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(6) Tue Aug 10 2004 19:35 PST Games You Already Have Roundup III: The Search For Puzzle Games:
Tonight we have puzzle games, both those correctly categorized and the refugees from yesterday. This elusive category contains some of my favorite games and some of my least favorite. And now, the games. What inspiration will the challenger bring?
- Mahjongg (Gnome): The tiles look cheap, like they're made of
parchment wrapped around Altoids tins. If I'm going to play I want the
tiles to look classy. Otherwise: has hint, random number seed, etc,
the same as the Amiga Mahjongg I played at my uncle Jon's house (I seem to have a lot of history with
games played on my uncles' computers. Also, I only assume that was an
Amiga, but I think it was). Background color sucks, but you can change
it. Has a "shuffle" feature that shuffles just the tiles you haven't
already removed, which is a good way to avoid frustration, and it's
not cheating if you decide that's the game you're
playing. Nonetheless, this implementation is no match for:
- KMahjongg: Now these are some slick tiles. It's probably just
because the tiles are more stylized, so I don't try to see them as
photorealistic. But they look like they're made of sandstone or
something. Also, the KDE Mahjongg tile set has the awesome
fire-breathing (a Westernism?) dragon tiles to represent "C", "F", and
"P". Whatever those are. (PS: aha!) In its
turn, no match for:
- Shisen-Sho: Like the solitare remove-the-tiles computer Mahjongg
(not to be confused with actual Mahjongg as played by bored housewives
of all nations), but much better. This should be the standard Mahjongg
game, but it won't be because it doesn't look as cool in
screenshots. Instead of nice stacks of tiles you have a big
board. Tip: turn off gravity; the game is pointless unless you can see
yourself taking chunks of tiles out of the board. Did I mention that
this was the game I played in college when I was bored? Winner of
KDE/Gnome Mahjongg smackdown: It's Shisen-sho, in a blatant display of
favoritism! The crowd goes wild for Shisen-sho, master of games
played with Mahjongg tiles! Woooooooo!
- KHangman: This game made me laugh harder than any other game in
this roundup, but unfortunately the laughter was unintentional. When
you start up the game you are treated to the sight of an uppercase K
which has met an untimely demise at the end of the hangman's noose. The
interface eschews drop-down menus in favor of buttons along the side
of the panel, and one of the buttons is "Child Mode". If you click
"Child Mode" the interface simplifies drastically and the background
changes to a nice picture of rolling hills and sun and flowers. But
there's still that purple-tongued K dangling in the noose! I thought
Child Mode would sanitize the game, but it merely moves the death-fest
to an outdoor venue! Comic highlight of the Roundup!
Oh yeah, the game. It's hangman. It focuses too much on building
the scaffold rather than hanging you piecemeal, and the UI isn't up to
code, but it works. I couldn't lose, even on words like "ethnography",
but a thing about hangman that a lot of people don't appreciate is
that longer words are not neccessarily harder unless you're counting
on someone not knowing the word.
- Imagine if Bastet were
taken seriously as a game, not as an exercise in sadism. Imagine if it
were used as an example of a simple game you too could write, if
clones were indeed written of it, if small children pledged allegiance
to it each school day. You would have Color Lines. This whip-wielding
dominatrix of puzzle games will titillate you with lurid personal ads
in the "Alternatives" section of the local weekly and then prove
unable to deliver anything beyond simply hitting you with the whip a
lot. Originally written for Windows, it has infiltrated your
red-blooded Linux system in not one but the requisite two
incarnations: Kolor Lines for KDE, and Glines for Gnome. Now, in this
review, I shall have my revenge.
In this game you are faced with a grid containing some colored
balls. You get to move one ball to any accessible empty square, and
then three balls are placed randomly on the grid. When you line up
five or more like-colored balls they disappear and you get to move again. When the
grid fills up you lose.
The source of my frustration with this game is that it is
impossible to win, or even to keep playing indefinitely. With Tetris
you could imagine having superhuman reflexes and playing forever. With
Skee-Ball you are given a certain number of shots up front
and you do not resent the end of the game. In some games like golf, the game is played out to a series of goals which has a predefined end. But none of these are true of Color Lines; while in principle a game could go on forever, the laws of statistics say that no matter how good you
are, the board will always fill up and you will
lose. To stay in a steady state you would have to consistently be able
to create a line of 5 balls by moving 2 2/3 balls (since you get a
free move after completing a line). Good luck can keep you going for a
while, but this just makes you feel more helpless. It is a depressing
game.
As for the implementations themselves: The Gnome version lets you
change the graphic used to represent the balls; the KDE version lets
you set the difficulty level. Choose the feature that's right for you.
Now all that's missing is a game that combines Bastet with Color
Lines (putting the balls in the worst possible spaces), creating the
game of ultimate frustration. The "Very Hard" setting on Kolor Lines
comes close, but I think there's still room for improvement.
Winner of KDE/Gnome Color Lines smackdown: in the true spirit of
Color Lines, this smackdown will have no winner. Oh, all right. In the
slightly less true spirit of Color Lines I have chosen a winner at
random. random.choice(['KDE', 'Gnome']) == 'KDE'!
- GNOME Klotski: More on the puzzle end of the spectrum than the
game end. Like Sokoban played via telekenesis; you have to move little
blocks out of the way so the big block can be moved. It reminds me of
a wooden puzzle my father had, but that's about all I can say about
it. Oh, it also dares to, on the high score list, represent the number
of moves to two decimal places. Fun if you are crazy about Sokoban (and I
assume there are people who do). Come to think of it, why is there not
a GNOME Sokoban clone and a KDE Sokoban clone bundled with all my
installations?
- KDE Atomic Entertainment: Nice name. Sounds like a production
company. This is a game played on a Sokoban type board where you move
atoms around to form molecules. It's not Sokoban because the defining
game mechanism is reaching down from the third dimension and sliding an atom in one direction until it hits a wall, not pushing an atom
one square in the opposite direction from where you're
standing. Anyway, I like Sokoban better as far as gameplay, but I
really love the concept here.
- KBlackBox: It was with great forboding that I opened up this
"logic game". It was frustrating at first, so much so that I started
wondering why I cared about a box full of lasers, and when that
happens you know the game's in trouble. It's a clone of an Emacs Lisp
game that I'm sure resembles the original in great detail, but is not
very helpful to people who don't know the other game. This must be how
people feel about remakes of eg. Lode Runner if they've never played
Lode Runner. Anyway, after some initial futzing around wondering what
"R" and "H" and "1" meant I finally read all the instructions and
seriously went about the task of locating the reflective balls in this
box full of lasers, and wouldn't you know I got it almost entirely
right. But I didn't think it was very fun. If you like Minesweeper but
think Minesweeper is too simple, you might like this.
- Tetravex: When you look at these squares with a number on each
side you think "Great, I'm going to be rotating these squares and
doing small-change arithmetic til the end of time." But actually
you're just arranging those squares in a grid so that the numbers
match, and you'll be done long before the end of time. It's basically
the same as the puzzles-on-cards I used to spend ages with on long car
trips, so it evokes a certain nostalgia, but the numbers still make me
feel like it should be one of those math puzzles where you need to
make everything come out at 21.
- kmines and gnomines: OK, both of these games are slavish
imitations of the old Windows 3.1 standard. They work the exact same
way. They have the same sort of graphics. I am going to give the
smackdown prize to kmines, even though gnomines' flag graphic is far
superior, for the following two reasons:
- gnomines' happy face tries way too hard to be cute and doesn't fit
in the happy face button, so it looks like someone's peering through a
window at you.
- In general, gnomines has UI spacing issues. The bottom of the
minefield is way too close to the status bar for my taste.
You see the kind of tiny distinction I have to make to turn this
into a proper smackdown?
UPDATE UPSET: gnomines takes it back! Shocking details inside!
- klickety: The closest thing I've seen in years to Tear
Down The Wall. You are faced with a jumble of colored bricks
subject to gravity. Click on a group of adjacent blocks of the same
color and it disappears. The only problem is that now I feel dirty
because this game turned Tear Down The Wall into something sort of
like Tetris.
When you get a high score, says "Congratulations, you have won!",
which makes me think of the Nirvana song Opinion. Actually this
is true of many of the kde games; it must be in the library.
- SameGame: I think this was the game that started the KDE/Gnome
clone wars. Maybe I'm just making that up. Anyway, now that I think
about it this game is a lot like klickety, but on a smaller
board. There are marbles on the board and clicking on a set of
adjecent like-colored marbles removes the whole set and compacts the
board. Nice rotation mouseover effect. This game has an 'undo'
feature, unlike...
- SameGnome: Same game as SameGame, but themeable. I always liked
the "planets" theme, but the colors aren't as distinct. Maybe they
should use Neptune instead of the moon. Winner of smackdown: Gnome,
just for the planets.
- KMessedWords: I thought this would be Boggle, and then when I
loaded it up I thought it was the game equivalent of that software
that looks at redacted text and tries to figure out what the text
is. It turns out it's a game that shows you a scrambled word and makes
you unscramble it. Unfortunately the word shows up on my screen as
black-on-black, so I can't play except by guessing words randomly from
the configurable word list. Same UI sensibility and same original
author as KHangman.
Bonus: I should have reviewed these yesterday, but they were
classified as puzzle games even though by the standards set out
yesterday they're board games, so I missed them.
- KJumpingCube: A territory game that features a stack of pieces on
each square. That's how I think of it, anyway, but the game chooses to
represent the number of items in the stack as a face of a cube. Each
turn you can put one piece on a square/increment the ordinal of a
square by one. A square with fewer pieces on it than enemy pieces
surrounding it is taken over. Two players or human vs. AI.
- Konquest/Galactic Conquest/GNUlactic Conquest is a great
multiplayer game that's kind of like a mini-FreeCiv. Both Sumana and I
are big fans. I like it due to its mix of its mix of strategy, tactics, and bluffing. Sumana says it's the best two-player computer game since Puzzle Fighter. You send ships across the galaxy or GNUlaxy, I suppose (maybe a GNUlaxy is just a very large
solar system) to conquer planets and crush the inhabitants in fists of
various hard materials. But your real target is your opponents, both
the humans who share the computer with you and vicious AIs like Comp1
and the sinister, monocled Comp2. "The once mighty empire of Comp1 has
fallen in ruins." Ah, music to my ears.
Filed under:
games:roundup
- Comments:
Excellent review! A lot of work...I mean play went into that!
"Ethnography"? It's almost entirely composed of the eight most frequent English letters [etaoinshr]. (Plus, once you've guessed [ethn], the rest should be pretty easy to figure out.) Now if you can win with "pygmy cub" or something, that is a different matter.
Best hangman word: "wax."
OK, "even on words like 'ethnography'" doesn't make sense. But my larger point (that Hangman inquisitors often mistake long words for hard words) stands.
Agreed, definitely.
I used to get slaughtered with "quiz".
