News You Can Bruise for 2005 January 23

Kid singing the alphabet song at Trader Joe's: "Q, R, S, T, U, V, now I know my ABCs." Nobody uses those last letters anyway.

Yes, it's the first Software Roundup in a year and a half! And I still have a backlog of 137 non-game items to investigate. Since statistics prove the real draw to this site is the Game Roundup, I'm posting this first and the new GR will follow.

• Debian is taking over! At least it is when you run debtakover, the program that turns non-Debian systems into Debian systems.
• I always hated the POV-Ray language, but pypov lets me program it in Python. Thus proving that the real reason I hated it was that I'm incompetent at graphics programming. Thanks, pypov, for invalidating my lame excuses!
• Magic Rescue is an attempt at an undelete utility for Linux.
• You know all those specialized database programs for keeping track of your wine or whatever? Who has so much wine that they need a database? Anyway, Happydigger keeps track of the archaeological artifacts you find while messing around with a metal detector. I wonder if there's another such specialized software for keeping track of your paleontological finds? I don't see one, but I did find the cool Paleontology Database Network and the USGS' Paleodata, which doesn't seem to exist yet.
• It was probably not a very gutsy move for Freshmeat to accept this clone of Freshmeat to its application database. But there it is.
• SlideRule does what it says. Nice scrolling trick on the webpage, too.
• letterize is supposed to give you mneumonics for your phone number: a boon for those of us who can't remember our own phone numbers. But if your phone number's the same as mine, and I don't see why that shouldn't be the case, it will just print a newline and exit. I guess this could itself be a sort of mneumonic, but one that would require keeping a copy of the program around. I'll stick to my checksum-based mneumonic.
• NanoHive, in addition to having a great name, is a simulation tool for demonstrating physical properties on the nanometer level. It's like the haptic nanoCAD program in The Diamond Age, but harder to use. I say wait for the haptic version unless you're a big nanotech nerd (or perhaps I should say, an incredibly small nanotech nerd). Sure makes cool demos though.
• Timekeeping Mini-Roundup

  The forward progression of time. Without it, would our universe be the same? No one can say for sure. Here are four programs that react in various ways to the asymmetric dimension that really puts the "time" into "space-time"!

  • orbitclock the time in the sort of format you might see on one of the computers on Deep Space Nine. Not liable for inaccuracies caused by chronoton distortion.
  • gtoday displays the fixed and movable feasts of the Greek calendar. I don't read Greek or know anything about the feasts, but I assume it does what it's supposed to.
  • First there was phase-of-the-moon software. Now there's sunwait, the crunch that's a blast to munch. I mean, the program that lets you set up a cronjob to turn on your house lights 5 minutes before sunset every day. Or activate your solar-powered deathbots from their long slumber. Just as an example.
  • Speaking of the sun, its reliable machinations form the basis for the atronomical Rube Goldberg device that is IridiumFlares. It tells you when and where to look to see Old Yeller's light bounce off an Iridium satellite, or bounce off the moon, then hit a satellite and head right for your eyeball. Tip: if you mention Iridium in your software somewhere where I can see it, I am almost certain to include it in a roundup.
• The Revisionist snoops through Microsoft Word's internal versioning metadata to prove once and for all that, eg., joint-company press releases are largely created ahead of time and the people in question never actually said those lame quotes. Be still, my heart! Has other, more interesting uses.
• BBS nostalgia reaches new heights with DuhDraw, a clone of the venerable TheDraw ANSI-art program.
• Keep Subversion and CVS repositories in sync with svn2cvs. Satisfy your local CVS bigot. Are there CVS bigots anymore? Surely the one thing that unites all version control system bigots is the lameness of CVS.
• enblend is a neat little one-trick pony that improves the look of panoramic pictures made out of multiple smaller pictures.
• And finally, lipotell is a script optimized for finding the parts of your filesystem that have all the space-taking-up junk. Those files have no right to be so large!

The winner: pypov, which I hope people more graphically inclined than I get some good use out of. And now, the traditional prize of a limerick, soon to be a major driver in improving open source software quality:

pypov shows me why, back in the day
I couldn't use POV-Ray
They say only fools
Go blaming their tools
I've just about had it with "they".

And here it is, the Roundup you've been waiting for. In case you're wondering, my Game Roundup backlog is a whopping 249 games. It's madness! But it's not like this is my job or anything.

• We at Game Roundup have a soft spot for games that attempt the nigh-impossible task of making tired game genres new. Scalar is a jigsaw puzzle game where the mechanic is swapping two grid parts of a picture to assemble the picture. But the quadrangles of the grid aren't all the same size. So you can get pixillated images that indicate that image needs to go into a smaller square. Pretty fun.
• Target Acquired is too clever for its own good. It's a space shooter in which projectiles acquire your ship's momentum at the time of firing. There are only three waves, but you have to relearn the space shooter from scratch to get anywhere at all.
• As long as I'm at it, here's Sable, by the same author. It's a low-poly-count 3D shooter sort of reminiscent of Zaxxon or the parts of the shareware classic Flightmare with the weird 3D interface.
• Behold ZapM, a willy-nilly mishmash of sci-fi cliches in roguelike form that almost captures the vibe of the late lamented Alphaman. Its main problems are: the feeling it gives you that lots of items and skills don't do enough to warrant their inclusion in the game (which makes it seem incomplete rather than, say, poorly planned), and the fact that the item system is so similar to Nethack's despite the genre change. It's not so much that "scrolls" are now "floppy disks"; it's that the floppy disks do things like teleport you and improve your armor class, things not generally thought possible in software. However I love the way wands have become futuristic ray guns. As roguelikes go it's very short; I think it's the first roguelike I won while evaluating it for Game Roundup. Bonus: has more Paranoia references than any other game not actually to be a Paranoia-themed game. Bonus bonus: the webpage links to Clan EIT, which is funny and which links to What Fools These Mortals.
• Axis of Evil is probably the best political-themed adaptation of Space Invaders I've seen, not that that's saying much. In Axis of Evil the space invaders are--wait for it--ne'er-do-wells like Khomeini and Saddam. Now, as all people bored of Space Invaders know, the best strategy is to blast through your protective barriers and fire through them even as you use them for cover. Well, in this case your barriers are, political cartoon-style, labeled "Freedom", "Truth", and "Civil Rights". Ba-dum-bum!

  Unfortunately I couldn't get the game to not segfault when I tried to start the game, but realistically the screenshot makes the same point as the actual game. Which now that I look at the source code I don't know if that was really the point the author was trying to make. Oh well.

• Alien Pool is a game with a fun mechanic described as "similar to both asteroids and pool", which is pretty good so I won't try and come up with a better description. Nice low-budget sound effects too. I wish more game authors would record their own little voice clips.
• PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: If you've written an open source game, Funkbunny Studios will write the music for it. There's no portfolio on the page so I don't know if anyone has taken them up on this offer yet.
• In this Java "Antichess", you must checkmate your king at all costs. I bring this up mainly to point out another kind of Antichess I think is more interesting: Anti-King Chess, which introduces a piece that loses you the game if your opponent takes it out of check. One concept: two executions. What inspiration will today's challenger bring?
• Tux-n-Run: I guess Run is the other penguin in the two-player version. A mismash of artistic styles in the splash screens is kind of creepy. The engine is pretty good but the only level is like a bad ZZT game. Will review again when it's a real game, if I remember. Probably the 30th or 50th game that takes the OS wars as its metaphor.
• At the other end of some spectrum or other we have Ensemblist, which has a great interface with which I can't do a damn thing. It starts out with you navigating a flowchart, which is fun, but then you get into 3D and taking the difference between two shapes and it's like the spatial recognition test they gave Hugh and you've lost me. But since I prize originality so much I can't give this a bad score.
• You purchased a thousand square kellicams of land on Zephulor for a new condominium project. But when you arrived to inspect the land, you found that Zephulor has a toxic atmosphere and is inhabited by voracious alien slugs, as well as being full of strange platforms hovering in midair. Now, in Adventures on Planet Zephulor you will take your bloody revenge on the man-eating aliens who even now invoke obscure zoning regulations to prevent you from constructing more than six consecutive residential units without an intervening common area! Okay, that's not the real plot of AoPZ, but there is no real plot, so it will have to do. Hey, maybe I could offer my freelance services to people who need a plot for their game, the way Funkbunny Studios offers to do the music. What do you think?

  Anyway, AoPZ is a PyGame platform shooter that kind of reminds me of Jill of the Jungle. It's got big, good-looking, explorable levels but unfortunately there's not much in those levels to find when you explore. If like JotJ it had puzzles, more weapons, etc. it would be a really great game. The player control needs a little work too, but it might just be cosmetic.

• CamelTrouble is a little arcade game written in Perl. You are a camel who must go out in the desert to grab some monks who've gotten lost. Along the way you must avoid vicious pythons and cups of java who will harm you. The Freshmeat description makes it sound like the monks are at the mercy of these desert monsters, creating a sort of Robotron hostage situation. But in reality the pythons and java cups are completely harmless to the monks and will only hurt you, the camel. It's got some odd bugs (try selecting "Go" multiple times for a psychedelic monsterfest), but it's not bad.
• Why not take two of the most-often-cloned games in history, and clone them simultaneously? Tong takes the Tetris and the Pong and bashes them together and makes them fight like plastic dinosaurs. You play both games simultaneously and they interact with each other in pleasing ways. Disadvantages: you have to use keyboard and mouse simultaneously (a weakness of mine), and the tarball is 32 freaking megabytes. Most of that is ogg files for the soundtrack. It's a really nice soundtrack, but still.
• Speaking of which, Tetris clones are now getting their own clones. Exhibit A: Abandoned Bricks, which features a Bastet mode. You'll recall that Bastet, star of a past Game Roundup, always gives you the worst piece possible for your present situation. Now, the bastardry is spreading. Beware! Many of the villagers have recently reported nighttime trances wherein, under the influence of some sinister force, they write Tetris clones. It could happen to you!
• Graviton demonstrates a great solution to the problem of displaying a field on which two players are scuttling around shooting each other. Rather than splitting the screen, the camera zooms in or out to keep both players visible. Worth it for that mechanic alone. Not much else in the game. Basic duelling-pyramids game. Will the red pyramid/blue pyramid war never cease?
• Batrachians is a clone of an Atari 2600 game without the slow control response time endemic to that system. You are a frog and compete with another frog for flies. In a masterpiece of realism, frogs are represented by ovals labeled FROG, and flies (less realistically) by ovals labelled FLY. It's fun and it has a great twist on the way Atari 2600 games end. Typically in a game of this sort, where each game lasts a set amount of time, once the timer runs out everything goes to reverse video and I guess it's nighttime? Well in Batrachians it really is nighttime, and instead of happening all at once the sky gets gradually darker and stars come out. A nice touch.
• When I hear the word "gravity" I reach for my laser pistol. But Gravity Wars has old-school Linux cred and lush Amiga graphics (Is it wrong of me to love those Amiga-style graphics and like games just because they have them? Why don't games these days have that kind of smooth, cartoony graphics? Reh reh reh.). So who cares if it's a Finnish spaceship-in-cave game? Well, I started caring when, after finally getting all the neccessary keys to get to the next level (there are fruit and keys, like in Super Pac-Man), I was suddenly informed that I was out of fuel and plummeted to my death. I tell you there is something in the Finnish psyche that makes them love to produce these spaceship-in-cave games. I do not understand it. But man, those graphics. Maybe there was some Amiga rendering tool that made that style of graphic. I never even had an Amiga, have barely used one, and I'm turning into an Amiga zealot solely on the basis of ported games.
• Spillwords is a clone of a classic game I've never heard of. Basically you get a bunch of Scrabble tiles and have to form a set of words out of them within the time limit. Once you put two letters together you can't disconnect them and change your mind later. Dragging a letter around lets you knock other tiles around the board, creating a surprisingly tactile experience for a computer implementation of a word game. Recommended.
• Arrows is a fun little game of the type where your movement is constrained by arrows. There are rules about when you can deviate from your planned course, creating new arrows, which gives the game a nice mixture of planning and thinking on your feet.

So there we go. Tong wins this Software Roundup, and gets the limerick:

A game that is more than one game
Is constantly changing its name
The more clones we tacks on
From Asteroids to Zaxxon
The more we put Firefox to shame