Category: Computer Games

Categories
Computer Games

Games I have known: Snood

Snood is a truly bizarre game. Recently, in the past couple years, it was re-released. It is a game I played some in the distant past.

The way the game works is that there is a collection of faces that make up a bulk at the top of the screen. For all I know these faces are the snoods. The grid is triangular so the snoods are in offset rows. The arrangement depends on the level. You can have many different arrangements of snoods.

Snoods are different curious faces of different colors and head shape like square or triangle.

The faces are coming down at you. This is a precursor emotionally to Majora’s Mask. Not really. It is quite a strange game. When the faces fill up the screen and reach the bottom you lose. You win by clearing out all the faces or snoods. The way you do this is you shoot snoods with snood ammo which are snoods at a distance with a gun that has 180 degree range. By shooting at the wall at an angle, you can bounce the snood much like a beam of reflecting light.

When you shoot a snood and it reaches any other snood it sticks. This is the way you can lose aside from the snoods descending all at once by a buildup that occurs at the top over time. There is a danger meter on the side.

When snoods of the same type are altogether, I’m not sure how many, maybe three, they are eliminated and you get points. Any snoods that were hanging on to a group of snoods that were eliminated fall down but they do not harm you. They are also eliminated. This is the way to win.

The game resembles breakout but the strategy is not to chip away at the wall. You quickly realize that the way to play the game is to make a snood stalactite of snoods that you cannot use and to take away the base so that they all fall at once. If you try the chipping away strategy by making matches you begin to cover up the snoods adjacent to the snoods you are trying to match. Once you have the snood you need and you shoot it, you can hit one of these adjacent snoods and get stuck to them and not touch the snood you were aiming for. The gun is accurate but it is a mouse game and although in easy mode the line of sight extends all the way to the snoods and like a laser reflects off the border, my feeling is that aiming is difficult. It is like billiards. You have to shoot a relatively wide object through a small gap in order to have the right snoods touching.

The look of the strategy differs from other arcade games where often you are playing in a balanced way like moving right to left taking out enemies. It is similar to tetris in that the accuracy in how you place pieces really matters. In tetris though you are building up rows by carefully fitting pieces together. When you make a bunch of snoods that are meant to fall, you care less about the placement or what snoods they are, only that you get the right snood later on and you have a clear shot towards the base. If you miss that shot, the game is probably over because by piling on snoods they are much closer to reaching the bottom.

The game in its modern form had a payment model (the last time I played) that was arcade style. You paid for coins, sometimes you won coins too, and then got to play longer. It might have been an arcade game originally but I remember playing it on a Macintosh.

Categories
Computer Games MacOS

Games I have known: Castle Mouse 2000

Castle Mouse 2000 is an old Mac puzzle game. The goal of the game is to scare a mouse into a hole. The game takes place on a small tile grid of around 10 by 10. On this grid are small animal sprites each taking up 1 cell. There is a progression of animals ranging from small to large: mouse, cat, dog, etc., all the way up to lion, bears, and an elephant, probably though I don’t remember all the animals. The animal of one larger size when adjacent to the smaller animal scares that animal in the opposite direction. The elephant can also be scared by the mouse.

As a puzzle game it is very interesting somewhat similar to the game Rush Hour, the game where you slide blocks out of the way in order to clear a pathway. Though, not quite the same, as you are given a setup and asked to add pieces that will allow the mouse and any other animals to interact in a simulation.

There must be some rules about blocking and stopping animals. I seem to remember say a cat bordered at some distance by two dogs that would move back and forth like a trap. What if this animal was blocked in its motion by another animal that did not interact with it? If that animal clears the area where the cat moves back and forth, does the cat continue to run in the direction of the opposite dog for eternity? I also remember that when two animals collided at the same cell in the sense that the movement animation would cause them to overlap in that next instant they would bounce backwards the path that they came. I think it is possible that when an animal is blocked it just stops and will not continue to move once its path is cleared. This allows the option of another animal changing the direction of the once moving animal sometime down the line.

Let me cook up an example of a puzzle with numbers denoting the animals of different sizes, 1 being the smallest, and 0 giving the hole.

0....1.
5......
.......
......2
.3.....
Place 4

On this small grid, where the periods are spaces, by placing the 4 underneath the 5, on pressing go, the 4 will be sent down to the 3, the 3 sent to the right, the 2 up and the 1 sent to home, resulting in the following outcome.

0.....2
5......
.......
.......
4.....3

In 2023, I made a clone of Castle Mouse 2000 called PythonMouse2020.

Categories
Computer Games

Grunt: Games I have known

Grunt was an old platformer for the Mac. I played the shareware version. Thinking back now, I should have purchased a copy as I liked the game so much and it would have made it more playable. As a kid, starting a game over and over from the very beginning and getting to the furthest room possible adds to the challenge, though now it is clear that this is why I never beat the game because that kind of way of playing is somewhat insane. https://www.macintoshrepository.org/3496-grunt

In the game you play a rotund pig that stands upright and looks a bit like Robin Hood with a cap and tunic. The goal of the game is to explore a large dungeon with many levels and rooms. Each room is a screen size and rooms can have multiple entrances and exits that lead to other parts of the dungeon. You can find keys that open up different doors. One of the charms of this game is the variety of levels. At the beginning levels are simple colored brown and green, but levels and doors near the end are red, blue, steel, and all kinds of psychedelic colors. A door might indicate what type of level lies behind it.

You gather different ammo arrows and fireballs, maybe something else, and dispatch with enemies that are blocking your way. Ammo is very limited and lives are few. Enemies might be bouncing or pacing on a platform, or they follow you around. Another way of dying is falling or hitting spikes. If you duck, which is an important mechanic for getting under walls while traveling on a moving platform, and you get up under the wall, you also die. This is the main source of sound in the game except for some intro lute music, the sound of a fireball sounding like something getting hit and burning, and the sound of death being a squeal. To begin with you only had 3 lives though you could gain more by finding them.

Grunt had an interesting movement mechanic. Grunt is a pig with a large oval body standing on two little feet that are always running. Grunt can stand on a very thin platform because his feet are quite small. However he can accelerate quite quickly and had quite a bit of intertia, so if you are on a small platform, say you have just jumped there, you might need to quickly adjust in the opposite direction so you don’t fall off. If you are in air you can actually move slightly in the direction that you are running, so you are accelerating in a direction without there being an obvious force in the opposite direction, like when you walk on a platform. It is such that if you are running quickly, and quickly turn directions on an edge, the inertia attained during running will move you in that direction, but since you turned quickly and started running, you will move then in that direction, making an overall U-turn in air. Therefore if you are under a ceiling which is also a platform, and falling off the edge will bring certain death, you can do this maneuver to run beneath the ceiling and quickly change directions and jump on top of the platform which was just the ceiling. This type of jumping maneuver is the hardest in the game. Another movement was running and sitting, and thus sliding. It was important to gain enough speed while sliding so you didn’t end up underneath a wall. The other very difficult part is to stay on a moving platform. I believe you have to move with the platform to stay on top of it and so if the platform is small you are constantly moving and making slight adjustments, maybe even jumping to avoid an obstacle. This detail might not quite be right, but moving on a moving platform to say do a hurdle is something I remember. There were also elevators.

Overall, the game was very difficult, with lots of need to conserve ammo and a tantalizingly difficult dungeon with many doors that led to far off regions.

Categories
Computer Games

Games I have known: Catacombs

Catacombs was a game where you played a ranger that shot arrows and explored a dungeon looking for an exit. There were trolls, skeletons, and demon monsters. Each monster had its own generator block. A common way to use the block in level design was to have the monsters in a contained area and then open that area so they began to overflow out of the area into the main map. This way all of the sudden many demons were flowing over the map. A lot of the fun in the game was the editor, where you could make mazes with traps and use these generator blocks. I believe there were some simple triggers that would make doors disappear if you stood upon them and also keyed doorways. It might have also been possible to destroy walls with certain weapons, maybe fire arrows. You could pick up arrows, coins, and keys. I really enjoyed playing this as a kid because it was simple to make your own levels and you could have huge sprawling areas where there were generator blocks placed throughout making it a huge danger area. There was also a nice logic with making rooms and placing treasure in them like the experience of designing a dungeon with stages and difficult areas.

Categories
Computer Games

Games I have Known: Glypha

In this game you ride on top of a bird. By pressing space you flap your wings which allows you to gain height, and then glide. The setting is Egyptian as if you are inside a crypt. Fighting is done by jousting where if you slightly above the enemy, other birds of prey with their own jousters, you win. On the bottom there is an egg that hatches enemies f you don’t pick it up. Walking on a surface is very slow, so it is faster to gain vertical distance then glide.

On the bottom however there is lava that will kill you. In the lave, if you get too close, a hand comes out and pulls you down. By flying up rapidly you might escape or if you fly just right, you can pull up the disembodied hand to the middle of the stage as a joke. Speed might also be an important factor in fighting. If another bird is moving as fast, they might have a computer advantage. With the hand slowing you down and pulling you down, the lance is more likely to hit your body and kill you. With several enemies flying around it becomes quite challenging.

Also if you are messing around I remember a Horus eye is summoned by lightning and hunts you down.

Categories
Computer Games

Games I have known: Greebles

Around the time I was in middle school, probably sometime before that, my favorite computer game was a game called Greebles. The name Greebles has as its background image the 2d fly and on the title screen lots of dark colors blues and blacks. The way the game works is that you are a tank 1×1 size on a 2d grid around 20 by 20 squares large. In the grid a maze is generated and within the maze there are enemies that are also 1×1 first starting with flies. On these first levels there are flies but on later levels there are all manner of enemies and enemy generators.

The key thing is that as a tank you can move at a normal speed around this maze and the bugs are also moving normally. By pressing the space key in the direction of a wall of the maze, the wall separates into a block that flies in the direction that you are facing. If that block hits a fly the fly collects on the side of the block along with any other flies. Against enemies, the collision is inelastic and when the block hits a wall on the other side the flies are squished and you get points with a convincing splat. When the flies are hit sometimes they spin and pileup in front of the block.

One of the first big mechanics is bomb blocks. When you propel a bomb block, you don’t need to hit other enemies to kill them. If a bomb block hits another bomb, they both explode, which in this case means, there is a loud bang and the blocks disappear. Any bomb blocks touching each other explode. Any blocks in the vicinity that are not bombs but have the ability to be propelled go in the direction the bomb exploded like shrapnel. Any enemy or ally including yourself that is adjacent to the explosion dies, this time blinking out of existence. I believe it is also possible that there is another block that is like a bomb block that is more sturdy that is on a timer, so it is possible to propel by a bomb block into another bomb area, thus the initial bomb triggers a chain reaction. It is possible to destroy a lot of enemies not only from the bomb but secondary effects like blocks being propelled. It is a common trick to shoot a bomb block down a hallway which will explode, disintegrating any block, another mechanic that cannot move, and propelling the blocks that make up the dead end down other hallways into other enemies.

If you are at the end of a hallway and an enemy is coming for you, you can propel blocks and try to make an escape. It is also possible to chomp blocks, although it takes some time to make them disintegrate. It might not matter though because on the opposite side there could be more Greebles.

There are a few special blocks. One of them you disintegrate and freezes enemies, another speeds you up, and another makes you invincible: I believe it is called death touch. There is also some money which doesn’t do anything I think just points, and extra lives. In later levels, Greebles are generated on a clock by generator blocks every 10 seconds or so. One way to destroy these generators is to surround it by ordinary blocks. When you propel a block sometimes it hits a wall and the collision is elastic, so the block bounces back. I don’t think it is harmful usually and you can ram into the block and push it into position. If a block is propelled by an explosion though I think it might kill you, or perhaps it just bounces off of you harmlessly. When the clock goes off around a surrounded generator it disintegrates. There are also in later levels blocks that don’t move and generators that don’t disintegrate. The game can become very difficult by developing more and more enemies with different features. Some are very fast. Others could be smart. Some on splatting might explode. I think around level 70 or so there are some that when you make splat create generators, so if the generator is not against an edge, it will make more. It was a high level. Also, perhaps there were some that on splatting turned into generators for other enemies like chess pieces which did not move in any new special way, maybe a bit faster with some acceleration. There were some really tough levels I believe with generators that could not be destroyed, if you surrounded that they simply ejected the blocks in all directions in lieu of creating new greebles. Some of these generators also just wore down I believe and if you survived long enough you got to go to the next level. The toughest levels had a lot of different blocks and enemies moving at fast speeds, and just to survive you had to dodge a lot of stuff. Some enemies could even propel blocks themselves. When you defeated all the greebles you could go to the next level.

The game had multiplayer and network play and I remember playing some with my brother on the same keyboard. I really liked the maze aspect and block activity, the grid, and arcade style of it, sort of like Pac-Man but you had more options. The sounds and general vibe of the game, difficulty & colors, were pretty good too.