News You Can Bruise for 2005 November 6

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.