Some Games for the N900

Following up from the list of the most useful apps I found. This one is dedicated to the games. So lets get right too it. Again in no particular order:

• Angry Birds: You shoot angry birds at greedy pigs using a slingshot. Works kinda like worms & although it sounds cruel is actually loads of fun. The first 21 levels are free. Pickup the Level Pack 1 for 42 more levels. Highly recommended.
• Color Flood: Gradually fill the screen until it's all 1 color. Sounds mundane but is rather difficult & addictive because you gotta do it in 25 moves.
• Crazycat: A real simple Flash game of capture the cat. Takes a surprising amount of strategy to corner a crazy cat.
• EightyOne: The best sudoku implementation on maemo. There are at least 4 others that are shit in some way.
• Airport: An air traffic control game. See how many planes you can guide to land safely & avoid collisions. So far 35 for me. (I know, I suck!)
• Electric Beams: Move beams of electricity to light up all the light bulbs. Simple & fun game. Not much replay-ability though.
• Hex-a-hop: Jump around on a puzzle of hexagonal tiles that break-up behind you. You gotta break them all. This game will last a while, it's got a lot of levels & it gets progressively harder and more complex as you go. Highly recommended.
• Kobo Deluxe: A top down view, all directional space shooter. Simple premise, destroy enemy ships and bases & stay alive. This game would be shit if you had to use the arrow keys on the keyboard to play it. But it's support for using the accelerometer for direction and the proximity sensor for the trigger makes this games very playable and enjoyable on the N900. Highly recommended.
• SolarWolf: A similar game to Kobo Deluxe except you don't shoot anything, instead you just pickup stuff while avoiding getting shot. Plays with the accelerometer & is pretty entertaining.
• Wok: Frantically shoveling stuff to the side with a rectangular wok using the touchscreen. Sound bonkers but is actually kinda fun.
• VoR: Variation on Rockdodger. Navigate your ship through an asteroid field. But Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1. Plays very nicely with accelerometer. See how long you can survive.
  

A decent FPS for the EeePC

Because of the limited graphical performance of the EeePC, FPS choices are rather limited, the best I've come across so far is AssaultCube. It's a modified version on Cube that runs very well right away on the EeePC. In order to get better frame rates, you do have to tweak down some of the graphics, but overall it played very well. So if you're looking for a decent FPS to play on the EeePC, do give AssaultCube a go.

Tips for playing wormux on the EeePC

Due the screen resolution limitations of the EeePC, many applications will have windows taller than the screen. This is typically solved by using Alt+Drag to move the window around, typically so you can click the buttons at the bottom.

This resolution also posed some interesting problems for some games, while most games would happily run at 800x480 or 640x480, games such as wormux expects the minimum resolution to be 800x600. So running wormux on the EeePC has a few problems.

Fist off, it's necessary to modify wormux's ~/.wormux/config.xml file to set the desired resolution:
width 800
height 480
full_screen 1

After this you should be able to start the game nicely fullscreen. In the player selection screen you'll see the first problem crop up. Your ok & cancel button are not visible, they are lower down & can't be seen. You can overcome this easily using the keyboard, Enter for OK and Esc for Cancel.

Finally the last obstacle is in actually playing the game. Your right click weapon selection menu is too large & goes beyond the top of the screen. Making it impossible to choose the topmost weapons (such as the Bazooka which incidentally is the most common weapon of choice). Fortunately this last problem is solved using the keyboard shortcuts F1 through F5, these keys will allow you to cycle through and select a weapon/gadget from the 5 categories.

Enjoy blowing up them gimps. :)

Gaming on the Asus EeePC

I figured out that Asus EeePC worked quite well as a portable game machine. I installed Dgen & Snes9x into it, they work great. Playing Contra on it was excellent. I also installed a host of native linux games that all worked out very well.

Here's a list of em:
- abuse
- armagetron
- neverball
- pinball
- supertux
- wormux

I just can't get enough of wormux, it's excellent.