News You Can Bruise for 2005 January 16

First, some updates from Game Roundups past. I played xdeathlord some more and it's not me, it's it. It's not nearly as good a game as xevil. It's just plain hard to play. So blah. Second, since its last mention two years ago Iter Vehemens ad Necum has in true roguelike fashion gotten bigger and in true IVAN fashion gotten weirder (and gorier), becoming simultaneously less and more frustrating. It remains in my opinion the most bizarre roguelike, the Yapok Sundria of roguelikes, if you will.

And now, new games. I'm very excited about this roundup; most of the games here are really good. They're also for the most part pretty violent, which may or may not be a plus in your book. One of them isn't as violent as it needs to be, which won't satisfy anyone.

• Formido, not to be confused with Formico, the game of floor-laying, is a game where you are beseiged by countless large alien insects. The challenge is to see how many you can blow up before your inevitable death. Fun but kind of depressing, and with no illusions: your score is counted directly in bug deaths, not using any sort of "point" system.
• As real-time strategy games go, NetPanzer is pretty simple. There are only about eight types of unit, and scattered factories that produce units for whoever owns them. No complicated resource gathering, just "go over there and blow that up".
• Deadly Cobra tries to make the snake game genre more interesting with the obvious-in-retrospect step of making the energy pellets into helpless humans. By itself this would be a welcome yet cosmetic change, but once you've taken that step the next step is obvious: the people can move around aimlessly to increase your chomping challenge. These developers have come up with all kinds of great twists on the snake game. PLUS they have the snake's tail feed into itself when the snake dies, like I wanted in the KDE snake game. Could this be the ultimate snake game? Probably. And yet, it's a snake game. Let's move on.
• Marauder is a nice, simple game where you fly a spaceship throughout the universe and blow up other spaceships. Planets contain stores, where you can buy weapons and sell cargo which you mainly steal off the ships you blow up. (Hit enter when close to a planet to enter the store; I had to look in the source code to find this out.) Has comical effect when you crash into a planet and it's like bumping into a wall. Thumbs up etc. Unfortunately there's no win condition, so once you figure out the strategy you're addicted but there's nowhere to go but to the next difficulty level.
• I looked out the window and what did I see? Ack-ack popping in the Apricots source tree. Apricots has a great name and a great Amiga cartoonish look (it was originally written for the Amiga and, like rfk, has followed its author to Linux). In this game you fly a jet and blow up buildings for points, all the while being chased by other planes with the same goal. Just don't blow up the civilian buildings (enumeration of civilian buildings follows: huts, little suburban cottages, office towers).

  In nuclear war there are no winners, only survivors; but in this war there aren't even survivors. You and your opponents die a lot, which costs points, and then you end up having to fight dogfights to get enough points to meet the win condition, because the landscape has been reduced to rubble. It gives the impression of an air war conducted by people who don't know how to fly airplanes: a more accurate treatment of a theme first seen in Battlefield Earth.

  Apricots has lots of fun touches: stealth bombers, trees and different landscapes, persistent wreckage, excellent physics system. It's hard to land, but it's fun to die. A game worthy of the "X Carnage" brand.

• Contrary to popular belief oki is not a game where you have to move your family to central California. In fact, in an early version all you could do was "run, jump, and die". Well, it's a little further along now and you can also collect coins. Coins are helpfully marked "C" and look like little copyright symbols, which would make this game an excellent propaganda tool for the intellectual property industry. The low-res, Game Boy-like graphics mean it could be distributed over the mobile phones the kids are using these days. Put on some simple DRM protection and it could be a valuable opportunity to teach the younger set that the process of obtaining copyright clearance can be fun! I call it my new "Compliance Is Awesome" initiative.
• TechnoballZ is a tricked-out Arkanoid game that has too many power-ups to be a real challenge. Has between-level store for buying even more power-ups. Too many power-ups, not enough paddle-death!
• Gate 88 says "relive a childhood daydream of deep space intergalactic battle", and it delivers on that promise. It's a multiplayer space shooter/real-time strategy game with vector-looking graphics that make it look like a lost arcade game from the 80s. You build structures in space and then defend them. Lots of fun. Not open source, but my "no non-open-source" policy is mainly just an excuse not to have to evaluate non-open-source games unless I want to. This one is really good.
• Atris is the Tetris clone I've been waiting for for a long time: it's got ASCII art customizable block patterns so you can play with shapes made out of more than 4 blocks. Also has a twist where the units of the blocks can be different colors; such a piece isn't cemented together very well and will fall apart and settle when you drop it, in a pleasingly Tear Down The Wall-like moment.

Closed source games are not eligible for the Palm d'Rassemblement De Jeu (Des Jeux?), so Gate 88 is disqualified and the winner of this roundup is Apricots, the chaotic death-from-above game with the classic Amiga lines. Runners-up: Marauder and Atris. The traditional limerick prize celebrates the many non-enemy-initiated modes of death in Apricots:

When Pilot Mike tired of slaughter
Right into a fir tree he'd auger
It felt like a balm
To smash into a palm
And bliss to crash-land in the water