Sun Nov 06 2005 21:05 PST What You Call Hell, He Calls Game Roundup:
Frustrated that NYCB is not as interesting as it used to be what with all the book-writing, so I took time today to do an old-fashioned Game Roundup. But not so old-fashioned that instead of reviewing Linux games I'm going to be reviewing crappy old jigsaw puzzles and board games. Seriously, have you seen those first commercial games from the early 1900s? What was wrong with those people? They weren't stupid; games like chess and backgammon have been around for thousands of years. But when someone got the idea of printing games and selling them commercially, it was Chutes and Ladders all the time. Though most of the games sold today are not much better, so maybe I'm being unneccessarily hard on those turn-of-the-century fools.
Anyway, here we have five games. In the near past I also found a new (Java?) version of an old Ultima-type game called Ranadin. This was a really great game in its time, but I can't find the URL to the new version on the web or anywhere in my notes. All I have is this excellent quote from the intro: "The king announced victory and dispersed his army, leaving the true threat largely undisturbed to this day." Now, games.
- Variations on Rockdodger is a
superior version of a game called rockdodger which is like
a pacifist version of Asteroids. Instead of destroying the rocks in an
asteroid field, you are a harmless space probe and you can only
maneuver so as to avoid the rocks. Your score is based on how long you
can keep up this futile task.
The champions of realism might point out that in a real asteroid
belt the asteroids would be scattered across millions of square
kilometers and not all crammed into one space. What these people
conveniently ignore is the possibility that your space probe itself is
hundreds of kilometers in diameter. Though that would mean you were
expending an enormous amount of reaction mass whenever you turned on
your thrusters.
Variations on Rockdodger is so much better than rockdodger that
having played it I can't even play the original. It's too difficult,
too visually unpolished, and too full of the bottom two-tracks of
four-track techno music. VoR is also incredibly difficult but it has a
better feel and is more fun. It's a good way to waste 30 seconds
(maximum playable time according to the author: 2 minutes; my high
score: 55 seconds).
- I mentioned Troubles of
Middle Earth before but I'll mention it again. It's Produced "in
collaboration with Eru Iluvatar and Manwe", so you know it's
good. It's got several interesting implementations of magic, and it's
scriptable in Lua. Lua is the up-and-coming embeddable scripting
language for games. There's
even a book about it. Someone should write an article about this
phenomenon. Perhaps that someone will be me.
The best thing about ToME (maybe this works for other Angband
clones) is if you die, you can start the game in wizard mode and
resurrect the character. This keeps me from the temptation of using
wizard mode all the time, but it also stops me from incredible Angband
clone frustration. Those suckers will kill you in a heartbeat. Maybe
I just need to read the spoilers. Oh, the other good thing is there's
a type of magic that gives you access to the millions of attack types
monsters use to kill you in said heartbeat.
- Exodus Arcade
Game is a clone of an old Commodore 64 game which was itelf almost
exactly like Pac-man, right down to the ghosts. But instead of the
magical power pills of Pac-man you can get a little lightning bolt
that you can use to stun the ghosts. Not a good trade-off. I do like
the way it represents your need to visit every part of each board:
there are no dots for you to eat. Instead, you go around lighting up
the bulbs on the edge of the board.
This game allegedly takes place in the Dungeon Dimensions, which
are portrayed rather differently than I always imagined them from
reading Pratchett. Requires non-open-source library.
- Space Mine
is a game that resembles Anthill, the first C program I ever
wrote. You run a mine (which, incidentally, is in space). You need to
sell ore and pay your workers and buy new factories. But no matter
what you do, at the end of the first round it says YOU'VE OVERWORKED
EVERYONE and you lose. Now it probably is true that I OVERWORKED
EVERYONE, but what am I supposed to do? The simulation is not
stable. Just as no matter how I tweaked the starting parameters, games
of Anthill always ended in the ants not producing enough food for
their population, which lead to ant cannibalism, which led to even
less food and more cannibalism until the colony wiped itself out (I
believe this is also why SimAnt was a commercial flop). So,
inevitably, with my space mining operation.
- You'd think Spacerider would be a
space version of Easy Rider. I was suckered in by the screenshots that
showed a huge spaceship blowing up Metroids. This seemed a great idea
to me. Why send out fragile, humanoid bounty hunters to do battle with
Metroids when you could just bring out the heavy artillery and blow
them up easily? But the game disappointed me. The huge spaceship packs
less punch than a well-equipped bounty hunter, and it's got big
nacelles hanging off that do nothing but make you an easier
target. There are no power-ups in this game, and the metroids and
other abominations keep coming thicker and faster until you're reduced
to just blasting a path through them, and then you can't maneuver
enough to give yourself space. Game over.
- Slime
Bomber is a superior shooting game, in which you fly the aircraft
of your choice and drop slime bombs on the Suess-esque buildings of an
enemy city. It's like Nickelodeon Goes to War. Why are you dropping
slime bombs anyway? That's privileged information, airman.
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games:roundup
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