Hack 15 Have Fun and Play Some Games

While you can get a lot of work done with Knoppix, you can also have a lot of fun. Windows gives you Solitaire, Freecell, and Minesweeper. Knoppix gives you a virtual arcade full of games.

Primarily, you should use Knoppix to complete work, but sometimes it's good to have some fun too. Knoppix has something for everyone with its broad selection of games. Here's an overview of the game categories and descriptions of some of the games.

All of the games included in Knoppix are organized in the K Menu under Games. This submenu lists the different game categories, such as adventure, arcade, board games, card games, puzzles, strategy, and a special category for Tetris-like games.

You will find a lone title, Falcon's Eye, in the adventure category. This role-playing game is a graphical frontend to the console adventure game nethack. Nethack is a classic dungeon game that focuses on exploring the depths of the dungeon rather than simply killing everything in sight. Falcon's Eye takes the nethack engine and replaces the monotone ASCII symbols with colorized characters, monsters, and walls. To play the game, create a character, complete with attributes like strength and intelligence, just like in Dungeons & Dragons. Game play begins with your character in a dungeon with a trusty sidekick—a pet dog or cat. Use the mouse to move your character, attack monsters, and open doors. Icons along the bottom of the screen allow you to select items to use, spells to cast, or extended commands to perform. For nethack veterans, you'll find the key bindings familiar. Novices can click the question mark at the bottom righthand corner of the screen for help. Once you are done exploring the dungeons, quit by selecting [q] quit from the list of extended commands.

Many of the games in the arcade category revive classic arcade games from the 1980s, and most fall into two categories: games with spaceships and games with bouncing balls. Don't laugh; sometimes the simplest games are the most addictive. Galaga, Chromium, and KAsteroids are all space shoot-em-ups. Galaga is a Linux remake of the famous arcade game with more power-ups and a faster pace, KAsteroids provides all of the fun of the original Asteroids game but with three-dimensional asteroids, and Chromium is a fast-paced top-scrolling shooter with excellent graphics.

Chromium does require a 3D accelerated graphics card, so it won't play well on many systems, especially with new graphics cards. If you have an Nvidia card, you must install the binary Nvidia driver with the live installer [Hack #28] before 3D acceleration will work.

After shooting at things in space, try Xkoules, which makes me think of sumo wrestling in space with hi-bouncing balls; Xboing, a Super Breakout clone from Austrailia; and KBounce, a Qix-like game in which you attempt to isolate bouncing balls into a small percentage of the screen. Imaze is a multiplayer game that requires both a server and a client. Run the server to determine the size of the maze, and then connect the client to it to run through the maze firing bouncing balls at your opponents.

The board and card game categories provide computerized versions of many classic games: XBoard, KMahjongg, and KReversi are computerized counterparts to Chess, Mahjongg, and Go. The card game category contains many different card games, including Solitaire and Freecell. Many of these games also support playing against opponents over the Internet, adding a new dimension to old favorites.

For those who find brainteasers fun, the puzzles and strategy categories have plenty of programs to exercise your brain. The puzzle games range from Gtans, which has you rearranging and rotating shapes to match the given pattern, to Minesweeper, a requirement in any complete set of puzzle games.

In the strategy category, you find logic games such as KAtomic and KSokoban as well as battle strategy games as simple as KBattleship, a clone of the classic Battleship game. You will also find Xbattle, which lets you and an opponent set up many different battle scenarios with varying terrain, army size, and many other options, and then lets you control troop movements to see which team comes out as the victor.

A special category has been created for Tetris-style puzzle games containing Netris, a console-based Tetris clone, and Frozen-Bubble, a Bust-A-Move clone with a penguin motif (Figure 2-10).

Figure 2-10. Frozen-Bubble

With so many game choices, it is easy to find an escape from work that is suited to your tastes. With a few exceptions, most of these games run fine without having an advanced 3D graphics card, so you can have fun even on older systems. If you aren't familiar with some of the games, most of them come with a complete help section, which describes objectives and key bindings. Many of the programs allow multiplayer games over the Internet. You can even pass out Knoppix CDs to friends or coworkers and have a quick game over lunch.