GNU Chess Fail
2009-12-08 20:25:00 Rather unsporting of GNU Chess right when I pulled two pawns ahead. GNU Chess, here playing black on the easy setting, responded by forcing me into perpetual check. Apparently there's no mechanism in place to offer a draw in the case of threefold repetition. Set up the board this way and try it yourself - the black queen moves back and forth indefinitely. Note that the king has two possible moves from g2; however, both lead to the same outcome. I would make a feature request, but my finger's tired. Oops! I just noticed that moving king to g1 allows me to block with the queen and break the loop (GNU Chess withdraws its queen rather than exchanging and the game proceeds normally). But the point of not having a draw offer on 3x repeat still stands. Update I just tried the same position in xboard, and it did automatically draw on the third repetition! So this is the front-end's problem (glChess 2.26.1 - the default for Ubuntu/Gnome) rather than the engine (GNU Chess). Also, I tri...
Son of the Return of the Rock-n-Roll DOSBox Freak Show
2009-11-06 19:49:00 From here on out, game reviews for abandonware DOSBox titles should be in the fall and winter. Who wants to play video games when it's 76 and sunny out? But after the time change, when the sun drops dead as soon as you get off work and the frost is forming by six, that's the time when you want classic DOS video games. Because there's only so many hours you can spend reading the Internet before you go all Jack Nicholson on the snowbound household. Cartooners You're not going to believe this, but Electronic Arts published this way back in 1989. Yes, the same people who brought you The Sims! This is a doodle toy, plain and simple. Click and drag backgrounds, props, actors, and speech balloons to create little frames, which you can animate and add music to and so on. There must be 100 Flash applications online these days that let you do the same thing in your browser, but in 1989 this made everyone who owned a 386 PC into the next Warner Brothers, as they, too, could now make up ...
Game of the Day - Neverball
2009-10-23 23:08:00 It's about time I paid attention to Linux gaming, isn't it? My fancy new machine with excellent OpenGL support can finally run games like Neverball smoothly and flawlessly. Neverball, for those of you lagging behind, is a game of skill where you attempt to move a series of platforms and structures in such a way as to move a ball around collecting coins and then over a goal. Obstacles and perils lie in your path - you'll have to navigate catwalks, bumpy roads, bumpers, blockades, ramps, and every crazy path element you can possibly draw in GTKRadiant. Without falling off. This is much, much harder that it looks. Anyone watching you will conclude that you're drunk as a sailor. Some tips I've discovered so far: Screenshots go to your "~/neverball/" directory. Go into the "~/.neverball/neverballrc" file and change the mouse_sense number to a lower number for greater sensitivity - I have mine to 100 for a bog-standard Logitech Trackball. Most of the time you want camera on 'm...
Game Review: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection
2009-09-15 17:58:00 While I'm usually happy blasting away demons in a FPS or pushing a necromancer with skeleton escorts to conquer yet another level-grinding dungeon, sometimes I just want to get back to the basics. Casual puzzle games are the unsung champions of the modern game scene. The blockbuster titles get all the attention, and yet it's the simple solitaires and brain-teasers that are in every PC's menu, on every mobile phone, and bookmarked in every web browser. These games have the advantage of being portable, simple to learn, fast to start and shut-down, and providing stimulation for your little gray cells in between more pressing tasks. So this is Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection, which I just discovered as a Zenwalk package on the kids' system, and liked so much that I went to get my own copy. My Slackware compiled the tarball without a single hiccup. After inserting the games into my Fluxbox's menu file, I've been only too happy to become addicted to fiddling with them. ...
Shisen-Sho FAIL
2009-02-05 13:07:00 Was playing KDE's Shisen-sho, because I'm probably one of the few who actually likes that one. And this happened. You ever get down to four tiles in this arrangement? I get this all the time, no idea how to avoid it. Feel free to snarf for your own Demotivational poster fun.
Return of the Rock-n-Roll DOSBox Freak Show
2008-08-20 19:25:00 Summer's going too fast, man. The kids are almost back in school, already, which makes this the perfect time for the grown-ups to huddle back to their simulated DOS directory and play at some goofy, childish fun. So once again, we crank up DOSBox and grab random stuff off the abandonware buffet. Sometimes for nostalgia, sometimes for thrills, and most of the time just for the endorphin rush from the masochism. Secret Agent A little-known and hard-to-find Apogee classic, this game sports harsh Windows 3.1-era colors, buzzy 8-note beeps, and is doggone hard to play. This game is pretty low-quality for an Apogee title, and you get the feeling that they wrote it more to test an engine or fill time between blockbusters than for the game itself. The splash screen is the best part. But it still beats working. Because there's a man who leads a life of danger, and to everyone he meets he stays a stranger. With every move he makes another chance he takes. And something about odds. Get i...
Why I Think Games Aren't a Focus on Linux
2008-03-15 03:35:00 It is perhaps a sign of advancement of Linux as a platform that people are starting to seriously ask the question: "Where are the Linux gamers?" Just recently, I've seen Mad Penguin ask it, followed by this indie-game developer's blog. The question also got batted around on Slashdot. Of course, we enter into the discussion with the assumption already established that there are fewer Linux users, and that game companies mostly take no notice of Linux except to burn it in effigy. Duh, we know. Even if you adjust for that, there's a lower percentage of Linux gamers. Onward: First, my own experiences: For one thing, I have the experience of having run both Linux and Windows extensively. Back in the pre-Linux days, it was a monthly family expenditure to go to the mall and buy the latest hot game title. Now, that sentence contains the seed of an epiphany: Every month, we'd get sick and tired of the games we currently had and want something new. Every game that we brought home woul...
Son of the Rock-n-Roll DOSBox Freak Show
2008-02-08 23:38:00 Well, here it is, Friday afternoon with no upcoming StupidSuperbowl or StupidSuper Tuesday to distract us... an even better time to plug in DOSBox and wallow in DOSBox retro-gaming coolness! So here's some more random roadside attractions on the way to DOS gaming Valhala: Monty Python's Flying Circus Sure, you're like any geek; you hear about this and go, "There's a Monty Python game??? I must play it!" Yes, and I feel guilty about posting the screenshot. It really does look like a playable version of Terry Gilliam's animations. And it plays very nicely (well, for a Monty Python fan looking for a fix anyway) except for one. small. detail. You can't tell from the screenshot. It plays the TV show theme. In PC speaker-beeps. "DEE-doop doo-doo-doo-doo-DEEP DE-DOOP de-Doop de-Doop de DEEE..." Over and over and over. In a continuous loop you can't shut off. I tried playing as far as I could, getting to about the fourth screen before I was screaming "GAAAHHHH! I CAN'T TAKE IT A...
The Rock-n-Roll DOSBox Freak Show
2008-02-05 03:08:00 I'm glad that somebody who can get away with saying these things has finally said it: Linux is becoming more Windows-compatible than... well... Windows! Of course, we can quantify that to mean "open source software, which hangs out with Linux a lot". Yes, I too, have been noticing how GNU and Linux are becoming the de-facto standard bases for virtualization and emulation. Over and over, I see people in forums complaining about some favorite game or application not working on Windows, and several people pop up with recommendations for DOSBox and Wine. Even on Windows, DOSBox is held up as a solution to many problems. What Windows-native programs have I gotten running on Wine this year? Incredible Machine, Starcraft, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Quake, and the Windows-version of MakeHuman, to name a few. Not five feet from me sits a running Windows XP box, and yet when I get hold of a Windows program, the first thing I think is to see if it runs on Wine. It usually does. But DOSBox - ah...
Linux Gaming Handheld Announced
2008-01-30 06:45:00 OpenPandora plans to release in April a handheld gaming device called Pandora, with a touchscreen, WiFi, and USB. read more
The Unique Problem of Go
2007-10-11 18:46:00 This Slashdot article reminded me of one of my favorite games. It is about the continuing effort to try to make computers good at Go. Go is an active topic in the free software community. There's the excellent GNU-Go engine, the CGoban GUI front end, and then there was Hikarunix, the Linux live CD devoted entirely to the game of Go. It is a shame to see that Hikarunix appears to have closed since this review was written. Here's the Wikipedia article on it. Damn, I'd be happy to host that distro myself, if anybody out there is connected to the project and reading this, and it's not too late. I also blush a little bit whenever I hear a discussion of the difficulty of programming Go, because... I took a shot at it. This was back in my grasshopper days when I was tinkering with the SDL library and C. At the time, GNUGo was much slower, and I tried to make a one-piece engine and GUI front-end, that would be faster. It's fast alright, and it plays worse than a drunk monkey. It was...
Game of the Day: Hexen
2007-09-06 12:32:00 Following on from my recent exploration of Heretic, I next tried Hexen. This has been motivated by my curiosity; while we've all played Doom and Quake to death, these two interim games just never seemed to get the press. Hexen, too, runs smoothly in DOSbox on my Slackware setup, albeit with CPU cycles and frameskip raised a notch. Gaming was the last thing I had in mind when I put this machine together, so average systems will probably have no problems at all. Hexen is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it has many innovative features that seem to have been lost in later first-person shooters, and on the other hand it has a few faults. I'll pick the briefer of the two, the faults, to list first: Far less action than the average FPS. There's more of a focus on traps and finding your way around. Less variety of creatures; after the 100th two-headed Ettin comes at you with the same lumbering slow attack, it becomes monotonous. And the biggest fault of all: the graphics are amazingly ...
Game of the Day: Heretic
2007-08-31 11:44:00 id Software has long been popular with the Linux crowd for releasing their game engines as open source and their generous shareware packages which offer quite a bit of game play for free before you have to pay anything. But much of the focus has been on their more famous milestone games, like Doom and Quake. The two that seemed to get overlooked were Heretic and Hexen. Heretic was a game which was based on the Doom engine and produced in joint cooperation by id and Raven Software. It has many improvements on the Doom games, including an inventory system, the ability to look up and down, a flying power-up, and lots of eye and ear candy effects. In my opinion, it's under appreciated. I ended up grabbing the shareware DOS version and playing it in DOSbox. If you experience problems with the game's speed, hit DOSbox's keys for increasing and decreasing cycles (Ctrl-F12 and Ctrl-F11) and frameskip (Ctrl-F8 and Ctrl-F7) to tweak the performance to your system. The play is engaging...
Carmack on Linux Gaming
2007-08-14 07:38:00 United-Underground, news source on software and technology, has John Carmack’s opinion on the future of Linux Gaming, from his keynote speech at QuakeCon last week. “Doom 3 stuff will be open source.”
John Carmack of id Software On the Future of Linux Gaming
2007-08-14 05:21:00 As is the popular “rant” about Linux, gaming options are scarce and low-quality. Right? Actually, no; but that’s a totally different discussion. John Carmack, Lead Programmer for id Software, the company behind gaming favourites such as Wolfenstein, Quake, Doom and others, talked about the future of gaming on the open source operating system at ...
Modern Linux Gaming Review
2007-06-17 23:49:00 A new technology site, Kahvipapu, has started off their articles by reviewing the state of Linux gaming. So far, so good - no mention of Tux Racer. The writing in part one of the series covers first person shooters, including commercial titles. A number of nice screenshots highlight each game’s features. ...
The Killer App for Linux Gaming
2007-06-13 07:08:00 What is it going to take for Linux operating systems to be considered a real platform for games? Are there technical limitations? Certainly not. There are already a vast number of 3D shooter games (games considered the most technically complex) available by way of the Quake engines. Are the “too many ...
Game of the Day: Angband
2007-06-02 15:19:00 If you've not played Angband or its variants, sprint, don't waddle, to Thangorodrim and get thee thy new game. It is a stupendous implementation of the text-mode RPG game, with a highly authentic Lord-of-the-Rings flavor. Here is an absolutely random assortment of mutterings I've burbled about the game, originally done with the intention of a text file (before the days of blogs, my young listeners!) affectionately titled: Uncle Bilbo's tips for Angband Hobbit Rogues Hobbit Rogues are played different from every other character, it is often said, but different in what way? They are, first and foremost, thieves. They have some meager fighting skill, excellent stealth and perception, saving throws that give them the luck of the Devil himself, charisma to charm the shopkeepers, and detection spells. Let's say you accompany a Hobbit Rogue into the dungeon. While you heft your sword and begin slashing at orcs, the rogue hangs behind and casts detection spells. He scurries about, o...
Linux Gaming: Is it really here?
2007-06-02 08:31:00 On this six-month anniversary of Linux Gaming World, we ask — is Linux Gaming really here? What are your experiences with Linux gaming? Have developers made games in a format available to you? Have you purchased a game for your Linux gaming system? |
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