News You Can Bruise for 2004 August 10

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:
  1. 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.
  2. 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.

I have the darnedest luck with the websites I scrape for the Automat. They either change their website formats while I'm working on them or they stop updating before I can make sure the automatic import works. Case in point: the Catalog of Government Publications ("Pueblo, Colorado stuff", says Kevin), which has been averaging 25-30 new online documents a day but which only had one today. Hope it picks back up soon; I've actually found several very interesting documents in this stream (examples later, when I don't have to go to sleep).

What are they doing, anyway? About two-thirds of the documents they put in the database are not online, and lack even a reliable bibliography link, so I haven't been able to put them in the RSS feed yet. Are there 75 and only 75 new documents published by the government every day? I have no idea whether or not that number even sounds right.

Supposedly the GPO is required to keep a master index of everything the government publishes, but is that really all of it? They're still releasing documents from 2000 and 1994. That implies that there's a big delay in getting some information from the government agency to the GPO. It's a mystery. I am driven by the cool idea of having an RSS feed listing every document the government publishes, but even if this feed had all the not-online ones I can't shake the feeling it's only scratching the surface. Does anyone know?