andrel's Journal: Game review: Frozen bubble

Last night around 10pm I apt-got Frozen Bubble. [game homepage] This was a big mistake, as I wound up playing it for five hours straight. Frozen Bubble was written at Mandrake; I suspect it may have something to do with their lack of profitability. To make matter worse, I was woken up early this morning by an AT&T sales rep who was wearing underwear. (I asked. She hung up immediately after saying "yes", but before I had a chance to tell her I want to be added to her do-not-call list. Somebody must do business with telemarketers; if everybody told them off they'd stop calling.)

Frozen Bubble is a sphere-packing game in the Tetris genre. (Rob says it's similar to Snood.) You shoot colored snowballs up at the ceiling, and when three of the same color join they fall off. The one player game is fun, but I suspect the two player version is better.

The game has a few interesting features:

• It's mostly written in Perl, with a few routines in C.
• Professional quality glitzy graphics and sound.
• Runs fine on my 1996 era P5-200.
• They've got a stand-alone boot CD you can play it from if you don't have GNU/Linux installed. This is a slick hack. The Mandrake install CD was modified so instead of the graphical installer it runs Frozen Bubble. It ought to be possible to avoid the CD by doing two-kernel monte from DOS/Lose32 to Linux (this is how the TomsRootBoot installer works [tomsrtbt]), but they haven't set that up yet.

This game will suck up lots of time; avoid it like the Plague.

Bust-a-move

[Sebbo]

To my understanding, all that sub-subfamily of Tetris derivatives is derived from the Neo-Geo game Bust-A-Move. For a moment, I was about to hunt down a link but you know how to use Google as well as I do.

The Evil Empire Gaming Zone has also added a java copy of the meme, called Dynomite. It never seems to finish loading under Mozilla, so it it currently the only thing I regularly use Aieee! for.