Games for the terminal

When we think terminals commands, text, scripts, programmer utilities and things that only free software gurus would understand often come to mind. But not everything is work in an environment without X, and just as you are imagining too there are games For the tty, it is true that they do not have impressive graphics like today's games (neither sound), but they do their job well in making us have a good time.

To give you an idea, most of their graphics are just letters and signs in pure ASCII style, some little box with your score, and sometimes just a simple coloring. The basics, right? Some of them may well go through mini-games, while others have a difficulty that few imagine.

Considering the above, why don't we take a look at them?

robotfindskitten

Few can relate robots to kittens in a single sentence, and more if they are in a tty. At first this sounds strange, but it is the plot of this minigame. In it you are a robot (#) with the task of finding a hidden kitten among several objects, for this you just have to touch them and see if they are indeed a kitten or not. The best thing about this is that when you do, they will drop some funny or somewhat disturbing phrase.

This toaster strudel is riddled with bullet holes!

moon buggy

Who has not wanted to travel to the Moon? Surely everyone has heard of the famous moon landing back in 1966 and its many conspiracy theories. In this game we will take control of a moon car, with the aim of making a perfect moon landing, by jumping we will avoid falling off the cliffs and fulfill our mission.

ascijump

The snow and the mountains are the ideal place to practice a little sky, even in a terminal. In this little minigame we will have to strive to achieve a high score, and as the name implies, we will do it trying to make big jumps in the middle of the snow. It has 7 stages and a world cup, we can choose several competitors and determine their skills. The animation of the falling snow it is a success.

tint

Did you think that I could not miss a tetris?, Well, no. And we have all already played one of the many clones of it, and of course, we also have a version for the terminal. It has the option of choosing the level with which we want to start, just as simple as the original.

Dungeon crawl stone soup

It is said that beyond the deep hell, there is the wonderful Crystal of Zot, an object with unimaginable power that holds a mystery. In this game roguelike our job is to go down to the bottom of the immense gourd of 27 underground floors to get hold of it and return to the surface, sounds easy, doesn't it ?; With a class and profession system, and great difficulty, this little gem for the terminal can rival a modern RPG.

Watching an online game of Crawl.

With 24 different races to choose from, 5 game modes and a tutorial, around 27 different jobs, 12 types of magic, gods and weapons; We have a deep range of possibilities to make our way through the dangerous dungeon that is randomly generated every time we start a new game. It also has a graphical version called crawl-tiles.

We can also play online using any of their servers via ssh or telnet, and see the games of other players in real time or recorded. For example:

telnet crawl.akrasiac.org

User: joshua
Password: joshua

It is in constant development and has a very active community, as well as tournaments. Incredible true?.

Open possibilities

And with this we conclude this small review about these games, remember that most of them are in the repositories of your distribution, which facilitates their installation, they are just a handful of them. I hope you had as much fun reading it as I did at write it, we read later.

Greetings.