FOSSwire

ManiaDrive describes itself as "an arcade car game on acrobatic tracks, with a quick and nervous gameplay (tracks almost never exceed one minute)" and also as a clone of Trackmania.

What I can tell you is that ManiaDrive is a lot of fun, and extremely addictive at that.

Download the game from the site and on Linux, simply extract the archive and run ./mania_drive.sh. You will need 3D support enabled in your Linux distribution, or the game will run with terrible performance.

Once you're up and running, you can get started straight away with the Beginner's tracks. You drive a clapped-out Renault Clio around a simple track. The aim is to get your car through all the checkpoints and to the finish in the quickest time possible (beating the 'Gold Time' on each track unlocks the next, and is how you can progress through).

Once you've been taught the basics of the checkpoint system, how to run, jumps and more, you can progress into the real levels (under the Pro heading).

Each level is challenging, but not so much to make it frustrating. I found that progressing through the first few levels, after doing the Beginner series, was difficult enough to be rewarding (and addictive, for that matter), but was also easy to just pick up and play.

The game also features a soundtrack of Creative Commons-licensed (mostly punk rock) music (see the bottom of this page for the listings). The tracks work well as a backdrop to the game, but might get annoying after a while. Thankfully, you can easily mute the music in Options by turning its volume to the lowest setting.

Unfortunately, the website's News section hasn't been updated in a very long time, but you can find some additional downloadable tracks from there as well if you finish the set that the game comes with. Heck, if you're really ambitious, there's even a track editor (./mania2.sh in the download directory) so you can build your own.

If you're looking for realism in ManiaDrive, forget it. This game is all arcade, and doesn't pretend to be anything more or less. For what it is though, it is very entertaining. A word of warning though - if you need to get stuff done, you might want to stay away.

There are times when you find a game that for some reason just doesn't work well with Compiz. It may flicker over other windows, become distorted, or it may crash. The real fix for these comes in new X.Org drivers in the works, but for now the best solution is to suspend Compiz while you run a game.

Let's think of a way to do this. First, we'll obviously want to start Metacity and replace Compiz. Then, we want the game to run. And when we're done, Compiz should start up again. The most logical script would be this:

#!/bin/bash
metacity --replace
game_name
compiz --replace

If you try to run the script above, you'd notice that Metacity would start, but nothing else would happen. This is because the commands are run synchronously, that is, when one finishes the next starts. Metacity will never finish unless you stop it. So, let's make it run in the background:

#!/bin/bash
metacity --replace &
game_name
compiz --replace

The ampersand makes Metacity run in the background, allowing other commands to run. We then can run the game. The game shouldn't be run in the background, however, because Compiz would immediately replace Metacity again.

At the end of the script, we start up Compiz again. This is where you don't want to run the script in a terminal for once, because as soon as you close the terminal Compiz will quit. So, let's make a menu item for it. I'm a big fan of StepMania, so I'm going to run the version I have installed in my home directory:

#!/bin/bash
metacity --replace &
cd ~/bin/stepmania
./stepmania
compiz --replace

If you run a command that requires a path, make sure to put the full path name in or your script may not run. We then add a menu entry in the Games menu:

Now whenever I decide to play StepMania, all desktop effects will be shut off. When I am finished, they will be switched back on again. This can be applied to almost any situation where Compiz needs to be off in your own scripts.

You'll have to forgive me, this is the second game review I've done in the past two days, after yesterday's look at Battle Tanks. After discovering this gem though, I simply couldn't not share.

The game is Wormux - and it is basically a clone of the Worms series of games originally by Team17. For those who aren't in the know, Wormux (and the Worms game) put you in control of a team of worms armed to the teeth with an arsenal of weapons. The aim of the game is to use those weapons against worms of the enemy team. Each worm has a set amount of energy, and being shot at, blown up etc. will reduce that energy until that worm dies (or if you can get a worm to go for a swim or fly off the edge of the map, it's instant death). The last team standing wins. It is turn-based, so while your team is in control, everyone else stands still for you to take a potshot at.

Wormux makes a formidable clone of the original series. It has an impressive set of weapons 'inspired' by the series, plus some extra ones that you won't have seen before. It doesn't copy directly in every way, however, and has a distinct free software spin to it. Instead of the same old plain worms, for example, the different teams that ship with the game are themed - so there are Tux penguins, PHP elephants, KDE dragons and so forth. This adds a unique Linux and free software spin to it, and keeps things interesting.

Gameplay is spot on. It manages to be simple, yet almost endlessly fun. The game is best played hot-seat with other human players, where you each pick a team and take it in turns to blow each other's worms up.

The game is very stable and seems to work very well, although again it does need 3D acceleration, so without it you might struggle to get it at playable framerates. Also, the screen scrolling system, where you move the mouse to the edges of the screen to move the camera around can be a slight problem if you 'get lost' and can't find the currently active worm.

Despite these minor issues, I am absolutely in love with Wormux right now. If you can't play the real Worms games, then this is, in my opinion, the absolute next best thing. Highly recommended.

Wormux is cross-platform and can binaries for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and FreeBSD as well as source code downloaded from the download page. The Linux static binary can be downloaded from there, but install using your package manager if you can for the easiest installation.