Pingus - A Lemmings like arcade game for GNU /
Linux and FreeBSD (Free Lemmings Clone)
Some might remember Psychosis
Lemmings that we used to enjoy
back in the glorious days of DOS
I remember
Lemmings used to be among the played game in one line with
other top arcades like
Dangerous Dave, Commander Keen, Xenon
etc.
The game used to be quite unique for the time and it was quite cool
that it worked on quite old machines lime my old 8086 XT with 640kb
of memory. It even supported two player mode! ;)
I was happy to find out actually Lemmings remake is available in
the
Free Software OS realm . These Lemmings clone game is
called Pingus
Instead of governing a group of lemmings which had to move to an
exit door by making a save path using various tools and combination
of team member character skills, the main heroes in
Pingus
are cute little penguins ;)
Pingus is built on TOP of SDL libraries and has a
combination of awesome graphics and enjoyable music soundtrack and
as a game play is a way better than its original predecessor.
If i have to to rank this game I would put it among
the best 20
free software games ever produced for Linux / BSD.
pingus is available for almost all kind of Linux
distritubions as well as is included in the FreeBSD port
tree:
On Debian its available as a package ready to be installed with
aptitude or
apt by issuing:
debian:~# aptitude install pingus
For FreeBSD pingus is installed via ports tree, by running
cmds:
freebsd# cd /usr/ports/games/pingus
freebsd# make install && make install
clean
By default pingus will run in a Windowed mode, to run the game in
fullscreen you will have to run it with the
-f switch via
terminal, or by pressing ALT+F2 in GNOME and typing:
$ pingus -f
The game is quite hard to complete in that resembling the lemmings.
It has an embedded
Mapeditor , by which new levels can be
easily constructed and sent to the game developers (in that way
helping the game development).
Pingus is also multi-platform, licensed under GPL2 and is
also
ported for Mac OSX and MS Windows, allowing others non
free software users enjoy.
Pingus Windows and MacOS X binary as well as source can
be downloaded here
Playing
Pingus has few benefits, one is it can be nice to
kill some boredom (for sysadmins) or / and bring some good past
gaming memories. It's also good for developing some elder people
strategic thinking as well as very suitable for
little children
to help develop their intellectual (thinking) in solving complex
consequential tasks.
Pingus could also be beneficial for
teens to develop organizational and math skills.