A strange phenomenon has been sapping valuable time from our lives at my office in the last week.
It’s called Armagetron. It’s an open source (freeware) arcade-style game that plays like a cross between the movie Tron (“Where love and escape do not compute.”), and the Snakes (aka Worms aka Nibbles) game that came with Microsoft QBasic back in the day.
All you need to know to enjoy the game is that ‘Z’ and ‘X’ are your left and right controls and that the closer you are to an opponents ‘wall’, the faster you will travel. Works well over a LAN – team play is a must. I have to, uh, go back to work now.
Having played “just one more game” for half an hour yesterday, I can only agree. The beauty of the gane, like early video games, is its simplicity in paying controls which allows the focus to be on tactics not whether I have a fictitious arsenel in my back pocket as I run amok in some urban war zone. If only Asteroids or Tempest would come out in a shiny new form with better audio and 360 degree perspectives.
Hey, ummm not to make you get any more addicted to this game…but I have created a version of the game and the server that runs directley off a floppy disk (no instalation needed), so you can play it anywhere, anytime (a linux version is in the works 😉
You can find the article for it at http://www.cybernetresources.com/articles/armagetron_floppy.htm . Tell me what you think 😉