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.

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'.

BattleBall

BattleBall puts me in the unique situation of wanting to praise a game I don't really enjoy at all. It's not really pretty, it's missing a bunch of features that it should have, and it's not even fun. But the idea behind it is amusing, and there's the solid core for a really fun game here.

Basically, it's soccer played with combat vehicles. The players are all tanks, divided into teams, and each team has a headquarters. Points are scored by running into or shooting the ball, so as to move it down the field to your opponent's headquarters. Your gun doesn't destroy anything, but if it hits another tank, it causes that tank to spin around out of control for a second, and if it hits the ball, the ball bounces off of the projectile.

And you can turn into a helicopter.

How could it go wrong? The sad and simple truth is that the game is just annoying to control, to someone whose been using mouse+keyboard or dual-analog controls for way too long to go back to the keyboard. If I could mouse-aim, or alternately have one analog-stick for movement and one for aiming, the rest of the faults of this game would be forgiveable. I'm sure when it was new, it was awesome. I remember thinking my friends were crazy for trying to play some old FPS with the mouse (I think it was the first Quake, but it could have been something else; long, long ago, y'know?).

The other problems are legion, but excusable, because they don't affect the fun of the game, just the friendliness. The biggest one is that all aspects of game-configuration are via command-line. Which is normal for Linux software, but not normal for modern-day gaming. Some sort of front-end for the game would mitigate that completely, without even changing the code. I have no idea how the multiplayer would work - apparently that's all handled via Linux command-line programs somehow.

I thought the game had no options at all, but then a quick look at the man file (another way in which this game shows itself to be part of the Linux, rather than gaming, community; most of these Linux games have no man file at all, or useless man files with no real info) showed that it's configurable as all-get-out. Up to six teams, with the number of players limited only by the processor of the machine it's being played on (apparently, rather than a bunch of clients connecting, it generates the graphics for everyone playing, and does all the software-running, on one machine; everyone else plays on connected terminals).

But you set up all of that via the command line. It doesn't appear to even have a configuration file of some sort that you can set it up in; you have to type out a half-dozen flags, the names of the team-members, and all the options every time you begin the game, from the command line. Unless you want to play it one on one, one human player against the AI, so that was how I played it.

BattleBall has no sound, and very primitive 3D graphics that are actually quite charming. It shows its age (at least, I hope it's old; I can't find a website for it anywhere, and there's a new game from a commercial developer with the same title, which made the search confusing) but it's easy to interpret and looks fine.

With a configuration utility or internal game setup, and the ability to use a modern control system, this would actually be a great game. It's bizarre, and intriguing, and would promise a lot of multi-player fun. As it is, it's a distraction for ten minutes while you take in the premise, and then it's not really worth touching ever again.

Armagetron Advanced

Remember how I felt like Nibbles was a bit boring, though it might have been better with multiple real opponents? Well, scratch that. There's no reason at all to play Nibbles with Armagetron Advanced available! The basic rules are the same: you leave a trail behind you, and the point is to get other players to crash into your trail, or the walls, and avoid crashing into anything yourself.

Only instead of being a 2D game about worms, it's a 3D game based on the light-cycle races from the classic film Tron. And it's much, much better. Why?

Well, the easy one is graphics. Not only does the isometricish 3D display make it intrinsically more fun (not being able to see the entire field of play at once adds more skill to the experience), the art direction is snappy, and consistent with itself. It's simplistic, like the scenes from the film which inspired it, mainly consisting of a black grid upon which are located however many players, each of which is driving a light-cycle in a unique color, and which leaves a wall of that color behind it as a trail. It's easy to comprehend, and easy on the eyes.

The sound is relatively minimal as well, mostly being engine sounds that change in pitch according to your speed, and sounds when you turn. This means you can play along to whatever soundtrack you like, and not be annoyed by constant sharp interruption. It plays well with other audio. (note: it doesn't actually feature an audio-player that you can select files to play with; I'm just saying that you can be playing music in something)

The gameplay itself is very customizable, with a full two screens of options setting everything from the number of players to the size of the field of play to the speed of the game... tons of customization is available. There are only two styles of play out-of-the-box as compiled ('Last Man Standing' and 'Free Play'), but if you want to do additional work, there are a number of other modes available. Testing them seemed outside of the purview of this blog, but there appears to be a relatively active community that plays a number of them.

There's support for multiplayer games of a relatively large size, which can be served within the client or via standalone server, and I can only assume the game's more fun when you're playing with other people.

The basic gameplay consists simply of turning, and occasionally applying the break if/when so inclined, but there are some intricacies and tricks that add more depth, allowing you to capitalize on things like proximity to other players to increase your speed.

This is another winner. As a single-player game it's adequate - no story! no story! - but in terms of well conceived and solidly executed core mechanics, it's a winner, which can only mean that it would rock via multiplayer. Who could ask for anything more (from a multiplayer game)?