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Continued from the 39th “Beyond Heresy”
Since it’s already here, it’s time to properly introduce General Graphics Interface. This was a then-abandoned effort to create an integrated graphics library intended to be portable across all platforms. GGI streamlines that process by allowing a developer to target just one interface to his game or application, rather than having it appear directly in X11 or SVGAlib. Recruitment was limited, primarily due to the success of his SDL, but there was one game that relied on SDL. URBAN The Cyborg Project.
RPM package urban This version, written by Karol Pietrzak, has a typo that makes it depend on “libmikmo” instead of MikMod, but you can work around this by passing the –nodeps flag while installing the package. You will also need to download the sound.tar.gz archive and extract it to the /usr/share/urban directory. This is because the sound effects are quite large at 8.6 MB and are therefore separate from the main game. It was a sign of the times.
An action platformer first released in 1999, you play as Urban Gutter, a man taken to a secret military base by an evil scientist and turned into a cyborg against his will. The acronym in the title is a bit strange, but your goal is to escape and exact the bloodiest revenge possible on the world.in this regard urban Seems like free software Post, even if perhaps its presentation isn’t even more clever. But any hope for true catharsis here is often lost in a sense of frustration.
urban allows you to move one tile to the foreground and another to the background, but this is barely perceptible because the perspective is gone. To be most effective, the game requires either an oblique view or shading to show the visual differences between the various levels. You can still navigate for the most part, but this means you’ll often miss jumps and shots, and some of the essential platforming is only possible through key mashing.
Combat is also unbalanced, with too little damage taken from bullets and too much damage taken from explosives. The only effective strategy I found for defeating grenadiers for most of the game was to retreat and blindly shoot them with the starting rifle from off-screen. To make matters worse, mines are represented by a few flashing red pixels on the ground and are used in actual sneaky traps designed to burn your entire life.
Weapons expand to include flamethrowers and freezethrowers, and later in the game rocket launchers and miniguns, but most of these still require standing in the line of fire to use. There are also some other novelties, in the form of futuristic technological weapons that inexplicably seem unable to damage the final boss. Instead, you had to take out tanks using a rocket launcher, a minigun, and a starter rifle in that order, while treating your own life as expendable.
This all contributes to my frustration with the save system. The save system is checkpoint-based, allowing you to save your progress only at the end of each level. A quick save can forgive so many sins. urban You had committed so many things that your life needs to be valued for use in a minefield, not as a cushion for other mistakes. Escaping to the menu ends the session, so you can’t even pause it, and the last one now also locks up when reloading two levels.
Despite my complaints, there’s still a strong game buried beneath all these annoyances. urban Boasting high quality pixel art and an impressive tracker music score. However, the sound effects can be a little sparse, and many of the ones there are pulled from other media. Determining which assets are free content and which are infringing would require a full audit, which is a major hurdle for anyone wanting to create updated and fixed versions of the game. Become.
If ported to the latest SDL version and with some improvements, this could become something of a classic of free software, but as it stands it is only considered old freeware and the latest It’s much easier to play from DOSBox on your computer. With the deprecation of GGI, native Linux binaries are now available. NetBSD still packages the game and I tried to install that package via pkgsrc on Arch Linux, but the build failed because LibGGI refused to compile.
This is a shame, because the cheat codes “LINUSISGOD” and “LINUXRULES” clearly indicate that the Swedish developer was actually a friend of Penguin. In fact, if you type “MICROSOFT” the player will exit immediately. From the above, URBAN The Cyborg Project It wasn’t the only freeware action platformer from the turn of the millennium that later had its source code released. The next version will focus on the Allegro game library instead.
Continued in Part 41: The worm rotates
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Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
