KeepAlive

Yumpin' yiminy! These GGZ games have reached a new low! KeepAlive is not only no longer being developed, the server for it is no longer being run, meaning it is 100% useless. I mean, the code-base may be useful for people developing something, but you can't play the game at all, so there's no reason whatsoever for it to be in the damn repository.

I have no idea if it ever worked. The screen pictured is all it does when I open it and I can't tell if it's locked up or just waiting for something from a server, or what. Nothing I do affects it. Which is what caused me to look it up and discover that even if it did something, it wouldn't do anything like 'be a game' because it has been shut down, dismantled, and removed from the GGZ servers' operations.

Ignore at all costs.

GTK Slash'EM

Fun name: Super Lotsa Added Stuff Hack - Extended Magic is what you would think it would be after decoding that acronym. It's another rogue-like game based on the Nethack source. Technically, it's based on the SLASH source which was in turn based on the Nethack source, but you know what I mean.

After I figured out how to make the graphics work (hint: it's under 'Options' not 'Preferences') it got a lot more playable. Not because I can't decode ASCII, just because the default font-size was really small at 1024x768 in its tiny little window. It has the option to use a 'big tile' tileset as well as a 'big 3d tile' set, which is nice because I don't really like the fact that the Nethack visual tile-set is as itty-bitty as the regular ole' ASCII at high resolutions.

They look as good as anything did that was shareware for Windows in the early 90s: specifically, they don't look any better than Castle of the Winds. No big deal. If you're into rogue-likes you could care less what it looks like. The 3D tileset is a bit confusing to look at, because it's not actually 3D, it's just tiles that are drawn to look 3D, and so you move like a sprite that's not 3D in a 3D world, and it... yeah, it just looks awkward. I can't recommend it. The 'big tiles' one is great, though.

Mostly, this just plays like a rogue-like. For specific differences between this one and Nethack, see the website, but there are a few extra classes and races, as well as that 'Extended Magic', whatever that is. According to the Wikipedia entry, there's been some cross-pollination with new ideas from Slash'EM being incorporated into Nethack. That's gotta be the highest form of compliment in the rogue-like community.

I found it harder than Nethack; I didn't make it off of the first dungeon level in my first four attempts. This was partially due to the fact that I was playing classes I'd never played with before, but mostly it was due to the fact that Slash'EM defaults to having you pick up everything you walk over, so I kept getting encumbered and not being able to move or defend myself while I tried to unload whatever object it was that had pushed me over the edge.

Most annoying feature? It accepts the arrow-keys for movement, but for inputting directions for commands, it demands the 'only used in frickin' rogue-like games' set of directional keys employing the 'k' and 'h' and whatever keys that I can never remember. I like to play rogue-likes (well, actually I don't) with my right hand remaining over the arrow keys while I deal with everything else with my left hand and too often I was having to change that up. Every other rogue-like I've played accepted the arrow-keys' directions at all stages.

I could go on another rant about how much I hate rogue-likes and why, but there's no reason. This seems like a fairly fleshed-out experience that differs from Nethack mostly in esoteric ways that only the experienced rogue-like gamer will notice, or even reach. I'd recommend it mostly on the basis of the larger tile-set, compared to Nethack, as it makes it easier on the eyes for extended playing.

FreedroidRPG

What a pleasant surprise. While in an obviously incomplete state, FreedroidRPG is a surprisingly functional and full-featured attempt at blending a Diablo-clone with a more traditional RPG. I'd definitely recommend it to fans of Diablo-style RPGs or fans of sci-fi humor, without a second thought.

The plot is just weird. You're on a far away planet, where bots were the friends and helpers of humanity until just recently; they revolted and are out to slaughter all the humans. You play the part of Tux, a Linerian (read: a penguin). Linerians are an ancient and wise race said to be able to communicate with computers via their minds, and they came from an unknown galaxy for an unknown reason centuries ago. Tux was in cryogenic sleep until he was awakened by a human who was hoping he could save the world.

Yeah, it's really that bizarre. It's actually got a decent amount of depth; there's a city run by the tyrannical Red Guard, who offer folks security at the cost of outrageously high taxation and lack of personal freedoms. The city is well-populated with a diverse and unique cast of characters. The surrounding countryside, as well, is peopled with bizarre personalities that are a joy to interact with.

And that's the best thing about FreedroidRPG: its personality. The game is full of amusing jokes about Linux culture and geekdom in general, making it a delight to uncover new characters. While the writing is occasionally clumsy, it's usually witty and clever.

Unfortunately, there's not as much personality or cleverness in the general plot progression, as quests inevitably devolve into going into the same type of place (a dark and cramped dungeon) and doing the same type of thing: killing all the bad bots.

Its lineage is partially to blame for this; you could say similar things about Diablo, but Diablo did feature unique and varied locales which contained unique and varied creatures to kill. Here, everything looks pretty similar, and the bots are mostly derivative and unimaginative. This could change as more art assets are created for the game, but at its current state, outside of the city there's an awful lot of awfully similar terrain.

The graphics are a slapdash mix of aesthetics, with romantically pastelled post-apocalyptic trees surrounded by futuristic classic sci-fi looking buildings - it's Star Trek-meets-Fallout, competently done to varying degrees of success. It's never ugly, but it's occasionally boring.

The music is pretty but it gets old really fast. The music changes whenever you hit a different area, which makes for grating rapid transitions whenever you're near a border; this isn't the first game where I've noticed this, and it's a bit annoying.

Everyone's played Diablo so the basic game mechanics should be easy to pick up. Click to move, click to attack. Unfortunately, the pathfinding blows in constrained spaces and there's enough of a problem with item-finding that to pick something up or to attack something sometimes requires a bunch of random repositioning to find the sweet spot where the game will recognize what you're trying to do. It's manageable, but annoying. A little work on the part of the dev-team could fix it.

The only other real problem I found was that quest items are not indicated as such. This directly led to me quitting the game, as I discovered that I'd inadvertently sold an item needed for the completion of a quest, before I even got the quest. After wandering around the game world for hours, some Googling revealed that I had been wasting my time, and that I would have to start over to finish the quest. Game-breakers like that suck.

Outside of those faults, however, it's a fun romp in a geektastic post-apocalyptic world. Forewarned is forearmed (don't sell the energy crystals!), and keeping the flaws in mind, you should have a good time with FreedroidRPG. If it ever makes it to 1.0, it will be favorably comparable with any of the commercial Diablo-clones of the past few years. Open-source games, like ugly people, prove that personality goes a long way. FreedroidRPG has personality in spades.

Falcon's Eye

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention something here: I don't really like rogue-likes. They're boring and frustrating to me. Falcon's Eye is a graphical engine for playing the most famousest rogue-like of all, NetHack. As such, it's not my cup of tea. Is it a good game, however?

Sort of, if you like rogue-likes. But sort of not. Let me explain: There are two issues with NetHack that people who don't like it, don't like. Every complaint with the game falls into one of these two categories: the gameplay, and the graphics. Falcon's Eye does nothing to fix the former - it's still NetHack. If you don't like the way the game plays, throwing graphics on top of it won't help. Trust me, I know.

But replacing the ASCII graphics of the original with some well-done if not exactly impressive 2D-isometric tiles does a lot to make it easier on the eyes. Gamers who didn't come up on text-based games and old-school low-res graphics tend to dismiss rogue-likes out of hand because they're so unapologetically low-tech, graphically, and Falcon's Eye does a good job of eliminating that, at least as far as independent/open-source games go. It certainly doesn't match current retail-gaming graphics, and it's not even as pretty as the best of the independents, but it does alright.

I said that it doesn't fix any of the problems people have with the mechanics of rogue-likes, but that's not entirely true. Mouse support had the added consequence of getting rid of the need to remember a bazillion keyboard commands - since the game is supposed to be playable with a mouse, clicking on things brings up option menus that allow you to select the command. I suspect that not all commands are represented in these menus, but the vast majority of them are.

Admittedly, one of the (many) reasons I don't like rogue-likes is the insane number of commands, many of which are useful only in very rare and specific circumstances. So kudos to Falcon's Eye for ameliorating that issue. But it just adds its own set of issues, as it's a bit annoying to have to navigate through these long lists of commands every time you want to do anything. What the mouse adds to ease-of-assimilation, it detracts from ease-of-usage.

Those perks come with a further price. Say what you will about how lame ASCII graphics are, as far as map-reading goes, they have a benefit: it's very simple to understand the layout of the level you're moving around in. The 3D isometric nature of the graphical overlay makes differentiating between different corridors problematic, when they're very close to each other (which is common), and the mouse-support makes it even worse. Click a teensy bit to the whatever-direction-you-like, and instead of moving a single square, you're walking five miles through a bunch of corridors to get to a tile right next to it.

And basically, that's the downfall of Falcon's Eye. Not that, specifically, but the reason it's a problem, and the reason there are others. Falcon's Eye isn't a graphical rogue-like, it's a graphical overlay on top of a text-based rogue-like. It wasn't written from the ground up to be graphical and mouse-driven, it just had a graphical and mouse-driven coat of paint slapped on top.

For this reason, I can't really recommend it, even to fans of rogue-likes. Rather than opening up the world of rogue-likes to players who like graphics, it's more likely to annoy players of rogue-likes who don't mind the ASCII. It's still not super accessible, and you're still going to have to scour the code, or FAQs on the internet, or both, if you want to come anywhere near actually surviving to the endgame. It's not the best of both worlds, or the worst of both worlds. It's the mediocre of both worlds.

Exult

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Arkhart

The short version: don't bother with Arkhart.

The long version begins now: Arkhart is another incomplete game. They got the engine functioning, if not complete, but there's no real game here, and it's a bit annoying to toy with.

This is a 3D isometric RPG, which looks vaguely like Diablo would have if it had come out a few years earlier than it did. There's a backstory involving the arrival of some alien insects, and a rogue priest who starts a war between the 'humans' and the aliens, centuries ago, but in this demo sorta dealio, that doesn't really matter.

The biggest problem with this game is that it's not done, resulting in the main quest being about ten minutes long, and only that long because walking around is painfully slow and there isn't a run button. Outside of that, there are a few other things that make it not even as good as you would expect from that level of completion.

The developers were French, apparently. This results in the French equivalent of Engrish mostly, with some parts not translated at all, and therefore entirely inscrutable to my mostly monolingual self (I took Latin in high school, and German in college; I understand less than nothing of French). The font the game uses is a bit hard to read in the first place, and badly translated + badly rendered = hard to understand, if occasionally unintentionally amusing.

As far as I can tell, the only controls are the arrow keys, for rotating the camera and moving forward (you can't move backwards, which makes for an unintuitive experience from the getty-up), and the left mouse button for... clicking on things. Most things do nothing when clicked upon, but you can initiate conversations with NPCs via clicking on them, and I think clicking on a flower picks up some leaves of the flower, although I couldn't tell as the dialog box that comes up is entirely in French. I needed to collect two things, one of which I got from an NPC. I can only assume I got the other one from clicking on the flower.

The sound gets a little old (it's just one song that loops) but is nice enough. It has that fantasy film score vibe, only less so.

All you can do is talk to NPCs and walk around. I didn't do much exploration after it told me that I'd finished the demo, so there may be a massive world here, but if so, it's not worth your time to examine it. Which is a shame, because the graphics are crisp if a little old-school, the engine seems to work at rendering the environment, and with a little work it could have been used to build an actual decent game. I think.

But first they'd have to add a run key. The character walks at an amazingly slow rate; if they'd made the same game in the 2D tile-based Adonthell engine, it would have taken approximately a minute and a half to finish the quest, but it takes like ten or fifteen minutes here. The difference comes solely from the time it takes to walk from place to place.

Since this game hasn't been updated since 2003, I think it's safe to assume that you're really wasting your time if you bother downloading it. It's not a game, it's a tech-demo, and it's not even a particularly engaging tech-demo. If you're a member of the dev team that was putting it together, wasted countless hours making it work, and then somehow stopped before adding a plot or any real gameplay, I beg you to reconsider. It seems like you got the hardest part over; why not make something fun out of it?

Adonthell: Waste's Edge

The best of the lot, so far, despite the fact that's it's basically a tech-demo for incomplete technology. Adonthell is a game engine that is eventually (we all know how open-source development tends to go, right?) going to be used to craft an old-school console-style RPG set in an epic Tolkienesque world. Waste's Edge is a module that demonstrates where the engine is at right now.

While the final product may aspire to the heights of great SNES RPGs such as Final Fantasy II (IV in Japan, I think) or Earthbound (Mother 2 in Japan, I think), Waste's Edge plays more like an extremely simplified adventure game that takes those old-school RPGs as inspiration for its user-interface. There is no combat, and no inventory system (although that is deceptive; technically in two spots your character actually picks up an item - but it's done solely through text and plot-triggers, and doesn't involve an actual inventory system).

What is there? Well, there's a solid story and the enter-button. That's right, one button. You use it to activate people and objects. Basically, if you're in front of an object, you press enter, and it looks at it (or, in rare circumstances, interacts with it). If you're in front of a person, it initiates conversation. You use the arrow keys to move around, but outside of that, the only key you use is the enter-key.

It's relatively short - call it an hour or three - but because of that, the simple system never really gets old, and it actually works to make the experience more gratifying than some RPGs by not making you waste tons of time grinding to level up so you can beat a boss-character, or doing all the "realistic" things RPGs tend to require, like buying potions or resting. Despite the fact that the game consists entirely of walking up to people and talking to them, then using what they've said to figure out who you need to talk to next, it's fast-paced and a lot of fun.

Since the bulk of the game is just reading conversational text, it helps that the writing is consistently at the higher level of fan-fiction type stuff. It's readable, and has a lot of personality, and doesn't descend into frightening levels of cliche very often.

Before I continue, one caveat: just like Abuse, this one requires you to do more than simply install the game from the 'Add/Remove...' window - after you add it there, you have to open up Synaptic and install the module 'Waste's Edge' as well. Actually, you should probably just install both simultaneously from Synaptic; there's no reason for you to do things as backwards as I do. With that said, on to the specifics:

Graphically, it's not exactly the bee's knees. It's striving for that old-school CRPG feel, and that's what it achieves. No more, and maybe a little less. The only thing really bad about the art-direction is that the main character, a (presumably) male half-elf, looks like a waitress in a '50s diner. Outside of that, everything's great for the resolution at which it operates, and the character portraits that show up during dialog capture the personalities of the characters they portray.

The soundtrack is delightful. 8-bit sounding drums with a bunch of piano and strings that's really soothing and pretty, and some nice melodic synth-guitar. It's apparently available here, but I'm not sure which tracks are from the soundtrack to Waste's Edge and which are unrelated.

This was fun. Especially since I've been so story-deprived since I started this blog. There's a charming sense of humor, accompanied with the kind of fleshed-out-by-inference sort of world that allows the game to seem serious enough to be engaging. It's unfortunate that everyone with dwarves n' elves in a game has to make them dislike each other, but oh well. It's worth mentioning that there's a lot of backstory available on the game's website, that probably fleshes out the world a lot and adds more depth to the plot of this little game, as well as setting the state for the epic RPG to follow. Some day. I look forward to it, personally...