Bonus: A low score of games after a score of games

I should probably apologize for yesterday’s post; I couldn’t remember when I had done anything special for April Fool’s Day, and perhaps it was just dumb. I’m allowed to be dumb once in a while.

And I’m finally stretched thin on games, which is a good thing. Here’s what’s left, and my notes about my luck with them … or lack thereof.

• animonstres: This managed to make it onto my list but it appears to be graphical. It’s possible there’s an ncurses or text-only mode, but it wasn’t immediately visible.
• bj: Supposedly a text-only blackjack game that supposedly survives on some shell account services, but other than this rather esoteric and probably unrelated source code page, I can’t find any reference to it. I’m not sharp on compiling assembler either, so maybe that page is totally irrelevant. I did see this, but didn’t have any luck building it.
• cls: An e-mail suggested cls as a game worth investigating, but I think the tipster was kidding. That’s not any kind of game.
• corewars: I have felt obligated for a long time to include corewars in this list, but to be honest, I can’t find any sort of text-only version of the game. Even pmars seems to spawn an X window, and will complain if you try to run it in a tty. If you know of a text-only way to play corewars, please let me know. 😦
• drmario: A Tetris-ish game in the vein of Mario Bros., etc. Wouldn’t compile for me.
• enigma: If I understand correctly, enigma was the original text version of chroma, and was later absorbed into it. I didn’t try this, since I took it to be a twin to what chroma offers in textmode.
• gin: Sort of like bj, above, I have seen reference to a gin rummy game for the terminal, but couldn’t find a source file and don’t have any relevant links. I have lots of irrelevant links though, and I can forward them to you if you want. … 😛
• manhunt: Screenshots of this suggest its something similar to dopewars but with a puzzle orientation. I can’t find the source for it, and other unrelated “manhunt” titles are obscuring my searches.
• reversi: A Reversi clone for the terminal, written in lisp. I have a terrible time trying to find which lisp interpreter to use and the order of instructions to start lisp games, so if you know of a better way to get this built and started, please send me baby-step instructions. 😳
• sewer-massacre and urban-warfare: Two roguelikes, both written in lisp, but in this case, both of the precompiled binaries complained about needing readline … which pacman says is installed. And of course, my efforts to build them from source were hopeless. That seems to be a recurring theme these days. …
• torus: Supposedly a borderless, wraparound knockoff of robots, this would not compile for me from the torus-src source file. It may be something simple that I have mis-configured, or it may be that the code is just too old.
• ularn: ularn apparently has a pedigree that reaches back all the way to the late 1980s, and exists in versions for a variety of operating systems, including (of all things) PalmOS. My attempts to build it from its Github home weren’t very successful though, and most of the errors I saw were beyond my ability to fix. 😦
• ultrarogue: I feel a little bad leaving out ultrarogue, because from a technical standpoint, it does nothing wrong. It compiles, it runs, it stretches to just about any screen size. And supposedly it’s almost 30 years old. But unfortunately, it’s just not different enough for me. And when I hold it up to things like scrap or Frozen Depths, it’s just sort of … blah.
• wallyplus: Touted as a Go client in ncurses, but wouldn’t build for me. The source code has datestamps of 2002, so it’s more than likely it just hasn’t rolled with the times.

I will probably stop there. I have a few other, very small “games” that I tinkered with only as long as it took to acknowledge that they didn’t work. Listing them here would just be sort of rubbing their noses in their failure. And in some cases, I’m sure it’s not their fault.

Next up: Boring stuff … 😦 😉