out which of the little icons meant 'move' and which meant 'attack', but with only four choices, that wasn't as challenging as it might have been. Cut to the 'HQ' building. As is typical in RTS games of this type, your headquarters allows you build and place other types of buildings. Alright.

Only the types of buildings it can produce are not labeled, and there is - as I mentioned - no manual, so the only way to determine what each building is is to build it. There are at least a dozen possible buildings, so this was time-consuming. I gave it up when, upon building a barracks, I couldn't figure out how to use the barracks to create troops. Fine, maybe it does something else, but it didn't seem to do anything, and I sure as hell wasn't going to keep building buildings that have no effable purpose.

So that was the frustration that made me determined to find some sort of documentation, no matter how obtuse or inadequate, that would let me get a handle on what exactly the game was doing. I had already checked the usual suspects - my hard drive, the website, the SourceForge page for the game - to no avail. Okay, then. I re-examined the website, and noted that the link which was called 'FAQ' and was dead (the only link on the page that was dead, and the only link to a different server) actually had 'handbook' in the directory tree it linked to.

This led me to believe that an instruction-book of sorts did actually exist, somewhere. Searches for 'Boson handbook' via Google got me nada, however. The closest I came were old forum postings complaining that an earlier link to the handbook had gone dead. Obviously, the internet was not going to help; there hadn't been any news updates since '06, so the developers had probably just not noticed that their handbook was no longer being hosted.

I did a more exhaustive search of my hard drive, now that I knew I was looking for a 'handbook' but still came up with nothing. So I downloaded the game's data files (you know, that had already been installed by Ubuntu, and that I shouldn't need?). The file containing the binaries was useless, but the actual game-data file contained a directory called 'Docs' - EUREKA!

So I extracted it, and navigated there, only to find that it contained a bunch of .wml files which didn't actually help me. The 'README' informed me that it utilized .wml files, and linked me to the website for the WML language or whatever (it's for dynamically creating HTML files, apparently). Opening up Synaptic, I searched for WML and found the software suite. After it installed, I was able to get the executable text-file 'make_html_files' to run. It ran.

Neat, there was an HTML file in the directory now. I opened it up... it was a manual!!!! I read through the introduction, so excited. I clicked on the first entry of the second section, entitled 'In the game' and... got a file-not found error. I tried running the script again. It actually mentioned each section of the handbook as it assembled it, but when it finished running, there were no HTML files; all it created was the initial one, and it was supposed to create one in each of the subdirectories. Possible more than one, but at least one, I'm sure.

So I gave up. When you can't even get the documentation to compile, you're just S.O.L. - someone else can review the game, if and when they fix the documentation. Or the game. As near as I can tell, the game is broken, but I can assert that the documentation is broken. It don't work. At least not on my machine. Best of luck to you - it looks like a Command n' Conquer clone, and the button that says 'full screen' doesn't actually make it full screen. That is all the reviewing I can give it.

Battle for Wesnoth

I was a little trepidatious reviewing Battle for Wesnoth because I think it has a big fanbase, and so I felt compelled to find out why they love it so. It ended up not being a chore: it's a fully featured, aesthetically and mechanically pleasing game with graphics that are essentially current-gen. In short, it's lovable. It has its drawbacks, but rather than being failures on the part of the designers/coders, they're just 'features' of the genre of play.

I've never been a big wargamer, so Civilizations is about as close as I've ever come to the turn-based hex-tiled strategy genre. Battle for Wesnoth has me thinking I should check the genre out a little more. Basically, you have a map, where there are resources (villages), spawn points (keeps), different types of terrain (which affect unit movement rates and performance), and units. Each map has goals, which must be accomplished within a limited number of turns.

The game has a great sense of aesthetics. When I said it was 'current-gen', graphically speaking, I simply mean that it's crisp and pretty and you don't immediately think 'I'm playing a Linux game', but rather 'I'm playing a nice-looking game.' I don't mean to imply that it does all kinds of crazy things with textures and bump-mapping and real-time lighting and all that jazz that people talk about in regards to FPSs (and which I have only a vague conception of). It may do some of that, but I don't think so, and I don't think it's necessary at all to this style of game, which hasn't really changed much insofar as I can tell since the late 80s. It looks pretty much as good as Europa Universalis III, which came out only last year, I think.

Why did I start out talking about the graphics? Laziness, most likely. That's the easiest thing to summarize. The rest is difficult, because unlike most of the previous games I've looked at, it's really complicated. The combat dynamics take into account a number of things that combine to make it truly a 'strategy' game, rather than a tactical game.

Besides the afore-mentioned terrain, there are attributes (certain classes perform better at night than in the day-time and vice-versa, for example), and units even gain experience. Higher levels make for more capable units, and units can be transferred from scenario to scenario within a campaign, so it's feasible to imagine performing so poorly in an earlier scenario that finishing a campaign is impossible.

Other things that can affect a unit's performance are their available forms of attack and the type of weapons they use - and I'm probably forgetting and/or ignorant of a few other things. It's a really nice system that allows for a lot of variability, and therefore allows for a lot of personality in your play-style. Your preferred tactics will affect which units you prefer, as will the terrain in which you're playing, and both of those will affect the strategies you utilize to conquer a given map.

While it's quite complex, it's not overly so, which is important. There's a really bare-bones tutorial which to be completely honest needs work. But even though it doesn't come near fully describing all of the features of gameplay, it shows you enough to get started, and a bit of experimentation in an actual campaign can get you comfortable and familiar with the basic systems in very little time.

Like many open-source games (and not a few retail games), Battle for Wesnoth is expandable via custom content, which has two sides to it. On the one hand, it makes for infinite replayability via downloaded content, which we're all aware is a wonderful thing. The downside (for me, at least) is that since it ships with a number of campaigns, which don't seem to have much relation to one another in any chronological or character sense, it's hard to develop a real connection to the things that are going on in a meta-game context.

Within the confines of a single campaign, it depends on how well the campaign is set up (skip the first one in the list; the second one has higher production values, and better writing). But after beating the first campaign or two, I don't feel any real drive to play the next one, because it doesn't have much to do with the former outside of setting. This isn't any real 'flaw' that can be faulted anywhere; it's just the nature of the beast, when your content comes from various sources with various interests.

It is, however, a difference between Battle of Wesnoth as an indie-game (amateur game, if you prefer) and what it would have been as a retail release in this day and age: that imaginary retail version would either have had one really long campaign, or it would have campaigns that went in a chronological sort of order and/or attempted some sort of meta story-arc that lent them a sense of cohesion. For me, that's an important thing, because I play to find out what happens next. Fourth down the list of campaigns that 'ship' with the game is the one where Wesnoth is founded. That just seems like a waste of time, since I've already saved Wesnoth in the present. If it were some sort of prequel that affected events in the 'present' day (there's no real sense of a consistent chronology, so I'm being loose with that term), then it would be interesting.

What I'm trying to say is that, although at least one of the campaigns I played through had a well-conceived story that was a delight to progress through, the game doesn't actually score highly on the 'story' scale of game evaluation. When I go back to it, as I'm sure I will, it will be solely for the fun of the game mechanics, not because I want to find out what happens next. Which in this case is fine, because the mechanics are fun to play with, and it's not for-profit. It doesn't have to be addictive, and it doesn't have to build relationships between the player and the storyline, in order to sell a sequel.

Outside of that, the only complaint I really have is a petty one that is probably endemic to the genre of hex-based wargaming: it's a pain in the ass moving a large number of troops from place to place. It's never game-breaking because the number of units is never so large that it takes an epic amount of time, but moving each unit individually, when I'm dealing with a dozen or more units, and I just want them all to go in a general direction, is annoying. I don't think you could eliminate that, and it's only a problem because the only wargaming I've ever done was RTS-style, and I'm used to dragging to select and then issuing commands to groups.

Because I'm not very good at strategy games, I also found myself a little annoyed by the fact that every scenario in every campaign I played had a turn-limit. I'm paranoid, and I like to stockpile units. That said, it's a good thing the game does this: it adds a sense of urgency, and it forced me to actually play the game from the beginning. While I'm more comfortable doing all I can to make a game easy for myself, I suspect I have a more engrossing experience when that option is taken away.

I forgot to say anything about the sound; it's pretty. One of the best I've heard in a Linux game, actually. It's got that epic-fantasy-film sort of thing going on, for the most part, although not always all that epic. It's never annoying, which is especially important in a game you'll be playing for hours at a time.

And make no mistake, you will be playing it for hours at a time... if you don't mind turn-based gaming (who does? Turn-based gaming r0x0rz, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling something). This is pretty much a masterpiece, and that it was developed by the open-source community is a hopeful sign for the future and provides much amusement for the present.

BattleBall

BattleBall puts me in the unique situation of wanting to praise a game I don't really enjoy at all. It's not really pretty, it's missing a bunch of features that it should have, and it's not even fun. But the idea behind it is amusing, and there's the solid core for a really fun game here.

Basically, it's soccer played with combat vehicles. The players are all tanks, divided into teams, and each team has a headquarters. Points are scored by running into or shooting the ball, so as to move it down the field to your opponent's headquarters. Your gun doesn't destroy anything, but if it hits another tank, it causes that tank to spin around out of control for a second, and if it hits the ball, the ball bounces off of the projectile.

And you can turn into a helicopter.

How could it go wrong? The sad and simple truth is that the game is just annoying to control, to someone whose been using mouse+keyboard or dual-analog controls for way too long to go back to the keyboard. If I could mouse-aim, or alternately have one analog-stick for movement and one for aiming, the rest of the faults of this game would be forgiveable. I'm sure when it was new, it was awesome. I remember thinking my friends were crazy for trying to play some old FPS with the mouse (I think it was the first Quake, but it could have been something else; long, long ago, y'know?).

The other problems are legion, but excusable, because they don't affect the fun of the game, just the friendliness. The biggest one is that all aspects of game-configuration are via command-line. Which is normal for Linux software, but not normal for modern-day gaming. Some sort of front-end for the game would mitigate that completely, without even changing the code. I have no idea how the multiplayer would work - apparently that's all handled via Linux command-line programs somehow.

I thought the game had no options at all, but then a quick look at the man file (another way in which this game shows itself to be part of the Linux, rather than gaming, community; most of these Linux games have no man file at all, or useless man files with no real info) showed that it's configurable as all-get-out. Up to six teams, with the number of players limited only by the processor of the machine it's being played on (apparently, rather than a bunch of clients connecting, it generates the graphics for everyone playing, and does all the software-running, on one machine; everyone else plays on connected terminals).

But you set up all of that via the command line. It doesn't appear to even have a configuration file of some sort that you can set it up in; you have to type out a half-dozen flags, the names of the team-members, and all the options every time you begin the game, from the command line. Unless you want to play it one on one, one human player against the AI, so that was how I played it.

BattleBall has no sound, and very primitive 3D graphics that are actually quite charming. It shows its age (at least, I hope it's old; I can't find a website for it anywhere, and there's a new game from a commercial developer with the same title, which made the search confusing) but it's easy to interpret and looks fine.

With a configuration utility or internal game setup, and the ability to use a modern control system, this would actually be a great game. It's bizarre, and intriguing, and would promise a lot of multi-player fun. As it is, it's a distraction for ten minutes while you take in the premise, and then it's not really worth touching ever again.