glTron

If I hadn't already played Armagetron Advanced (reviewed here), I probably would have been impressed by glTron. Unfortunately, they essentially offer the same gameplay, and while glTron has a few nice touches, Armagetron Advanced is a more feature-rich and solid production.

Like Armagetron, glTron is a lightcycle game, based on the scenes from the sci-fi Disney classic film. It captures the look of the film, and the controls are simple and intuitive, but... so does Armagetron.

Differences? First, the positive: the mini-map that shows the whole playing field is a nice touch; you can tell at a glance exactly what's going on and plan your strategy around that.

The other big difference is the booster-button. Pressing it gives you a speed boost, and in one game mode allows you to power through walls. Armagetron allows you to gain extra speed solely via a weird wake-system, where if you're close to a wall, you gain a bit of extra speed. It's very unintuitive and I never quite got the hang of it. In glTron, the booster button allows for a simple and highly intuitive method of gaining extra speed, which can be very useful. Huzzah for that!

A minor difference that may make all the difference to you is that glTron has a simple method for adding your own music to the game. You just drop your music files into the appropriate directory, and select them from the internal menu. While you could play Armagetron with another music player running in the background, in-game support theoretically means less processor overhead and is just a nice feature.

Negatives? As far as I could tell, glTron runs only in a window, and only at one resolution (technically, you can change the resolution from the command line, but can't go into full-screen even from there). The graphics aren't quite as nice looking, even at a comparable resolution.

glTron does offer different artpacks - you just download the artpack and plop it in the appropriate directory, and it becomes available within the game's menu system the next time you start the game. Some of the artpacks may make up for the game's innately lackluster look - I didn't install any. Their screenshots showed them to be better done than the graphical themes available for Armagetron, which is an amusing quandary: better game, with better graphical engine, or lamer game with more creatively styled graphics? You decide. Out of the box, Armagetron is more appealing.

Biggest drawback? No network support, yet. You can play up to four players locally, sharing a keyboard, but uhmmm... yeah, that's not ideal. Armagetron offers 16-player networked games, which is in fact ideal. With no story and limited AI, these games depend on their multiplayer to make them fun once the mechanics have been figured out - without the added dimension of intra-human competition, there's just no real reason to play very much. The FAQ on the website says that network play is planned - for 2004. Obviously, they didn't make that deadline, but glTron was still being updated as of October of '07, so there's still hope.

Those are pretty much the only differences. glTron isn't a bad game - it's a solid implementation of the lightcycle game from Tron. But it's not as good as the other lightcycle game available from Ubuntu's default sources, so I don't see any reason to mess with it. If they get around to implementing network play, you may want to revisit this one and see if the alternate artpacks make it more aesthetically appealing, but until then, I'd pass on it.

gLife

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

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

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

GL-117

This makes the second flight-sim we've looked at here, and while GL-117 is bunches less realistic, it's also bunches more fun. It appears to be a few versions out of date, which is a bit odd considering that the last version released was released in '05, but even in this state it's completely playable.

There are four training missions that give you the hang of controlling the aircraft and blowing stuff up, but the meat of the game lies in its campaign mode. There doesn't appear to be any sort of 'story' per se, at five missions in; each mission is arbitrarily defined, and not related to any of the others.

GL-117 is an arcadey combat flight-sim; prior to each level, you pick your plane and your armament package, and then it plops you into the mission a few hundred feet above the ground. While taking off and landing are not the important bits of combat, the fact that you never take off and that it just cuts to the mission-select screen after you finish a mission certainly make the simulation a lot less immersive.

Where GL-117 really shines is in the controls - I've never played a flight-sim with mouse controls so intuitive and streamlined that they feel perfectly natural. I wasn't even tempted to pull out the joystick, which is a first for me as far as flight-sims go. Huzzah!

Graphically, it's got the Linux-3D look. You know how everything is sharp and well-defined, but doesn't look photo-realistic, it just looks 3D? If retail games are using oil-paints, your average open-source game is rocking crayons or colored pencils. This falls at the upper end of colored pencils, but it's certainly not as impressive as that game for the 360 I keep seeing ads for.

The machine-gun and explosion sounds are a bit too tinny and empty for my tastes, but the throttle sound is fun. The music is decent and oddly dancy, but it only plays in the title screen, so it doesn't really matter.

Flaws? The most glaring issue I had was that I couldn't create new pilots or delete a pilot or anything; this resulted in my playing through everything as 'Pilot AB', and only having one slot I could play with. Couldn't find any mention of the problem elsewhere, so I'm going to assume it was fixed in a release after the one installed via Ubuntu's packages, and that I would have had no problem if I'd compiled from source.

The campaign, as mentioned, doesn't have any sort of narrative to it, so you are going to play solely for the joy of the mechanics. Thankfully, the mechanics are well-conceived and well-implemented, so it's still fun, but it doesn't have the pull to push further that a connected series of campaign missions would have had.

It's greatest strength is probably its largest flaw to a lot of people: it's not an accurate simulation at all. It's a fun simulation, but you only have to know five buttons and that includes the three buttons on your mouse. What it offers the casual player in terms of instant fun and accessibility, render it useless and unsatisfying to the hardcore flight-sim player.

There stands the verdict: if you're looking for a light n' fluffy pastry of a combat flight-sim, GL-117 is exactly what you need. It's simple, fun, and fast-paced. If, on the other hand, a hearty meal full of minutiae and realism is all that will satisfy you, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Frets On Fire

Hrmn, this one was disappointing but I think it's because my computer sucks, not because the game does. Frets On Fire is sort of an open-source version of Guitar Hero, which I've never actually played. But I've seen people play it at parties, which qualifies me to judge it, right?

The guitar-controller of Guitar Hero and Rock Band looks a lot more intuitive than using the F-keys of the keyboard, especially my keyboard with its weird gap between each set of four function keys, making my life difficult. That said, I'd think that anyone who was into the game could quickly get used to his or her particular keyboard, and you can re-map the keys if you're so inclined.

I couldn't really do a good test of this game, however, because it ran so poorly. Even at 640x480, there was horrible lag in the menus and in the game. I couldn't tell if my low scores were because of the lag, or because of my own ineptitude combined with the lag, but the lag was definitely a problem. Actually, my ineptitude was probably just as big a problem, but I'll never be certain, thanks to the lag. Sometimes it's better not to know.

Still, it's kind of a shame, as I would have liked to get into the game. It was worth the download just to go through the tutorial, voiced by a hilarious German accent that perfectly captures the personality of the sneering metal snob. Kudos for that!

On the downside, every time I tried to change video settings, it crashed to desktop with my resolution changed to 640x480, which was a major drag. I just had to log off and log back on to fix the resolution, but crashing is uncool. Thankfully, it did save my changes each time. Unfortunately, disabling anti-aliasing didn't help with the lag.

Also of note is the fact that the default package installs just the game. You can use Synaptic to download the default four-pack of songs, or you can search the internets for others. Torrent sites seemed to be full of them, as they were virtually all that came up when I googled for song-packs. As installed, it doesn't have any songs, so it doesn't work. But the tutorial works fine, and that was the best part for me, anyways.

Don't trust this review's negativity - others speak very highly of the game. If your hardware exceeds mine (almost everyone's does), it's probably very playable. It's a free Guitar Hero-clone that, according to the website, even accepts input from a guitar-controller, so it adds free extensibility to your console guitar games, if your PC runs it well. I have no valid opinion to express.

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.