Specifications

www.linuxjournal.com august 2008 | 39
some sort of decent gaming distraction?
Well, you have a lot of options, such as
adventure text games and moon-buggy,
but my favorite discovery is vitetris, a
Tetris clone with full color and many
options. According to the vitetris
Web site:
vitetris is a terminal-based
Tetris clone by Victor Nilsson.
Gameplay is much like the
early Tetris games by Nintendo.
Features include:
I Configurable keys
I Highscore table
I Two-player mode
with garbage
I Network play
I Joystick (gamepad) support
on Linux
It has been tested on Linux,
Cygwin, NetBSD and a few
other UNIX-like systems.
Library dependencies are mini-
mal (only libc is required), and
many features can be disabled
at compile time.
Installation For those who prefer
binaries, included at the Web site
are links to RPM packages and some
tarballs built with gcc 3.4.6 for i486
Linux on Slackware 11.0. However,
vitetris has very few dependencies, and
99% of you should be able to compile
it from the source tarball (saving you
from some of the inevitable binary
incompatibility). Indeed, this is the
easiest and most trouble-free compila-
tion I’ve encountered in a long time, so
I recommend compiling it.
Grab the latest tarball from the pro-
ject’s Web site, extract the contents,
and open a terminal in the new folder.
Once inside the vitetris directory, enter
the commands:
$ configure
$ make
and, as root or sudo:
# make install
Once compiled, typing tetris at the
command line loads the game.
Usage Once inside the game, you’ll
see a heap of cool options. For instance,
you can change the height of the level
you’re in, enable rotation in both clock-
wise and counter-clockwise directions,
and switch between game modes.
These two game modes enable or dis-
able attacking the other player with
completed lines and adding them to
the bottom of their stack (game
mode A is for attacking enabled, and
B is for disabled). To start a game by
yourself, choose 1 Player Game, and
choose your difficulty level and game
height to begin. On your keyboard,
the left and right arrows move each
piece left and right; the up arrow
rotates the piece on screen; the down
arrow makes a “soft drop”; and the
spacebar makes a “hard drop”,
straight to the bottom of the screen.
If you want to change the keys or
switch between rotation methods and
so on, you can to that from the Options
menu. If you want to play a two-player
game, you also have to define Player 2’s
keys here. If you’re having any problems
displaying vitetris in your console and
want to change the game’s colors, or
even switch to a monochrome mode,
those options are available in the
Options menu as well.
Ultimately, vitetris is a great Tetris
clone by itself, but coupled with the
fact that it runs on the command line
without graphics, vitetris is a great addi-
tion to any system and will be a nice
distraction the next time the X Window
System won’t start!
Tetuhi
This was the craziest project I came
across this month! Tetuhi is basically a
program that takes an image and gen-
erates a game around it, but its appeal
doesn’t end there. Aside from making
landscapes from parts of the image,
Tetuhi also creates characters from other
parts of the image, as well as other
objects, such as food, ammo, friends
and enemies, which all wriggle and
move about as the engine morphs
sections of the original image. On top
of all that, it also has a dynamic and
adaptive rule set with changing game
modes—meaning each game and image
may be truly random and different from
the last.
Installation Tetuhi is definitely
something that is still in development,
so the usual
configure && make &&
make install won’t do you much good
here. In terms of requirements, you
need up-to-date versions of Python,
GCC, Pygame, the Python Imaging
Library, PyYAML and the Gnu Scientific
(halo.gen.nz/tetuhi/code.html)
vitetris provides two-player Tetris fun without graphics.