News You Can Bruise for 2002 October 4 (entry 3)

Fri Oct 04 2002 19:32 Game Roundup: I visit Linux Game Tome so you don't have to! This is fun, almost like running a BBS. Here are some Da Warren-style descriptions for some games that caught my eye recently.

• Salp Wars, a multiplayer action game based entirely on in-jokes.
• Hubris, an amusing retelling of Tetris. "[T]he player arranges multiple falling blocks into sacrifical lines to please the gods, while avoiding building too close to the heavens lest his hubris arouse their wrath."
• Pachi el marciano, a nice-looking but slow (slow in the sense that your character doesn't move as fast as I'd like; not in the sense that it's processor-intensive) jumping game. I originally didn't look very closely at the title and thought it was about a mariachi singer named Pachi, but it turns out to be about a Martian named Pachi. The game would be more interesting if Pachi were a mariachi as well as a Martian. [Maybe he is! --Ed. Well, he does a good job of hiding it.]
• cars, the only game I've ever seen where the GIMP is the level editor. Now that's hard-core innovation!
• Linley's Dungeon Crawl, a Roguelike game with an emphasis on character development (skills and religion). I had to mess with the source to get it to compile. I remember seeing this a while back but it was just for DOS; there's a Linux version now and it's pretty nice. [Nb. this game gave me an idea for a silly little Rogue-based (but not Roguelike) game, of which more later; I may try to write it tomorrow.]
• Powermanga, a game which I'm not sure why it's called that since its raytraced sprites look more like Mr. Funercise In The 25th Century than anything that comes to my mind when I think 'manga'. However, the French probably do things differently. It's a nice shooter-with-purchasable-powerups game.
• Crossfire: I keep meaning to try out this game and then not doing it. I'll let you know how it goes.