#1 Kreshna might be interested in this: astonishing gameplay
Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2006 2:45 pm
You guys know I am a Linux user, but what you might not have known is my Linux install came with over 2800 free programs, and I have not had the chance to even know most of them existed.
Well, I was looking through the games that came with it today, and after seeing many of the normal classics, like solitare, tron, monopoly, poker, blackjack, minesweeper, tetris and chess, I was quite suprised to see something rather original. Something I've never seen in a game before.
It is kspaceduel, a small game which can be played either one player vs computer or 2 players.
The game is simple, but amazingly addictive.
Each player controls his little spaceship in orbit around a sun.
You can rotate your ship, thrust, fire, and drop a mine. The objective is to destroy the enemy ship.
So what is so special about it? The sun has gravity. If you, or any of your bullets, lose orbital velocity they fall into the sun.
If you collide with the enemy ship, you both die and fall into the sun.
When you fire your bullets, they get a velocity, determined by their muzzel velocity minus your ships velocty. This means if you fire one behind you, it simply falls into the sun. If you fire one ahead of you it will go into a highly elliptical orbit of the sun either until it hits something, or its orbit decays and it falls in.
Each player may only have 5 bullets on the screen at once, so when you fire you want to make sure they hit the target or fall into the sun quickly. If they go into stable orbit, you can't fire again, or worse yet, they might hit you.
Also, your ship is solar powered, and anything you do drains your batteries. The farther away from the sun you are, the more slowly they recharge. Maintaining a constant high orbit might be slow and rather safe, but you will run out of power and be stranded in a circle!
The simple addition of gravity and need for orbits makes this game one of the most interesting games I've played for a long time.
I will probably write a simple clone of it for MS-DOS, or perhaps port this one to Microsoft Windows (shouldn't be too hard, being open source). You will be hooked too.
Well, I was looking through the games that came with it today, and after seeing many of the normal classics, like solitare, tron, monopoly, poker, blackjack, minesweeper, tetris and chess, I was quite suprised to see something rather original. Something I've never seen in a game before.
It is kspaceduel, a small game which can be played either one player vs computer or 2 players.
The game is simple, but amazingly addictive.
Each player controls his little spaceship in orbit around a sun.
You can rotate your ship, thrust, fire, and drop a mine. The objective is to destroy the enemy ship.
So what is so special about it? The sun has gravity. If you, or any of your bullets, lose orbital velocity they fall into the sun.
If you collide with the enemy ship, you both die and fall into the sun.
When you fire your bullets, they get a velocity, determined by their muzzel velocity minus your ships velocty. This means if you fire one behind you, it simply falls into the sun. If you fire one ahead of you it will go into a highly elliptical orbit of the sun either until it hits something, or its orbit decays and it falls in.
Each player may only have 5 bullets on the screen at once, so when you fire you want to make sure they hit the target or fall into the sun quickly. If they go into stable orbit, you can't fire again, or worse yet, they might hit you.
Also, your ship is solar powered, and anything you do drains your batteries. The farther away from the sun you are, the more slowly they recharge. Maintaining a constant high orbit might be slow and rather safe, but you will run out of power and be stranded in a circle!
The simple addition of gravity and need for orbits makes this game one of the most interesting games I've played for a long time.
I will probably write a simple clone of it for MS-DOS, or perhaps port this one to Microsoft Windows (shouldn't be too hard, being open source). You will be hooked too.
Sounds like a blast.