After wading through empire and trying to grasp its many subtleties, you might regain a little self-confidence with nibbles:
nibbles is a snake variant, and does well in the way of color and animation. Maneuver your creature with the IJKL keys, munch up the berry-like dots without colliding with a wall or your own elongating corpus. Earn points, increase levels.
Ordinarily another snake variant wouldn’t enthuse me enough to make a note of it here, but Toby Jaffey’s version is colorful, fast-paced and has some strong animations — particularly when your snake expires. I hope you appreciate the screenshot for that; I had to retake it about four times in a row before it snapped at the right moment. 🙄
By Toby’s own admission the game has shortcomings, and I won’t disagree with his analysis. Levels are in a separate folder, and are not manageable except perhaps by direct editing them. That does mean you could create your own and slip them in when nibbles isn’t looking though.
And there’s no speed adjustment, which in a game of this nature means there’s no way to accommodate new players or younger drivers. Unless you start editing the source code, that is.
All the same, I like the color, I like the animations, and for as simple a game as it is, it does a decent job. And after a few hours of empire, it feels quite good. 😉
Inconsolation 