roflbalt: ASCII action, at its finest

I don’t know much about Canabalt, the game that roflbalt hopes to imitate. I do know roflbalt is pretty darned fun.

That’s another static image that won’t give you an idea of the speed and activity involved in roflbalt. It might give you an idea of the only eccentricity I could find with roflbalt: If you screen space isn’t 120×42, you’re going to see some smearing effects.

But once you get that ironed out, roflbalt is actually quite impressive. The game scrolls horizontally at a good clip, and the animated figure, while primitive, still has some flair in his action. Key commands are … pretty much anything you want, since any key seems to make your figure jump.

I am also willing to add points for roflbalt just for attention to some small details — like reflections on building windows. I can’t speak to the original game, but it is impressive that someone took the time to get that working in a text-only environment.

There’s not much more for me to say about roflbalt, mostly because there’s not much more to roflbalt. There is an AUR version that has some issues with its PKGBUILD, so you might do best to just install it through ruby, and gem install roflbalt. Debian users might have to do the same.

roflbalt might take some added processor muscle too, not only to run the animation but also to keep the ruby guts running at a pace.

And I don’t want to be a downer, but I don’t think that guy is ever going to catch up with that helicopter.

P.S.: Thanks to Ander for mentioning this one too.