News You Can Bruise for 2002 October 19

I haven't actually played any of these games, but they look cool. All of tonight's games are clones of existing games. But first, a slight digression.

There are four DOS games I'd love to see cloned [Do it yourself! -- Ed. Bite me! I'm just sayin'!]. Strangely, three of them are set in mines (one of them involves mines inside a mine); I must be a sucker for games set in mines. All four were once Da Warren files.

• MINERVGA, by Harell Stiles. You buy supplies and dig around and try not to run out of money.
• Mine Bombers, by Skitso Productions. A multi-player game. Your two tasks on a level are to acquire valuables from the mine and to blow up the other players. A wide variety of weapons (including mines) is for sale, providing a mapping of the first objective onto the second. Just the right combination of action and strategy. Andy and I used to have a lot of fun playing this.
• Reaping the Dungeon, by Ron Heuse. A roguelike game taking place in the mines of Jupiter (I never figured out how that works). Exciting, good resource management, good atmosphere.
• Tear Down The Wall, by Chet Langin. This one has nothing to do with mines. Instead, you play Mikhail Gorbechev, trying to open relations with the West. No, just kidding. You and the computer take turns removing bricks from a wall and trying to create chain reactions that destroy as many other bricks as possible.

THE POINT of that digression was that

• One of the games in today's roundup, TunnelWars, sort of reminds me of Mine Bombers, though it's actually a clone of another DOS game called "Tunnelers".
• LinTower is a clone of SimTower, apparently one of the lower-rent concepts in the series of Sim games. (Actually, another game I'd love to see cloned is SimEarth. It could have an incredibly snappy title, like, say, "LinEarth".) Funny comment in the source code (when writing out a saved game): "DON'T CHEAT THIS FILE!\ncheat the source code!!"
• Gnocatan I actually did play once, with Dan Helfman, but that was a much older version so it doesn't count. A clone of the Settlers of Catan boardgame.