Category: Games

I’ve been really enjoying the GP2X I got for our 5-year anniversary (!) and have got DVD ripping working, along with Quake playing at a decent speed, and lots of downloadable games, notably Spout, which is excellent, and (unlike many games which are really too visually complex to see on a small screen) simple enough to work on a handheld. There are a few other good games too, and lots that I immediately deleted off my SD card. I’d like to see some of the very polished LGames ported – maybe I’ll get around to it myself sometime.

Anyway, all of that is peripheral really, because what I really like doing is writing games, not playing them. So far I have imposed two games on the unsuspecting public:

mop(e)snake – a classic snake game with no featuritis – just a snake, apples (pain, actually – read the plot if you’re interested…) and you. Try to “fill the screen with green”^TM. It’s reasonably mature now and works on GP2X, Windows and Linux. There’s not a lot left to do, except a bit of polish and fixing any bugs that come up.

duckmaze – a maze game where you can move walls. This is based on a game I played years ago on a handheld, whose name I have forgotten. It’s potentially quite fun, but I need to design some more levels – so far it only has 8, and several of them are pretty noddy. The first release includes a level editor (go me), so you can help out with designing more. Actually, you don’t even really need the level editor, since the level file format is designed to be fairly human-readable, so potentially you could create levels in a text editor. I’m quite pleased with that, even though no-one is ever going to appreciate it now I’ve written the level editor.

Download, enjoy, write to the mailing lists with ideas, bugs, code etc.

arrived through the post from ebay yesterday. It is superb. Exactly my kind of game, and with loads of features from the old game (one of my favourites of all time), all updated and made even more beautiful. It is incredibly atmospheric, and so far the gameplay has been utterly compelling. Am I more excited about this than the pervious post? Surely not.

For my train journey, I ended up downloading a few emulators that didn’t work, and a few games that didn’t work, but what did work was the PC version of Prince of Persia, and the PC version of Cannon Fodder, both of which were very enjoyable.

Especially good were some new levels someone had created for PoP – a lot harder than the original ones! It did show how much work went into creating games, even back then, though, since there were a couple of subtle bugs in the new levels that led to you getting trapped with no means of killing yourself, which means your entire game is over and you have to start again, which is quite frustrating.

I did dig out the code for my track and field game, but when it appeared all on one line with weird symbols for the carriage returns, and I contemplated the idea of fixing this (and coding generally) in notepad, I decided to go back to PoP instead.

More on the track and field game later. It’s in Python…

We’re taking a 4.5 hour train ride to Leeds at the weekend, and then even longer on the way home, so I am hoping to entertain myself using a Windows 2000 laptop with no CD drive. The options I’m thinking of are:

• Pingus
• Prince of Persia on WinUAE
• Continuing work on my secret Track and Field game by porting the UI stuff to Windows.
• Booting some kind of Linux off my iRiver. Not at all sure this is possible.

The easy way would have been to run Games Knoppix, but there’s no CD drive. Gutted.