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If you happen to run a GNU/Linux machine and often play video games, then you might have heard of Teeworlds. If you didn’t hear about it yet, Teeworld is a retro-styled 2-D online side-scroller, which has pretty graphics, fast-paced gameplay with the well-known game mods: CTF, Deathmatch, etc. A lot of user-created content is available for the game, including extra modes, maps, and graphical sets.  Well, thanks to the Maemo being a complete GNU/Linux distribution, Teeworlds is surely available for playing on your N900!

The package for Teeworlds is available in Extras and you can install it with
sudo gainroot
apt-get install teeworlds
Once installed, you can launch it and see how actually well does the PC game run on your phone. Teeworlds starts up pretty smoothly, can access all the servers, settings and everything else. While you might think that the N900 keyboard might not be suitable for playing, the default key bindings prove otherwise, the game is played fairly well. If you don’t like the bindings, of course you can set your own.
Another point for Maemo’s power as a mobile platform, such a game is definitely worth trying, so check it out!

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Ever played Crayon Physics Deluxe? Well, I’m sure you’ll be happy to learn about it’s FOSS clone, Numpty Physics! And what’s more, it runs on your Maemo device perfectly!

In case if you never heard of the game, here’s a quick overview: you have a ball/box/something ‘A’ and you must get it to star/box/something ‘B’. How you do it is completely up to you, your stylus and your imagination. With such a simple premise, the game is very-very fun and has a huge replayablility factor, as every level can be passed with at least 10 ways.
Need to get a ball over a palm tree? Build a giant mallet to hit it! Or create a zipline than will take the ball over the tree. The possibilities are basically endless. In case if you get bored with 17 alread included levels, you can download more, or easily create your own levels!

A little and simple, but very addictive game that will make sure to hold your interest for long and kill the time whenever you want. So get the game and start creaating!

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Do you like strategy games? Well, then you probably have heard of “The Battle for Wesnoth”, a popular free software turn based strategy game with a strong, Tolkienesque fantasy setting. But did you know that there is a complete port of this PC game for Maemo?

The game is currently available in Extras, you can find it in the Games category.
sudo gainroot
apt-get install wesnoth
Note that the game is pretty large and will consume about 240~ Mb of memory on your /opt Unpacking a large package can also take a lot of time, so make sure you have enough battery charge.
Optionally install the music files. (Not recommended as this will take up 100 Mb more of memory and will slow down the game a bit):
apt-get install wesnoth-music
Once installed, you can launch the game from your applications menu or with
wesnoth
Loading times can be a drag, but apart from that and a few resolution issues with menus, the game is completely playable. Add-ons, Multiplayer, Singleplayer campaigns are all functional. I was able to both finish one of the mainline campaigns and play co-op survival on the official server without any trouble, right with an N900 in my hand.

The Battle for Wesnoth is definitely a game every N900 gamer should take a look at. So install the package and dive into the world of dwarves, elves and orcs!

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Want another chance to revisit some of those awesome childhood games?  How about the amazing Warcraft II for Nokia N900?  Warcraft II is brought to you by the Wargus app, which runs on the Stratagus engine.  All the special moments from Blizzards 1995 DOS classic are here in Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.  In a time where Orcs were truly the evil guys, before they were just misunderstood and simply pawns of the Burning Legion.

If you haven’t played this game before on the PC, then you cant really play this game.  Firstly that you need the files from your old Warcraft II cd, and the other that it wouldn’t make much sense, and a mouse is a little more intuitive to use then the touch screen.  I did find it reasonable to play though, while dragging, tapping and double tapping my stylus.  I wouldn’t want to play this without a stylus and keyboard though, so that’s unfortunate for basically any other phone.
With that, Warcraft II felt right at home on my N900, beyond a few double tap issues everything went rather well…  Oh, and getting eaten by dragons.  There were no major frame rate issues, and it was very easy to install.  All one needs to do is…

-          Copy the Warcraft II cd files (DOS version, battle.net version doesn’t work) to /home/user/MyDocs/WAR2
-          Install Wargus from the Application manager (this will take some time)
-          Run from the menu

I know I have mentioned before that I’m not a huge fan of games that take such a time investment on my N900, but this is an exception.  It plays well, you can save and pickup later and you get to be Orcs!  If you want to look into it in more detail, you can over here.

Now you can relive the glory days, and guide the Horde to victory against those meddling Alliance scum!  For the Horde!!

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Fan of scrabble?  Fan of thinking?  Well, look no further!  My faithful companion just learned a new trick, its called Wordsler, and word game (duh!) that pits you with random tiles to test your English, and your intelligence.
We all need an extra bit of help with our words, and perhaps even our scrabble scores, and this fast little mini game helps with both.  With options to try to play through a set of 50 cards at your own pace, play through 50 cards on a time limit, or pit yourself against another player head to head online.  Who needs real friends when you have word games?After looking into a few of the more time heavy games lately, its good to play one that only requires a few minutes, addiction permitting.  The standard game was straight forward and smooth, and although I didn’t get through all the cards I still progressed reasonably well.  Time trial plays exactly the same but with a time limit, adding a nice spice of pressure to the equation.  Funnily enough I managed to score better in time trial then I did without the pressure, but perhaps I had a lucky moment.
The online play is defiantly a nice touch, after creating a username and some waiting; I was taken to a time trial game.  Whether I was actually competing against I don’t know, but my score was submitted to the game webpage to see how I fared against everyone else, so that is at least fun.

As you can see from my amazing scores, word games are not my forte.  It’s been said that Australians don’t even speak real English, which may be true depending who you ask.  Regardless, I stay away from most forms of word games, and nothing makes me run faster then a mention of scrabble.  Even all that said though, I did find it somewhat enjoyable matching up words here, and would probably find myself trying again in a spare minute.  I suppose that it is easier then scrabble, and the fact that it’s only a few minutes of pain which compels this Aussie’s …

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It wasn’t long ago I had a little play around with Neverputt, a minigolf game recently ported to the N900.  There I mentioned that Neverputt has roots in Neverball, a very similar game with a slightly different concept.  It is of course good to know that I didn’t find Neverball for Nokia N900 nearly quite as frustrating as Neverputt.

Neverball has a fairly identical world to Neverputt, making sense since Neverputt is derived from Neverball.  The physics work the same, and the levels all appear the same.  The difference is that while Neverputt you control the ball with a golf club while selecting angles and power, in Neverball you control the ball by moving the floor, and that is done by moving the N900 itself.
The basic idea of the game is to simply navigate a course, collect a sufficient amount of coins, then reach the target within the time allotted.  The more coins you collect, and the faster you complete the stage, the more points you receive.  Simple but effective.  Perhaps it’s my lack of gaming skill coming into it again, but I did find controlling the ball very difficult to begin with, and moving the N900 all around conflicted with my CSSU portrait support.  After a while of playing around though, I did seem to get the hang of controlling Wilson somewhat as the difficulty increased, and I found that having the keyboard out while playing eliminated the games desire to try play in portrait.
Frame rates were fine, with out too many slowdowns, nothing game breaking.  Once again trying to change graphic options only causes the game to crash, much like Neverputt.  One of the awesome options here though is the ability to change the ball, away from a boring monochromatic beach toy, to things like the atom, Saturn, or even Blinky the pac man ghost.  Bouncing around the levels with Blinky made any fun had just that much better; perhaps it’s the emotionless state it gives me that makes it feel like I’m looking into a mirror.

Neverball may actually find some love with me whenever I need to kill …

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Magic: The Gathering, a game that has around six million players, in over seventy countries across the world, is now in your pocket and better then ever.  It is probably the most popular trading card game in the world and if you haven’t played it, you have probably seen it.  Of course it would go without saying that if you don’t play Magic, then you probably wouldn’t be interested in Wagic.  Wagic has been available for around six months, and can be found in the Maemo Extras repository, but it was the recent update to it has brought it back into my recognition.

 Wagic, if you haven’t gathered yet, is a Magic: The Gathering game, which imitates the game, and reduces it to a bunch of squares.  I should probably state that I am no MTG veteran, but have dabbled in it, so my analysis of Wagic is based on that and may miss many of the finer points to this great game.
It took me a little bit to work out they keys, and how it quite works with the game, but once that was out the way, I got to construct my deck.  It works like many card games, where you can build a desk from a preset hoard of cards.  More cards can be acquired as you go along too.  To save everyone else the trouble, the arrow keys work, enter is back, space is ok, and Q scrolls though the phases.  That’s about all I really needed.
Beyond needing to know the appropriate buttons to press, knowledge of the game does kind of give it meaning.  If you have those two things though, away you go.  As an average player to MTG, I found Wagic enjoyable, but of course not as good as the real thing.  It was a good time sink when I wanted to loose half an hour of my day, which generally only happens when I’m waiting in the doctor’s office.  Long games on the phone have never quite flown well with me, which is probably why Angry Birds does so well.

As far as lengthy games …

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If you’re like me, you want to coax as much power as you can possibly get out of your warp drive, and to do that you need all the tools to do it. One of many systems working towards performance on the USS N900 is Swappolube, which works to change certain parameters in the kernel for maximum speed.  Swappolube can be found in the Extras repository, and once installed, it’s fairly easy to use, just fire and forget.

What is Swappolube?
Swappolube can change up to fourteen different parameters for maximum efficiency from your device, and also lists their default values.  You are free to tinker with these parameters to your hearts content, and see what works best for you.  To make things easier though, there are three options for quick setting selection, found right up the top.  Custom which is for when you feel like tweaking, proposed for preconfigured values that have been proven to increase performance, and current, the current values being used.
The easiest way to go about using Swappolube is to simply hit ‘proposed’, and then tap ‘apply’ down the bottom to put these values to work.  If you don’t want to run Swappolube every time you restart you device, hitting ‘store’ now will make it so these values are used from start up… pretty cool huh? Of course with anything performance oriented, each individual will perceive it in their own way.  You may not see any change whatsoever.  It is only one thing that goes into an array of tweaks that help to make my star ship go as fast as I can get it, either way its not going to do you any harm… now… Engage!

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Nothing in life can strip a person down to a pile twitching nerves quite like mini golf can.  With that I get to take a look at Neverputt for Nokia N900, an old skool mini golf game recently ported to the N900.
Neverputt is an offshoot of a similar game Neverball, and it’s just great to know that all of the frustrations of mini golf can now be put in your pocket!

 Once I got around the style of play, and falling down quite a few holes, I did start to get the hang of it.  I found that being able to use a stylus made the game much more enjoyable, being able to see the screen past my fingers is always a plus.  The graphics are adequate for getting the job done, and it runs rather smoothly.  There was minor frame rate dips on some levels that have a bit more detail, but nothing too serious.
There are options for turning down graphics detail, but messing with these only resulted in the game closing, and not yielding any other effect.
Still, the game plays well, and I found myself sinking a nice amount of time into it.  With that though, it isn’t exactly my kind of game.  I find it to be, just like mini golf, to be rather frustrating.  Kind of like when you’re playing Mario Kart, in first place and get smashed with a damn spiny shell on the line, and come last… yeah… that kind of frustrated.  My ball was off the course more then it was on, and I only found my score coming close to par a few times.
My own lack of skills aside, there isn’t anything wrong with a challenging game, and I’m overjoyed that there are still people working on ports for the N900.  Really, I love you guys.  Neverputt is just not the kind of game I get into… at least in Mario Kart, you can exact revenge on Princess Peach.

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I know that this Game Gripper for Nokia N900 have been around for some time and I’ve had mine as soon as I could manage to get one shipped to Australia.  But I just wanted to give it a quick spotlight, for those that aren’t aware of it. I enjoy the occasional game on my trusty N900, even more so when I know I have a charger on hand.  One of the best parts of gaming on my little mobile computer, over something like an iPhone, is that is has real buttons.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Now, given that it has real buttons, a smart bunch of fellas thought they could make a neat little overlay to cut down the clutter and give me a direction pad to boot.  All of this while still allowing me access to my charging port, and headphone jack.
Now all of a sudden my amazing gaming machine is reminiscent of a Super Nintendo controller, and my favourite games like Doom, Jazz Jackrabbit, Duke Nukem 3D and Super Mario War are awesome to play.  Not all games need one of these, but for the ones that can make use of them, and can remap their keys, these things are ideal.
Maybe it’s me showing my age, but who doesn’t like reliving their childhood through the games we played. You can buy the Game Gripper for Nokia N900 at Amazon for 16.99$.

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Today I am just go do a brief review on the NAMCO recreation of Space-Invaders-Style game, GALAGA. Came across this game while I was browsing through the Ovi Store. It is available on the Ovi Store for free. Here it goes:

The Start Menu
I would like to comment on the gameplay. Playing on a resistive touch screen was never fun for me. But in this case, it is quite easy and relaxing I think. The whole process of picking up a game and start playing it was fun. One of the good ways to kill time when you’re bored. Due to the resistive touchscreen of the N900, it still lacks multi touch control such as shoot and move at the same time. But fortunately NAMCO has included a way to overcome this.

A little bit on how to play Galaga
See the red button with two arrows? Pressing it on the red left button would make your ship move to the left and shoot. The same goes for the right. The yellow button is to move left and right while the big red circular button is for you to fire.
The problem comes in here. Mistakenly pressing the RED LEFT or RIGHT button forces you to move when you don’t want to. This could be frustrating to some who has big thumbs to play with. And again, they added another feature. The slider.

Conclusion on Galaga Game
You practically need to slide using the green button and shoot by tapping on the playing screen itself. One disadvantage of this slider is that it tends to move when you let go your thumb to enable another thumb to shoot. So there you have it, the brief review on the game itself.
Graphics : 6
Sound: 5
Gameplay: 5
You should try the game and beat my highscore posted on the screenshot. Till then.
UPDATED:
The link to the game is here. Accessible from other countries are not guaranteed. Thanks

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Dear nokia N900 website readers, My name is Pang Zi Yang and I am the co-writter here with Maciej. I hope you like my articles. I’d like to start showing you how to install Preenv on N900 so that you can be able to play webOS games easily.
Those of you might get this error when trying to install preenv using the .deb file
“Incompatible application package”
Some may not find Preenv in the App Manager
—It isn’t there—
So to install Preenv is actually very simple.
You will need to activate extras , extras-testing and extras-devel repository in Application Manager
Go to Xterminal and type this in sequence
root
apt-get install libgles1-sgx-img
apt-get install preenv
apt-get install libsdl-net1.2
This would get your Preenv up and running.
Next is to install your webOS game onto your N900.
METHOD 1

First download the *.ipk file
unpack the *.ipk file using e.g. 7zip and extract the /applications/ folder from it
put the extracted /applications/ folder to /home/user/ on the N900 using SSH
Go to X-Terminal and type the following in sequence

sudo gainroot
cd /home/user/applications/ folder
chmod +rwx filename
To run the game, simply type ./filename in X-Terminal (where filename is the name of the executable file. eg. nfsuc in the case of Need For Speed Undercover)

METHOD 2
Download the .deb file and install it through Hildon Application Manager.
You can find on the web where people have repacked the .ipk files into .deb files.
This method is much easier and faster for beginners

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Long time ago I’ve seen a movie, futuristic vision of what’s going on inside computer. Tron was revolutionary and now we have sequel and GLtron game for Nokia N900. Let’s see what can it do.
When I was lying with fever for last few days (winter in Poland is scarry this year ) I was watching, if I can call sleeping with TV turned on watching, a lot of movie trailers, commercials of movies and games. Tron kept my senses intact for few minutes, first movie was released in 1982 and was major step in computer-rendered special effects. Following years revealed many ideas of adapting movie solutions to games, mostly with bikes like Armagetron. When I was watching Tron: Legacy trailer I thought about porting Armagetron to N900, but in catalogues I’ve found…
GLtron, very nice 3D game for N900, really good-looking, placed in Tron realm. The best part is that this game is running very smoothly on N900, without any glitches, framerate drops, freezes, it gives very good gamers experience. Game is quite nicely configurable, so how it will look like is up to you. I’m playing with most of default options and speed set to ‘Crazy’, with my fever I’m mostly loosing most of runs, but I’m still having a lot of fun.
Summarizing, I really like this game, it looks nice, has very addictive gameplay, it may still look like some PC game port, but who cares? If you haven’t seen the first Tron movie, I think you should, at least to know how it looked like quite some time ago, if you want to see the new one, I think GLtron will be nice game to play in the line for tickets

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Winter in Poland is fully-blown now and I’m lying ill again. When I’m ill I’m playing more games, also on N900. This time I propose you something like a game, something every geek should know, something that may be simple model of life in bacteries colony, so something exacly for geek in fever like me .
Conway’s Game of Life is actually 40 years old cell life simulation. Everything happens on square grid filled with living and dead cells and is based on four simple rules (from wikipedia):

Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

On such simple basis geeks have developed many interesting patterns, immortal structures, most of them have their own names. One of them, glider, became hacker emblem.
N900 users now have own game of life, pretty simple as the idea itself, with (not working, at least for me and hopefully not for long) placeholder for standard patterns like glider, lightweight spaceship or Gosper glider gun.
I was playing with this gadget for hours, lying in bed with fever. Try it yourself, playing with life is pretty much fun
–
MJ

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A top speed of 75km/h, 3D, a good object to use and an objective, its called Tuxrace! It is compatible with your Nokia N900. Use a penguin to catch each fish with many different levels. The sliding penguins name is Tux. That is the origin of the name of the game.
The Nokia N900 accelerometer allows you to get the maximum speed avoiding the tress and rocks.The game is simiar to bounce. It has great graphics.

First up is the start screen then you press play followed by the choice of level and finally the game.The time clock is on the top left while rhe cought fish counter is on the top right.
Its a great amusing game. Have a look at the game on the video.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-AQqMd-h1I
If you need to exit or the game has frozen then please press q.Its wonderful and easy for the user to control.This game was firstly developed for Linux desktop users only but then the developers transformed it for the Nokia N900.

Try to excel in this game and beat your buddies with it. Enjoy.

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