Penguin Powered Gaming: Wormux

Today I finally stopped putting off upgrading the schwuklet’s computers to Feisty, and actually did it. Sort of. The story actually started yesterday when I started looking at schwuklet #1’s computer which it transpired never completed an upgrade to Edgy several months ago and whilst it would still work, it would not under any circumstances talk to my network. After numerous attempts and much head scratching I gave up, loaned it a working CD drive and did a fresh install of Feisty. Schwuklet #2’s computer was still on Dapper, and although I got it upgraded to Edgy it ended up being much quicker (on a slow machine) to also do a fresh install.

So two clean machines, almost ready for grubby little fingers. Of course I needed to install their games which are the usual suspects like GCompris, Childsplay, Tuxpaint et al. Whilst selecting the packages to install I scanned past all the other games available and realised that a) I’d never heard of most of them and b) if I hadn’t, then it was likely others hadn’t either.

This leads us to Penguin Powered Gaming. My collection of (brief) reviews of games that meet the following strict criteria:

1. They are available in any of the official repositories for the current (at time of writing) release of Ubuntu
2. Er, that’s it

I do not intend to cover every game, in fact I’ll be avoiding the better known ones (e.g. BZFlag, Armagetron). I want to explore new titles and hopefully share them with others who have overlooked or remained ignorant of them.

Here ends a lengthy introduction to our first title: Wormux.

No prizes for guessing this is a clone of the 2D variants of the Worms games – which should need no introduction – with the usual Free/Open Source slant. Worms has been a firm favourite of mine since the original on the Amiga, although I’ve tended to generally play it on various consoles – in fact Worms is my most played title on Xbox Live Arcade.

Gameplay remains almost identical, although weapons do differ slightly. Graphics and sound are both well done. Most importantly, it is fun. If you liked any of the 2D Worms titles, you’ll like this.

Overall Rating: Worth installing

I know I hinted these might be brief, but this was briefer than I intended. Wormux builds on such a well known game style that there is little to judge apart from how well the developers have done implementing it and I’m happy to say that they have succeeded in making a fun and enjoyable game.