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The hot game in my circle today is Minecraft, a 3D game about running around a grid and collecting things. I played the beta a while ago and exhausted the game's non-obsessive-compulsive possibilities, but I picked it back up when I discovered that people have been making and sharing custom Minecraft maps in a way that strongly reminds me of the ZZT days. In honor of the impending release of Minecraft 1.0, I present an overview of the custom map scene, with links to my favorites and commentary from a game-design perspective.

I got all these maps from the Minecraft forums. If you go there you'll see lots of people posting maps, advertising in the title the number of downloads each has received and the genre of the map. ZZT's game mechanics gave rise to certain genres: RPG, slider puzzle, the nebulous "adventure", and so on. Minecraft's mechanics have given rise to significantly different genres:

Survival: The genre that's the name of one of Minecraft's game modes. In this genre, you're put into a situation and you have to do... whatever you want. It's like playing Minecraft on someone else's map. Usually they've constructed some cool things for you to explore, or constrained your access to resources in some way, or at least created some arbitrary challenges like "build 64 bookcases". For me, all the memorable instances of this genre fall into the subgenre of:

Survival puzzle. (My term, it's lumped in with [SURV] on the forums.) In vanilla Minecraft, you have easy access to unlimited amounts of dirt, grass, water, wood, and stone, which can be crafted into unlimited amounts of food and basic tools. In a survival puzzle map, severe constraints are put on these inputs such that you have to figure out unusual ways of reaching certain desirable spots in the game world (cool-looking cave) or in the crafting graph (useful pickaxe).

The best pure survival puzzle map is Skyblock. ("500,000+ DOWNLOADS") Skyblock dominates this genre to such an extent that any new entry in the genre will be derided as a Skyblock ripoff. That's because it's very difficult to come up with a new survival puzzle. Survival puzzles depend very heavily on the implementation of Minecraft: facts about what inputs you can craft into what outputs, and facts about the environment. Facts that you can't change without modding. This is where the differences between Minecraft and ZZT begin to emerge.

Your best bet is to either come up with a totally new survival puzzle, or to combine the puzzles popularized in Skyblock with some fun pure-survival content. The Pit does the former, and the Complete The Monument genre (q.v.) does the latter.

Adventure: Unlike with ZZT (and games in general), the "Adventure" genre is very clearly defined. In an Adventure map, you have to go from one place to another, and you are not allowed to place or break blocks. In other words, the game stops being Minecraft, and becomes a 3D platformer with awkward controls and blocky graphics.

I've played a couple Adventure maps that showed off really impressive designs, notably Deep Space Turtle Chase (requires a mod that remakes Minecraft as a world made of spaceship components) and this Indiana Jones trapfest where you should probably just watch the video. But prohibiting the game mechanics that Minecraft does really well, and relying solely on its mediocre platforming, is a recipe for boredom. Specifically, my boredom.

There's a subgenre of Adventure called Parkour, which I haven't even tried because it requires very precise jumps, and I can't do that. Parkour is popular enough to rate a top-level genre on the forums, but it operates under the same constraints as Adventure, because if you could place blocks there'd be no need for very precise jumps.

Complete The Monument: My favorite genre, pioneered by the excellent Super Hostile series, and spread by the fact that the Super Hostile author put up a "toolkit" full of useful idioms to copy-and-paste into your own CTM map.

Basically, CTM turns Minecraft into Zelda. To win the game you need to collect a bunch of identical things (blocks of different-colored wool, generally). You explore an overworld until you find some dungeons, and at the end of each dungeon there's one of the identical things. If you're smart, while you're in the dungeon you can usually score an upgrade to your equipment (the Survival Puzzle aspect).

Turning Minecraft into Zelda works great! It leaves the building/crafting mechanics alone, it gives some goal-direction to the aimlessness of vanilla Minecraft, and it gives the creator a chance to show off some cool designs. Unlike Zelda, CTM games tend to be brutally difficult (it's called Super Hostile for a reason), but a little strategic cheating always works if the fun starts to fade. In addition to Super Hostile I've enjoyed the Twisted Logic series, the Forgotten series, the Corrupt Lands series, and Timetoslide's maps. See? Lots of series, just like Zelda.

If I were twenty years younger I'd be making Minecraft maps right now. Instead I'm the age I am, but I did have an idea for an arthouse Minecraft map: "Return To The Town Of ZZT". I'd build ZZT screens in Minecraft, making those stereotypical ANSI-yellow borders out of glowstone. I'd fill those screens with all the awful cliches of ZZT design: the broken slider puzzles, the "X of ZZT" naming convention, the talking trees. And it wouldn't matter because everything would be one block tall and you could just jump over the obstacles.

Except... I don't think the awful cliches of ZZT design can even be implemented in Minecraft. ZZT had a simple object-oriented programming language. In Minecraft if you want a programmable computer you have to lay out the circuits yourself. ZZT made it easy to display messages to the player. The Minecraft maps I linked to above are covered in little signs, 60 characters to a sign, worse than Twitter. A long message will be stuck on a wall with a grid of 9 or 16 signs!

The ZZT level editor was designed to make games to share with people, and Minecraft is designed to make an environment to walk around and enjoy. The genius of Minecraft is that the level editor is the game. But writing code isn't really a game, it's work. So instead of programming stupid games with ZZT, kids are building roller coasters and pixel art and Skyblock ripoffs with Minecraft. Clearly it's not Minecraft's job to be a programming environment, but this feels like a step backwards.

I'm giving some thought to minimal additions to Minecraft that would give players more scope for programmer-style creativity, without changing the nature of the game. I'll post my ideas in a separate entry.

• Spelunky: (no real homepage) Very fun, replayable. Does what everyone says: combines real-time platforming gameplay with the randomness of a Roguelike.
• Barkley, Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden: Hilarious. A masterpiece of bathos. Reminds me of Dwarf Fortress somewhat in the amount and type of detail.
• Mighty Jill Off: I'm not used to writing in Game Roundups about games on which there's already a critical consensus (or, indeed, have ever been written about by anyone else), so I don't really have much to add here. Except I think it's not appreciated enough how the sadomasochistic dynamic of this game spills over and makes one look differently at games in general. Except it probably is appreciated enough, I just like appreciating it, so I wrote the previous sentence.
• Legend of Princess: I don't really enjoy beat-em-ups, a trait that dates back to childhood, although it was fun to play Castle Crashers with Brendan. I was confused and eventually killed by the flashing lights and sound effects and fast-paced flying around the screen. But I really liked how this game adapted all the tools and cliches of the Zelda series to that format.
• ROM CHECK: FAIL: Clever idea. Fun for as long as you want to play it. Plus, I waited so long to play it that there's a Linux version now.

More later, I gotta work on secret project. Do let me know what Windows games I should look at. Note that any future GR:WE editions will be similar to this one in only reviewing games I hear about from other people.

PS: Even though I'm now mellow about it, Windows is still slow and aggravating. Take that!

Anyway, I went through the games section of ndshb.com, or another site much like it, dumped a bunch of games on my mini-SD card, and played them (or tried to) over the course of several plane flights. I'm pretty sure it wasn't ndshb.com, actually, which means I could do another one of these. Anyway, here are the games I was 1) able to get working and 2) entertained by. My list includes helpful hints like WHAT THE POINT OF THE GAME IS, a tidbit sometimes omitted from official game documentation.

• robotfindskitten ds: still the acme of human achievement.
• As mentioned earlier, Portal ripoff StillAliveDS is still the champ of DS homebrew. Remember, drag and throw to move a crate!
• As with Linux in the early 2000s (and today, I guess), a lot of homebrew DS games are clones of preexisting games. Unfortunately they're often clones of lame games, like Simon or Same Game. One exception is Lemmings DS, which takes a good game that feels right under the DS pointer and does a faithful port of it. Bonus: includes levels from all the Lemmings spin-offs in one game.
• Plus, physics simulation clones! There's a "World of Sand DS" that doesn't seem to have an official site. If only World of Sand could somehow be combined with World of Goo. And Pocket Physics is a Crayon Physics clone that is an immense amount of fun.
• Grafoon is a gravity game that omits the gravity but leaves in place the cave, the spaceship, and the dying if your sprite enters the vicinity of any wall sprite. It took me a while to figure it out, but read the official website instead of whatever list of games I was using and you'll see quickly that your job is to act as a taxi service for the "Hobbels", collecting them all and discharging them on the red platform. I still find it frustrating to control the spaceship, but it's a fun game.
• The Linux version of the Roguelike POWDER was reviewed in a 2007 Game Roundup. It's about the same on the DS as it was on Linux.
• ASCII WAR, aka ASCII WARS (official site is gone) is a very interesting idea for a Roguelike--you're actually hunting down rogue ASCII characters in a computer's memory--but it's not well-adapted to the DS. You could do a Roguelike with a super-stripped-down action set, or a Roguelike like POWDER where the actions are available as icons on the touch screen. Or you could even do a Roguelike in which the touch screen displayed a keyboard, though it would be annoying. But in ASCII WAR[S] you have to bring up the keyboard by hitting R! Otherwise there's nothing on the bottom screen! Oh well.
• Anguna (did you mean: angina?) is a Zelda-type game that just doesn't have enough stuff to bear comparison with a real Zelda game. It starts off well enough with a dungeon escape scenario but when you get into the overworld it's pretty sparse. This is something that could be fixed just by adding more stuff to make each overworld screen unique, so I'm not saying you shouldn't check out Anguna.
• Meteora is an action game where you and the computer basically throw space junk at each other. After playing the tutorial I knew what was going on, but I couldn't wear down the computer's shields in a real game. Worth further study, I think.
• Warcraft: Tower Defense is the first "tower defense" game I ever played. I've avoided such classics as Desktop Tower Defense because of all the people who posted to their weblogs about how much time they'd wasted playing tower defense games. But an airplane trip is a welcome opportunity to waste huge amounts of time, so I fired it up. It turns out I'm not very good at tower defense games, so I was unable to waste very much time on it. I can tell this is a good game though.

A second round of reviews coming eventually.

The major downside is the controls. You jump with the up arrow instead of the more typical tactic of using a button. This is awkward, but necessary because your right hand needs to be operating the stylus at all times, because the stylus is what you use to indicate where you want to put a portal. It's an understandable design decision but a little awkward when you just need to run and jump. Also, in a "we present you a new quest" type move, once you complete the main level set you get to play the exact same level set again except with more turrets and plasma balls.

There are two other problems I'm a little loath to bring up, but here goes. The first is the cake. You know how lame media tie-in games, especially in the NES era, always had some iconic thing you had to collect? In the Bugs Bunny game you had to collect the carrots, in the Back to the Future game it was clocks, in the Mickey Mouse game it was copyright extensions. You get the picture. Well, in StillAliveDS each level is full of little hovering pink cakes, all of which you must collect to leave the level. They took a game whose whole premise was the absence of cake, and made a spin-off where the problem is too much cake. Is this a game design problem strictly speaking? I say yes, because "collect all these identical things" is to my mind the ur-annoying ludeme (Mario coins, how I loathe thee), and it seems to be favored by tie-in creators especially.

The other problem is the writing. I'm not going to fault the game creator for not doing better writing, especially because English is probably not their first language, but I'm also not going to not mention it. Every level has a little taunting monologue from GLaDOS just like in Portal, but GLaDOS is feeling especially passive-aggressive or something because she just tells you how to beat the level. And occasionally she quotes a line or two from the song "Still Alive". Yes, not even actual dialogue is being stolen, just song lyrics. So it's like you're being tormented by a GLaDOS fangirl with a vocoder.

Disclaimer: in the interest of scientific accuracy I should point out that, like many animal-themed games, Dino Run uses as a game mechanic a totally inaccurate model of evolution. It also depicts the K-T event as something you could outrun, which seems about an order of magnitude worse than having an action hero outrun an explosion.

• Duckmaze is too much maze and not enough duck. There's a pretty servicable duck on the title screen, but the duck in the game looks like Pac-Man. Wall-pushing mechanism is isomorphic to Sokoban.
• Scum of the Universe: Galaga with a trading component. Great idea, but the Galaga component is really aggravating. There's a quest, moral ambiguity, etc. but getting to phase 2 of the quest requires playing about 100 not-terribly-difficult levels of Galaga. I don't have the patience, mon.
• Cultivation is a lovely "social simulation" where you try to grow and harvest plants while getting along with your neighbors and occasionally mating with them to produce the next generation. Unfortunately it's kind of depressing, because your neighbors inevitably manufacture some spat over someone sleeping with someone else, and start poisoning the soil making agriculture impossible. Then there's a race-against-time aspect reminiscent of a bad SF novel, where you've got to get off the planet before the world is destroyed by society's insoluble problems. I don't know if this was the intention.
• The Goonies: 20th Anniversary Edition is a decent-looking remake of the first Konami Goonies game in the style of the second, much more popular game. As Sloth, of "love Chunk" fame, you run around gathering keys and freeing the Goonies while evading terrible enemies such as drops of water and the stalactites those drops of water eventually form. Actually I've never seen a game in which stalactite formation was a mechanic. Prove me wrong, Internet.
• Can't get Polybius to work in WINE, but I wanted to mention it just because of the backstory.
• Save Scummer is a satirical Roguelike from the author of Powder and Letter Hunt. Uh, it looks like I never reviewed Letter Hunt.
• So! Letter Hunt is a Roguelike where you get power-ups by killing monsters in an order that spells out words. Recommended.
• While I'm at it, Jeff Lait's other roguelike, You Only Live Once has the great character name of Farmer Amy and appears to have some relationship to the Powder universe. It also has the sort of plot more usually associated with interactive fiction than with roguelike games.
• Remember Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid? Now there's Blob Wars: Blob And Conquer, the 3D game with the same graphics and sense of blob blood 'n' guts. I was doing pretty well for a 3D game until I encountered the bane of my existence: 3D platforms I had to jump on. Oversensitive controls sent many a blob plummeting into the acid lake. Your mileage may vary in the direction opposite mine.
• From blobs to slimes. I found Slime Forest in my Game Roundup directory and thought it was that pseudo-RPG game that teaches you katakana. Then I played it for a while and it was just a regular pseudo-RPG. Then I was ambushed by some slimes and it turned out to be a katakana tutor after all. So, kind of slow playing. Not sure why that surprised me.
• I hate Manic Miner! There, I said it. The Marmite of video games still exerts a nostalgic hold on Britons, but it's a terrible game. It's extremely crude run-and-jump that rewards only after school repetition and endless pixel-scale memorization. Plus, for a long time before I played Jet Set Willy I read "Jet Pack Willy" and assumed there was a jetpack in the game. The truth could not be further from the truth.

  However, I do enjoy the totally random enemies, so I won't feel terribly bad about pointing you to the MM-like Chaos Caverns over at Dan's Remakes. The gameplay is smoother, which makes the game a bit easier.

• This is the third time I've mentioned Lost Labyrinth in a Roundup, and that's because they keep changing it. Its Linux port is back and there are now presets for the enormous list of character-creation attributes. It also seems a little better-balanced than previously. Full of even more random stuff--last time I played, I got trapped in a throne room by a jolly king who wouldn't let me leave. Seriously. PS: casting spells in this game is a pain.
• POWDER has a really simple interface due to being originally written for the GBA. Has all the moving parts of your more complicated roguelikes, though, like self-polymorph.
• Now a bunch of Java Roguelikes based on old games, put out by Slashie.net. All of these do a good job of translating the original gameplay into roguelike terms. To play them on Linux you'll need to delete a DLL file that comes with the download, or Java will crash. (??)
• First, CastlevaniaRL, the best of this group. Captures the atmosphere of the Castlevania games, complete with incongruous candlesticks that you smash for prizes and poorly-translated narration from Castlevania II. WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE, indeed.
• DrashRL seems to be an Ultima-type roguelike. Or Ranadin-type, which I never did find the Java remake of that game. Anyway. Kind of boring, but cool "floating orb" graphic.
• ZeldaRL is okay but the color curses interface makes it look like Zangband, totally changing the mood to a non-Zelda mood.
• MetroidRL was pretty disappointing actually. You know what we need here is a Kid Icarus roguelike.
• Not from Slashies.net but a similar idea is DiabloRL, which is Windows-only and won't work on WINE. There's a whole 7-Day Roguelike project that spawns most of these weird games, kind of like the IF MiniComps except they often get fleshed out later.

One ludeme shared by most of these games is non-regenerating HP. I find this ups the difficulty greatly in a roguelike, where you can't rely on dexterity to evade enemies, so I tend to go for magicians or other characters who can self-heal, like the allegedly reformed vampire in CastlevaniaRL.

Earthbound (totally spoileriffic and erudite review) is not very fun as a game—I got enough of this kind of gameplay with Dragon Warrior, which I don't think I ever beat despite many Saturdays spent getting up at 5AM to grind through mid-level enemies. But Earthbound has great music, even larger and more varied environments than Cave Story, eccentrically-written NPCs, and a totally insane ZZT-like plot that manages to hit all the RPG cliches (town area, desert area, snow area, water area, jungle area, graveyard, alternate universe) while violating many of the conventions of RPGs. Plus, designed by the guy who voiced the father in My Neighbor Totoro. Recommended.

Looking back through the mists of time, I thought I remembered seeing a box for this game in Software Etc. when I was a kid, and wanting to buy it but not having the money. But I was wrong; it was a similar game called Starflight 2. What I remember accurately is the source code for this game being made freely available a few years back. Now the game has been ported to modern platforms and it's in Debian, with goofy voice acting and everything.

This is an excellent game with some serious gameplay problems. The story is like a good text adventure, complex and nonlinear, with strong characterization (though all the characterization happens on the species level: you never see two named members of a species, for instance) and lots of dialogue and backstory. There's also a Spacewar sub-game that looks perfectly fine but I skipped it because I was more interested in the adventure game.

The problems are with the other sub-game, a resource-gathering-fest that takes all the fun out of exploring the universe. Just like in real life there are too many stars, they're too widely spread apart, it takes forever to navigate within a solar system, and most of the planets have few points of interest. But you spend most of the game going around poking at planets for resources. The entire game universe starts to look like a big copy protection scheme, and the various hint guides, with their huge tables, take on the appearance of the manual that has the secret numbers you need to complete the game in the time limit provided.

So, I guess I'd like to see it turned into something more like a Maniac Mansion type graphic adventure, is what I'm saying. Fun game though.

I'd heard of Dwarf Fortress for a while but never played it because 1) it's a Windows game and 2) I was writing a book. But the book is done and the game runs perfectly under Wine, so I played it yesterday. The other day, Dwarf Fortress came up in a conversation between me and Adam Parrish where I claimed it was a roguelike game. Well, it does have a roguelike game in it, but that's nothing special. What's really interesting is the other game, a real-time strategy game based heavily around emergent properties.

You control a few dwarves trying to make a home for themselves. The dwarves themselves have a lot of autonomy: it's not like Warcraft where you're always telling individual units to move around. But you can give a dwarf a profession, you can show which rocks need to be mined, and once you build a workshop you can give jobs to the workshop. Each dwarf decides which open job to fulfil at the moment.

Each dwarf also has an internal monologue that describes how things have been going for them lately. You can make the dwarves happy by having the society produce booze, nice places for them to sleep and eat, and interesting things to do.

So I go along for a while, making buildings and inventing agriculture and bartering with caravans. The dwarves are perfectly happy in a state of primitive communism, assisted by me, the omniscient game player that reads their thoughts and directs their actions. Every year there are some migrants, so the population grows. And then civilization shows up.

Civilization (in the Huck Finn sense) comes in the forms of Dwarf Fortress's "nobles". These Balins-come-lately think they know better than me and my dwarves how society should be run. They demand better living quarters than the other dwarves, and contribute nothing to society except ridiculous demands and trade restrictions (they also unlock some interface features, which creates a weird metagame element that I could do without, given the shaky state of the existing interface).

This is the point at which I stopped playing. Apparently the nobles go on to create punishments for dwarves who don't meet the quotas. (Snippet from sheriff's internal monologue: "She was worried by the scarcity of cages and chains lately.") Then they create an economy and start charging rent for other peoples' rooms, and really why should I play a game when the people in the game have so much autonomy they can force me to do what they want but not vice versa? You can arrange for the nobles to meet with "accidents", but you just get another noble of the same type in a later year's immigration.

There are also some pretty big interface problems: inconsistent ways of sizing and selecting, as other reviews have pointed out. Other reviews also complained about the extended ASCII interface, but I think it's great. Very old school. However the ASCII art chosen for the workshops doesn't look like a workshop: it just looks like a mess on the ground. This makes it impossible to tell what kind of workshop you put in a certain place without moving the cursor over it.

The creator of DF is also the creator of many other games, including "WWI Medic" and "Liberal Crime Squad". LCS has a Linux version, I played it for a bit and was again impressed by the emergent properties. I was also struck by the BBS-door quality of the juvenile humor and the resemblance to the fun 80s roguelike "Mission: Mainframe".

Anyway, I'm just going to review one game, an IF game, and I'm cheating because it's a game I played and liked when I was younger. It's called Crusade Adventure and it came with AGT as a sample game.

I'm a little surprised that no one has written a program to convert AGT code to Inform. AGT and Inform are abstruse in opposite directions, though, so maybe I'm the only one nostalgic enough about AGT to be interested. And as I look at these old games I become less interested. AGT runs just fine in a DOS emulator, after all.

I remember Crusade Adventure as being full of action, with a caving section more sophisticated than Colossal Cave. Well, it's not full of action, it's full of the action-evasion. And its caving section is only sophisticated in that it's a small adjunct to a larger map. The game relies heavily on random events: you can avoid some puzzles (including a fairly clever one) by relying on chance. The map is disjoint, and you have to use a magic word to move around.

Unlike most AGT games, Crusade Adventure is pretty nonlinear and has good atmosphere that I associate with Sir Walter Scott. Unfortunately, it turns out I only associate the atmosphere with Sir Walter Scott because the game makes explicit reference to Ivanhoe, in what might be the most jarring anachronism I've ever seen in an IF game. As Mark Twain would say, "the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization". I've never read any Scott but his "dreams and phantoms" fit well into an AGT setting: misty woods, suits of armor, talking skulls.

I remember playing a very slightly racier version of Crusade Adventure. But the one on the IF archive is fine because it makes this game stands in stark contrast to the all-out sleaziness of E. L. Cheney's GAGS games, also often distributed with AGT. There was one really disturbing one set in an ultra-sleazy San Francisco that featured lines like: "Lucy's firm young breasts are the center of your focus, You'd love to play around with them, but do you have the time?" Oh, gee, look at the time! A web search reveals that E. L. Cheney now draws cartoons about golf.

As a palate cleanser for the sleaze let me offer more of Twain's Fennimore Cooper-class vitriol against Scott:

It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations.

Bam!

• Overgod looks like one of the games that comes built into your Hitchhiker's Guide. It's a visually appealing 2D space shooter where you're free to move about the arena shooting at other ships. It's a lot of fun, but would be more fun if your ship weren't so slow to maneuver.
• Linux Shuttle Lander is a frustrating take on those frustrating "lunar lander" games (in fact, LSL author Thoma Raes also wrote one of those), where you have to land the fuel-less Space Shuttle. The viewfield is cleverly centered on the piece of the sky you just went through, so that you don't see the ground until a split second before you hit it. It doesn't end well. Let's hope the real Space Shuttle fares better. At least the game code is reentrant.
• Mega Mario, not to be confused with Molto Mario, is a clone of the Super Mario Bros. engine. Which one? Well, all of them, sort of. The graphics and sound are taken from the three NES games and the SNES Super Mario World, which gives a very weird effect. You haven't lived until you've seen SMW Mario stomp a SMB1 Goomba. Ironically, the Goomba has lived right up to that point. In what was surely the defining feature of this software project, Mega Mario features monochrome red blood spurting in precise arcs out of you and the creatures you stomp.

  The mechanics are kinda off: for instance, your Mario is just slightly too big which means that if you don't position yourself just right you'll punch two bricks instead of one. I don't generally make a big deal out of these little issues but c'mon, it's-a me, Mario! The Mario games are classics because of their polished, flexible gameplay. Anyway, the level design is the big problem here. It doesn't have the cleverness of any real Mario game. There are just mazes and coin bonanzas. I've seen the same thing in ZZT games and Rocks 'n' Diamonds boards.

  Speaking of games that rip off the Mario sprites, Super Mario PAC looks like fun but I can't play it because it's a Windows game. I think it's a game where Mario forms an organization to buy off Mushroom Kingdom politicians.

• On a very special Game Roundup, it's Pango: Mudbath, a pygame game by Python guy Moshe Zadka. You're a penguin and you wander around an unobstructed 2D field shooting at squares. Because squares are getting you down, man. Pretty good start on a game, but the name is too similar to the arcade classic Pengo.
• 304. This card game has not been modified.
• Paratim is a clone of an old DOS game called Paratrooper. Unfortunately, the original is totally superior in every respect except for the DOSsy circumstances of its birth. The original was a game that played the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor--not the Phantom of the Opera part but the part that sounds like a helicopter--and then tries to kill you with helicopters. This game can't live up to that.
• A while ago I rounded up a game called Tower of Doom, which it turned out had changed into a totally different game called Warp Rogue. Despite the promising name the game is not that good as a Roguelike. There's no exploring, only tactical combat and corpse-looting for the resale value. It does have a nice advancement system (you spend experience points on new abilities and improved attributes).
• And now what I hope to be a new feature of Game Roundup, Interactive Fiction Roundup. I haven't played any IF in years and I have lost track of the "scene" assuming it is the kind of thing that has a "scene" and not just a room with a description and geographically-defined exits. But the release of Inform 7 rekindled my interest, so I'm working to catch up on what people have done since, say, 2001. The results of my working will make it into future Game Roundups.

  And this one! Today we have Chris Klimas's Blue Chairs, a 2004 game that is kind of a modern version of IF chestnut A Fable. Fable was not even a real game, only part of a game, written by Stan Heller in 1985 to test out GAGS (game development precursor to AGT). Somehow it got included as one of the sample AGT games, which was a bad idea because from a game design perspective it's not good (even by AGT standards). I liked the writing though. You wandered around a landscape experiencing vignettes from your past.

  Anyway, the game I'm actually reviewing. Blue Chairs has all the good aspects of Fable, but it also has a real (surreal) plot, good NPC interaction, and really good descriptions. It mixes linear and nonlinear elements well, with many endings that are nonetheless easy to all see with a strategically placed saved game. It's also got this (spoiler), and the near perfect example of using characterization as a puzzle element.

• Flatland goes to war in Dangen, the geometric shoot-em-up. Minimalist Galaga-like sharpshooter action. Fun and elegant.
• Less elegant but more three-dimensional-looking is Triplex Invaders, featuring hot triplex action. Everything is rendered in real-time as big Dactyl Nightmare-style polygonal shapes. Cool Ghostbusters-like beam weapons add to the fun. Lousy projectile weapons subtract from the fun. Can this game achieve a fun surplus?
• Lämmerlinge is a fun Javascript game where you guide sheep around a board, feeding them flowers and preventing them from wandering off or drowning. Documentation is both in German and totally superfluous. Levels are password-protected: also superfluous since the passwords are right there in a supplimentary Javascript file.
• Deadly Rooms of Death is a fun shareware puzzle game with a video game sense of humor. This is not a sophisticated sense of humor, not an interactive fiction or Ealing Studios humor. Maybe a ZZT game humor. If you saw it in a sitcom it would be undistinguished, but so few video games these days have any sense of humor that DROD's juvenile antics are charming. DROD has lots of puzzle elements and scriptability that make it more enjoyable than Rocks 'n' Diamonds. Fun voice acting separates this game from free software games with no voice acting.
• Trackballs (Debian: trackballs) captures the sleek futuristic look of Marble Madness but seems really obsessed with narrow passageways for your marble to navigate, instead of the sweeping ski-slope wireframe mountains of the original. On the plus side, your marble can jump, and the game levels are scriptable with Guile. So make some levels that don't rely on split-second marble manipulation cause I don't do that. Oh, this game also has enemies that you can squash with your marble. Unfortunately this does not make your marble bigger a la Katamari Damacy.
• How's that crackpot scheme of yours to mine Mars for mercy and sell it back on Earth? Not going too well? Maybe you should have played the cautionary game Mars: Land of No Mercy. You'll find out that anything that lands on the surface of Mars can only move once and then has to wait for the opponent's move, which never comes. Basically the game is still in a very early stage. Nice realistic Mars graphics though.

• Miller's Quest is a game you can just let run and it does the dull repetitive things for you. If you are a Windows person you can play its ancestor, Progress Quest. Written by a guy who I think used to write Segfault stories, though I can't prove this. Basically a non-bad Segfault story in game form.

  This game is written in Ruby, and it has a bizarre attitude towards generating colored text, but I'm probably the only person who will notice. I have been thinking about writing an MMORPG in which all the players are scripted robots, but the idea keeps running into problems. I've also been thinking about mentioning in the Ruby Cookbook the bizarre curses-less colored text hack used in this program, but I don't think I want to encourage this kind of behavior.

• Enemy Lines wins many points for extreme literalism (your enemies are lines) and its castlezzt.net-type presentation. It foolishly squanders them all by being kind of like Missile Command. Bah!

  The author has also put out three other games with the same name, only some of which are like Missile Command. The best-looking one is #4, which has a great cyberpunk Zaxxon look.

• You'd think a game whose file is called "todoom" would be "To-Doom", an action-packed slaughterfest organized around the principles of the Getting Things Done productivity philosophy. But it's actually a Roguelike game called Tower of Doom. Pretty good, not great. All your characters are various lowlife types (because the Tower of Doom is a punishment). Peculiarities: no enemy spawning and complete knowledge of all enemies on the level.

  Hmm, since I downloaded this game, the project seems to have undergone a freakish metamorphosis! It's now called Warp Rogue and is much different. That's what I get for writing reviews of ancient copies of games found on my hard drive while I have no Internet access. Developing...

• Zoid's Quest is potentially a really good side-scroller game like Jill of the Jungle. It has an excellent, original fighting mechanic, and good first-level music that reminds me of NES games like Faxanadu. But this game makes many of the tiny mistakes or misalignments that ruin so many NES-like open source games. I should make a big list of these and do a cookbook on how to avoid them, so here are a couple:
  • Jerky or disproportionate character movement. Zoid's Quest has pretty smooth character movement, but as in almost all of these platform games, the speed of the character is much slower than the character dimensions would indicate. A good rule of thumb is that I should not be continually jumping from place to place because it's faster than running.
  • Ladder behavior. When you jump and grab onto a ladder, your horizontal motion should stop or be absorbed by the ladder. The ladder is not a strip on the wall that lets you defy gravity; it's actively supporting you.

    The ladder is not a hole. It's bolted to its platform; it doesn't bisect it. You should be able to walk on top of a ladder square.

    If you stop moving on a ladder you should stay clinging to the ladder, rather than falling off of it.

  • Jumping and gravity behavior. First, you should be able to jump more than one square in height. This overlaps somewhat with disproportionate character movement. Maybe you think it's cliche that your character should be able to jump as high as Mario, but Mario jumps that high for a reason: jumping games aren't fun when you can't friggin' jump.

    Before dropping down below the edge of the screen, you should have some way of seeing whether or not a drop is infinite. You either need to provide some kind of "look up/down" facility, or design the level so that the player has a chance to experience the lower levels before the higher, or design the level so that it all fits on the screen. (This is actually in the Zoid's Quest TODO, as a magic spell.)

  • Enemies. You must have more than one kind of enemy, and each type of enemy must have different behavior, and in particular the first level must have more than one kind of enemy. I know your game is in development, but just make another kind of enemy for us.
  • Okay, that's enough for now. You get the idea.
• Holotz's Castle is the first game to ask, "What the hell are doing all these keys here?" But it never answers it. Instead, it disguises itself as two games with identical mechanics. In one, you must gather keys to escape the level. In the other, you must gather gems to... escape the level. After Zoid's Quest, the movement in this game felt perfect, and your characters gradually become faster and able to jump higher. Nice cut scenes use the game engine and have a somewhat juvenile Nintendo of America-approved sense of humor. The only problems: one touch of an enemy's hand kills you, and it's possible to get stuck in the corner of a block. And there's a big ol' cut scene cliffhanger. (though I should check a newer version; maybe it's done a Tower of Doom).

  "How do you know what I think?"

  "I KNOW EVERYTHING!"

• The other day I was laughing about the classic Rounded-up game Apricots. Specifically, I was recalling the limerick I'd written about the hilarious deaths which are impossible to avoid in that game. Sumana said I shouldn't talk that way online about death, because it might be read by someone who's thinking of committing suicide and it might give them the idea that suicide is somehow fun or that I approve of death in real life. Well, I'm here to tell you that suicide is not fun and that death is a bunch of crap. And there's no better game to tell you this than N.

  N is a game with a wonderful physics model and a million deaths. Your character is a greedy ninja with a lust for gold--and not being killed! Unfortunately you get killed a lot, usually in hilarious ways that top even the deaths in Apricots. In Apricots you might crash your plane into a tiny island in the middle of a lake. Explosion. In N you might do a ninja leap right into an active death ray. Your body plummets the length of the screen and splats on the ground. Then your wireframe corpse bounces around for a bit and hits a mine, which blows it into its little wireframe parts. The parts themselves will bounce around and get into all sorts of trouble: setting off more mines, being shot around the game board by trampolines, being zapped by zap-robots, and so on. It's the most morbid game with the simplest graphics I've ever seen, and I've seen at least five.

  But it's not fun to die, because that means you've got to start the whole frustrating Lode Runner-esque level over again instead of going to the next cool level. Which, under Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence, is basically the same thing that happens in real life. So I guess I'm saying it inculcates a healthier attitude towards your own, actual death than Apricots.

  It's also one of the best games I've ever seen on my Game Roundup scale of game-liking: "a flexible set of techniques to use towards your goals, and lots of random variation within well-defined parameters." Except it's not random here; varity here comes from a huge number of well-designed levels. There are also many user-created levels that simply use the player's (non-dead) body as a pinball in the machine of the board, bouncing you around narrowly avoiding rockets and zap-bots and all sorts of horrible fates.

  Oh, I should mention that it's composed of Flash and it's not open source. Good game though.

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.

• The mini-game Ambassador of Pain really cleared up a lot of my misconceptions about diplomatic service. For instance, who knew that international relations were so much like a snake game, except without the snake? And how else would I have found out that the major topic of discussion at summit meetings was pain?

  There is not a whole lot to this game, but you can define the levels with ASCII art, and it has a level in which you must make your way up the TCP/IP protocol stack. So that's two points in its favor.

• Jump n Bump has nothing to do with arcade classic Bump 'n' Jump, except that both involve bumps and jumping. You'd think that would be a lot of commonality, but while in Bump 'n' Jump you were a car and you needed to jump over obstacles and bump your opponents, in Jump 'n' Bump you are a bunny and you need to jump onto your opponents (bumping them is also an option). Multiplayer only. Lots of fun, very polished; a basic carnage game.
• Dragon Hunt is a little Python game of the Final Fantasy genre, written by the guy who ported all of Kenta Cho's games to Linux. Not very difficult, but kind of fun. And c'mon, this guy ported Kenta Cho to Linux. Give him a break and play his game.
• crossfire is a Roguelike I've known about for years but never really tried out, possibly to avoid a namespace collision with the old IBM game called Crossfire, covered in an earlier Game Roundup. It's multi-player and semi-real-time, giving it sort of a Gauntlet feel, which is really nice. What's not so nice is the weird feel of the tile system. Not sure what's going on there. Also the interface is kind of awkward: you can tell it's been programmed for extensibility but not actually extended that much. However it does have lots of user-contributed maps in its map set; it's like Rocks 'n' Diamonds, only not overwhelming to the point of aggravation. I shouldn't have overlooked this game for as long as I did.
• Silmar is an updated Java version of a DOS Roguelike that I remember uploading to Da Warren. So this guy's been working on the same game idea for over ten years. You don't see that kind of dedication too often. So how is it? Well, I took the old version out of mothballs to do a comparison, and I must say the new version is much nicer. The only feature of the old version I miss is the enormous number of character classes: the old version was the only Roguelike I've ever seen that lets you play a baseball player.

  Nowadays Silmar is an interesting Roguelike, pretty tough, with an IF-like fixation on light management and lots of interesting non-character-class related features like a spell that bookmarks your location on a particular level (so you can get back there later). It's also got abandoned mine shafts that you can't resist poking around in. You'd think there'd be treasure in there, or a bonus level, but half the time they're just empty and the other half they contain a ferocious dragon who comes out and slaughters you. So it's got a real sort of Lassie "don't poke around abandoned mine shafts" vibe.

• RPGD is a BBS-style game, but I couldn't get signed up with it so I never got to the point where I figured out if it was like the door games I like (Wizard's Arena) or the door games I don't like (Legend of the Red Dragon). I guess I suspected it would be like the latter and I didn't care enough to sign up for an account. I like the ANSI graphics though; that brings back the memories.
• Widelands was covered in an earlier Game Roundup (the one linked above) and I couldn't figure out what the heck was going on. Now it's been improved, made more usable, and I see that it's an RTS game after my heart, kind of like SimCity. The focus is on building roads and structures to gain new types of materials, but there's still no real indication of what you're going to do with those materials so it's like playing FreeCiv without any knowledge of what the tech tree is for. I'll check back in another few months.

  I'm also not sure what is it with these games and frame rates. They seem awfully proud of their frame rates, so much so that it has to be displayed on the screen at all times. It makes no sense to me.

• There's a whole genre of games I never knew about before: Slime Volleyball. First invented by computer science students at the University of Western Australia, it has spawned a Roguelike number of variants. All the variants are fun to play, mainly because you're controlling these awesome slime characters. Very good character design here. Iconic.
• Lost Labyrinth of previous Game Roundup fame has lost its Unix branch, but the developers have put a lot of new features into the Windows version and the game is much more playable now, assuming you have Windoze, as the kids call it, though probably not the kids in this part of the timeline. I think it's still too hard, but there's not so much near-instant-death as previously.
• crosssum lets you solve those number puzzles that take place in crossword grids. Not the Sudoku which became popular in the UK between the time I wrote that sentence and the time I wrote this one, and which indeed made me have to write this clarifying sentence.
• In these times of crisis we must find ways to reduce our dependence on foreign games. This is why more and more game makers are producing explanation-efficient ludemic hybrids. Torrent combines SameGnome and Tetris: you must click on adjacent blocks of color to remove them, to avoid the blocks from reaching the top of the screen. Now I can use words on something else!
• Like Batalhao, a fun little Brazillian tank game in which your tank has to protect the city from other tanks. The other tanks will try to blow up your pizza parlor and your hospital, with no regard for the relative strategic values of those locations. In fact I think the city in this game is the town where Encyclopedia Brown lives, which was always being described in terms of the buildings within the city limits (two delicatessens, a synagogue, etc.). This game has some tactical element missing that if present would make it a great game; as it is it's just a good game.
• It had to happen: 3D Minesweeper. The only question is, why? On that soul-searching note, I end this Game Roundup. My antivengeance is complete!

• They say the neon lights are brighter on Broadway. But Cruising on Broadway, a clone by Game Roundup veteran Paul Robson, is a little dull. It looks nice but it's homomorphic to a very very simple game of Pac-Man. Not his fault.
• Ever since I went on my Roundup rampage against snake games (not to be confused with my Roundup of snake-themed Rampage clones), the authors of said games have been lying low, disguising their snake games as other sorts of games. For instance, here's SpacePong, which you'd think would be Pong-esque but it's actually snake game-esque, with echoes of the old DOS game Helius. See how I pepper my reviews with knowing, incredibly obscure references? That's the sign of real quality writing there.

  Anyway, Space Pong is a pretty fun mouse-scribbling game. You're a metal ball, controlled with the mouse, which bounces around space collecting green boxes. Overzealous mouse movements send the ball careening out of control, a dangerous thing to be out of due to the sessile space mines and roving asteroids that would just love to have you smack into them and have to restart the level. This is in sharp contradistinction to most traditional snake games, where the major threat is your own ever-lengthening tail. This is a bit unfortunate for Space Pong because the "long tail" is the only aspect of snake games that is hip nowadays.

• There are too many Angband variants! What we need is a way to abstract away the differences between two variants and have them use a common framework! What if we provided a series of roguelike services? And it was written in the Java® Programming Language? You'd have Ng, the Java Roguelike Engine Project. It's a shoo-in for this Roundup's HAS prize, but even though I started writing this review a long time ago and only came back to it today, it's still active. Despite its near-identical fit into the "incredibly ambitious software project sure to be abandoned" category, it's refusing to be typecast.
• Crummy: The Site is proud to tell you about SSC: The Game. This is a 2D space combat game inspired by the venerable xkoules game that Andy and I independently got addicted to in the late 90s. Wait, actually, that was xkobo. Totally different space game. In this space game, you're a yellow blob who shoots it up with blue dots. The graphics are basic but there are several nice camera angles, proving that you can have a game take place in 2D yet give it the 3D effects that the kids demand these days.

  SSC seems abandoned and the gameplay is pretty clunky (maybe my computer's just too slow, maybe I should install THE FASTER CPU I ALREADY BOUGHT), but it looks like the games I like and it has really nice enemy swarming behavior. Running into the edge of the universe gives you a huge wrestling-ring-rope-style boost of kinetic energy, and the swarms of blue dots use this to propel themselves as a group across the screen. Nice emergent behavior in this game.

• Continuing the seeming trend of games set in space is XGalaga and XGalaga++. I found out about XGalaga++ first, but XGalaga is actually the better game. Both have power-ups, cool aliens, and the dorky-looking spaceship from the original Galaxian. XGalaga has much smoother gameplay. On my scorecard, smoothness of gameplay has a huge positive correlation with perceived quality of game. Just a tip, in the unlikely event that people have started using my tastes as a touchstone for the games they write (surely before I reach that point I'll reach the point where people are emailing me URLs to their games without taking my tastes into account).
• This one's funky. E.T. Traveller is far superior to the disastrous E.T. Atari 2600 game. In fact, I liked it better than just about any Atari 2600 game except Combat, but I've never been a big 2600 fan. In this game you "collect objects that have been randomly scattered in 3D scenes", yielding an experience oddly reminiscent of robotfindskitten. Except, I explored the one 3D scene provided and there were no collectable objects, just sad cool-looking buildings abandoned for billions of years until I, the E.T. Traveller, came along to check them out.

  Comes with a scene editor of which I can make neither head, tail, hide, nor hair. Just to prove its incomprehensibility to me, the scene editor can export to POV-RAY. Both game and editor have an approach to user interface design I've never seen anywhere else: it opens up a GUI window for the graphics, but prints text output to the standard output of the terminal where you started it. I guess it's kind of like what you'd see with Freeciv if Freeciv printed stuff to the terminal instead of the text box within the frame of the game.

The winner: Strategic Space Combat, aka SSC. No limerick as I am done with writing for today. Submit your own limericks in the comments, why don't you?

• 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

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

• JRoller is a fun little Java applet that lets you create roller coasters and watch helpless blue spheres race around them. Somehow the spheres have just enough momentum to make it to the top of the highest hill, no matter how high that hill happens to be at the moment. A neat compact representation of your coaster keeps file size small and makes the board surprisingly editable. All in all a class act. Would make a great executive desk toy were it not for the violation of the conservation of momentum.
• As long as I've got Java installed, I might as well try out this guy's other game applet. Minas is a fun game where you click to build a bridge across a river and then try not to have it fall apart when physics are turned on. It reminds me a lot of a construction toy that I know I wrote about on NYCB but I can't find where.
• CalcRogue is a full-featured Roguelike game that can be played on the TI series of calculators, or on PalmOS as well as Linux and Windows. Truly the robotfindskitten of Roguelikes. Includes shop names like "Paul's Power Potions", and, bizarrely, the prompt "You're so hungry, you could eat a horse! Do so? [Y/n]" Most of the monsters are the original Rogue ones (remember the aquator?). It would be kind of neat to have the Rogue level in Nethack yield only monsters from the original Rogue, some not seen elsewhere in the game.
• Tyrant enjoyably combines microdesigned Ultima-like worlds with randomly-generated Roguelike exploration. Java applet, easy to lose your game by accidentally clicking a Google ad. A lot of fun, and a great in-game tutorial. While I'm giving out funny Roguelike prompts, here's Tyrant's: "The ham is not yours. Steal? [Y/n]" What Would Brak Do?
• David Bellot presents SVG playing cards. I especially like the Mozilla backs-of-cards.
• JZuul is an interactive fiction platform with editor, written in Java. If you're into writing games that can be easily translated into other language, this is your interactive fiction platform. Also allows for real-time MUD-like elements.
• The Virtual Online Aquarium is nice, but would be nicer if you could drag and drop the fish.
• Dodgin' Diamond 2 is a fun spaceship combat game. It's billed as "an 'old school' arcade game", and it delivers, with NES-quality graphics and a synth soundtrack that reminds me of the NES staple The Goonies II. Incidentally, there was an arcade game called The Goonies and then that slightly-similar NES game The Goonies II. Namespace integrity across platforms! Anyway, that's not the point of this entry. The point is Dodgin' Diamond 2. Good clean spaceship-destroying fun.
• On the other hand Tumiki Fighters is groundbreaking, the Katamari Damancy of spaceship combat games. In the world of Tumiki Fighters, everything is made of blocks. Not only is this easy on the rendering engine, but the blocks of your defeated enemies can be bolted onto your prop plane where they act as shielding or still-gamely-firing weaponry. I'm a sucker for this dynamic, as my love of the Mega Man games indicates. And it's just awesome, though the bolted-on parts could stand to take a little more damage before becoming unbolted. The star of this roundup and many others!
• Another by Kenta Cho, author of Tumiki Fighters, A7Xpg looks really cool but is just a chase-around-the-screen game about which I didn't find much special. Tumiki Fighters really got my hopes up, or I'd give this a higher score than I am.
• There are several more Kenta Cho games, but I need to start making dinner so I will deal with them later. You can see them linked from either of those pages.

Twig's In Space faithfully reproduces the look of an '80s arcade Asteroids-like game being emulated with MAME. Written by a CS professor partly as a computer graphics demonstration, partly to tweak a rival professor at the same university, making the game a more sophisticated, less directly insulting version of the old standby Spray Steve's Cooties (one of the most obscure computer games in history, if Google is any judge).

Barrage is kind of a disturbing game, and it's mouse-based to boot, so I can't even play it very well. Soldiers and tanks file past you and you try to blow them up with your artillery piece. They're not even trying to attack you! It's like blowing up a parade! It's got a sort of shooting gallery theme, but it should have little wooden ducks and clowns instead.

Speaking of which, look at Chickens For Linux, which offers the same kind of game but you're destroying chickens hell-bent on destruction, unlike the perfectly harmless military units of Barrage. I couldn't get it to compile because of some Allegro thing, but I didn't try very hard because I don't really like this kind of game anyway.

Chromium B.S.U. is a very nice-looking infinite-powerup shooter. Very difficult--more difficult than my skill or patience can handle--but it's designed for those who like a challenge. Maybe it would be more to my liking if it were called Chromium B.T.U. instead.

neverball is like a big Labyrinth puzzle that you tilt to move a ball around. I used to crave a Labyrinth puzzle when they were a mid-level prize in those magazine-selling schemes advertised in the back of Boys Life, but now I can't be bothered. There's a putting-based variant called Neverputt which is better.

Robohack is an ingenious ASCII version of arcade favorite Robotron 2064, with all the flashing colors and obnoxiousness you've come to expect from such games. But it's all in ASCII and ncurses. It takes a special breed of madman to take ncurses in this direction, and I'm behind it all the way. Greg Naughton, I salute you.

Nazghul (I guess that's a Nazgul plus a ghoul) is a tile-based game engine that's being scripted to clone Ultima 5, but which can of course be scripted to clone other games. Wins major points for agreeing with me that the first-person Ultima dungeons are entirely pointless.

I haven't played it, but balder is based on the zero-gravity combat training game featured in Ender's Game. Character development presumably not included.

Transcend is a board-based shooter with smoothly morphing vector graphics, in which you assemble a weapon out of space flowers to help you battle a big "anti-glyph". The thing is that everything in the game world corresponds to some facet of a piece of music which gets constructed as you solve the level. I would really love to experience this aspect of the game but I couldn't get the sound to work. This one is quite the high-concept piece, let me say. Fun, too.

• Widelands looks like a lot of fun, but it's a clone of another game and one of the things they cloned is that you can't figure out what's going on without looking at the manual. Tooltips are essential to any real-time strategy game.
• From the makers of Dead Mobsters (see Game Roundup passim) comes Egg Blaster, a solitaire Bomberman clone in which you are a chicken who lays exploding eggs. Isn't there a joke along those lines? Also includes two-player Bomberman destruction goodness. Better play than Dead Mobsters, but still the unhealthy obsession with only letting me have one damage-dealing item on the screen at at time. Note: not open source (actually Dead Mobsters is probably also not open source).
• From the same namespace as Egg Blaster comes Alien Blaster, another entry in the hold-down-the-fire-key ship fighting genre. Lets you play as the small fast ship or the big tough ship. The two subgenres of this game are the anachronism-ridden WWII game and the futuristic spaceship game. This game cleverly fuses the two by putting spaceships in pitched battle over the islands of the Pacific. Only has two levels, after which You WIN ! ! ! The perfect length for a Game Roundup reviewer, but you might crave more alien blasting action. In that case, there's Arcade mode, which is futuristic spaceship all the way. There's also a two-player cooperative-mode. Pretty solid, with nice powerups like the "Kick-Ass Rocket".
• Netrok is a very fast-paced and surreal platform game. Has a cackling Zorak sample when you lose, but the ideas in the game are a lot better than the game mechanics. Kind of reminds me of Karnov for some control-related reason I can't put my finger on.
• SuperTux: in the hilarious demo mode, a fat little penguin goes across the board systematically missing every chance to get points. Nice pentatonic jazz intro song. Nice generic NES storyline, too.

  Okay, this is almost exactly like the Mario games, which makes sense because the Tux character has been spread even thinner over more even games than the Mario one, so why not start enroaching on the latter's turf?. It's got the same power-ups and the same enemies. The third level of SuperTux is nearly identical to the first level of Mario 1. Graphically the enemies look more like Mega Man robots, but it's pretty obvious who in Mario-land they correspond to. The fire flower power-up sound is a great gargling noise. All the music is really good.

  Oh, you know how a lot of games have numbers that float up indicating how many points you got for something? I somehow got one of those that said zero points. That's the best floating-point joke since "Jack Flash: Mutiny of the Things", a Duke Nukem parody in which everything was worth one point and wherever you went you were surrounded by floating 1s.

  I don't know what it is but the levels seem really repetitive. Okay, Mario-style green pipes started showing up. That's a sign that it's time to end the review. Oh, it's got that dang icicle too, the one that waits til you're right underneath it and then quivers a bit and falls on you. One of the few non-Mario imports.

• Auto-Nethack: Big disappointment. You think it'll be like Autorogue or the Angband Borg, but it's just a port of Nethack to autoconf. There seems to be a big trend towards writing Nethack utilities that aren't as cool as they sound (cf. Emacs Nethack or whatever it was called).
• Pac's New Adventures looks like Pacman, but it feels more like Crystal Castles, one of the most underrated old-time arcade games. It's got unconventional board layouts and the graphics are not too bad. A good first effort, especially when you take into account that it's only 80K. My only complaint: it runs way too slow, especially on a CC-like board that's packed with a huge grid of tasty energy dots.
• I Have No Tomatoes: makes you install the unfree fmod library, then doesn't work with your sound card, then goes to a blank screen right after "Loading" and won't do anything. Sorry, I Have No Tomatoes, but all the cool screenshots and silly ideas in the world won't save you if I can't even get the game to run.
• Crossfire was one of the games on my first computer. When I say that I mean that one of my father's co-workers put a bunch of games on the computer for me, thus starting me on my lifetime of disregard for intellectual property (I always want to write "intellectual popery"). I lost all those games when I foolishly took apart the 20-megabyte hard drive they lived on, and they probably wouldn't run on a modern computer anyway. But they're gradually being remade, which is great.

  My only complaint is that this Crossfire is not exactly like the version I played. It seems harder (maybe my reflexes are slower), and the graphics aren't as cool (the enemies are different colored blobs instead of menacing robot-looking things). Minor complaints. It's good to have this game back. My current high score: 430. I like the music even though it's kind of just generic electronic music, which actually explains why I don't like electronic music much: I'm listening to it, yet I'm not playing a video game. Such tragic oversight!

"There is GNOME Sokoban already implemented as a set of caves within GNOME Stones." Of course there is. I should have seen that coming, since the exact same thing happened with Rocks 'n' Diamonds.

Re the Minesweeper clone smackdown where I didn't care: he tipped the scale hugely in favor of Gnome by pointing out that the Gnome version lets you choose a board of up to 100x100 for a huge Minesweeper experience, while the KDE version limits you to a puny 50x50 board. New winner of KDE/Gnome Minesweeper clone smackdown: Gnome! That happy face is still a little creepy, though. Reminds me of the Pac-Man cartoon.

• Gearhead is a great Roguelike with Omega-like nonlinearity, excellent character development for a Roguelike, and many wacky touches like randomly generated dialogue, which throws it all away by being a mecha game. Because it has the potential to be so great and its fatal flaw is so simple, I am going to take this opportunity to make a detailed argument about UI design which you can skip if you find it boring.

  In case you came late to the party, a mecha is a Godzilla-sized robot (such as, well, Mechagodzilla) operated by a person who is usually riding in the robot. The point of a mecha game is to do a game on a large scale, where you can crunch through entire cities wreaking havoc. People who like mecha games also seem to like drawing lots of pictures of mechas (mecha? mechae?), which is not my cup of tea, but that is not relevant to this discussion.

  In your standard Roguelike game, you push buttons to control a simulated person. When you play a mecha game, you are pushing buttons to control a simulation of a person pushing buttons to control a second machine. Sometimes people have wacky ideas about what it would look like to have a video game about playing a video game. Well, here you have it. It looks like a mecha game, and it is annoying.

  It doesn't have to be this way. Mechas are, by conceit of the genre, vaguely humanoid. The best interface is therefore the one you've spent your whole life using: your own body. Forgo the buttons and use motion capture and force-feedback to tie your mecha's movement to your own, as in Fiasco. Indeed, some mechas are refered to as "suits", implying this very mechanic. In game terms, this would be implemented by letting you use the same commands to move your mecha in battle mode as you use to move yourself in non-battle mode.

  If you absolutely need to simulate additional clunkiness (eg. so you can have a notion of "current facing direction", as Gearhead does), do it by reducing the directional key controls to the Clunky Three: rotate left, rotate right, and thrust (move forward). This time-honored trio shows up in innumerable games all the way back to Spacewar, and nothing does a better job of connoting "the thing on the screen does not represent you, only a machine you control". I don't play a lot of mecha games, but this was used in the only one I ever liked--a DOS play-by-modem maze chase that Andy and I used to play.

  Gearhead, in the worst mecha game tradition, forgoes both these mecha-motion strategies in favor of a menu system. When you're just walking around with your feet, you can use the arrow keys to move. But when it comes time to stand and fight mecha-style, you can't directly move your mecha at all. Instead of letting you use the arrow keys for left, right, and thrust, there is a menu system which has options for left, right, and thrust. You use the arrow keys to select your option from a menu, and hit enter to rotate or move. It's Microsoft Mecha 98. Just don't do this! There's no reason to! Factor out the aggravation for a better game.

  Someone who likes mecha games might say that this is part of the the game; the human is subsumed into the machine and must operate it in clunkiness. I would say that misses the point. You are already interacting with a machine in a clunky way. It's just that it's a real machine, not a simulated one. Treat the player sitting at the computer as though they were the character sitting in the mecha, and you've got big mimesis wihout sacrificing usability. You can bet the character in the game is not selecting "Rotate left" from a menu; it's not that bad to drive a mecha. Take advantage of the clunkiness of the standard Roguelike controls and kill two robo-birds with one mecha-stone.

  I've picked on Gearhead enough. As I said, I pick on it not because it's a bad game but because it's a really, really good game made virtually unplayable by a bad UI decision. It's a game where talking to the world-weary shopkeeper is quick and fun, but where even small battles play at a crawl. Admittedly I have a preference for the world-weary shopkeeper type interaction, but that doesn't mean I want the battles to be slow and hard to play.

• icebreaker is interesting because of the skill with which it uses nice iconic graphics to conceal the fact that it's another Qix clone until you actually start playing. There's also a convenient webpage which details all the ways in which this game is different from Microsoft's Jezzball, pioneer of the mouse-based Qix clone.

  As previously mentioned, this is a lot better than KBounce. It has penguins--the bouncy balls are penguins and you're trying to cut up their ice floes so they can be transported to zoos or some lame excuse like that. I like the penguins, but I don't like the linear way it gets harder, adding one penguin each time.

• Freebooters: Lovely nonsensical name disguises a game that is more atmosphere than game by a wide margin. It's set in the Caribbean region, and who's to say but that certain piratical impulses might be indulged in the course of the game. That's what it promises, anyway. What it delivers is a game where you, a legitimate businessman, go from port to port buying and selling rum and other commodities (in a welcome deviation from realism, there is no slave-running). Occasionally you run into a pirate ship and have it out, but the having-it-out action scenes have weird controls and look like boats fighting in a bathtub. It reminds me of a nautical version of North And South, but not as good. Great graphics in the non-real-time parts of the game, though.

  This game is a clone of "Pirates!", one of Sid Meier's pre-Civilization games. There was a real chance here for the clone to improve on the original, but it just plays like early Sid Meier, the kind of game that would be fun if it were the late 80s and similar, better games didn't exist yet.

• Komi is not actually a Qix clone, but I can't shake the feeling that it's somehow homomorphic to Qix. You are a frog with an arbitrarily long tongue, a frog who lives in a swamp--of madness! Alien spaceships and vicious robins patrol the air, protecting the yummy fireflies that are your food. To retrieve these morsels you must dare to expose your tongue to the alien/robin joint assault for as long as it takes to move your tongue up the screen and then back down--but wait! The water itself teems with vicious herons who will peck at you, and fish that will gobble you up! I'm taking liberties as to what the sprites are supposed to be; they don't look like herons or fish or fireflies (but they do look like alien spaceships). The web page says you are a "space frog", which might explain things even as it makes things more confusing. Anyway, it's very hectic and it's fun for a while.
• Laby: Fun roguelike, very customizable with skillset. Has a kind of SNES feel to it. Hard to find items, instant death got me twice. Really feels like there's something missing in terms of game balance, but I still want to play even though I know I'm just going to die. A little work could turn this into a classic.
• Dead Mobsters has a great idea (mobsters come back from the dead in a Marley-esque quest to undo the damage they did while alive... okay, it's not quite that good) and excellent funny graphics, but it's way too hard. The undeath factor explains the old video-game conundrum of how you can take ten bullets to the chest and still live, but it doesn't explain why your un-undead opponents have the same ability. It's doubly frustrating when your opponents can fire off those ten bullets all at once, while you're stuck with the crappy one-bullet-on-the-screen-at-a-time gun they issued you in Mobster Hell. Fix this, and you've got a fun shoot-em-up.

• Tea Cooker: This is a timer. It is preset for various types of tea steeping. Has a little, hard-to-read pie-chart display in the deskbar window (is deskbar a word or did I just make it up?). You can choose your own custom time. As a timer, it's not bad.
• KDE World Clock: Displays a geographic map of the world with the in-daylight portion shaded. You can add flags to various cities, which would be nice if you were homesick or separated from your loved one. The best feature is the ability to change the map graphic to an irrelevant false-color map of the earth that shows eg. the amount of rainfall.
• AMOR: The only in this series of Roundups to which I have made an (unofficial) contribution. AMOR creates a little animated icon that wanders around the active window and does tricks. My favorite is the segmented worm; it's cute.
• Mousepedometa: an odometer for your mouse. It measures how far (in inches or centimeters) you've moved your mouse pointer. The help claims the next version will be USEFUL, which I assume means it will have a keystroke counter as well. Has a trip odometer, just like the odometer in a car. Old-fashioned analog flippy number graphics, not the harsh digital graphics of the modern era. Would you believe I racked up 10.8 inches on the mouse writing this review?

  Oh, also if you had your WACOM tablet pen acting as the mouse, you could use it to do things like see how long your signature would be if it were a straight line.

• Moon phase indicator: The moon is new right now. That's all it says, so that's all I'll say. Lets you see the moon from any Earthbound angle, not that it matters at the moment.
• KTuberling: A Mr. Potato Head for KDE. Hacker Abstraction Syndrome (henceforth to be abbreviated HAS) has added "penguin" and "aquarium" modes, but has yet to turn it into a KidPix like collage/drawing program. A lot of fun. To the right you can see Sheriff Tater, my own creation.
• xeyes: The sailor's favorite. This classic demonstration of non-square windows in X (this used to be a big deal, but I think everyone has it now) is a pair of googly eyes that follow your cursor. It would be kind of funny to have a background be a famous painting and put xeyes on top of it so that the painting's eyes really did follow you (r cursor) across the room (screen).
• xlogo: It's the X logo. Useless! Except, I suppose, as an example X program.
• xearth: This doesn't come with enough systems. It pretty obviously inspired the thing in Snow Crash that's exactly the same but fancier. Like KDE World Clock, but shows the earth as a globe in space. Has lots of options (with or without starfield, markers, etc.). Good clean fun.

  PS: if you are interested in this sort of thing, check out Fourmilab's Earth and Moon viewer. I think I've mentioned that the Fourmilab website is what Crummy merely aspires to be. On that happy note, we end this roundup.

Did I miss something that came with your system? Let me know and I'll review it, unless it is not a game or (catch-all) I don't want to review it.

• AisleRiot: Starts off as a slavish Klondike klone of the Windows 3.1 Solitaire that made "computer" synonymous with "productivity drain". Fortunately, can be turned into about 80 other card games a la pysol. Nice acronym, and by default uses the Knuth font for the card labels. As go attempts to tug on pysol's coattails, pretty good.
• Patience: KDE's attempt at a pysol type framework. Also starts up as Klondike. Not as slick as AisleRiot, and only has 18 games, including three difficulty levels of Spider. I like the card-flip animation though (but not the card-turning-over animation, which I find disturbing and smacking of witchcraft). Unlike AisleRiot, it can play games on its own (and is actually easier to watch doing this than pysol), though it can get into an infinite loop. Winner of KDE/Gnome pale shadow of pysol smackdown: Gnome!
• Blackjack: Actually, this one's not in pysol. And this is a good implementation. In a fit of anti-realism, will actually help you improve your blackjack game by showing you the odds and giving you hints in case you don't understand what the odds mean what with all the confusing numbers between zero and one. It even does card counting for you, and doesn't kick itself out (though I was able to crash it).

  Downsides: somewhat unintuitive interface requires that you click the dealer's hand to stand. Keeps your winnings (or losings) in some Gnome persistence cubbyhole so it's like one eternal round of blackjack your whole life unless you clear out the file or whatever gconf uses. Figures out the optimal strategy for blackjack every time it loads, which is a bit slow.

  Since you have an unlimited amount of credit, I was thinking it would be actually possible to do the thing where you double your bet every time you lose and thus have an expected take of zero no matter how long play or how unlucky you are. Unfortunately, a 500.00 (in a nod to internationalization, there are no units; but I assume it's not like 500.00 baht) per-hand limit stymied my plans, but I'm still 652.50 ahead after a few high-stakes rounds. This game is fun and glamorous and statistical, but I can't stop thinking about the dealer in the old BASIC blackjack game who would give lame excuses like "THE CARDS HAVE TURNED AGAINST ME" when he lost. Is there no place for heart in your cruel modern technology? The heart provided by lousy twenty-year-old technology?

  Oh, I forgot to mention that there are a lot of rules knobs you can tweak, but the rules are gathered into groups like "Atlantic City" and "Vegas Strip". You can't tweak them individually. Anyway, this is a good game and I wasn't expecting it.

• Freecell: I was worried this would be a whole nother program from AisleRiot, but it's actually just AisleRiot set up to run Freecell instead of Klondike. Good call, Gnome people. Next!
• KPoker: Can be played video-poker style or against one computer opponent. I won $82 off the computer, which I know it has because I paid several hundred dollars for this computer, but it won't pay up. Deadbeat computer! When you win, has a little screen-saver like wavy effect on the notification that you won which is a little queasy.

  Remember, you click the cards you want to keep, not the ones you want to discard. I traded a straight in for two pair by keeping the one card I wanted to discard. Also, the computer is not a real poker player--it never folds in response to an agressively played hand, or does anything besides match your bets and optimize its hand. So really it's just another type of video poker when you play against the computer. But still not bad.

• Lieutenant Skat: I think this was one of those wartime movies where Mel Tormé joined the army. Anyway, it's also a card game implemented for KDE with a splash screen that looks just like what you might see on the big LCD of a Vegas marquee in between ads for cheap surf-and-turf. I always thought it was a solitaire game, but it's actually a two-player game that is what War would be like if you tried to make it into an actual game with real strategy and kung-fu grip. Amusing German-sounding error messages like "This move would not follow the rulebook. Better think again!" add to the Teutonic flavor.
• xmille: I don't know if this still comes with systems, but it should. Consider it a bonus. Before KDE and Gnome and their big bundles of toys and games, there was a big bundle of toys and games that came bundled with X Windows. This game stood among them. Someone should write a modern GUI version of this because not everyone can stand the unadorned X widget set, but I love this game. It's Milles Bourne, which is a classic card game even though I've never played it with cards. It simulates a car race where both contestants are trying to sabatoge their opponents. It's a fun game, but a little weird, frustrating, and often capricious; as with running for president, you can win the race yet have thousands of points fewer than your opponent. Who wins? It doesn't say.

So, that's all the X games that come with your standard Linux install nowadays. Stay tuned for Games You Already Have Roundup V: The Final Toys.

• 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.

Greetings, already havers of the following games. Today we look at computer versions of games usually played on boards. "Board Games", they are called. Man, it's hard to fill up a whole introductory paragraph. Did you ever notice how arbitrary the "board game" term is when games are categorized in a Linux installation? The category includes solitaire Mahjongg, which is not a board game and uses pieces from a board game that has no proper board. It includes Yahtzee, which is put out by a board game company but is played entirely with dice. Yet it does not, and this is the real travesty, it does not include my groundbreaking multiplayer mudfest "Bran's Brother Has Flipped!: The Home Game". Where's the justice? Not in this life, my friends.

That's why I'm imposing a strict rule on this episode of Games You Already Have Roundup. No matter what the menu classification says, if the game does not feature competition, ie. you versus some human or AI opponent, it is not a board game. It will not be featured in this episode, but rather in the next episode, Games You Already Have Roundup III: The Search For Puzzle Games. Hopefully the people who write Debian post-install scripts for these games will take this as the stinging rebuke it undoubtedly is, and will get their act together in time to avert game-categorization catastrophe on a grand scale.

Don't thank me; I'm only doing this so I can put off playing those awful marble games. And now, with further ado, the games.

• KWin4: Give me a break! I thought I could go the rest of my life without having to play Connect Four, but then I got this crazy idea to review all these bundled games. Hm, I never realized how quickly this game degenerates into a holding pattern where you fill up all the useless rows to the top.

  Actual title of this clone: either "Four wins" or "Kwin4", depending on what part of the application you believe. You can play over the network. I hope that was fun for the author to implement. Nice animation, on the opening screen and in the game. It's really well-put-together, but it's Connect Four. What's next? Operation? The goofy game for dopey doctors?

• Four-in-a-row: Argh! OK, this one's actually not a good game. It looks like every other Gnome game with marbles on a grid, but it's got the logic of Connect Four. Again the inconsistent naming: help claims it is called "Gnect". I also can't help noticing that I never win. Is it a solved problem or am I just no good at this game? This version has AI settings, which implies the latter. Winner of of KDE/Gnome Connect Four clone smackdown: damn you, Connect Four! The only way to win is not to play. I hate to admit that there are degrees of "better" and "worse" here, but the KDE one is a lot better.
• Iagno: Scraping the bottom of the Gnome pun barrello is this Othello clone. I started wanting to eat the pieces; they look like delicious mints. I tried various buttons to see if one was the "eat" button. I searched the settings for an option that would let me eat the pieces. Then I gave up and switched to a slick sun-and-moon graphic set which I think would give the implementation a lot more character if it were used as the default. Two local players or AI.
• KReversi: Graphics not nearly as good as Iagno's can be, and what's more the animation is annoying. In Iagno all the pieces you capture turn over simultaneously. In KReversi they turn over piece by maddening piece (I later found out you can speed up the animation so fast it goes away). However I perservered and by pressing the one Othello hint I've learned since I was 9 and playing a BASIC Othello game ("go for the corners"), I was able to rack up what I think is my first Othello win ever. One player against AI only. Winner of KDE/Gnome Othello clone smackdown: Gnome!
• GNOME Tali: It's Yahtzee, despite the name which tries to connect it to the ancient Roman game of knucklebones. For once, I believe the game conglomorate official history. It's fun. I don't need to defend Yahtzee to you. I like the interface by which the dice you want to re-roll turn into pumpkins when you select them. AI and/or human players. Keep it.
• Ataxx: Uses the same graphics as Iagno. And it's a little like Othello: you're trying to convert your opponent's pieces to your color. But you have a choice: you can clone a piece by 'moving' it to an adjacent square, or you can jump a piece and convert all neighboring enemy pieces. There's a point at which the strategy abruptly switches from always cloning to always jumping, and at that point the game can go on for quite a while. There's nothing wrong with this game, but I think Othello has a better-defined win condition.
• KBackgammon: To review this I thought I would have to relearn how to play backgammon, but it turns out this is not the case. This game is a mostly GUI wrapper around GNU backgammon, which in and of itself is fine. There are also GUI wrappers around eg. GNU chess. But the GUI wrappers to GNU chess don't have a text adventure-esque interface surrounding the chessboard where you interact with the GNU chess engine. You don't have to enter a special command to castle; the chessboard and the pieces and the drag and the drop constitute the whole user interface. Yet tragically this seems not to be the case with KBackgammon--sometimes nothing in the GUI will advance the game and you have to type a command. So even if you know how to play backgammon, I think you will find that KBackgammon is not nearly as usable as it should be. However as I flailed around trying to understand this state of affairs I was treated to comical output like "Only 3 beavers are permitted (see `help set beavers')." Who will deny me additional beavers?!?!

  PS: Why does chess not come with every system? It's the single most popular chess in the world! Could it be because "gchess" and "kchess" are already taken as names?

• Atlantik: I remember the halcyon days of 1998 when Linux was a doomed fad and this program was called "kmonop". Yes, I remember well those halcyon days of 2001, when Linux was just a flash in the pan and this program was renamed to Atlantik under legal pressure. I stood by on the sidelines for years and watched via the project go from its original goal--to be a Monopoly clone for Linux--to being an all-singing, all-dancing all-client-server Monopoly®-like board game framework, allowing you to play any arbitrary game so long as it was homomorphic to Monopoly. Well, I get quite enough of that philosophy in the world of physical games. I managed to avoid Atlantik, to keep it in the realm of free software nostalgia and out of the realm of free software installed on my computer, until this installation with its new version of KDE. Even now I have managed to avoid actually playing it due to the server not working (admittedly, I am not trying very hard to make it work). So you can say this is not a fair review if you want. Maybe if I actually started playing I would find some features to tickle my fancy.

  Looking at the board designer, which does work, I see that your games can differ from Monopoly mainly in the number and names of squares, the cards, the rents charged, and the locations of the special squares. Frankly I expected more from a project that seems to have fallen victim to hacker mania for abstraction; it looks like it just lets you design your own local version of Monopoly. Whereas if I were to design a Monopoly-like game it would have fluctuating rents, mobile properties, and monstrous beasts that roamed the streets destroying houses and hotels on your command. On the other hand, Atlantik is bundled with KDE, and none of my stuff is. So they must be doing something right. PS: Linux is too hard to install! There's no application support! Where's the GUI?

• Kenolaba: Where chess is a battle this is kind of a mob scene, or a really big wrestling match where all the down-home "good" wrestlers take on all the effete, pretty-boy, villanous, or downright foreign "evil" wrestlers at once instead of going at it one-on-one or tag-team. Or maybe a real battle instead of the abstract battle that was planned beforehand. You have to push your opponent's pieces off the board using your own pieces. Really nice click-and-drag interface. I was wondering "What kind of game played on a big hex board could justify its inclusion in kdegames?" But this is a... wait, I just figured it out. This is that game "Abalone". I never checked out that game and now it's been KDEized. Anyway, a good game worth your attention.
• kbattleship: You sunk my kbattleship! OK, I got nothing. This is your basic Battleship game. Has several nice improvements over the overpriced Milton-Bradley version. Apparently you're not allowed to put your ships touching each other (I never knew this), so when you destroy a ship it blocks out all the surrounding squares so you don't waste time on known bad squares. This is pretty good, but I don't think the AI is too smart.

Well, the deal is that most of those games are clones of games I've been playing off and on for the past fifteen years. They don't have that much play left in them. Even for the ones I like, there's usually some DOS version that is the focal point of my nostalgia, and the new GUI versions don't measure up.

Because of my general policy regarding saying things when I can't say anything nice, I had never even thought about reviewing them. But surely a review, even a cursory one, is better than unthinking deletion. So here is the first in a series of Game Roundups that focuses on games that are probably already installed on your machine. For this reason, I'm not giving links to most of these. Here we go, with the "Games > Arcade" section of your Start^TM-like menu.

• GNOME Robots: First, this is not an arcade game (indeed, it's filed under both "Arcade" and "Puzzle" in my convoluted menu layout). It has the layout of an arcade game but it's turn-based, which no arcade game is. (I would be very interested if anyone has any counterexamples) Anyway, this implementation is not as menacing as the DOS robots clone my uncle Robert had on his PCJr, where a robot with a Cylon eye would taunt you between levels. This version has two types of robots: the "Type 1", which you all know and avoid, and the bloodthirsty, double-quick "Type 2". Doesn't use numeric keypad by default--you're going to put GNOME on the desktop by using vi keys for the robots game? Bad idea, dude.

  Has an idea of "safe moves", where if you try something that would get your little guy killed, it just beeps at you instead of letting you do it. That would be great if I had any emotional attachment to my guy. As it was I was wondering why I couldn't just die and get the game over with. You win, evil shortsighted robots trying to kill one guy!

  Oh, here's a feature I'm excited about. You can change the icon of the things beseiging you. So you can play being chased by shell-gnashing eggs or tail-tapping mice.

• KAsteroids: I always liked this Asteroids clone. Good rock graphics, and some of the rocks have powerups in them (asteroid mining on the cheap, I guess), which adds a different element to the game. There's also a "break" key, so you don't have to turn around and fire your jets in the opposite direction to slow down. Has a pretty silly method of pausing--a modal dialog box pops up saying "KAsteroids is paused". Is that in the usability guidelines? I'm keeping this one; I like Asteroids and this is the best Linux implementation I've played.
• KBounce: "Press Ctrl-N;Space to start a game!" But may I end my turn early? No, because it's a Qix clone (subgenre: mouse-controlled). I think icebreaker (coming soon to a not-installed-by-default Game Roundup near you) has more class, with its near-ASCII graphics. Does bonus score allocation with a dialog box, which I'll admit is easy to program and explains everything well, but doesn't have the visceral thrill of a game where one number goes down as your score goes up at the end of a level. Frippery: Lets you select a background image.
• KFoulEggs: Color-matching Tetris clone (actually a Puyo Puyo clone) with blobs. Points for the name, and for multiplayer mode. Points off for being a clone of a boring game.
• KGoldrunner: Lode Runner clone. Didn't respond to my attempts at keyboard control, then popped up a dialog saying "You have pressed a key that can be used to move the Hero. Do you want to switch automatically to keyboard control!" Now that's service! Except for the automatic part.

  The implementation is not bad--you don't have to stand still while digging a pit; you can move on and the pit will still happen. Unfortunately this means if you're running you can easily fall into your own pit. The sprites for the people are kind of blocky compared to the rest of the sprites; did they copy everything from the old Broderbund game and those sprites don't stand up to the test of time?

• KSirtet: Servicable Tetris clone. Nice block graphic. Its distinguishing feature is that it features an "arcade" mode that's just like the arcade game. No, I did not know this either. The difference is that the arcade version of Tetris clears the board when you "level up", as the kids say.
• Gnometris: Sounds like one of the lesser-visited science labs on the Enterprise. Preferences let you configure the random filler blocks in excruciating detail. A high-class stone finish to the blocks and excellent control makes the act of wasting time playing Tetris seem restful. The game was written for the author's wife, so awwwww. Winner of KDE/Gnome Tetris smackdown: Gnome! But KDE wins for sheer number of Tetris clones bundled with the desktop; see above (and below!).
• KSmileTris: Another PuyoPuyo variation, with smiley faces on the blocks. The best thing about this game is that of course you can change the distinguishing graphics on the blocks, but in a feat of graphics recycling one of the graphic sets consists of the icons for the other comes-with-your-system games reviewed in this roundup. Genius! Sheer misused genius!
• KSnakeRace: I was dreading this one, because I hate these snake games. But this one has nice EGA style graphics and an enemy snake who wishes your doom--and really, who can blame him, after all the horrible things you said about him? Since, if you really think about it, snake games kind of look like Qix, there are red balls bouncing randomly around the playing board. In a biblical twist, you eat apples instead of the featureless energy pellets you see in many snake games.

  My big disappointment was that your inevitable death is not treated with the same drama as the death of the enemy snake. When you run into a wall it just starts the level again, but when the enemy snake gets stuck its tail flows back into its body until it disappears. Also, the snakes have rattles but there's no way to use them. Anyway, I came in with really low expectations but this implementation was cute enough to get me to keep it installed, which is saying a lot because I thought you couldn't pay me to play a snake game anymore.

  PS: What was the name of the original snake game? This has broken my streak of "X clone" comments because I don't know the name of the original progenitor of snake games.

• GNibbles: Not as good as KSnakeRace. Impossible to see your snake on the dark playing board. Graphics in general seem dystopian, though there are side-of-board warps like in Pac-Man. These mean that when you get tired of playing the game (elapsed time: 15 seconds) and start writing the review, your snake can go across the screen over and over again like a dead EEG. Winner of KDE/Gnome snake game smackdown: KDE!
• Gnome Stones: I think this used to be called Gnome Mines but it was changed because it was too similar to gnomine (of which more in the next exciting episode of Games You Already Have Roundup). This is a Boulderdash clone which can't lift a candle to Rocks 'n' Diamonds. The gameplay is jerky, your character is is a freak (okay, he's kind of endearing; I like the Commander Keen-esque mannerism animations when you're not moving him around), and I have it on good authority there are only 60,000 levels. Best part: psychedelic between-level fades. Get Rocks 'n' Diamonds instead.
• KSpaceDuel: A SpaceWar clone, made ridiculous by the fact that the contestants are satellites with little solar panel wings, and not proper spaceships at all. Two-player only, but has space mines.
• KTron: The Tron lightcycle game is just a deathmatch version of the snake game, so I think it's even less interesting. But check out the "Appearance" configuration panel for this implementation. It lets you change the line style and line size and color, as though it were a chart program.
• Kolf: Ok, this one I actually hadn't seen--it's new in KDE 3.2, so I'm providing a link. The wacky Modernist splash screen intrigued me. And it's a lot of fun! It's a mini-golf game with water hazards, moving platforms, pinball bumpers, teleportation, Excitebike-style acceleration panels, and other things that would be impractical on a real miniature golf course.

  My generally horrible scores were balanced out by a good many holes in one. (In the anti-frustration sense, not in the below-par sense.) It's probably a clone of something, but I've never played the original (much less 10 variations of the original at various points throughout my life), so it's new to me. Includes "USA Pro" tour which replicates actual miniature golf holes with probably no degree of accuracy whatsoever--wait, I get it. They are miniature golf recreations of places, like the Grand Canyon and Lake Tahoe (Tahoe?!?! One can count the scales on a trout at a depth of a hundred and-- Calm down, Sam). This is a great game.

It's also been hard for me to do X Roundup because it just plain takes a long time to find and test and review a lot of pieces of software. So I've decided that once I have five Games/Softwares, it's Roundup time. Here we go.

Slag Panic is a Qix clone with the featuritis that comes from games being written in Python and features thereby being easy to add. It's got more interesting enemies than your average Qix, obscure bonuses, and an aggravating between-rounds roulette wheel that decides your fate for the next round.

The record will show that I usually only review Tetris clones with a good twist. Not a random slight-game-mechanics change twist like "everything's colored and you have to match colors", but a real twist that changes the way you look at Tetris. bastet is such a game. It uses heuristics to figure out what piece will be hardest for you to place, and always gives you that piece. You have to change your strategy from planning for completed rows to creating situations where the computer can't help but give you a piece that will complete a row. The traditional 'next piece' window isn't possible (or desirable), so instead it gives you the piece it deems the most useful, just to tease you.

The unfortunately named Kraptor is a decent arial combat game. What was the original game in this genre? I want to say "Xeyes", but obviously that's not right. My biggest complaint about this game is that most of the weapons get mounted on the sides of your aircraft, so it's impossible to hit anything directly in front of you. That's always where I aim when playing these games. So except for the huge end-of-level ship I always use the cheapo unlimited-ammo weapon.

Aklabeth is a clone of the prequel to Ultima. I always thought the Ultima games were an incongrous blend of fun overhead 2D adventure and dull underground 3D maze-mapping. Guess which one came first. Written by the same guy who did The Valley of previous-roundup fame.

Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid offers the most realistic depiction as yet of blobs at war. You are a blob commando who must repel an alien invasion and rescue quivering blob MIAs. In a nice postmodern twist, the aliens are also blobs--they look just like you except they're green. I had a great time until I got on the wrong side of a lava pit with no way to cross, and then I gave up and wrote this review.

The game's intro movie uses the actual game mechanics, which is to my mind the only way to do intro movies. It's very gory (insofar as a game about blobs can be gory, which is actually a fair amount), but you can turn of the gore. There is a variety of weapons, though I couldn't find any way to switch between them--it looks like you have one weapon at a time, which can be aggravating because there's a puzzle element to the game that sometimes requires you have a specific weapon.

As for the limerick prize: it's hard for me to decide between bastris and Blob Wars, and I'm tired, so I'm going to punt til tomorrow. Suggested limericks are welcome.

Update: Ok, I came up with a poem finally, about Blob Wars. I was not in a poetry-writing mood today because POLLY CALLED ME FAT! I don't know, what causes people who write poetry to not be in the mood?

There once was a blobbish commando
In many exploits had a hando
He rescued his maties
And made time with the ladies
(See also: Calrissian, Lando)

• Wolf Pacman is the Pacman clone that makes you realize that Pacman is just a Rocks 'n' Diamonds-like game. It does this by removing features that distinguish Pacman from Rocks 'n' Diamonds, like compact boards and enemies that chase you. One new feature in this game is that you can't stop. I can't stop! You bounce off walls like a Breakout ball. I'm pretty sure this is intentional. In the default theme, you are Tux the penguin, and the ghosts are little bitmaps of Bill Gates from xbill. (Incidentally, did you know there is a new xbill? Me neither. It still uses the Athena widget set, which was always my favorite thing about it.)
• Molecule Man is a maze game in which your character moves way too slow, but the graphics are great, quirky and cartoonish. Plus, the documentation is hilarious. "The multi-perspective 3d maze is hiding the very life pills that can bring you salvation... In this cruel world extra time can be bought - with cash!" You need to download some weird Borland developer libraries to run it, which control the frame of the game but not much about the actual game, such that the toolbar be all walkin' down the street like "La di da, I'm Windows XP", whereas the game window itself be all walkin' down the street like "I be kickin' it with the EGA old school," and what's up with that? Tip your waitresses!
• Speaking of isometric views, Pyplace is an isometrics library for use with pygame. It makes me want to write a game in which overbearingly superior beings of pure light visit old Roman ruins and dispense hokey cosmic wisdom despite there being no one there. I'm not sure how the gameplay would go.
• Speaking of pygame, pygsear has some very simple pygame games and demos to use as starting points.
• Stop me before I segue again! Stone's Throw is an Arkanoid clone in Java. "Why write yet another Arkanoid clone?", asks the author. This one has a physics engine that models the universe in which you and I live. But where's the escapism if the game is just like reality? Already as it is I throw a ball at disappearing bricks all day!
• Any Door Is Closed simulates the game you always wanted to play as a kid, where you divided people into two teams and you tried to lock each other into the rooms of an enormous house. This never worked in real life because there weren't enough kids, there weren't enough rooms in the house, the rooms weren't interconnected enough, the doors were openable from the inside, or there were present pesky grownups or safety inspectors who prohibited you from playing. ADIC gets rid of all of these problems.
• Onyx Ring has a good general-purpose Inform library (a supplement to the standard library) and an Inform guide. From Onyx Ring I also found Platypus, a replacement for the Inform standard library.
• SCAM is a sprite collision library. It's been discontinued, but the webpage is worth a visit due to the author's great design sensibilities; check out the logo, and the "happy face insanity" benchmark screenshot.
• In the misty shadowlands on the edge of the space of all games, lives the space of all puzzles. Now, Raymond Hettinger Productions brings you a puzzle-solving framework so generic they said it could not accurately represent puzzle state! But it can! Get it now! Includes representations of "boring jug filling puzzle" and "boring rowboat puzzle". A great example of my philosophy that computers should automate tasks humans (ie. me) find boring.
• Feuerkraft could be the top-view drive-around-in-a-tank-and-blow-things-up game you've been waiting for. "You can only drive around in this demo and destroy a few buildings," says the README, but what else would you want to do? Perhaps if there were some way of destroying vehicles as well, such as other tanks, or airplanes on an airstrip. Or if it used XML somehow. Yes, yes, XML.
• Kalyp is a Roguelike written in Java. In this game, "[G]enerated items can be cursed" (be still, my heart!), but the great thing is that it's the first Roguelike I know about that has unit tests!
• Vertigo is a great Java applet game where you, a blob, inhabit a void full of blue tiles which you must paint purple as stars whiz past you like in Star Trek: The Motion Screensaver. The slightest false move, and you plummet into the void. Includes two-player deathmatch mode. Includes single-player deathmatch mode, in fact. Great gameplay, great mix of puzzle solving and reflex action, greatest bottomless pits in the history of gaming. I can't say enough good about this game, and it wins the coveted Palm d'Rassemblement De Jeu for this episode of Game Roundup. It also gets a poem (I honestly don't know if I'm going to keep doing this, but it's a good gimmick.):

  An reddish and amorphous blob
  Had the world's most dangerous job
  "Meet our tile-painting needs
  At superluminous speeds?
  You're hired, reddish amorphous blob!"

• Zinc is an IF interpreter front-end (it does both TADS and Z-code) with network support, so that people can connect across the network to collaborate on a game.
• There's a new Celestia, which now comes with a user's guide.
• Langband is an Angband clone written in Lisp, which aims to contain existing and new Angband variants as plugins (what has happened to the good old technique of just cramming every single feature into the same game?). The Langband logo also demonstrates the debilitating effect on Roman discipline of imported Greek culture.

• Agar is a C library for writing pseudo-RPG[0] games. Written for the in-progress game Trek To The Cave (motto: "Okay, we'll make the links visible, but that's it.").
• Nethack-el lets you play Nethack from within Emacs. As always, it's not an actual port of Nethack to Emacs, but it does patch Nethack so that it can display the Nethack messages, etc. in different Emacs windows.
• Bankiz is a multiplayer top-level fighting game in which your penguin kills other penguins with sundry weapons. This demonstrates my theory that in the absence of natural predators, penguins will develop ways of killing each other. The life bar on top of your penguin makes it look like the penguin is toting around a girder or something on its head.
• Genuts Cheese Indigestion Puzzle wins the silly name prize for this roundup, and also the triviality prize: the puzzles are all really easy. However, that mouse is indeed going to have some serious indigestion, and kudos to the game for recognizing that fact in the title. What if Pacman was like this? What if Pacman was one of us?
• DIE is "deathmatch with cars". I think this makes obvious the problem with every previous deathmatch game: you are not a car. This could be the first game with a "crush a mountain of Japanese steel" mode (of course, someone would have to write it, but that's never before stopped me proposing ridiculous modes).

[0] "Pseudo-RPG": TwenCen[1] Leonard/Andy term for computer games which have the trappings of traditional tabletop RPGs yet which are not actually RPGs. They're usually just tactical games. Not that there's anything wrong with that! There's no reason you couldn't implement an actual RPG in Agar, except for the inherent difficulty of doing role-playing with a software DM.

[1] Obvious nomenclature for this sort of stupid fake future slang, which I came up with last week while reading David Brin's Earth: "Newslang".

• Falsoyd is a fun, pointless space dogfighting game.
• Dodgin' Diamond 2 is a fun, pointless space shoot-em-up.
• Abe's Amazing Adventure!! is a game written for the author's son, whose birthday is in April. Happy birthday, Abe! The game is a Super Pitfall-ish underground jumping sort of thing. It also has monsters like the "dungenous crab", and settings on the settings screen called "CRAP" and "OTHER CRAP". I think CRAP controls the speed of the monsters and obstacles, but I don't know what OTHER CRAP does.

• There's a new version of Nethack out.
• Catch The Furball is a combination graphical adventure/icebreaker discussion game. It's got disparate elements which work together well.
• Consider if you will, Intelligent Tetris, the Tetris clone that includes a Tetris AI. Yes, it can think!, says the Web page. It used to be a DOS game, and I have a soft spot for games that used to be DOS games. This is very convenient; now the computer can play Tetris while you get useful work done.
• Ashwin N. finally cleaned up Alan Cox's old, segfault-prone Linux port of Rogue, and gives us LinuxRogue. Rogue is apparently some sort of roguelike game.
• The Valley. Eto retro! This game was originally published in a computer magazine in the '80s, and the author has recently rewritten it. I originally thought it was an Oregon-trail-like thing, but it's more of an Ultima/BBS door type game.
• gtk-manix is your standard Pacman clone with a very Unixy-looking Pacman. I have no facts to back this up, that's just my subjective impression. He looks like a Pacman who accepts energy dots on standard input.
• Slune, a car racing game in which Tux the penguin and a certain Gnu team up to deliver AIDS drugs to Africa. The Gnu, in particular, has a wry buddy-cop-movie sense of humor that I never envisioned him having, but which fits pretty well.
• There is no escape from Sokoban 3D! Come back, you! I said there was no escape!

• Liero-AI is a side-view fighting game with an enormous number of weapons. No other game that I know of lets you use Iridium satellites as weapons.
• Enigma is seemingly a clone of an old DOS game called Oxyd. Oxyd was a very smart puzzle game which endeared itself to me by not using the same moving parts for every puzzle; there was some basic thing different about the game engine for just about every puzzle. This game deviates from that somewhat, but it's still got that great Oxyd gameplay (you toss a black sphere across the screen with your mouse; it's really fun).
• Trackballs is a Marble Madness-ish game. I couldn't get it to run, but it looks fun.
• Mojotron is suspiciously similar to Robotron and Llamatron. Sadly, is less bizarre and frenetic than Llamatron. Contains fake Engrish on title screen!
• Iter Vehemens ad Necem is a graphical roguelike with a realistic damage system ("Realistic damage system" == "There's gonna be dismemberment"; I think Penny Arcade once did a strip on this topic) and a properly roguelike obsession with fruit. I recommend it, and I usually don't recommend non-ASCII roguelikes.

• Polyroids is a cross-platform port of an old Asteroids-ish SGI game. In this game, you must prevent the sentient shapes of Flatland from taking over the universe. Space Command has equipped you with a ray which will reduce the many-sided Flatlanders to successively lower castes until they die of shame. Unfortunately, there's a bug (?) which makes it easy to cheat, even inadvertently. It's still a difficult game, although I find all Asteroids-ish games difficult because I never move around the screen.
• Senken is a Simcity-style game. It's too micromanage-y for me, but others might like it.
• Kamikaze is a nice-looking KDE Bomberman clone.
• The Perl BlackJack Engine does what I was going to do, only in Perl.
• Gnome Attacks, a game worthy of the "Carnage" brand. In fact, it's very similar to City Destroy Carnage except that the cities can't fight back.
• I should mention PoopmUp, "An Urban Flight Simulator", and leave it at that.
• AirStrike is a clone of some Amiga dogfight game or other. I think all such games should have a Snoopy vs. the Red Baron mode, but this one doesn't (in fact, I don't think any of them do, unless there's a special licensed game which only has that mode).

• HackNet is a Lightly Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. It's a roguelike that features an amazing three (count 'em, three) monsters. You telnet in to the server to play, giving it the feel of one of those old BBS door games.
• LBreakout2 is the free software generalization of Breakout; it has many the generalizations people put into free software versions of preexisting games: client-server architecture, definable levels, etc. It probably has XML definitions for its bonuses and tile types. Like Rocks'n'Diamonds (which has yet to be mentioned in a Game Roundup; I should remedy that) it has several sesquillion contributed levels (though not as many as Rocks'n'Diamonds' whopping 90.6 sesquillion). Many of the contributed levels are simply examples of the genre of Breakout board art, where the tiles form a low-resolution color bitmap of something, but some of them make good action puzzles. Action puzzles!

  LBreakout2 has several features for people like me who care more about experiencing the different levels than about getting the last lousy brick on the board; at a certain point you can warp to the next board without finishing it, and if you run out of lives you can purchase another one with points from your score (finally, a game where points are good for something!).

• Rocks'n'Diamonds. Hey, it's your lucky day! Another clone, and another mine game. It clones an old Amiga game called Emerald Mine, in which you run around a mine collecting the conveniently pre-polished gemstones and avoiding or thwarting the baddies and natural disasters inhabiting the mines. But there's another game called Boulder Dash which is very similar, and it'd be a shame to write a whole nother game engine to clone Boulder Dash, so Rock'n'Diamonds also clones Boulder Dash. There's also an old DOS game called Supaplex, which has the same gameplay but completely different objects, so Rocks'n'Diamonds is a general running-around-pushing-and-collecting things engine with several sets of objects including Supaplex objects. And really, when you think about it, isn't Sokoban a degenerate case of that sort of game, with all pushing and no collecting? So it also clones Sokoban.

  The aforementioned 90.6 sesquillion levels are available for Rocks'n'Diamonds (Update: thousands of new levels just released! Rocks'n'Diamonds now features 90.603 sesquillion levels!), many of the levels contributed from people living in Scandanavian countries where there's nothing to do but hold war crimes tribunals and write Rocks'n'Diamonds levels. I wish there were some site with reviews of R'n'D level sets, because (again) the boards are divided between dull representational boards and good puzzle-oriented boards (and bad puzzle-oriented boards); perhaps I'll start keeping notes and putting up my reccomendations. There are, or should be, levels which combine objects from different games in interesting ways.

  Oh, one more thing about Rocks'n'Diamonds. When you die, your body decays into yellow gemstones. Why? And what does that say about all the other gemstones?

• Salp Wars, a multiplayer action game based entirely on in-jokes.
• Hubris, an amusing retelling of Tetris. "[T]he player arranges multiple falling blocks into sacrifical lines to please the gods, while avoiding building too close to the heavens lest his hubris arouse their wrath."
• Pachi el marciano, a nice-looking but slow (slow in the sense that your character doesn't move as fast as I'd like; not in the sense that it's processor-intensive) jumping game. I originally didn't look very closely at the title and thought it was about a mariachi singer named Pachi, but it turns out to be about a Martian named Pachi. The game would be more interesting if Pachi were a mariachi as well as a Martian. [Maybe he is! --Ed. Well, he does a good job of hiding it.]
• cars, the only game I've ever seen where the GIMP is the level editor. Now that's hard-core innovation!
• Linley's Dungeon Crawl, a Roguelike game with an emphasis on character development (skills and religion). I had to mess with the source to get it to compile. I remember seeing this a while back but it was just for DOS; there's a Linux version now and it's pretty nice. [Nb. this game gave me an idea for a silly little Rogue-based (but not Roguelike) game, of which more later; I may try to write it tomorrow.]
• Powermanga, a game which I'm not sure why it's called that since its raytraced sprites look more like Mr. Funercise In The 25th Century than anything that comes to my mind when I think 'manga'. However, the French probably do things differently. It's a nice shooter-with-purchasable-powerups game.
• Crossfire: I keep meaning to try out this game and then not doing it. I'll let you know how it goes.