Kobo Deluxe

Hey, what's going on? Kobo Deluxe isn't a KDE game! Can it be? Blessed respite from the logic-puzzle/strategy doldrums, in the form of an action packed top-down space shooter? By Crom!* It is!

Maybe just because it was something different after the last half-dozen games, but I really enjoyed my time with Kobo Deluxe. Anyone who's played a video game in the last 30 years is familiar with the basic mechanics of these games; use the arrow-keys/number-pad to move your ship in the direction you desire, and press the fire-button to shoot.

Your ship in this game shoots out of its front and back (stern and bow?) simultaneously whenever its firing. The ship is always moving; there's no brakes, no accelerator, and no way to stop. You're in constant, uniform motion. With those two bits of information, you know all you need to know to play Kobo Deluxe. There are no power-ups, and on the 'Classic' difficulty level, one hit = death (the other difficulty levels have a life-bar, and the possibility for your guns to overheat, which didn't seem to have any affect when I played it).

This simplistic approach belies the frustrating, adrenaline-fueled nightmare of fun that actually makes up the game. The magic is in the level design. It's kind of hard to describe your goal... remember at the end of the first Star Wars movie (Episode 4, for the anally inclined) where Luke had to shoot that one spot on the Death Star? It's kind of like each level is populated with these squarish mini-Death Stars that have to be destroyed. Get 'em all, and you beat the level.

Each one has a central node, that destroys the whole structure when you hit it, and a bunch of other nodes (they're a different color) that hold up various pieces of the matrix. All of the nodes spit out something harmful, be it missles, weird spiky bullets, bombs, or what-have-you. So you have to dodge a constant stream of evil things while attempting to clear enough of the outer nodes to expose the central node and destroy the matrix/Death Star.

It's really fun, it gets really challenging a few levels in, and its addictive nature is enhanced by something the greatest gaming blog in the world mentioned when discussing Trials 2: as little interruption as possible between dying and trying again. The fire key doubles as the enter-key, so when you game-over, you can just tap it impatiently for a second and a half and you're right back in the game, at the level you died on. This makes it really easy to zone-out and kill shamefully long periods of time trying to get further.

It's got fifty levels, which will probably be enough to satisfy the person who only dabbles at the scrolling shooters, but expert sh'muppers will probably run through that, eventually. The levels are laid out in the same way (i.e. each Death Star matrix is in the same position each time you play the level in question) but the layout of the matrices, internally, is randomly generated each time, so they're slightly different - sometimes in maddening, level-altering ways - each time you play.

Hrmn... what else should I mention? There's a radar screen, that comes in extra handy in this game, as you can use it to line yourself up with targets that aren't on screen, and make strafing runs. I found the strategy invaluable, myself, but I have the reflexes of a garden-slug, so it may be less necessary to you able-bodied gamers.

The graphics are nothing to write home about, but they look coherent, with a retro style that makes the most of the low-fi visuals, and thanks to their relative simplicity, the game will probably run on just about anything. The enemies and obstacles are all clearly differentiated from one another and easy to spot - I didn't run into any of the sophomoric errors that haunt indie games, where stuff looks nice but is a pain in the ass to play with.

Sound-wise, it's got a typical retro sh'mup score with decent enough sound effects to get you into the spirit of the game aurally as well as visually. Of note is the fact that the game actually generates all of the music algorhythmically when the game is loaded, rather than including a bunch of .wav files in the install. That means less than nothing in today's world of broadband (even when the music's been generated, it only takes up a meg and a half of space; who cares about an extra meg in a game download?), but if you're using the game on a PocketPC or something, it might come in handy, and it's just neat. Go ingeniosity!

Add it all up, and you've rather surprisingly got a sh'mup that has my unqualified seal of approval. Tiny elements of a dozen games get mashed up into a thoroughly satisfying gumbo of gaming greatness. It's not going to change the world, or even change the world of gaming, but if you're in the mood for some semi-twitchy gaming you could do far worse. Check it out.

*- I've been using this phrase since I was 10, occasionally, so please don't think I'm promoting Age of Conan or anything. Though I can't wait to try it as soon as I get my PC upgraded to current standard. I'm just sayin'...

Holotz Castle

The internet seems to agree that Holotz Castle is a Lode Runner clone. I can't really remember Lode Runner, though I'm pretty sure we had a copy of Lode Runner Construction Set on my XT back in the day. Therefore, I have no idea if it utilizes the amazing mechanics of that classic game or not. It certainly didn't amaze me.

It's one of those 'beat the room' games where you have to collect a certain number of somethingorother and then make it to the exit. In this case, you play the part of two people who "touched that stone" and were transported to another world. Woot. One of them has to collect keys, and the other has to collect stones. You don't get to pick, it just arbitrarily decides which character you are for each level. And it has no meaning whatsoever. The two characters play the same.

The rooms are littered with beasties and traps which must be avoided. Examples: slugs, firepits, acid/lava puzzles, dissolving floor spaces. Pretty par for the course, really. Getting to some places requires doing things like swinging across on ropes, which is fun, or would be, if it weren't for the fatal flaw in this title...

... Namely, the fact that the jump button must be held down to complete long jumps to ropes and platforms, but also automatically re-jumps as soon as you hit a platform or rope. So you immediately launch yourself off of the thing you're trying to land on nine times out of ten. The one time you don't is when you're jumping onto something close by, that doesn't require you to hold the jump button down.

The fact that jumping - the only mechanic in the game outside of walking left or right - is hopeless broken makes what would be an enjoyable bit of beat-the-clock action gaming into a frustrating 'I'm going to throw this ever-lovin' keyboard through my monitor' experience. Normally this is where I say something along the lines of "And it's a shame, because if it weren't for that, this would have been a great game."

That's not really true, in this case. It would have been a passable, dare I say mediocre, game. Which is almost praiseworthy in the open-source community, but honestly, even if the jumping worked, it would just make the game easy enough to complete in a few hours max. In a way, the broken controls kind of extend the replay-value like the cut n' pasted levels in F.E.A.R. The graphics are cute but unimpressive, and the sound is basically the same.

There's some attempt to have a story, with semi-cutscenes playing every few levels where people say things like "I told you not to touch that stone. What are these keys? I think I should collect them." It's not exactly engrossing material. I don't think the developer speaks English, however, so it's possible that in the native Spanish it's a gripping epic of a thriller.

If the jumping thing got fixed, this game would be good for a few hours of fun. With additional levels and a level-editor available for download from the website, you could theoretically extend that fun, but the core mechanics are so limited that I suspect it would get old rather quickly, and so broken in their current state that I can only view additional levels as additional torture.

I have to suggest passing on Holotz Castle; if you crave LodeRunner gameplay, you can probably find some console ports of LodeRunner that play fine in an emulator, have more levels, and aren't broken. They all probably also support using a joystick, which this one doesn't.

Bloboats

I'm not sure if I'm just really bad at Bloboats, or if it's really impossibly difficult. A quick glance around the internet reveals that a number of other people had serious difficulty with it, but there are a lot of lazy and/or incompetent people out there, so it's possible I'm just a member of that category.

This is another simple game - it's a side-scrolling platformer of sorts. You're the captain of a boat, and you have to get from the beginning of the level to the ship in need of rescue at the end of the level. You do this by accelerating, which causes your ship to want to flip up/backwards, so you have to 'steer' with the left and right keys to keep your ship moderately level.

There are obstacles (read: tentacle monsters!) and land-masses which must be jumped. The height of your jump is determined by how low you 'sank' in the water before rising out of it, which is hard to explain, easy to understand once you're doing it, but even harder to do effectively.

It's really hard to control the boat. And if you touch the tentacle monsters at all, you immediately explode into a gajillion pieces. For me, I found the controls simple to learn, but impossible to master, which made it less fun than the traditional 'simple to learn, but difficult to master' that most mechanics-based games strive for. I never really got past the 'trial-and-error' method of passing a level, where I just kept trying it until I lucked out as far as my position on a wave and managed to jump it right.

But the controls are consistent, and responsive, so it's possible I just suck at it. Graphically, it has a unique look. Sort of 'hi-res MS Paint', almost. It's child-like but attractive, and it performs well. It certainly doesn't look like a AAA retail title, but it's not supposed to.

Sound? Didn't work for me. Did some lookin' on the intarwebs and found other people with the same problem, but no solution. An amusingly nautical soundtrack would have made Bloboats more fun, but since I never really 'got it', I don't think it would have made it fun enough.

In all, if you're into odd physics-based boating games with tentacle monsters, I recommend trying it out. It's a relatively small download, and five minutes should be enough time for you to discover that you adore it, or can't stand it. I believe that most people will find it frustrating to play, and not a lot of fun, but I'm not sure enough of myself to give the game a 'don't bother'.

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.