Specifications

right of the screen, and a pop-up menu appears
(Figure 2). Not only can you change the difficulty here,
but you also can turn sound effects on or off, check
high scores and run the game in full-screen mode.
Willi Kappler’s Snowball (Figure 3) is a classic
jump-and-run multiplatform game. It’s also an inter-
esting puzzler that requires a lot of thought before
you can advance to the next level (of which there are
20). Your job is to find some way to help your pen-
guin (Tux, in one of his many incarnations) release a
trapped snowball and roll it into the exit. Along the
way, you place (and remove) a limited number of ice
blocks, collect gold coins and other treasure, all the
while avoiding various dangers, including monsters.
Snowball is written in Python, and it’s available from
www.snowball.retrovertigo.de.
On the right-hand side, a sidebar shows the
number of available ice blocks as well as your cur-
rent score and remaining lives. Using the Action key,
you can either place or remove ice blocks. You use
these blocks to climb to higher levels and to block
the path of monsters. Find a way to release the
snowball and guide it to the open doorway. The so-
called Action key is, by default, the Enter key—
something I found hard to manipulate when I was
using cursor keys with the same hand. I switched
the Action key to the spacebar instead via the
Options menu (Figure 4).
Snowball hasn’t been updated in a while, but it’s
still a lot of fun in its current form and sure to provide
a few hours of frozen fun. It would be great if Willi
could be convinced to revisit his game or invite another
developer to take over. If you want to try modifying
Snowball on your own, there’s an included level editor.
By now, you may have noticed that cold, snow,
ice, penguins and Linux strangely seem to go together
very nicely. Another great penguin-themed game,
and one you must have a look at, is Ingo Ruhnke’s
Pingus (Figure 5). This is a game based on the classic
Lemmings game (circa 1991), where you assist some
friendly little creatures in escaping various dangers.
Pingus, however, is much more than a clone. It has
become a classic in its own right. Sit back, sip your
wine, and relax while I tell you the Pingus story.
The Pingus, mes amis, have been living happily
at the South Pole, presumably gorging themselves
on fish. In time, their environment started to, er, go
south, with the temperatures rising, the ice melting
and the food supply getting tight. Rather than look
for colder climes, as did other animals, the heroic
Pingus decided to embark upon a quest to discover
the source of this environmental havoc. You, as the
www.linuxjournal.com august 2008
| 27
KBounce
A similar game called KBounce exists as part of
the KDE games package, minus the cute pen-
guins bouncing around.
Figure 3. Snowball is a combination jump-and-run and
puzzle-solving game.
Figure 2. If the game seems too easy, you can increase the
difficulty.
Figure 4. Snowball ’s Options menu is the place to go for
keyboard mapping.