I’ve been back into Ubuntu 9.04 for the past week or so. I didn’t really have a good reason to switch out of Windows beyond just feeling like it but I am pretty pleased with how it’s working out. I installed a package of games because it happened to catch my eye while I was looking for something else. It’s a collection of a lot of sliding tile games and general logical thinking puzzles. I killed several hours yesterday playing a couple in particular that I’d like to share. They reminded me of a time when I was perhaps 12 and visiting some of my parents’ friends. They had a couple puzzley games on their computer and it’s the first time I remember sitting down for a concentrated period of time and playing games. These took me back there and I have found Flash equivalents of the two I liked the most.
Net is a tile rotation puzzle where the goal is to get all of the squares connected to the central source. I find the Flash version linked to be a bit harder to do than the one I’ve got installed due to the flashy colours and animations. Mine looks like this:
so addictive
The second (less addictive, more time consuming) is called Untangle in Ubuntu but Planarity online. The player is presented with a tangled web woven between several points. The object is to move the points around until no lines are crossing each other. Here’s a look at it in Ubuntu:
super-simple but takes a while
I did one of 43 nodes last night which took me a long time. The versions I’m playing on don’t keep track of number of moves so I am basically only playing in order to solve it and not to beat any previous time or number of moves. I am 100% intrinsically motivated by the simple challenge which is frankly amazing because of my short attention span. The How-To Geek provided this last game, WarpShot (just available in Flash, as far as I know) and as I am a sucker for physics-based games, I played it for a good long while. They provide a really good write-up over there but if you’d prefer to play it directly, you can find it here.