News You Can Bruise for 2003 January 11 (entry 2)

Sat Jan 11 2003 14:14 Game Roundup: Some of these games I've actually played, others I've just looked at the screenshots. Just like real game reviewers, except I'm honest.

• Polyroids is a cross-platform port of an old Asteroids-ish SGI game. In this game, you must prevent the sentient shapes of Flatland from taking over the universe. Space Command has equipped you with a ray which will reduce the many-sided Flatlanders to successively lower castes until they die of shame. Unfortunately, there's a bug (?) which makes it easy to cheat, even inadvertently. It's still a difficult game, although I find all Asteroids-ish games difficult because I never move around the screen.
• Senken is a Simcity-style game. It's too micromanage-y for me, but others might like it.
• Kamikaze is a nice-looking KDE Bomberman clone.
• The Perl BlackJack Engine does what I was going to do, only in Perl.
• Gnome Attacks, a game worthy of the "Carnage" brand. In fact, it's very similar to City Destroy Carnage except that the cities can't fight back.
• I should mention PoopmUp, "An Urban Flight Simulator", and leave it at that.
• AirStrike is a clone of some Amiga dogfight game or other. I think all such games should have a Snoopy vs. the Red Baron mode, but this one doesn't (in fact, I don't think any of them do, unless there's a special licensed game which only has that mode).