Konquest

If I were making a list of the most dull games I've ever played, Konquest would surely rank pretty high. It's the most simplistic turn-based strategy game I've encountered, in a long and storied career of playing turn-based strategy games a few times then quitting because I suck.

There's these planets, see. And they produce ships every turn. Every turn, you can send ships from your planets to other planets. And that's it. Send ships to other planets you own, to reinforce them. Send ships to planets you don't own to attack them - if you win, they're yours. The point is to control all the planets.

They added 'depth' by having each planet generate ships at a different rate, and also having each planets' ships be of different effectiveness. Wow. I'm so impressed. Linux gaming disappoints once again!

In all honesty, the only thing that could possibly save this game is networked multiplayer, because then you could engage in the social activity of chatting with someone while simultaneously engaging in this most boring of games. It doesn't work in person, because if you're playing this in the same room as someone, you'll both realize that it would be more fun to watch Die Hard 2: Die Harder, and quit playing the game around five turns in. Unfortunately, there is no network multiplayer.

It's funny, because the open-source gaming community is often running its mouth about compelling graphics being irrelevant, because compelling gameplay is all-important. Konquest makes this point nicely, by having a nice-looking GUI for what is essentially the least compelling experience I've ever had in a game that wasn't tragically broken. Did I say 'wasn't tragically broken'?

My bad. You have a good chance of opening the game up only to discover that the tool-tips that give you a planet's stats (i.e. make the game possible to play, basically) are cropped and invisible. I'm not sure what caused the problem, and whenever it happened, I just had to close it and restart it and it fixed itself, but man, it never rains but it pours...

To summarize: Konquest sucks. Don't play it. Download an abandonware copy of Master of Orion or something, if you have to get your turn-based space-game on. This is just too limited and simplistic to offer anything near a fun experience; if you want a simple but satisfying turn-based strategy game, just play Go.

KNetwalk

I'm thinking that KNetwalk may be my favorite KDE game so far. It may just be that I'm really, really sick of playing these damn KDE games, though. Remember the classic game Pipe Dream? KNetwalk is sort of like that, only you have to make the water flow through every piece on the board.

The difficulty that suggests is mediated by the fact that you don't have any time constraints; there's no 'water' per se, just electrical charge, so you have as long as you need to get 'er done. I can't believe I just used that phrase.

Anyway, the basic premise is, like I said, one you've seen before. You have to rotate pieces so as to allow the network connection to hit every PC on the LAN, and there can't be any pieces unconnected to the LAN.

It's a lot of fun, actually. It uses your brain, the game's over pretty quickly, it rarely frustrates for very long on the easier difficulty levels, and it features high-scores in the form of counting how many clicks it takes you to complete, so you get to compete against yourself (and anyone else who plays games on your computer).

Simple logic-puzzle gaming fun for those who like simple logic puzzles. It does feature sound effects, but I think they're only when you begin a game, and when you end a game. I tend to not hear them, because my speakers cut off automatically when they don't get any sound for a long time, and the sounds are so short that when they play, they get lost in the speakers re-powering up. I hate these speakers, for the record.

If you're looking for a quick game, this is probably more mentally stimulating than Solitaire, if not generally as fast-paced, for me. I'll go ahead and highly recommend it for fans of logic-puzzle games looking for a bite-sized snack.

KMines

I shouldn't take up too much of your time talking about KMines. It's a Minesweeper clone - like Mines for Gnome (see review here) which comes preinstalled with Ubuntu.

In fact, there's only one real difference: KMines has themes. Only three are installed by default, but I assume you can add more. Playing full-screen, the 'Gardens of Danger' theme looks quite sharp, and adds a much-needed splash of color into a traditionally grey game. Unfortunately, it's not so playable when it's small, and you're better off sticking to the 'Traditional' or 'Default' themes if you're going to be playing in a window.

Outside of that difference, it's Minesweeper, it's Mines, it's whatever other similar games you've played. In the end, who really cares? This is a well-done implementation of the Windows classic for KDE, but unless you're a true Minesweeper-ophile, I wouldn't bother installing it; I'd just stick with the game that came with whatever flavor of OS I'm using.

Kenolaba

And so the revolving cycle continues, with Kenolaba being unique if not exactly engrossing. The best way to explain it is Othello if it were sumo-wrestling. Confused? My job here is done!

Honestly, that's pretty much how it plays out, right down to the annoying give-and-take tactics that take forever to play out. You start out on a hexagonal playing-field populated with balls. The point is to push your opponent's balls off of the playing field. You have to have more balls in the group you're pushing with than the group you're pushing.

My room mate cracked up every time I said 'balls' while trying to describe it to him.

It's graphically on-par with late 90s shareware for Windows, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The graphics are simple, but clear, and not entirely unattractive. I hate the color yellow, so I personally don't really care for the color-scheme, but the vaguely golf-ballish look of the pieces is fun. It compares favorably to most of the other KDE games I've looked at, meaning it doesn't make me want to vomit, so there's that.

There's no sound. Once again, and I'm tired of saying that, so I think I'm just not going to mention sound when it isn't present and isn't necessary, this game doesn't need sound. It's a turn-based logic-puzzle/strategy game. Without a plot, or any kind of dramatic tension at all. Sound would just be irritating.

Final verdict? Meh. Not my thing, but at least it's not a clone of something I've played six times already, and fully functional. It's got an AI opponent, with different degrees of difficulty, so it's cool for single-player. If they were to add networked multiplayer it would pretty much be perfect for what it is. Want another abstract strategy game? Check it out. Want another FPS? Pass.

Hex-A-Hop

The open-source community seems to just love making puzzle games, and so Hex-a-hop* had to be quite a good game to stand out. It stood out. Despite the fact that I hate puzzle games, and I hate them even more after downing a bunch of bottles of Mickey's Big Mouth while fighting a head-cold, I was hooked.

You play the role of a cute little girl who has to crush green tiles. Once you land on one, it cracks, and once you jump off of it to another tile, it's crushed and falls into the sea. The whole 'puzzle' part involves going from tile to tile in such a way as to be able to crush all of them, leaving yourself a solid tile to jump onto from the last one standing.

It's really hard when you've been drinking 'Fine Malt Liquor' and it's probably really hard even when you haven't. After you beat a level, it unlocks more levels in a world-map from which you can select which one you want to play next. If one of them is too frustrating, you just go back to the world map and pick another one... Which will also be too frustrating, eventually. I spent forever trying to brute-force a solution for the second level I played, before giving up and finding much greater success with the alternate branch.

The world is not filled entirely with green tiles: there are a plethora of purpose-specific tiles to aid/hinder you in your quest, and figuring out how to use them, as well as how they interact with other sorts of tiles, is sure to bring you hours of delighted frustration. With over a hundred levels, I have barely touched the surface of what Hex-a-hop has to offer, and it was enough to kick my ass.

The requisite technology analysis: graphically, it's got a cute/cartoony art-style that looks as cute and cartoony as anything else windowed, but blown up to full-screen isn't quite as high-res as commercial software. It still looks really nice. You could even call it 'current-gen' as it's been ported to the PSP and PSP Slim by homebrew developers, so it's running on cutting-edge console hardware. :)

There is no audio, so the audio never gets monotonous. Sound effects would perhaps be nice, but by the time you've restarted the same level thirty times because you're 'in the zone', you won't even notice that it's been completely silent for forever. Until the dog barks and it scares the hell out of you, anyways.

If you're into puzzle-games, this one's a keeper. Even though I'm not, and I'm miserably stuffy-headed, I couldn't help but keep trying... and trying... and trying... to progress in the game. There's no real-time element, so it's entirely a cerebral experience, but its instant rewind and restart features keep the pace up even when you're thoroughly frustrated. If you're only going to install one turn-based logic-puzzle, this is the one (at this point in the list, at least; its closest competition is probably Fish Fillets NG (review here)).

*This is the website for the game, but I can't get it to load. I couldn't even get a return when I pinged the domain. I hope it is just temporarily down, because I want to see the hints page. :)

Gamazons

Weird game. Gamazons is a chess-like game, played on a 10x10 chess board where you get five pieces that move like queens. I'll never play it again, but people who like playing chess on a regular basis should probably check it out, as it's a very different sort of game but it relies on the same sort of tactical thinking, perhaps moreso.

You see, not only do all of the pieces move like queens, they also all have to shoot an 'arrow' at the end of each turn. So the board slowly fills up with these permanent 'arrows' that can't be moved over. You don't take pieces, you eliminate squares. The winner is the last person who can move a piece. Your goal is to trap the opponent's pieces with arrows while leaving your own pieces with mobility. It's just as brain-stressing as a game of chess, but with different strategies.

Graphically, as you can see, it's a bit simplistic. Outside of one or two of the 3D chess games and a handful of other exceptions, graphics haven't been very impressive for any of the logic-puzzle/strategy games we've looked at, so I wouldn't take off too many points for that. Gamazons has no music or sound effects.

There is an AI opponent, so you can play against the computer, watch the computer play against itself, or play against another person locally. There is no network support, but the website states that network support is planned, so just hang in there. Maybe.

If you're a fan of turn-based strategy board-gaming, you should probably check this out. If you're not - and I'm guessing you're not - you should probably not bother. If you don't dig playing chess, you're not gonna dig this any more.

Fyrdman

What can I say about Fyrdman? It's ugly, I can't make it do anything, and I think it's multi-player only, which puts it outside the mission of this blog. It has no documentation: it was designed to run under KDE, not Gnome, and so trying to use the help command just gets you a 'There is no documentation' error in some KDE help-file system thing.

This is a game from the 'GGZ Gaming Zone Project', which "makes free online gaming possible." Or at least, the website says it does. It doesn't seem possible for me.

FreeCiv

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bygfoot

Ok, time for another confession: I'm American. Unlike many Americans of my generation, I did actually play soccer (rest-of-world football, whatever) for a few years in middle-school. But it hadn't reached even the depths of popularity it's at in the U.S. today, much less the frenzied level of obsession the rest of the world seems to have.

What the hell do I know about leagues n' whatnot? I'll tell you what: nothing at all. Which is sort of important, as Bygfoot is a football (soccer) league-management sim. I think these are all the rage in the rest of the world, and maybe with Americans younger than me, but I'm not them.

I can't even begin to comprehend this game, and it's probably very simplistic in its approach - it claims to be, at least. I don't remember what position I played, and I don't know positions there are, and I can't even remember the difference between red cards and yellow cards. I can follow a game on tv, sort of. Managing a wall of text on my computer?

Nup. Can't do that. So here's a review from some sort of soccer-related blog. Interestingly, he chose the same "I will not customize my blog at all" look that I did, so if you ignore the top banner, you can pretend you're reading the review here. I think he might even be an American - he chose to play within our league, anyways, and I can't think of any reason why anyone not from American would want to do that.

Boson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Battle for Wesnoth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attal: Lords of Doom

Unfortunately unplayable, at least for me. Out of the box, I ran into the biggest problem I've seen with the whole automatic-installation thing under Linux, namely that when you compile something yourself, you know where all the documentation is. Attal: Lords of Doom is apparently lacking in any real documentation anyway, but it took forever to discover that.

The GUI loads, but I can't get it to do anything except display a few messages indicating that it's doing something. It never actually does anything. I went to Taco Bell hoping that it would have loaded a scenario by the time I got back; no such luck.

The forums for the project are non-functional on the official website, and have received like a dozen posts since 2005 on the SourceForge site (linked in the first paragraph), so there wasn't much help to be had there. The only posts I saw that had been made in 2007, outside of the announcement of a 1.0 release candidate by the developers (I think that was a bit premature) were people with the same problems I had, namely, the game not working.

If anyone tells me the magic secret to getting this thing functioning, I'd be glad to check it out. I was looking forward to it. There is much disappointment and gnashing of teeth in the house of Devlocke tonight.