News You Can Bruise for 2003 April 6 (entry 4)

Sun Apr 06 2003 21:55 I Know You Want Someone To Round Up Some Games:

• Agar is a C library for writing pseudo-RPG[0] games. Written for the in-progress game Trek To The Cave (motto: "Okay, we'll make the links visible, but that's it.").
• Nethack-el lets you play Nethack from within Emacs. As always, it's not an actual port of Nethack to Emacs, but it does patch Nethack so that it can display the Nethack messages, etc. in different Emacs windows.
• Bankiz is a multiplayer top-level fighting game in which your penguin kills other penguins with sundry weapons. This demonstrates my theory that in the absence of natural predators, penguins will develop ways of killing each other. The life bar on top of your penguin makes it look like the penguin is toting around a girder or something on its head.
• Genuts Cheese Indigestion Puzzle wins the silly name prize for this roundup, and also the triviality prize: the puzzles are all really easy. However, that mouse is indeed going to have some serious indigestion, and kudos to the game for recognizing that fact in the title. What if Pacman was like this? What if Pacman was one of us?
• DIE is "deathmatch with cars". I think this makes obvious the problem with every previous deathmatch game: you are not a car. This could be the first game with a "crush a mountain of Japanese steel" mode (of course, someone would have to write it, but that's never before stopped me proposing ridiculous modes).

[0] "Pseudo-RPG": TwenCen[1] Leonard/Andy term for computer games which have the trappings of traditional tabletop RPGs yet which are not actually RPGs. They're usually just tactical games. Not that there's anything wrong with that! There's no reason you couldn't implement an actual RPG in Agar, except for the inherent difficulty of doing role-playing with a software DM.

[1] Obvious nomenclature for this sort of stupid fake future slang, which I came up with last week while reading David Brin's Earth: "Newslang".