Kill everything that Moves (KETM) an arcade
spaceship Tyrian GNU / Linux game
I always love so much to go back to the times, when games were
games and people had still valued words like moral and
respect.
In that great days of old school computing, we used to play the
awesome old schools
Tyrian and the
Nintendo 1941 game
(hopefully some still remember).
For all who don't
Tyrian is one of the best Spaceship Arcades of
all times!, and especially for DOS operating system the best
I've personally seen.
Recently I was checking the arcade games available for install on
my Debian GNU / Linux and happily come across a game called
KETM.
KETM acronym stands for the memorizable
KILL EVERYTHING
THAT MOVES and is free software distributed game under
GPL.
The original creation idea was probably to resemble the so famous
in the '90s spaceshooter games.
KETM is pretty addictive just like tyrian and has
santimental meaning for me since it brings me memories for my
arcade gaming years ;)
The game is easy to play and has a feeling of "diversity"
especially in type of weapons your ship can obtain and use against
enemies.
The powerups you get is quite plenty compared to the enemy ship
types you should destroy
This however is
also a good thing, as you can play more smoothly without dying
every few secs like it is in so many arcade games...
The game has only 4 game levels and on each level end there is a
big spaceship "the boss" which is the last in line to destroy in
the tradition of the 2d arcade games.
Kill Everything That Moves is available for Debian and
Ubuntu as a deb installable with apt. To install the game on Debian
and Ubuntu
debian:~# apt-get install ketm
...
ketm's official latest available source and binary of time
of writting this article is at version 0.6 and as far as I checked
it unfortunately seems like the game development is stucked and the
code seems a unmaintained.
I'm sure ketm has a lot of potential en hope somebody will adopt
the code and will push further its development.
The game runs by default in the annoying windowed mode, I don't
like this so I always run it fullscreen:
debian:~# ketm -f
KETM also reminds a bit on GEKI 2 / 3, which I have
previously blogged about but I found KETM to be more enjoyable than
gekis.
I've seen
KETM has RPM ports as well so installing the game
on fedora will be probably as easy as downloading the respective
RPMs fulfilling the RPM package requirements and installing with
rpm -i. I would be glad to hear from people who had
succesfully run the game on Fedora and other RPM based Linux
distributions?
The only thing that prevents the game to feel a bit more awesome
(in my view) is the missing sound & music ... Even though in
the game settings inside the main menu there is an option for
Sound On / Off the game runs by default without any sound or
music (at least on my Debian).
I hope you will have some fun with KETM just I like I did! ;)
Also if you haven't played Tyrian yet, then I strongly advice you
download
Tyrian from here and try it out with
dosbox -
(a dos
gnu linux / bsd game emulator)
Interest fact to mention here, I've found
tyrian has an open
source version under development called -
OpenTyrian .
I'll check the game and write on it when I have time.