KGoldrunner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Heroes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Egoboo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Balazar

Again! The incomplete 3D RPG coded by French people is becoming cliche. Balazar is much more complete than Arkhart but still not actually playable. While it looks like virtually every aspect of gameplay has been finished (inventory, movement, saving, conversation, even combat) there's no actual content in place, so after going through a short tutorial, you're thrust into a world populated by characters with names that read like code, and don't have anything to say.

Where you go from there is up to you, but it doesn't seem to matter, as no one has anything to say, and attacking people doesn't get you anywhere either. I was plagued with stability problems as well - every time I played with the game (playing the game not being an option) I either got a crash that caused the program to close itself, or a lock-up that I had to manually kill.

This is another shame - the developer has abandoned the game to write some sort of puzzle game that has a similar name (Balazar Bros.) so it's unlikely that development will continue. I suppose to a programmer just getting the systems in place is the major hurdle, but to a maker of games actually getting the done, and giving users something to play should be of some importance as well, y'know?

Graphically, it's relatively pretty. The controls are a bit clumsy and hard to work with, especially the attack button - he doesn't tend to attack what he's in front of, but instead goes into a long super-attack that doesn't hit anything near you, if you hold the button down too long - but they have a nice feel to them. That is, they seem responsive, even though they're difficult.

The sound had occasional crackles, but was acceptable, if not actually good. If this were a real game, I would probably end up cutting off the sound and listening to my new CD by Rev. D-Ray and the Shockers. Since it's not a real game, I'm listening to the CD while complaining about how it's not a game. Which is still fun. Good CD.

In short, don't bother, this is another game that was abandoned by its developer long before there had been enough progress made to make it a game. This is starting to be really frequent, and I just now got to the 'B's for god's sake. Hope the next game works.

Abuse

I was lookin' forward to this one: Abuse is a dystopian sci-fi sidescrolling platformer. It is the opposite of Sudoku. You play a dude who was wrongfully imprisoned in the kind of prison you don't want to be wrongfully imprisoned in, i.e. one where they perform experiments on the prisoners. Thanks to an ill-timed riot and (presumably) an accident of some sort, everyone in the prison except for the player-character gets infected with a drug called Abuse that makes them batshit-insane and also makes them look like they were designed by H.R. Giger.

There are two types of open-source games, generally speaking: games which were developed by the open-source community, and games which were originally developed for retail sale, and eventually had their code released. This is one of the latter - Abuse was a quasi-successful game back in the dizz-ay (1996), and at some point later on in the 90s, they released the source-code. What I'm trying to say is that this is not a game that was recently released; I don't think it's even been worked on in a number of years. The game is basically unchanged from the original 1996 version, and hasn't been touched at all since 2000, near as I can tell.

Art-direction wise, it looks pretty good considering the state of the art at the time. The graphics are a bit pixellated but they manage to convey the creepy sci-fi vibe that they're undoubtedly going for, and it has a cohesive and consistent look. The game basically looks exactly like a Genesis game I played back in the day, based on the Alien franchise. Which is high praise for a shareware PC game.

Sound was the first problem with the game. I installed this from the 'Add/Remove...' option on the 'Applications' pull-down, not from the more powerful 'Synaptic Package Manager'. I will be doing so with all of the games I look at. The sound didn't work. So I looked at the entry again, in the list of available games, and saw no mention of it needing extra sound-files, as some websites seemed to suggest. This lead me to assume that it was a complete installation, and the problem must be with my soundcard.

After hours of struggling, I managed to confirm to myself that my soundcard was working perfectly, and so I looked in the 'Synaptic' manager, and saw a sound-pack for the game. So much wasted time... but worth the effort, nonetheless. Laser-guns are much more satisfying when they make that zappy sound, and hearing creatures before they show up onscreen makes for a useful warning.

Control-wise, the game is almost as broken as Gnometris. It's got a relatively novel system of mouse-keyboard support, where your mouse aims your weapon independent of your movement, which is controlled with the keyboard. Only, for some reason, it's difficult to shoot straight forward to the right, and virtually impossible, to the left. Even when your gun is pointing straight ahead, and the cursor is directly level with it, the gun likes to shoot toward the floor and rebound.

The main effect of this problem is that if an an enemy is above you in a narrow corridor, you can shoot it with no problem. But if it's standing on the ground right next to you, you shoot the ground, and the laser rebounds over its head. So you basically have to either move closer to it, taking damage, or hope that it will jump up into your shot. This is bad enough when there's just one enemy on the screen, but when you're being chased by four or five speedy little buggers at once, it's insane. My general strategy when being chased by things is to back away while firing, but that doesn't work when firing at things that are chasing you is impossible.

So the game is basically unplayable. I couldn't find any mention of this anywhere else, which means that either I'm the only one with this problem, or the game's just so old that no one plays it anymore. My guess is that the libraries the game relies on have changed in some way since the game was being actively developed, and one of those changes broke the aiming.

I tried switching from software-rendering to OpenGL mode, which took a lot of work to get working (what finally did it was reinstalling the restricted nVidia driver), in the hopes that it would fix the problem, but it didn't. It was still impossible to shoot anything that was next to me on the left, and virtually impossible to shoot anything next to me on the right. You would think that placing the cursor directly over the creature, at least, would work. No dice.

The game looks better without anti-aliasing on, in my opinion, as the anti-aliasing just makes everything extremely blurry. So keep that in mind if you're going to try it out. This game was probably awesome when it came out, but if it's as non-functional for you as it was for me, it's not even playable. This is a shame, because it seems pretty neat. It offers infinite lives, and you restart after death from the last save-point, so you can still brute-force pretty effectively by replaying spots until you get lucky and the monsters get into the areas where you can shoot them, but that takes an awful lot of effort.